Dec 3, 2008

King Lear | Selected Quotes

Dearer than eyesight, space and liberty
(1.1.56)

Goneril introduces a long series of eye and sight references which reverberate around Gloucester's blinding (3.7). Her formal rhetoric of love is manifestly insincere, but satisfies the vain and foolish Lear, who gives her half the Kingdom. Cordelia cannot compete with her sisters lies. Lear consistently misunderstands love, thinking it can be quantified – when Goneril and Regan combine to reduce his following he says 'Thy fifty do yet double five and twenty, And thou art twice her love' (2.2.448-449).