Lear Quote: Explained

“No, no, no, no. Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds I’ th’ cage.
When though dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too-
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out-
And take upon ‘s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’ moon.”
(Lear, 5.2.9-20)

This quote embodies both Lear’s return to sanity and the falling action of the play as a whole. After enduring his trials and hardships, and coming dangerously close to irreversible insanity in the process, Lear is now stable and coherent enough to see his life clearly, perhaps for the first time in his life. He realizes that he doesn’t need all the glamour and the glitz, he just wants to spend his days with Cordelia, watching people make life go on, sometimes speculating, sometimes not. It’s a dreamy, somewhat enviable existence, but one which he never would have wished for earlier in the play. This supports the idea that King Lear is a bildungsroman play, because Lear experiences a total change of heart. His meek acceptance of being outside the course of history makes his impending death somehow okay, like it’s now time. This quote represents Lear’s moral reformation, a lesson to value the things that really matter, and the truly mild culmination of the play, despite the superficially gruesome mayhem that ensues.