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Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 1 )

There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity. The artful involutions of distinct interests, the striking opposition of contrary characters, the sudden changes of fortune, and the quick succession of events, fill the mind with a perpetual tumult of indignation, pity, and hope. There is no scene which does not contribute to the aggravation of the distress or conduct of the action, and scarce a line which does not conduce to the progress of the scene. So powerful is the current of the poet’s imagination, that the mind, which once ventures within it, is hurried irresistibly along.

—Samuel Johnson, The Plays of William Shakespeare

For its unsurpassed combination of sheer terrifying force and its existential and cosmic reach, King Lear leads this ranking as drama’s supreme achievement. The notion that King Lear is Shakespeare’s (and by implication drama’s) greatest play is certainly debatable, but consensus in its favor has gradually coalesced over the centuries since its first performance around 1606. During and immediately following William Shakespeare’s lifetime, there is no evidence that King Lear was particularly valued over other of the playwright’s dramas. It was later considered a play in need of an improving makeover. In 1681 poet and dramatist Nahum Tate, calling King Lear “a Heap of Jewels unstrung and unpolish’d,” altered what many Restoration critics and audiences found unbecoming and unbearable in the drama. Tate eliminated the Fool, whose presence was considered too vulgar for a proper tragedy, and gave the play a happy ending, restoring Lear to his throne and arranging the marriage of Cordelia and Edgar, neatly tying together with poetic justice the double strands of Shakespeare’s far bleaker drama. Tate’s bowdlerization of King Lear continued to be presented throughout the 18th century, and the original play was not performed again until 1826. By then the Romantics had reclaimed Shakespeare’s version, and an appreciation of the majesty and profundity of King Lear as Shakespeare’s greatest achievement had begun. Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared the play “the most tremendous effort of Shakespeare as a poet”; while Percy Bysshe Shelley considered it “the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world.” John Keats, who described the play as “the fierce dispute / Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay,” offered King Lear as the best example of the intensity, with its “close relationship with Beauty & Truth,” that is the “Excellence of every Art.” Dissenting voices, however, challenged the supremacy of King Lear . Essayist Charles Lamb judged the play to have “nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting” and deemed it “essentially impossible to be represented on a stage.” The great Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley acknowledged King Lear as “Shakespeare’s greatest achievement” but “not his best play.” For Bradley, King Lear , with its immense scope and the variety and intensity of its scenes, is simply “too huge for the stage.” Perhaps the most notorious dissenter against the greatness of King Lear was Leo Tolstoy, who found its fable-like unreality reprehensible and ruled it a “very bad, carelessly composed production” that “cannot evoke amongst us anything but aversion and weariness.” Such qualifications and dismissals began to diminish in light of 20thcentury history. The existential vision of King Lear has seemed even more pertinent and telling as a reflection of the human condition; while modern dramatic artistry with its contrapuntal structure and anti-realistic elements has caught up with Shakespeare’s play. Today King Lear is commonly judged unsurpassed in its dramatization of so many painful but inescapable human and cosmic truths.

King Lear is based on a well-known story from ancient Celtic and British mythology, first given literary form by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1137). Raphael Holinshed later repeated the story of Lear and his daughters in his Chronicles (1587), and Edmund Spenser, the first to name the youngest daughter, presents the story in book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1589). A dramatic version— The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters, Gonerill, Ragan, and Cordella —appeared around 1594. All these versions record Lear dividing his kingdom, disinheriting his youngest daughter, and being driven out by his two eldest daughters before reuniting with his youngest, who helps restore him to the throne and bring her wicked sisters to justice. Shakespeare is the first to give the story an unhappy ending, to turn it from a sentimental, essentially comic tale in which the good are eventually rewarded and the evil punished into a cosmic tragedy. Other plot elements—Lear’s madness, Cordelia’s hanging, Lear’s death from a broken heart, as well as Kent’s devotion and the role of the Fool—are also Shakespeare’s inventions, as is the addition of the parallel plot of Gloucester and his sons, which Shakespeare adapted from a tale in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia . The play’s double plot in which the central situation of Lear’s suffering and self-knowledge is paralleled and counterpointed in Gloucester’s circumstances makes King Lear different from all the other great tragedies. The effect widens and deepens the play into a universal tragedy of symphonic proportions.

King Lear opens with the tragic turning point in its very first scene. Compared to the long delays in Hamle t and Othello for the decisive tragic blow to fall, King Lear , like Macbeth , shifts its emphasis from cause to consequence. The play foregoes nearly all exposition or character development and immediately presents a show trial with devastating consequences. The aging Lear has decided to divest himself of kingly responsibilities by dividing his kingdom among his three daughters. Although the maps of the divisions are already drawn, Lear stages a contest for his daughters to claim their portion by a public profession of their love. “Tell me, my daughters,” Lear commands, “. . . Which of you shall we say doth love us most.” Lear’s self-indulgence—bargaining power for love—is both a disruption of the political and natural order and an essential human violation in his demanding an accounting of love that defies the means of measuring it. Goneril and Regan, however, vie to outdo the other in fulsome pledges of their love, while Cordelia, the favorite, responds to Lear’s question “what can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters” with the devastatingly honest truth: “Nothing,” a word that will reverberate through the entire play. Cordelia forcefully and simply explains that she loves Lear “According to my bond, no more nor less.” Lear is too blind and too needy to appreciate her fidelity or yet understand the nature of love, or the ingenuous flattery of his older daughters. He responds to the hurt he feels by exiling the one who loves him most authentically and deeply. The rest of the play will school Lear in his mistake, teaching him the lesson of humanity that he violates in the play’s opening scene.

The devastating consequences of his decision follow. Lear learns that he cannot give away power and still command allegiance from Goneril or Regan. Their avowals of love quickly turn into disrespect for a now useless and demanding parent. From the opening scene in which Lear appears in all his regal splendor, he will be successively stripped of all that invests a king in majesty and insulates a human being from first-hand knowledge of suffering and core existential truths. Urged to give up 50 of his attending knights by Goneril, Lear claims more gratitude from Regan, who joins her sister in further whittling down Lear’s retinue from 100 knights to 50, to 25, 10, 5, to none, ironically in the language of calculation of the first scene. Lear explodes:

O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s .

Lear is now readied to face reality as a “poorest thing.” Lear’s betrayal by his daughters is paralleled by the treachery of the earl of Gloucester’s bastard son, Edmund, who plots to supplant the legitimate son, Edgar, and eventually claim supremacy over his father. Edmund, one of the most calculating and coldblooded of Shakespeare’s villains, rejects all the bonds of family and morality early on in the play by affirming: “Thou, Nature, art my goddess, to thy law / My services are bound.” Refusing to accept the values of a society that rejects him as a bastard, Edmund will operate only by the laws of survival of the fittest in a relentless drive for dominance. He convinces Edgar that Gloucester means to kill him, forcing his brother into exile, disguised as Tom o’ Bedlam, a mad beggar. In the play’s overwhelming third act—perhaps the most overpowering in all of drama—Edgar encounters Lear, his Fool, and his lone retainer, the disguised Kent, whom Lear had banished in the first scene for challenging Lear’s treatment of Cordelia. The scene is a deserted heath with a fierce storm raging, as Lear, maddened by the treatment of his daughters, rails at his fate in apocalyptic fury:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak cleaving thunderbolts, S inge my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder, Strike fl at the thick rotundity o’ th’ world, Crack nature’s mould, all germens spill at once, That makes ingrateful man.

The storm is a brilliant expressionistic projection of Lear’s inner fury, with his language universalizing his private experience in a combat with elemental forces. Beseeching divine justice, Lear is bereft and inconsolable, declaring “My wits begin to turn.” His descent into madness is completed when he meets the disguised Edgar who serves as Lear’s mirror and emblem of humanity as “unaccommodated man”—a “poor, bare, forked animal”:

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.

Lear’s suffering has led him to compassion and an understanding of the human needs he had formerly ignored. It is one of the rare moments of regenerative hope before the play plunges into further chaos and violence.

Act 3 concludes with what has been called the most horrifying scene in dramatic literature. Gloucester is condemned as a traitor for colluding with Cordelia and the French invasion force. Cornwall, Regan’s husband, orders Gloucester bound and rips out one of his eyes. Urged on by Regan (“One side will mock another; th’ other too”), Cornwall completes Gloucester’s blinding after a protesting servant stabs Cornwall and is slain by Regan. In agony, Gloucester calls out for Edmund as Regan supplies the crushing truth:

Out, treacherous villain! Thou call’st on him that hates thee. It was he That made the overture of thy treasons to us, Who is too good to pity thee.

Oedipus-like, Gloucester, though blind, now sees the truth of Edmund’s villainy and Edgar’s innocence. Thrown out of the castle, he is ordered to “smell / His way to Dover.”

