A king divides his kingdom between his daughters, and disowns the one who answers 'Nothing'
The love-test of the opening scene: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia
Shakespeare · Tragedies
King Lear
c. 1605–06
Tragedy — from the old play King Leir, Holinshed and Geoffrey of Monmouth
An ageing king of pre-Christian Britain divides his kingdom between the two daughters who flatter him and disinherits the third, who will not. Stripped of his followers and driven out into a storm, he goes mad on the heath with a fool and a beggar for company, while in a parallel plot the Earl of Gloucester is betrayed by his bastard son and blinded on stage. Reconciliation comes too late: Cordelia is hanged and the king dies over her body. It is the bleakest of the tragedies, and for more than 150 years the English stage would only play it with a happy ending.
How to spot them
- ▸An old king divides his kingdom between his daughters on a map
- ▸A storm on the heath, with a fool and a naked Bedlam beggar for company
- ▸An earl blinded on stage, then led towards the cliffs of Dover by his disguised son
- ▸Nahum Tate's rewrite, in which the youngest daughter lives and marries, held the stage from 1681 to 1838
- ▸Two substantially different early texts, a 1608 quarto and the 1623 Folio, now sometimes edited as separate plays
Scenes, characters & lines
'Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!'
The storm scene, the old king raging against the elements
'Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?'
Cornwall putting out Gloucester's eyes on stage, urged on by Regan
A blinded earl asks to be led to the cliffs of Dover, and is deceived into a harmless fall
Edgar, in disguise, stages his father's suicide to cure him of despair
'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport'
Gloucester, after his blinding
'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child!'
The curse on Goneril
'Now, gods, stand up for bastards!'
Edmund's creed, which sets the subplot going
A Fool who speaks the truth in riddles, then vanishes from the play halfway through
His last line is 'And I'll go to bed at noon'
Key ideas
- The double plot — a father deceived about his children, twice over — is Shakespeare's addition, the Gloucester strand drawn from Sidney's Arcadia
- Cordelia's death is in none of the sources; Shakespeare invented it, and audiences could not bear it for a century and a half
Quick-fire facts
- •The daughters are Goneril, Regan and Cordelia; the loyal Earl of Kent serves the king in disguise under the name Caius
- •Edgar's disguise is 'Poor Tom', a Bedlam beggar, whose devils' names come from Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures
- •Sources include Holinshed, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, The Mirror for Magistrates and the anonymous play The True Chronicle History of King Leir (printed 1605)
- •Nahum Tate's 1681 adaptation cut the Fool and let Cordelia survive and marry Edgar; it was the only version staged in Britain until Macready restored Shakespeare's text in 1838
- •Samuel Johnson wrote that he was so shocked by Cordelia's death that he could not bear to reread the final scenes until he had to edit them
- •The Quarto of 1608 and the Folio of 1623 differ by hundreds of lines; the Oxford Shakespeare prints The History of King Lear and The Tragedy of King Lear separately
- •Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985) recasts the story in sixteenth-century Japan, with three sons in place of daughters
- •Peter Brook filmed a bleak, Beckett-influenced version in 1971 with Paul Scofield in the title role
- •The 1608 quarto's title page records a performance before James I at Whitehall on St Stephen's night, 26 December 1606
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Sources
- Folger Shakespeare Library — King Lear
- Stanley Wells (ed.) — The Oxford Shakespeare: The History of King Lear