Lear Key Quotes Act 4
Scene Speaker Quote
4:1 Edgar “The lowest and most dejected thing of Fortune Stands still in esperance.”
4:1 Gloucester “Away, get thee away; good friend, be gone…Thee they may hurt.”
4:1 Gloucester “I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw…Oh! Dear son Edgar, The
food in thy abused father’s wrath; Might I but live to see thee in my touch.”
4:1 Edgar “(Aside) O Gods! Who is’t can say ‘I am the worst’? I am worse than e’er I was.”
4:1 Gloucester “’Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind.”
4:1 Edgar “(Aside) I cannot daub it further…And yet I must. Bless thy sweet eyes, they bleed.”
4:1 Gloucester “There is a cliff, whose high and bending head Looks fearfully in he confined deep; Bring me but to
the very brim of it…from that place I shall no leading need.”
4:2 Oswald “I told him of the army that was landed; he smiled at it: I told him you were coming; His answer
was ‘The worse’…”
4:2 Goneril “My most dear Gloucester!...Oh! the difference of man and man. To thee a woman;s services are
due: A fool usurps my bed.”
4:2 Albany “O Goneril! You are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face…Most barbarous,
mpst degenerate! Have you madded.”
4:2 Goneril “Milk-livered man!”
4:2 Albany “See thyself, devil! Proper deformity shows not in the fiend So horrid as in woman.”
4:2 Goneril “Marry, your manhood-mew!”
4:2 Albany “Gloucester, I live to thank thee for the love thou show’dst the king, And to avenge thine eyes.”
4:3 Gentleman “…now and then an ample tear trilled down Her delicate cheek; it seemed she was a queen over
her passion; who most rebel-like, sought to be the king o’er her.”
4:3 Gentleman “…once or twice she heaved the name of ‘father’ Pantingly forth, as if it pressed her heart…”
4:3 Kent “It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions…”
4:4 Cordelia “As mad as the vexed sea; singing aloud; crowned with…all the idle weeds that grow in our
sustaining corn.”
4:4 Doctor “Our foster-nurse od nature is repose which he lacks; that to provoke in him, are many simples
operative, whose power will close the eye of anguish.”
4:4 Cordelia “All you unpublished virtues of the earth, spring with my tears!...remediate in the good man’s
distress!”
4:4 Cordelia “O dear father!...My mourning and importuned tears hath pitied….But love, dear love and our aged
father’s right.”
4:5 Regan “It was great ignorance, Gloucester’s eyes being out, to let him live; where he arrives he moves all
hearts against us…”
4:5 Regan “I know your Lady does not love her husband; I am sure of that: and at her late being here she
gave strange oeilliads and most speaking looks to noble Edmund.”
4:5 Regan “My Lord is dead; Edmund and I have talked and more convenientis he for my hand than for your
Lady’s.”
4:6 Edgar/ “look how we labour.” // ‘Methinks the ground is even.”
Gloucester
4:6 Gloucester “Methinks thy voice is altered, and thou speak’st in better phrase and matter than thou didst.”
4:6 Edgar ‘Give me your hand; you are now within a foot of th’extreme verge: for all beneath the moon would
I not leap upright.”
4:6 Gloucester “(Gloucester throws himself forward and falls)”
4:6 Edgar “Thy life’s a mircle…From the dread summit of this chalky bourn. Look up a-height: the shrill-
gorged lark so far cannot be seen or heard: but look up.”
4:6 Gloucester “I do remember now…’The Fiend, the Fiend’: he led me to that place.”
4:6 Edgar “O thou side-piercing sight!”
4:6 Lear “(enter Lear, fantastically dressed with wild flowers.)”
“…every thing; tis a lie…”
4:6 Lear “None does offend, none, I say, none…Get thee glass eyes; and, like a scurvy politician, seem to
se the things thou dost not.”
4:6 Lear “And when I have stol’n upon those son-in-laws, then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!”
4:6 Gloucester “You ever-gentle Gods, take thy breath from me: let not my worser spirit tempt me again to die
before you please!”
4:6 Edgar “(Reads) Let our reciprocal vows be remembered…Your wife so, I would say- Affectionate
servant, Goneril.”
4:7 Cordelia “O my dear father! Restoration hang thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss repair those violent
harms that my two sisters have in thy reverence made!”