Act 4 arranges reunions and the expectation that the suffering of both Lear and Gloucester will be compensated and villainy purged. Edgar, still posing as Poor Tom, meets his father and agrees to guide him to Dover where the despairing Gloucester intends to kill himself by jumping from its cliffs. On arriving, Edgar convinces his father that he has fallen and survived, and Gloucester accepts his preservation as an act of the gods and vows “Henceforth I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself / ‘Enough, enough,’ and die.” The act concludes with Lear’s being reunited with Cordelia. Awaking in her tent, convinced that he has died, Lear gradually recognizes his daughter and begs her forgiveness as a “very foolish, fond old man.”

The stage is now set in act 5 for a restoration of order and Lear, having achieved the requisite self-knowledge through suffering, but Shakespeare pushes the play beyond the reach of consolation. Although Edmund is bested in combat by his brother, and Regan is poisoned by Goneril before she kills herself, neither poetic nor divine justice prevails. Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoner, but their rescue comes too late. As Shakespeare’s stage directions state, “Enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms,” and the play concludes with one of the most heart-wrenching scenes and the most overpowering lines in all of drama. Lear, although desperate to believe that his beloved daughter is alive, gradually accepts the awful truth:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all. Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!

Lear dies with this realization of cosmic injustice and indifference, while holding onto the illusion that Cordelia might still survive (“Look on her, look, her lips / Look there, look there!”). The play ends not with the restoration of divine, political, or familial order but in a final nihilistic vision. Shakespeare pushes the usual tragic progression of action leading to suffering and then to self-knowledge to a view into the abyss of life’s purposelessness and cruelty. The best Shakespeare manages to affirm in the face of intractable human evil and cosmic indifference is the heroism of endurance. Urging his despairing father on, Edgar states in the play’s opposition to despair:

. . . Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all. Come on.

Ultimately, King Lear , more than any other drama, in my view, allows its audience to test the limits of endurance in the face of mortality and meaninglessness. It has been said that only the greatest art sustains without consoling. There is no better example of this than King Lear .

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

Oxford Lecture King Lear

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I like to think that even the Greeks would’ve weeped at this incredible play. And perhaps even that man from Uz, whose grief was heavier that the sand of the sea, would’ve pitied Lear. Great analysis. Thank you!

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William Shakespeare

• Literature Notes
• Kingship and Lear
• Play Summary
• About King Lear
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Act I: Scene 1
• Act I: Scene 2
• Act I: Scene 3
• Act I: Scene 4
• Act I: Scene 5
• Act II: Scene 1
• Act II: Scene 2
• Act II: Scene 3
• Act II: Scene 4
• Act III: Scene 1
• Act III: Scene 2
• Act III: Scene 3
• Act III: Scene 4
• Act III: Scene 5
• Act III: Scene 6
• Act III: Scene 7
• Act IV: Scene 1
• Act IV: Scene 2
• Act IV: Scene 3
• Act IV: Scene 4
• Act IV: Scene 5
• Act IV: Scene 6
• Act IV: Scene 7
• Act V: Scene 1
• Act V: Scene 2
• Act V: Scene 3
• Character Analysis
• Earl of Gloucester
• Earl of Kent / Caius
• Edgar / Poor Tom
• Duke of Albany
• Duke of Cornwall
• King of France
• Duke of Burgundy
• Character Map
• William Shakespeare Biography
• Critical Essays
• Major Themes
• Major Symbols
• Divine Justice
• Parent-Child Relationships : The Neglect of Natural Law
• Famous Quotes
• Film Versions
• Full Glossary
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays Kingship and Lear

Integrity, compassion, and justice are important facets of an effective king. The king ismore than the physical evidence of a strong and united government. The king is God's representative on earth, and as such, serves as a model of behavior for all his subjects, who look to their king for guidance, strength, and hope. If a king lacks the essential components of kingly behavior, and the authority that these traits embody, his subjects will, as Goneril and Regan demonstrate, turn increasingly to deception, treachery, and violence as a method of government. Does Shakespeare's depiction of King Lear offer the audience a portrait of kingship, or in contrast, a portrait of kingly loss?

In his first scene, Lear initially comes across as a strong ruler, although his plan to divide his kingdom among his three daughters seems rather short-sighted and self-serving. This decision places his two strong sons-in-law, Albany and Cornwall, in charge of protecting the outlying areas of the kingdom. But the single benefit derived from this division creates many problems. Lear is abdicating his purpose and his responsibilities, and he is also creating chaos. To achieve his goal, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia are forced into a love test to determine their inheritance. The division of any kingdom is not without risk, but even before his action has the opportunity to create adversity, Lear establishes a competition, which complicates an already dangerous decision.

Competitions, by their very nature, result in winners and losers. Cordelia loses when she refuses to play the game, but Lear also loses when he "retires" and abdicates his kingly role. He cannot be king without a kingdom, and the country, which is to be divided into smaller principalities, will not have the unity and strength to long survive as separate units. Civil war and insurrection are the inevitable results of Lear's actions. The love test forces Regan and Goneril into competing against the favored younger sister. Ultimately, deadly conflict arises between Lear and his older daughters, and the long-standing competition between sisters creates conflict between ruling factions, further dividing the kingdom.

Even before Cordelia's return, dissent is in the air. In Act II, Curan's report of strife between Albany and Cornwall helps illustrate that Lear's division of his kingdom was a mistake (II.1.10). At this point, conflict doesn't appear to exist between Goneril and Regan, and Cordelia is out of the immediate scene as a result of her banishment. Already, though, Cornwall and Albany show signs of uneasiness, a discord with the clear potential to evolve into conflict, and perhaps, civil war. Goneril and Regan soon unite against a common foe — their own father; but it is reasonable to assume that Goneril and Regan, having disposed of Cordelia, would have next turned their troops and anger against one another. Certainly, Edmund was counting on this event, since he indicates he will marry whichever one survives the struggle for absolute control (V.1.55-69).

Notably, King Lear was not always the ineffectual king represented in the middle and final acts of Shakespeare's play. In the opening of the play, Lear is the absolute ruler, as any king was expected to be in a patriarchal society such as Renaissance England. Lear enters in Act I as the king, evoking grandeur and authority, representing God and the reigning patriarchy of kingship. The audience quickly forgets this initial impression because the love test, in all it absurdity, forces the audience into seeing Lear as a foolish, egotistical old man. But the evidence of his greatness is seen in Kent's devotion, in the love of his Fool, and in Cordelia's love, which is sustained, in spite of Lear's rejection.

By the time Shakespeare was writing King Lear , the English had survived centuries of civil war and political upheaval. The English understood that a strong country needed an effective leader to protect it from civil war and potential foreign invasion. The strong leadership of Elizabeth I had saved England when the Spanish attempted an invasion in 1588, and much of the credit for her success was attributed to her earlier efforts to unite England and to end the religious dissention that was destroying the country. No ruler would have deliberately chosen to divide a kingdom, not after having witnessed the conflicts that had marked England's recent history. The division of a country would have weakened it, leading to squabbles between petty lords and the absence of an effective central government and a capable means of defense. Having only recently achieved stability in their country, Shakespeare's Elizabethan audience would have been horrified at Lear's choice to divide his kingdom, and so, create disunity.

The audience would also have questioned the choice of the French king as a suitor, especially as Lear intended to give Cordelia the choice center section of his kingdom. The audience's abject fear that a foreign king might weaken England (and a Catholic monarch made it worse) would have made Lear's actions seem even more irresponsible. But Lear is doing more than creating political and social chaos; he is also giving his daughters complete responsibility for his happiness, and he will blame them later when he is not happy. All of these events create a picture of King Lear as a poor model of kingship, one who reacts emotionally and without reason.

Lear is very much loved by every good character in the play, with only those characters who are unworthy of kingship hating him and plotting against him. Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund offer a contrasting image of kingship in their animosity and evil, behavior that is brutal and uncaring, rather than loving and paternal. One other important element of kingship is its connection to natural law and the image of kings as anointed by God. Kingship is directly connected to natural law, which is a central force in this play. A king has absolute authority and has no need to question natural law, and yet kings rule as God's representative on earth; thus their very position creates a reciprocal agreement between the monarchy and natural law. A successful king works in concert with nature, as Lear does until the moment he disinherits his youngest daughter.

