Lear has given over his kingdom and his power to his daughters, retaining the services of 100 knights, who are, basically, old drunken comrades who have no particular value. After a time, Lear’s daughters try to talk him down from 100 knights to 50 to 25 to… Well, here’s the last bit, which I’ve always found gut-wrenching:
GONERIL
Hear me, my lord;
What need you five and twenty, ten, or five,
To follow in a house where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?
REGAN What need one?
(Read that last slowly, with pauses between the words, because you and your sister know this is not a question but an ultimatum that the powerless old man must accept.)
Lear replies (and goes mad), with a speech that’s relevant, I think, to today’s Regan-esque claim that poor people aren’t really poor if they have x-boxes:
O reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is as cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady:
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need—
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need.
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age, wretched in both.
If it be you that stirs these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women’s weapons, water drops,
Stain my man’s cheeks. No, you unnatural hags!
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep.
No, I’ll not weep.
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I’ll weep. O Fool, I shall go mad!
“King Lear,” Act 2, Scene 4, lines 263-285
