Act 3, Scene 2

Another part of the heath. Storm continues.

[Enter Lear and Fool.]
King Lear
1617 Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
1618 You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
1619 Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
1620 You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
1621 Vaunt couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
1622 Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
1623 Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
1624 Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,
1625 That make ingrateful man!
Fool
1626 O nuncle, court holy water in a dry house is better than this
1627 rain water out o' door. Good nuncle, in; and ask thy daughters
1628 blessing: here's a night pities nether wise men nor fools.
King Lear
1629 Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
1630 Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters:
1631 I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
1632 I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children;
1633 You owe me no subscription: then let fall
1634 Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
1635 A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man:—
1636 But yet I call you servile ministers,
1637 That will with two pernicious daughters join
1638 Your high-engender'd battles 'gainst a head
1639 So old and white as this! O! O! 'tis foul!
Fool
1640 He that has a house to put 's head in has a good head-piece.
1641 The codpiece that will house
1642 Before the head has any,
1643 The head and he shall louse:
1644 So beggars marry many.
1645 The man that makes his toe
1646 What he his heart should make
1647 Shall of a corn cry woe,
1648 And turn his sleep to wake.
1649 —for there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a
1650 glass.
King Lear
1651 No, I will be the pattern of all patience;
1652 I will say nothing.
[Enter Kent.]
Kent
1653 Who's there?
Fool
1654 Marry, here's grace and a codpiece; that's a wise man and a fool.
Kent
1655 Alas, sir, are you here? Things that love night
1656 Love not such nights as these; the wrathful skies
1657 Gallow the very wanderers of the dark,
1658 And make them keep their caves; since I was man,
1659 Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,
1660 Such groans of roaring wind and rain I never
1661 Remember to have heard: man's nature cannot carry
1662 Th' affliction nor the fear.
King Lear
1663 Let the great gods,
1664 That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,
1665 Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,
1666 That hast within thee undivulged crimes
1667 Unwhipp'd of justice: hide thee, thou bloody hand;
1668 Thou perjur'd, and thou simular man of virtue
1669 That art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake
1670 That under covert and convenient seeming
1671 Hast practis'd on man's life: close pent-up guilts,
1672 Rive your concealing continents, and cry
1673 These dreadful summoners grace.—I am a man
1674 More sinn'd against than sinning.
Kent
1675 Alack, bareheaded!
1676 Gracious my lord, hard by here is a hovel;
1677 Some friendship will it lend you 'gainst the tempest:
1678 Repose you there, whilst I to this hard house,—
1679 More harder than the stones whereof 'tis rais'd;
1680 Which even but now, demanding after you,
1681 Denied me to come in,—return, and force
1682 Their scanted courtesy.
King Lear
1683 My wits begin to turn.—
1684 Come on, my boy. how dost, my boy? art cold?
1685 I am cold myself.—Where is this straw, my fellow?
1686 The art of our necessities is strange,
1687 That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel.—
1688 Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
1689 That's sorry yet for thee.
[Singing.]
Fool
1690 He that has and a little tiny wit—
1691 With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,—
1692 Must make content with his fortunes fit,
1693 For the rain it raineth every day.
King Lear
1694 True, boy.—Come, bring us to this hovel.
[Exeunt Lear and Kent.]
Fool
1695 This is a brave night to cool a courtezan.—
1696 I'll speak a prophecy ere I go:—
1697 When priests are more in word than matter;
1698 When brewers mar their malt with water;
1699 When nobles are their tailors' tutors;
1700 No heretics burn'd, but wenches' suitors;
1701 When every case in law is right;
1702 No squire in debt nor no poor knight;
1703 When slanders do not live in tongues;
1704 Nor cutpurses come not to throngs;
1705 When usurers tell their gold i' the field;
1706 And bawds and whores do churches build;—
1707 Then shall the realm of Albion
1708 Come to great confusion:
1709 Then comes the time, who lives to see't,
1710 That going shall be us'd with feet.
1711 This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time.
[Exit.]

