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? (2.4.299-303)
King Lear begins his retirement with retinue of a hundred knights. Eventually, Goneril and Regan demand he get rid of his men and decrease Lear's knights to a number of seventy-five, then fifty, then twenty-five, then one, and then, finally, zero. A big fat goose egg.
What happens to all those men who were once employed in Lear's service? They simply disperse, becoming part of a growing population of what historian A.L. Beier referred to as "masterless men," homeless wanderers that roamed the countryside. As Beier notes, vagrants were called "masterless" because they were unemployed and landless in a period when the able-bodied poor were supposed to have masters" (Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640, p. xix). The dispersal of King Lear's knights not only speaks to Lear's dramatic loss of power but also offers a bit of social commentary in the play.
Quote 5
GONERIL
Put on what weary negligence you please,
You and your fellows. I'll have it come to question.
If he dislike it, let him to our sister,
Whose mind and mine I know in that are one,
Not to be overruled. Idle old man,
That still would manage those authorities
That he hath given away! Now, by my life,
Old fools are babes again and must be used
With checks as flatteries, when they are seen
abused.
Remember what I have said. (1.3.13-23)
Here, Goneril talks about her retired father in a pretty condescending way that reveals some serious anger and resentment. She calls Lear an "idle old man" who is foolish enough to think that he still wields any power now that he's retired and has given his daughters all his land. According to Goneril, old men are just like babies—whiny, weak, and powerless.