Act1
scene1仅仅一幕，大部分人的性格都体现出来了，两个虚伪的姐姐，不会阿谀奉承的Cordelia,勇敢的Kent,正直有眼光的法兰西王，还有脾气暴躁愚昧的李尔王。
Kent:
Think'st thou that duty shall have dread to speak
When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour’s bound
When majesty stoops to folly. Reserve thy state,
And in thy best consideration check
This hideous rashness. Answer my life my judgment,
Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least,
Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds
Reverb no hollowness.
法兰西王对Cordelia说的一番话：
Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;
Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised;
Thee and thy vitues here I seize upon.
Be it lawful I take up what's cast away.
还有
Love's not love when it is mingled with regards that stands aloof from th'entire point. Will you have her?
She is herself a dowry.爱情里面要是搀杂了和它本身无关的算计，那就不是真的爱情…
Cordelia：
I yet beseech your majesty—
If for I want that glib and oily art
To speak and purpose not, since what I well intend,
I'll do't before I speak-that you make known
It is no vicious blot, murder of foulness,
No unchaste action or dishonoured step,
That hath deprived me of your grace and favour;
But even for want of that for which I am richer,
A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue
That I am glad I have not, though not to have it
Hath lost me in your liking.
Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides,
Who covert faults at last with shame derides.
Scene2主要讲Edmund的离间记，让自己的哥哥和父亲反目，从而自己这个私生子可以从此名正言顺。
Edmund:
大自然，你是我的女神…
Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am stone twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? With baseness? Bastardy? Base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of Nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to th'creating a whole tribe of fops
Got' tween a sleep and wake?
(造成他这种自私自利的性格也是有原因的，很大一部分是这个社会的错）
人们最爱用这一种糊涂思想来欺骗自己…
This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we, are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own beha viour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and adulterers by art enforced obedience of pkanetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to 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.
Scene4傻瓜的话很有喻意啊，傻瓜无疑是这部戏剧里的精髓人物。在这一幕的末尾，李尔王开始忏悔自己对小女儿的过错
Fool:
这年头傻瓜供过于求，…
Fools had ne'er less grace in a year;
For wise men am grown foppish,
And know not how their wits to wear,
Their manners are so apish.
What kin thou and thy daughters are.They'll have me whiped for speaking true; thou'It have mw whipped for lying; and somtimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any kind o'thing than a fool! And yet I would not be thee, nuncle. Thou hast pared thy wit o' both sides and left nothing i' th' middle. Here comes one o' the parings.
That's a shelled peascod.
在李尔王被女儿指责时，傻瓜说
For you know, nuncle,
The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long that it had it head bit off by it young. So out went the candle, and we were left darkling.
Scene5
李尔王找二女儿帮忙时，傻瓜说她跟大女儿其实一个样:
She'll taste as like this as a crab does to a crab.(不明白中文为什么翻成野苹果) Thou canst tell why one's nose stands i' th' middle on's face?
Why, to keep one's eyes of either side's nose, that what a man cannot smell out, he may spy into(傻瓜不傻，他懂得道理比一般人多多了)
The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason. Becasue they are not eight.
Act2 Gloucester无法明辨是非，最终瞎了眼。
Scene2
感觉莎士比亚骂起人来也很厉害啊，借Kent之口骂小人Oswald，骂得畅快淋漓啊"A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothong but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition."真是一气呵成的脏话，再看下面一番话，见风使舵的小人，人人喊打，奸臣的形象刻画深入人心：
That such a slave as this should wear a sword,
who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these, like rats, oft bite the holy cords atwain
which are too intrince t'unloosed: smooth every passion that in the natures of their lords rebel,
bring oil to fire, snow to the colder moods;
renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks,
with every gale and vary of their masters,
Knowing nought, like dogs, but following.
A plague upon your epileptic visage!
Smile you my speeches, as I were a fool?
Goose, if I had you upon Saturn plain,
I'd drive ye cackling home to Camelot.
Scene4两个女儿都不让李尔王身边有仆人侍卫，李尔王发出一下感慨，人为什么要有除了物质以外的其他享受，如果没有这些，那和畜类有什么区别：
O mason notthe need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest things superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's. Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But for true need,—
You heavens, give me patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age, wretched in both…
Act3
Scene2 暴风雨中
Lear:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hunicanoes, 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! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o'th'world,
Crack Nature's moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!
Let the great gods,
That keep this dreadful pudder o'er our heads,
Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch
That hast within thee undivulged crimes
Unwhipped of justice. Hide thee, thou bloody hand,
Thou perjured, and thou simular of virtue
That art incestuous. Caitiff, to pieces shake,
That under covert and convenient seeming
Hast practised on man's life. Close pent-up guilts,
Rive your concealing continents, and cry
These dreadful summoners grace. I ama man
More sinned against than sinning.
Scene4
Lear:
Thou think'st' tis much that this contentious storm
Invades us to skin: so' tis to thee;
But where the greater malady is fixed
The lesser is scarced felt. Thou' dst shun a bear;
But if thy night lay toward the roating sea,
Thou' dst meet the bear i' th' mouth. When the mind's free, the body's delicate; this tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there filial ingratitude!
Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
For lifting food to' t?…
Scene6
Lear:
He' s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath.
Act4
Scene1
Edgar:
Yet better thus, and known to be contemned,
Than still contemned and flattered. To be worst,
The lowest and most dejected thing of Fortune,
Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.
The lamentable change is from the best;
The worst returns to laughter. Welcome, then,
Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace
The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst
Owes nothing to thy blasts.
接下来Edgar要让他父亲重拾希望，这部剧里难得的孝子，然后孝女是Cordelia
Edgar:
The worst is not so long as we can say "This is the worst"
'Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind.
Scene2
Albany:
Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile;
Filths savour but themseleves...
If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offencese, it will come
Humanity must perforce prey on itself
Like monsters of the deep.
Scene3
侍臣Gentleman描述Cordelia的话
Not to a rage; patience and sorrow strove
Who should express her goodliest. You have seen
Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears
Were like, a better way: those happy smilets
That played on her ride lip seemed not to know
What guests were in her eyes, which parted thence
As pearls from diamonds dropped. In brief,
Sorrow would be a rarity most beloved
If all could so become it.
There she shook the holy water from her heavenly eyes that clamour moistened; then away she started to deal with grief alone.
Scene6
Gloucester想要自杀时
Edgar:
And yet I know not how conceit may rob
The treasury of life when life itself
Yields to the theft.
Had be been where he thought,
By this had thought been past. Alive, or dead?
Gloucester:
Away, and let me die.
Edgar:
Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air,
(so many fathom down precipitating ),
Thou' dst shivered like an egg； but thou dost breathe.
Hast heavy substance, bleed'st not, speak'st, art sound.
ten masts at each make not the altitude
Which thou hast perpendicularly fell;
Thy life's a miracle. Speak yet again
后来Gloucester放弃自杀念头
Gloucester:
Henceforth I'll bear
Affliction till it do cry out itself
'enough,enough',am I die.
Lear:
Down from the waist they are centaurs,
Though women all above.
When we are born, we cry that we are come
to this grate stage of fools.
I will die bravely, like a smug bridegroom.
Gloucester:
were all thy letters suns, I could not see.
Act5
Scene3
Cordelia死后，Lear的哀嚎：
Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so
That heaven's vault should crack！She's gone for ever.
I know when one is dead, and when one lives,
She' s dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives.