King Lear

I

Introduction

King Lear, play by English playwright William Shakespeare, written about 1605 and first performed in December 1606.

II

The Legend

In the original English legend that King Lear is based upon, Lear, king of Britain, decides in his old age to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. He asks how much they each love him. The two elder daughters overwhelm him with expressions of their love, but the youngest daughter simply says that she loves him as a child should. Enraged at his youngest daughter's reply, Lear drives her into exile and divides the kingdom between the other two. After receiving their share of the kingdom, the ungrateful daughters treat King Lear so cruelly that he flees to the youngest, who in the meantime has married the king of France. This daughter returns to Britain with an army, defeats the wicked sisters, and places Lear again on the throne.

III

The Play

Shakespeare converted the legend of Lear into a great and terrible tragedy. The play’s intensity is heightened by Shakespeare’s portrayals of the madness of Lear, brought on by the cruelty of his older daughters, Goneril and Regan; the murder of his youngest daughter, Cordelia; and the death of Lear with Cordelia's body in his arms. These aspects of the story are original to Shakespeare’s play, as is the character of the Fool, whose bitter jests bring home to Lear the folly of his action. Both Lear's madness and the Fool's wit raise the explicit theme of the play—inhumanity in the form of filial ingratitude—to a higher level of philosophical meaning and resolution.

King Lear is unique among Shakespeare's tragedies because it contains an underplot, the story of the duke of Gloucester and his sons. This story was drawn from Arcadia (1590), a poem by English poet Sir Philip Sidney. Shakespeare interwove the underplot closely with the main plot by making both of Lear’s evil daughters fall in love with Gloucester's bastard son, Edmund, a development that brings about their eventual ruin.

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The double plot also provides parallels in the fates of Lear and Gloucester. The ruin of both men is brought about not only by their children's ingratitude, but also by their own lack of insight. At the play's outset, Lear, 'every inch a king,' is an absurdly proud man, expecting his daughters to love him more than they love their husbands. Gloucester, on the other hand, is self-important, rather like the character of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601?). Blind to the feelings of others, Gloucester never suspects that his son bitterly resents his birth out of wedlock. Only after they have suffered at the hands of their children do Lear and Gloucester achieve insight. Stripped of his kingdom and his arrogant pride, Lear goes mad and then, paradoxically, is able to perceive the reality of life more clearly. Encountering a naked beggar on the heath, the humbled, raving king perceives their kinship:

Similarly, Gloucester attains true vision only after his eyes have been put out. His insight begins with despair at the inhumanity of fate:

Taken as a whole, King Lear is the story of the struggle between good and evil. It is often considered one of Shakespeare's best poetic tragedies.

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