Sunday, January 29, 2017


Till Noon! Till night, my lord; and all night too.
Regan

 King Lear                                     Act II, scene ii    Line 136

Well I've been having a bit of a hard time keeping up with the daily posts. I'm going to try to make a point of doing better going forward. In the meantime...
This is a line from lovely Regan, one of the two horrible daughters of Lear. It just occurred to me that there’s the two evil daughters and the one good daughter, just like in Cinderella with the two evil step-sisters. But I guess that’s just coincidence.

Anyway, yes, this is Regan and she's talking about Lear’s man, Kent. Lord Cornwall (who, if I’m not mistaken, is Regan’s husband) has just put Kent in the stocks and said that he’s going to stay there until noon. To which Regan replies, ‘Noon schmatz! Leave him there all night!’ This is the same woman who gouges out Gloucester's eyes later in the play and then says 'Let him smell his way to Dover!' No, honest, she actually says that. So today's line is just a little bit of a warm-up for this lady. She is such a sweetheart! Gloucester is in this scene too, and he tries to say something about showing some restraint, but that’s not gonna happen here. Poor Gloucester is constantly trying to do good, and all he gets for his troubles is to be blind and smelling his way to Dover. Well, it is a tragedy, isn’t it?

I had a drawing commissioned for this post. I really like it when someone else does a drawing for something you're writing about because it's always a bit different than anything that you would have pictured yourself, and it's neat to see a different perspective. I especially like the use of purple here. And Regan looks quite a bit younger than I would have pictured her.

1 comment:

Mrs Blue said...

Great post. Stunning drawing.

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