“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!” (King Lear III.ii)
Lear: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks.
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world.
Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once
That makes ingrateful man.
Fool: O nuncle, court holy water in a dry house is better than this rainwater out o’ door. Good nuncle, in. Ask thy daughters’ blessing. Here’s a night pities neither wise men nor fools.
Lear: Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters.
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.
I never gave you kingdom, called you children;
You owe me no subscription. Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engendered battles ’gainst a head
So old and white as this. O, ho, ’tis foul!
“Alas, sir, are you here? Things that love the night” (King Lear III.ii)
Kent: Alas, sir, are you here? Things that love night
Love not such nights as these. The wrathful skies
Gallow the very wanderers of the dark
And make them keep their caves. Since I was man,
Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,
Such groans of roaring wind and rain I never
Remember to have heard. Man’s nature cannot carry
Th’ affliction nor the fear.
Lear: Let the great gods
That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads
Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulgèd crimes
Unwhipped of justice. Hide thee, thou bloody hand,
Thou perjured, and thou simular of virtue
That art incestuous. Caitiff, to pieces shake,
That under covert and convenient seeming
Has practiced on man’s life. Close pent-up guilts,
Rive your concealing continents and cry
These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man
More sinned against than sinning.
Kent: Alack, bareheaded?
Gracious my lord, hard by here is a hovel.
Some friendship will it lend you ’gainst the tempest.
Repose you there while I to this hard house –
More harder than the stones whereof ’tis raised,
Which even but now, demanding after you,
Denied me to come in – return and force
Their scanted courtesy.
Lear: My wits begin to turn. –
Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?
I am cold myself. – Where is this straw, my fellow?
The art of our necessities is strange
And can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel. –
Poor Fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That’s sorry yet for thee.
Fool: [sings]
He that has and a little tiny wit,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
Though the rain it raineth every day.
Lear: True, my good boy. – Come, bring us to this hovel.
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616 – from King Lear
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