Jonathan O'Neill’s Reviews > King Lear > Status Update
Jonathan O'Neill
is 43% done
REGAN
...So will you wish on me [these curses] when the rash mood is on.
LEAR
No, Regan, thou shalt never have my curse...
7 Pages Later...
LEAR (to Regan and Goneril)
... No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!
To be fair, she deserved it!
— Nov 06, 2026 04:22AM
...So will you wish on me [these curses] when the rash mood is on.
LEAR
No, Regan, thou shalt never have my curse...
7 Pages Later...
LEAR (to Regan and Goneril)
... No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!
To be fair, she deserved it!
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Jonathan’s Previous Updates
Jonathan O'Neill
is 40% done
LEAR
Who put my man i'the stocks?
'Kent in the stocks becomes emblematic of 'Virtue locked out', of a 'situation timeless and recurrent, catching in a mirror the world's way with virtue when separated from power'.
Love this scene. Not one that screams intensity off the page but in performance is dazzling! Lear desperately clinging to power that he has already relinquished and meeting no reverence.
— Nov 05, 2026 08:06PM
Who put my man i'the stocks?
'Kent in the stocks becomes emblematic of 'Virtue locked out', of a 'situation timeless and recurrent, catching in a mirror the world's way with virtue when separated from power'.
Love this scene. Not one that screams intensity off the page but in performance is dazzling! Lear desperately clinging to power that he has already relinquished and meeting no reverence.
Jonathan O'Neill
is 17% done
FOOL
Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest;
Leave thy drink and thy whore,
And keep in-a-door,
And thou shalt have more
Than two tens to a score.”
KENT
This is nothing, fool.
FOOL
Then 'tis like the breath of an unfee'd lawyer, you gave me nothing for't
— Nov 01, 2026 03:01AM
Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest;
Leave thy drink and thy whore,
And keep in-a-door,
And thou shalt have more
Than two tens to a score.”
KENT
This is nothing, fool.
FOOL
Then 'tis like the breath of an unfee'd lawyer, you gave me nothing for't
Jonathan O'Neill
is 13% done
Pat he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o'Bedlam. — O, these eclipses do portend these divisions. Fa, sol, la, mi.
Edmund sings, as if unaware of Edgar's approach, in order the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th notes of the Elizabethan scale (the Old Solfege syllables), a discordant motto, appropriate to his character...[cont.]
— Oct 30, 2026 04:16AM
Edmund sings, as if unaware of Edgar's approach, in order the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th notes of the Elizabethan scale (the Old Solfege syllables), a discordant motto, appropriate to his character...[cont.]
Jonathan O'Neill
is 12% done
EDMUND
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 enforced obedience of planetary influence; [cont.]
— Oct 30, 2026 12:15AM
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 enforced obedience of planetary influence; [cont.]
Jonathan O'Neill
is 2% done
Tell me, my daughters...
Which of you shall we say doth love us most,
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge.
Me displaying faux authority at the dinner table, deciding who will get the largest slice of apple crumble for dessert.
— Oct 22, 2026 09:10PM
Which of you shall we say doth love us most,
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge.
Me displaying faux authority at the dinner table, deciding who will get the largest slice of apple crumble for dessert.
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Len
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Nov 06, 2026 05:16AM
Sounds like a posh version of Eastenders.
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Unnatural hags indeed!I was a teenager when I first read this, a super-hypersensitive teenager. Every time I read the scenes of Regan's casual cruelty towards Lear, I had angry tears in my eyes. I wanted to kill her with my bare hands. 🤬
I wanted to scratch her name out of the book with red ink 🤣, but I couldn't because it was a library copy.
So I wrote both their names in my rough notebook and scratched them out until I had made holes in the paper, all the while with angry, hot tears streaming down my cheeks. 🤣
How I hated those two devils!!
This is the only Shakespearean tragedy I'm too afraid to revisit.
You have opened some old wounds, Jon🥺
lmaoooo - I too have resigned myself to the moral highground only to place curses on my enemies.
Len wrote: "Sounds like a posh version of Eastenders."We never got that one here (in Australia), as far as I know, but quickly googling it looks like a neighbours/home and away type setup :D
Vanitha wrote: "Unnatural hags indeed!I was a teenager when I first read this, a super-hypersensitive teenager. Every time I read the scenes of Regan's casual cruelty towards Lear, I had angry tears in my eyes. ..."
Ah, I miss reacting to things with the fiery passion of youth! Your horror and indignation is imitative of Lear's own, only you managed to avoid the tip over into madness (I think 🤔😂)
Perhaps, your very powerful empathy for Lear, which I do share in btw, should persuade me to avoid mentioning that there is a part of me that wholeheartedly acknowledges the legitimacy of Regan and Goneril's grievances (particularly if Lear's knights were infact rioting at Goneril's palace), Lear wants to retain all the priviledges of Kingship without any of the responsibilities of office. He's mad and his demands are absurd but there's no doubt the daughters' response is outrageously disproportionate and cruel. When they begin to dwindle down the number of Knights they are willing to allow him to retain, which of course becomes 0, it is no longer a matter of political practicality but of human dignity of which they are permitting him none. I loved this from Lear following Regan's What need one?:
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous;
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's...
Sorry for digging up old traumas, friend! 😅
Mark wrote: "lmaoooo - I too have resigned myself to the moral highground only to place curses on my enemies."Haven't we all, Mark! 😂
These are his own daughters. Wretched human beings it must be said!
Demarian wrote: "My fave of his"As good a choice as any, I suspect, Demarian. :)