When Lear finds his Fool beside him in the storm his thoughts suddenly turn from
his own plight to that of the poor (his famous “Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are” speech):
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
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.
There is a touch of Latinity in the words "physic", "pomp" and
"expose"
But the central word of the passage is "superflux"
Shakespeare coined it himself from Latin components instead of
using the Anglo-Saxon equivalent "overflow"
Especially striking is the combination of "shake" and "superflux",
as well as "take" and "physic" or "feel" and "expose"
In this powerful passage Shakespeare makes the most of the
contrast between the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin elements within
the English language