France. Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor,
Most choice forsaken, and most lov’d despis’d!
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon,
Be it lawful I take up what’s cast away.
Gods, gods! ’tis strange that from their cold’st neglect
My love should kindle to inflam’d respect.
Thy dowerless daughter, king, thrown to my chance,
Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France.
Not all the dukes of waterish Burgundy
Can buy this unpriz’d precious maid of me.
Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind;
Thou losest here, a better where to find.
Edm. This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,—often the surfeits of our own behaviour,—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail; and my nativity was under Ursa Major; so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar—
Enter EDGAR
and pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villanous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’ Bedlam —O, these eclipses do portend these divisions! fa, sol, la, mi.
The ending was so powerful. The play, of course, ends in carnage and despair. Then the music started, melancholy at first, and the minor characters returned to the stage, touching the corpses on stage to revive them. They in turn would awake the others. Goneril and Regan woke Cordelia who in turn finally woke Lear. Even as they rose, they were all still overflowing with sorrow. But then the music started to pick up and they moved into a dance, stomping their feet in time to the music, with a crescendo into a jig, allowing, at long last, the release of the sorrow and the much needed outbreak of smiles and laughter. What a beautiful way to end the play.
Afterwards, we stayed at the bar there for a pint. Everyone else left and the place was pretty much deserted until a few minutes later when the entire cast came out and sat next to us for their post show drinks. So we got to bask in the glory of their performance a little while longer.
