Lear

Lear:
I started this wall when I was young. I stopped my enemies in the field, but there were always more of them. How could we ever be free? So I built this wall to keep our enemies out. My people will live behind this wall when I'm dead. You may be governed by fools but you'll always live in peace. My wall will make you free. That's why the enemies on our borders - the Duke of Cornwall and the Duke of North - try to stop us building it.

Lear:
My enemies will not destroy my work! I gave my life to these people. I've seen armies on their hands and knees in blood, insane women feeding dead children at their empty breasts, dying men spitting blood at me with their last breath, our brave young men in tears... But I could bear all this! When I'm dead my people will live in freedom and peace and remember my name, no, venerate it! They are my sheep and if one of them is lost, I'd take fire to hell to bring him out. I loved and cared for all my children, and now you've sold them to their enemies!

Lear:
I knew it would come to this! I knew you were malicious! I built my wall against *you* as well as my other enemies! You talk of marriage? You have murdered your family. There will be no more children. Your husbands are impotent. That's not an empty insult. You wrote? My spies know more than that! You will get nothing from this crime. You have perverted lusts. They won't be satisfied. It *is* perverted to want your pleasure where it makes others suffer. I pity the men who share your beds. I've watched you scheme and plan - they'll lie by you when you dream! Where will your ambition end? You will throw old men from their coffins, break children's legs, pull the hair from old women's heads, make young men walk the streets in beggary and cold while their wives grow empty and despair. I am ashamed of my tears! You have done this to me. The people will judge between you and me.

Lear:
My daughters have taken the bread from my stomach. They grind it with my tears and the cries of famished children and eat. The night is a black cloth on their table and the stars are crumbs, and I am a famished dog that sits on the earth and howls. I open my mouth and they place an old coin on my tongue. They lock the door of my coffin and tell me to die. My blood seeps out and they write in it with a finger. I'm old and too weak to climb out of this grave again.

Lear:
The mouse comes out of his hole and stares. The giant wants to eat the dragon, but the dragon has grabbed the carving knife.

Lear:
I remember some of my dream. There was a king and he had a fountain in his garden. It was as big as the sea. One night the fountain howled and in the morning the king went to look at it. The servants emptied it and under the sea they found a desert. The king looked in the sand and there was a helmet and sword.

Lear:
There's an animal in a cage. I must let it out or the earth will be destroyed. There'll be great fires and the water will dry up. All the people will be burned and the wind will blow their ashes into huge columns of dust and they'll go round and round the earth for ever! We must let it out!

Lear:
A man woke up one morning and found he'd lost his voice. So he went to look for it, and when he came to the wood there was the bird who'd stolen it. It was singing beautifully and the man said, “Now I sing so beautifully I shall be rich and famous”. He put the bird in a cage and said, “When I open my mouth wide you must sing”. Then he went to the king and said, “I will sing your majesty's praises”. But when he opened his mouth the bird could only groan and cry because it was in a cage, and the king had the man whipped. The man took the bird home, but his family couldn't stand the bird's groaning and crying and they left him. So in the end the man took the bird back to the wood and let it out of the cage. But the man believed the king had treated him unjustly and he kept saying to himself, “The king's a fool” and as the bird still had the man's voice, it kept singing this all over the wood and soon the other birds learned it. The next time the king went hunting he was surprised to hear all the birds singing, “The king's a fool”. He caught the bird who'd started it and pulled out its feathers, broke its wings and nailed it to a branch as a warning to all the other birds. The forest was silent. And just as the bird had the man's voice the man now had the bird's pain. He ran round silently waving his head and stamping his feet, and he was locked up for the rest of his life in a cage.

Lear:
Oh, I know what you think! Whatever's trite and vulgar and hard and shallow and cruel, with no mercy or sympathy - that's what you think, and you're proud of it! You good, decent, honest, upright, lawful men who believe in order, when the last man dies, you will have killed him! I have lived with murderers and thugs, there are limits to their greed and violence, but you decent, honest men devour the earth!

Lear:
If a God had made the world, might would always be right, that would be so wise, we'd be spared so much suffering. But we made the world, out of our smallness and weakness. Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.