Away!
by Jupiter,
This
shall not be revoked.
-Lear
King Lear
Act I, scene i
Line 180
And here he goes again. The only other time we had a line
from Lear (the character, not the play) he was spouting about coining and being
the king. But that was much later in the play. Today we’re in the first scene
of the play. Lear has just disowned Cordelia (bad move) and now he’s banishing
Kent (equally bad move). It seems that Lear pretty much does everything in the
first scene of the play to screw himself for the rest of the play. And we spend
the rest of the play watching this self-screw job play out.
At the very least, though, we get a nice expletive that we
can use. And it’s a pretty darn clean one as well, by Jupiter! By way of
context (in case you’re interested), he’s telling Kent to beat it, by Jupiter,
and that he’s not going to change his mind about banishing him. This might be
another one of those instances where the audience is looking at what’s going on
and saying to themselves (or out loud) ‘Lear, you boob, Cordelia and Kent are
the good ones! Idiot!’ You know that at this point Goneril and Regan are
already chuckling to themselves. Now I don’t mean to come off as being too
critical of Will, but honestly, sometimes the way he sets stuff up, or the
things he has some of his main people doing, seem to lack a little bit of
credibility. Do you agree? On second thought, I guess all I have to do is look
at the people around me, or the news headlines (which by the way I’m still
doing a pretty good job of avoiding ever since I started doing these blog
posts, except for lately with this damn election) to realize that this stuff is not that unbelievable at all. Yes, after
contemplation, by Jupiter, I take it back! In a very real sense it seems like half the country just said 'Away! by Jupiter, this shall not be revoked' to what could have been their Kent or Cordelia last night in favor of an imbecile. Yes, this stuff is entirely believable, and Will is indeed timeless. Oh my!
Myself, I'm doing fine, because luckily I have two Cordelias. So I'm not going to worry about it, by Jupiter!
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