I heard myself proclaimed,

And by the happy hollow of a tree

Escaped the hunt. No port is free, no place

That guard and most unusual vigilance

Does not attend my taking. Whiles I may ’scape

I will preserve myself; and am bethought

To take the basest and most poorest shape

That ever penury, in contempt of man,

Brought near to beast. My face I’ll grime with filth,

Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots,

And with presented nakedness outface

The winds and persecutions of the sky,

The country gives me proof and precedent

Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,

Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms

Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;

And with this horrible object, from low farms,

Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills

Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,

Enforce their charity: ‘Poor Turlygod! Poor Tom!’

That’s something yet; Edgar I nothing am.

[IV, i, 1–9] Still in his mad disguise, Edgar finds he can take considerable comfort from the knowledge that he is firmly at the bottom of the social heap:

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.

[III, iv, 28–36] Brought low himself by circumstance, Lear reflects on the plight of his country’s poor.

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them

And show the heavens more just.

Macbeth

[I, v, 36–52] A single murder stands between her husband and the Scottish throne, realizes Lady Macbeth – and King Duncan is to be the guest of honour in her own home this very night:

The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements. Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood;

Stop up the access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between

The effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts

And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,

Wherever, in your sightless substances,

You wait on nature’s mischief. Come thick night

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark

To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’

[I, vii, 1–28] His wife having put the idea of murdering Duncan in his head, Macbeth is appalled at the enormity of the contemplated crime: