King Lear King Lear Quotes

When Lear goes off on Goneril, he insists she's more like a "disease that's in [his] flesh" than a daughter (his "flesh and blood"). Goneril, he says, is "a boil, a plague-sore," a nasty little "carbuncle" and so on. In other words, Goneril, whose name sounds a lot like "gonorrhea," is kind of like a venereal disease. In this way, Lear associates Goneril's disloyalty with the unfortunate consequences of sexual promiscuity.

After King Lear gives his kingdom away to his daughters, the Fool chastises him for giving away all his land and power. (After all, Goneril has just kicked Lear out of her palace and Lear is about to become homeless.) Here, the Fool cracks a joke, comparing Lear to a snail that has given away his shell and has no home.

What's most interesting to us about this passage, however, is the Fool's suggestion that Lear is a cuckold. A "cuckold" is a common Elizabethan term for a man who has been cheated on by his wife and, in Shakespeare's plays, horns are a pretty common sign that a man has been cuckolded. So, why does the Fool imply that Lear has "horns"? (Lear's wife is dead.) The Fool seems to equate the betrayal by Lear's daughters with like sexual infidelity—it's as though Lear's daughters, Goneril and Regan, are no better than a cheating wife. That's a pretty odd thing to imply, don't you think?

When Lear encounters Poor Tom (Edgar disguised as a poor, naked, beggar), he concludes that Poor Tom's terrible state must have been caused by Tom's "daughters." When the Fool points out that "Poor Tom" has no children, Lear insists that there's nothing in the world that could have reduced a man to such a lowly state… except "his unkind daughters." For Lear, it seems that all the problems of the world are caused by women.