Mojo, The Bard, & Me

The lamentable change is from the best.

Edgar

King Lear                     Act IV, Scene i   Line 5

Okay, so here’s the whole quote. This is Edgar talking to himself.  He’s on the run because his rotten half brother Edmund has turned everyone against him. Edgar knows that he’s on his own now. 

Yet better thus, and known to be contemn'd,

Than still contemn'd and flatter'd. To be worst,

The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,

Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear:

The lamentable change is from the best;

The worst returns to laughter. 

The way I read this is that Edgar, talking to himself, is saying that he’s got nowhere to go but up. It’s a fairly optimistic way of looking at things given the situation that he’s got. On the other hand, it might be the best way of looking at things, given the situation he’s got. 

Better to be despised and know it, than to be despised and not know it. If you’re the worst then you can still have hope and not live in fear. The lamentable change is to change from the best. If you’re already the worst (as he considers himself to be now) you can laugh and be happy because you’ve no fear of things going bad. You’re already there!

I don’t think there’s really that many of us who are in as bad a situation as Edgar, but there are times when we all probably feel like we are. So I guess those are the times that we can say ‘The lamentable change is from the best.’ 

Do you know what that yellow circle in the middle of this picture is? I'll tell you. It's a pee stain from a little dog on this carpet. And do you know how new this carpet is? It's brand new. Now if this was a pee stain in an old, beat up rug it wouldn't be so bad. But since it's a brand new rug we can say the lamentable change is from the best. Yes, this is a quite lamentable change; from brand new to pee stained. Very lamentable.