In King Lear , the King of France stands as a successful model of how a good and proper king should behave. In his acceptance of Cordelia — even without benefit of a dowry — France is conducting himself with reason and conscience. He is also acting within the confines of natural law, with generosity of spirit and a willingness to share his life and country. The model of France's behavior recalls how Lear must have behaved before his decision to divide his land. But instead of seeing this kind father and patriarchal authority, the audience witnesses an absolute ruler, one who refuses questioning, or even the wisdom of his lords. Goneril and Regan equate their share of the land with absolute power of a monarch. They reject any allegiance to God or to any divine justice. Instead, they establish their own system of morality, one based on their father's law rather than natural law. Goneril and Regan can be as absolute in their decisions as Lear chooses to be; their behavior echoes his.

In their choices, Cornwall and Regan remind the audience of Macbeth and his wife. Cornwall and Regan present a ruling couple, — perhaps even more ruthless, but just as ambitious as the Macbeths — willing to murder their way to absolute power. Goneril and Regan dismiss Lear's 100 knights, who are really his small personal army. Their action is reasonable if they expect to seize rule and authority. Although the threat of losing a personal guard warrants remedy, Lear's response to this move precipitates the crisis. No king should allow his army to be disbanded, and so Goneril and Regan's actions are certainly dangerous to the king. But by this time, Lear has waited too late to reclaim the kingship that he has denied.

At the conclusion of the play, Albany appoints Kent and Edgar to restore order, although Albany's rank places him above the other two. But Kent intends to follow his master in death and that leaves Edgar to inherit the kingdom. In spite of the recent events, Albany thinks that Kent and Edgar can rule jointly, but Kent is correct in choosing another future for himself.

Although traditionally, the highest-ranking individual speaks the last lines in a tragedy, Shakespeare gives Edgar the final lines, as Gloucester's surviving son responds to Albany's request. Edgar is clearly uncertain and reluctant to assume the crown. Kingship was never his goal, nor his intent. But circumstances have forced him to consider a position for which he is unprepared.

Shakespeare has not offered the audience much to appreciate about Edgar. For much of the play, Edgar was disguised as Poor Tom, and the audience saw only a poor creature from Bedlam. Edgar really steps forward when he challenges Edmund, revealing that he has the goodness and strength to defeat evil. In winning their duel, Edgar's defeat of Edmund signals the triumph of righteousness over corruption and provides an assurance of God's blessing on Edgar. This act signals his ability to assume the role of king. In Edgar, kingship is exemplified by integrity, compassion, and justice — all the elements that Lear once possessed but which were subordinated to his injured ego.

Previous Parent-Child Relationships : The Neglect of Natural Law

A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

K ing Lear is one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies; indeed, some critics have considered it the greatest. It is certainly one of the bleakest. The plot and subplot deftly weave together the principal themes of the play, which include reason, madness, blindness of various kinds, and – perhaps most crucially of all – the relationship between a father and his children. Before we offer some words of analysis of King Lear , it might be worth recapping the plot of the play.

King Lear : plot summary

King Lear has a plot and subplot which neatly and closely complement each other. The main plot centres on the ageing King Lear, who begins the play by dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters, only to disinherit one of them, Cordelia, when she refuses to tell him that she loves him.

The subplot also focuses on a father, the Duke of Gloucester, who has two sons: Edgar, his legitimate heir; and Edmund, his illegitimate son whom he fathered during a moment of youthful lust.

When Lear gathers his three daughters together to divide up his realm among them, he gives Regan (who is cold and calculating) and Goneril (who is hot-headed and impetuous) the biggest share, because they both play along with his game when he asks his daughters to say which of them loves him most.

But Cordelia, the third daughter (who is staid and dignified) refuses to play this game and says she merely loves him as much as is expected of a daughter for her father, and as a result of her refusal, King Lear banishes her to France. When the Earl of Kent tries to reason with Lear, he, too, is banished – but he returns, in disguise, so he can remain close to his King and serve him.

Meanwhile, in the subplot, Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, sets about getting his half-brother Edgar out of the way by telling their father that Edgar plans to murder him. In an echo of the main plot, Gloucester banishes his (true and loyal) son, Edgar, who will turn up shortly after this, in disguise, as a beggar and madman going by the name of ‘Poor Tom’.

No sooner have they been given Lear’s kingdom than his remaining two daughters start turning against their aged father. They refuse to let his vast royal entourage into their home, and Lear – complete with his Fool (who is the one person who can speak the truth to the King without suffering punishment), and with Kent (in disguise) – walks out into a storm. Sheltering in a hut, the three of them meet ‘Poor Tom’ (Edgar in disguise).

