Kuningas Lear
1608
Kuningas Lear
1608
Translated by Paavo Emil Cajander
An aging king, weary of power, makes a catastrophic mistake: he demands to be loved, and punishes the only daughter who tells him the truth. When Lear asks his three daughters to profess their love publicly, Goneril and Regan offer extravagant flattery. Cordelia, his favorite, can only say she loves him as a daughter should - no more, no less. Enraged by her honesty, Lear disinherits her on the spot, dividing his kingdom between the two hypocrites who will soon turn against him. What follows is a descent into madness, betrayal, and tragedy that scours the soul. But Lear is only half the story. The parallel plot of Gloucester and his sons mirrors the main tragedy with unsettling precision - another father destroyed by his own blindness, another child cast out for telling hard truths. The play builds toward a devastating climax, with Lear wandering a storm-swept heath, stripped of everything: his crown, his sanity, his dignity. When reconciliation finally comes, it arrives too late, and the final blows land with annihilating force. This is Shakespeare at his most ruthless. There is no comfort here, only the terrible clarity of watching a man destroy himself through his own vanity. It endures because it asks a question we still cannot answer: what happens when the people we love most are the ones who refuse to lie to us?
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“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.””
— William Shakespeare
“Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.””
— William Shakespeare
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.They kill us for their sport.””
— William Shakespeare
“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.””
— William Shakespeare
“Many a true word hath been spoken in jest.””
— William Shakespeare
“The prince of darkness is a gentleman!””
— William Shakespeare
“Who is it that can tell me who I am?””
— William Shakespeare
“The weight of this sad time we must obey,Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.The oldest hath borne most: we that are youngShall never see so much, nor live so long.””
— William Shakespeare
“Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.””
— William Shakespeare
