Mojo, The Bard, & Me

I stumbled when I saw: full oft ‘tis seen,

Our means secure us, and our mere defects

Prove our commodities.

-Earl of Gloucester

 

King Lear                            Act IV, scene i    Line 20

Well I didn’t realize how good this line was when I first laid eyes on it, but I can tell you now that it’s a beaut.

And speaking of laying eyes on it, this is the Earl of Gloucester speaking who has recently had his eyes put out, so that he is quite blind for the first time in his life. He tells the fellow who’s been leading him that he doesn’t need him anymore and that fellow tells Gloucester that he’s not going to be able to see  his way. And that’s when the Earl comes up with this beauty of a line. ‘I used to stumble when I could see.’ He says. ‘my sight made me overconfident, and it wasn’t ‘til I lost it that I began to see what’s really going on.’ What’s going on, and what he is talking about, is that Gloucester has spent most of the play up to this point believing that his rotten son Edmund was a good guy and that his good and true son Edgar was the bad guy. But as he was having his eyes ripped out by Regan, one of Lear’s daughters, he found out that Edmund was a rat fink. So he saw the truth for the first time as he was being blinded. Get it?

In fact, this line in a lot of ways sums up the whole play. This play is about Lear not seeing the truth about who his true daughter is and relying on the words he heard from his two untrue daughters. Gloucester is a subplot that has the same sort of thing going on regarding his two sons. Both Lear and Gloucester have a heck of a time seeing the truth. This line says it all regarding both Lear and Gloucester. It’s the play in twenty words. There is no other line that we could have picked that would have done a better job of summarizing this play. It really is the play in twenty words. Honest and I’m not kidding, this is a Totally Random line. I certainly hope you believe me, even though you may want to see things differently. I would not lie to you.

See for yourself. This is my downstairs die that I use to come up with the next day’s page each night.