King Lear

Out on the heath in a raging storm, Kent meets a gentleman who tells him he’s seen Lear, running wild and shouting into the wind and rain. The conditions are so wild that even “the cub-drawn bear would couch,/The lion and the belly-pinchèd wolf/Keep their fur dry” (12-14). Yet the elderly and maddened Lear is exposed to the elements. Kent warns this gentleman that Albany and Cornwall are secretly plotting against each other and that the King of France—Cordelia’s new husband—plans to invade and take the country back from these treacherous dukes. If the gentleman goes to Dover, he can deliver news of Lear’s plight and give Cordelia Kent’s ring as a token. The gentleman agrees, and Kent rushes off to search for Lear.

Lear, followed by the loyal Fool, spits fury at the weather:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!/You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout/Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks./You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,/Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,/Singe my white head (1-6).

The Fool struggles to get his master to shelter. Lear continues to rage at the sky, and the sky rages back.