King Lear Goneril Quotes

When Goneril first confronts her father about the noisy and riotous knights he keeps with him, she claims the knights disrupt her household by treating her palace like a tavern or a brothel. Yet, here, when Lear is absent, Goneril admits to her husband (Albany) that she doesn't like Lear's knights because they protect him, providing Lear with way too much power. 

Goneril insists that by stripping Lear of all his power, her life and political position are much safer. Whereas Lear sees Goneril's objection to his knights as a matter of family disloyalty, Goneril sees it as a political and military matter.

Goneril sure does lay it on thick, doesn't she? Even though she says her love for her father leaves her breathless and "unable" to speak, she still manages to find a bunch of empty, meaningless words to flatter him with.

Goneril implies that her husband, Albany, is too mild-mannered when it comes to dealing with Lear. When she refers to Albany's "milky gentleness," she's basically implying he's a wimp for not being harder on Lear when the retired king challenged Goneril's authority. For Goneril, mildness and lack of killer instinct make one feminine. Of course, Goneril goes on to say she forgives her hubby for being a wimp, but she's really not happy about him being such a dummy (he lacks "wisdom").

Brain Snack: "Milky gentleness," as Goneril calls it, is associated with a woman's capacity to nurture children (i.e., breastfeed). In Shakespeare's play Macbeth, when Lady Macbeth accuses her husband of being a wimp (Macbeth's not hot about killing King Duncan and his wife isn't happy), Lady Macbeth accuses her husband of being "too full o' the milk of human kindness" (Macbeth, 1.5.1), which you can read all about in our guide to Macbeth.

King Lear begins his retirement with retinue of a hundred knights. Eventually, Goneril and Regan demand he get rid of his men and decrease Lear's knights to a number of seventy-five, then fifty, then twenty-five, then one, and then, finally, zero. A big fat goose egg.

What happens to all those men who were once employed in Lear's service? They simply disperse, becoming part of a growing population of what historian A.L. Beier referred to as "masterless men," homeless wanderers that roamed the countryside. As Beier notes, vagrants were called "masterless" because they were unemployed and landless in a period when the able-bodied poor were supposed to have masters" (Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640, p. xix). The dispersal of King Lear's knights not only speaks to Lear's dramatic loss of power but also offers a bit of social commentary in the play.

Here, Goneril talks about her retired father in a pretty condescending way that reveals some serious anger and resentment. She calls Lear an "idle old man" who is foolish enough to think that he still wields any power now that he's retired and has given his daughters all his land. According to Goneril, old men are just like babies—whiny, weak, and powerless.