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Notes

TLN 1617rhetorical device
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!”
Lear opens with apostrophe — direct address to the winds and storm as if they were persons who can hear and obey him. The image of the winds 'cracking their cheeks' draws on the Renaissance convention of depicting the winds as faces with puffed, straining cheeks (common in atlases and sea-charts of the period). Lear commands the weather itself, as if he were still a king with subjects to order.
TLN 1620archaic vocab
“sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts”
'Thought-executing' means acting as fast as thought — lightning was the Renaissance byword for something instantaneous. 'Vaunt couriers' means outriders or advance scouts (French avant-coureurs), soldiers sent ahead of an army; here the lightning flashes go ahead of the thunder as its heralds. Lear is addressing the storm as if it were a military force marching against him.
TLN 1624archaic vocab
“Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once”
'Germens' (also 'germs' or 'germins') are seeds — the primitive seeds of life from which all things grow. 'Spill' here means to destroy or waste, not to tip over a liquid. Lear commands the storm to shatter the templates ('moulds') from which nature forms living creatures and to destroy the seeds of life itself — a wish for the total annihilation of the human world.
TLN 1626archaic vocab
“court holy water in a dry house is better than this rain water out o' door”
'Court holy water' is a proverbial phrase meaning flattery or fair words — the kind of empty ceremony that passes for honour at court. The Fool is saying that empty flattery indoors beats a real soaking outdoors. He is gently pointing out that Lear could have stayed dry by asking his daughters for shelter, even if it meant swallowing his pride.
TLN 1631rhetorical device
“I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness; I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children; You owe me no subscription”
'Tax' here means to accuse or charge, not to levy a financial tax. 'Unkindness' carries its full early modern weight — both 'cruelty' and the violation of 'kind' (natural bonds, kinship). 'Subscription' means allegiance or service owed to a superior. Lear distinguishes the storm, which owes him nothing, from his daughters, who owe him everything — and who have repaid obligation with cruelty. The legal-contractual language ('owe,' 'subscription') crystallizes the play's central argument about obligation.
TLN 1657archaic vocab
“Gallow the very wanderers of the dark”
'Gallow' means to frighten or terrify (related to the word 'gallows' in the sense of something that makes one quake). 'The wanderers of the dark' are the creatures — animal or supernatural — that roam at night. Kent is saying the storm is so violent it terrifies even the things that normally haunt the darkness, driving them back to their lairs.
TLN 1663cultural context
“Let the great gods, That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads, Find out their enemies now”
'Pother' means a noisy commotion or uproar; here, the thunder and storm the gods are driving over human heads. Lear reimagines the storm as a divine inquisition: the gods are stirring up this noise to force hidden sinners — perjurers, murderers, hypocrites, incestuous persons — to confess and be exposed. He lists the categories of secret crime (perjury, false appearances of virtue, incest, murder) as if pronouncing a general judgment, then adds that he himself is 'more sinn'd against than sinning.'
historical The great chain of being (order and degree)
TLN 1686rhetorical device
“The art of our necessities is strange, That can make vile things precious”
Lear is saying that desperate need has a strange alchemy: it can make worthless things — a bundle of straw, a hovel — feel like treasures. The formulation 'art of our necessities' personifies need as a craftsman who transforms the valueless into the valuable. It is one of the play's most compressed statements of how suffering educates: a king who gave away a kingdom is now grateful for a handful of straw.
TLN 1707historical topical
“Then shall the realm of Albion Come to great confusion: Then comes the time, who lives to see't, That going shall be us'd with feet. This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time.”
'Albion' is the ancient, poetic name for Britain (from the Latin for 'white,' referring to the white cliffs of Dover). 'Going shall be us'd with feet' is a deliberately absurd tautology — walking will be done with feet — mocking the inflated style of political prophecies. The punchline is the Fool's joke: he has been foretelling the future, then announces that Merlin will make this prophecy — but Merlin (the legendary wizard of King Arthur) lived centuries after the legendary Lear. The Fool is admitting he is making it all up.
historical King Leir and legendary Britain