King Lear, Act IV, scene vi, is one
of the great monologues in literature. It's full of sexual imagery, analogies, and
verbal irony (sarcasm). Literally translated, it reads something like this (according
to my No Fear Shakespeare):
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Women are sex machines below the waist, though
they’re chaste up above. Above the waist they belong to God, but the lower part belongs
to the devil. That’s where hell is, and darkness, and fires and stench! Death and
orgasm!
In the monologue Lear
uses the following rhetorical
devices:
Rhetorical question:
"What was thy cause?
Adultery?"
Animal
imagery: "The wren goes to 't, and the small gilded
fly"
Eye /
Sight imagery: "Does lecher in my
sight."
Verbal irony (sarcasm),
sexual imagery, and analogy: "Let copulation thrive;
for Gloucester's bastard son Was kinder to his
father than my daughters Got 'tween the lawful
sheets."
Animal
imagery: "The fitchew (a skunk), nor the soiled horse, goes to
't / With a more riotous
appetite."
Hell / fire
imagery: "There's hell, there's darkness, there's the
sulphurous pit," AND "Burning, scalding, stench,
consumption;"
Appearance
vs. reality motif (women are gods above the waist, devils
below):
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"Down from the waist they are
Centaurs,"
Though women all
above:
But to the girdle do the gods
inherit,
Beneath is all the
fiends';
Analogy
and apostrophe (compares Gloucester to an apothecary; addresses an
apothocary not present):
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Give me an ounce of
civet,
good apothecary, to sweeten my
imagination:
there's money for
thee.
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