“But where the
greater malady is fixed,/ The lesser is scarce felt. Thou’dst shun a bear,/ But
if <thy> flight lay toward the roaring sea,/ Tou’dst meet the bear I’ th’
mouth” (3.4.10-13).
This quote is beautiful to me because the message is a
tidbit of wisdom. Lear is saying that one will suffer one thing so as not to
feel another, greater pain. Shakespeare’s example (through Lear) of facing a
bear verses a roaring sea is also an example of his great skill with well
worded analogies.
I think this quote is key in explaining Lear's revelation in understanding his inevitable madness. In the same scene Lear states that, "This tempest will not give me leave to ponder On the things would hurt me more" (137). Lear's personal strengthed is measured by this storm, however he alludes to the fact that no external cause can hurt him as much as his family's lack of loyalty and gratitude.
ReplyDeleteActually, I think the greater meaning behind the quote is that Lear chooses to be blind to the truth of the betrayal by his daughters. Lear has already stated that he would choose to suffer a lesser pain than a greater one, and the connection is that in his mind, going mad and seeing the world through an altered state of perception is more agreeable than “the things [that] would hurt [him] more” (Act 3 Scene 4 Line 28-29). He refuses to “ponder” the issue of his daughters, and the parallelism within the scene is quite ingenious.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Alex on this one because you see that in the quote that Brianna used, Lear has run into a Tempest. He is facing another sort of pain to dodge the pain of his family betraying him. He is mad enough to believe that by by going through the pain of the storm he will forget his family pain.
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