Gloucester takes Lear into his home, and Lear curses his daughters for not loving him. Gloucester knows that Regan and Goneril plan to kill their father, so he sends Lear to Dover, on the coast, where Cordelia is landing with a French army. Edmund tells Regan and her husband, the Duke of Cornwall, what Gloucester has done, and they put out Gloucester’s eyes and cast him out.

Edgar (still disguised as the lunatic Poor Tom) meets his father, and madman leads blind man to Dover, where he dissuades Gloucester from suicide. They meet Lear, who has now gone completely mad and is wandering the heath.

As if this isn’t enough plot strands involving this rather large cast of central characters, there is also a love triangle between the two sisters, Regan and Goneril, and Edmund, whom they both love (even though they are both already married). Edgar intercepts a love letter Goneril has written to Edmund, and passes it to Goneril’s husband, Albany.

When Albany gets back from fighting Cordelia’s French force, he challenges Edmund to fight anyone who challenges him; Edgar ends up killing his half-brother. As Edmund dies, he reveals that he has arranged for Lear and Cordelia to be killed.

Everything now descends into mass death, but also enlightenment: Goneril poisons Regan over Edmund, and then kills herself. Lear finds Cordelia in prison, following her capture; she dies in his arms, and Lear, having wept for her, dies.

King Lear : analysis

King Lear is a bleak play, but like all great tragedies, a measure of catharsis or healing is achieved through Lear’s suffering, as well as that of the other characters. The play might be summed up as a battle between reason and madness, or between blindness and sight, except that the conflict between the two dissolves into a distinction without a difference.

Paradoxically, it is only when he has been (literally) blinded that Gloucester gains insight into his family, and realises that Edgar, not Edmund, was his true and trusted son. Similarly, it is only when King Lear has gone completely mad on the heath that he comes to realise that Cordelia, not Regan or Cordelia, loved him best; in comparison, his other two daughters were mere flatterers using him to get his kingdom (and then push him out of the way).

These paradoxes are also present in the relationship between King and Fool: Lear’s folly or (metaphorical) blindness is highlighted by his Fool, who is one of the wisest people in all of King Lear , and can (paradoxically, again) only be so frank with his King because, being a mere Fool, nobody is expected to take him seriously.

Part of the artistic triumph of the play is the way Shakespeare brings all of these apparent contradictions together to create a piece of compelling drama that is moving without being sentimental, despairing but also illuminating. Thematically, these various strands work together to reinforce the play’s central concern with madness and reason, blindness and seeing.

And Shakespeare cleverly sets up the characters as doubles, opposites, and complements: as Harold Bloom notes in a persuasive analysis of King Lear (in his book Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human ), in a play where so many of the major characters speak to each other at some point, it was canny of Shakespeare never to have Lear and Edmund speak a word to each other throughout the entire play, because they are complete antitheses: where Lear is all feeling, Edmund is ‘ice-cold’ and emotionless.

Less than a hundred years after Shakespeare wrote the play, in the 1680s, King Lear was given a rather dramatic (as it were) rewrite by the Poet Laureate, Nahum Tate. But in fact the story of King Lear was originally a happy one, when it first appeared in the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century.

The anonymous play, King Leir , on which Shakespeare based his tragedy also ends on a somewhat more upbeat note. Shakespeare took the story and unleashed its apocalyptic tragedy, in which everyone dies except Edgar, who is to inherit the realm whose division, at the outset, led to the subsequent chaos that unfolded.

One reason Shakespeare may have been tempted to take King Leir and rewrite it for the Jacobean stage was that his King, James I of England (and James VI of Scotland), had been responsible for uniting England and Scotland under a common ruler; indeed, if we include Wales (which always gets left out), he brought together three kingdoms.

In this connection, Lear’s fatal decision to divide his kingdom into three parts at the beginning of King Lear takes on additional historical relevance. Was Shakespeare trying to flatter his King and show him How Not to Rule?

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8 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear”

I wish I had seen that production I heard about where the opening scene had everyone in party hats while (I think) Lear was whirled about furiously in a wheelchair (UK ten years ago??). Anyway, there’s so much potential for a creative director to set the stage with that scene!

I have seen three versions, maybe four, and it is always interesting to see how the actor portrays Lear: autocratic, megalomaniac, ruthless, unenlightened? Give David Tennant a few more years and let’s see him tackle it or maybe Peter Capaldi is ready?

More productions of Lear, please

Well written

• Pingback: A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear

Thanks for this but…I’m fairly certain you’ve got mixed up with the names of the daughters once or twice. Cordelia appears a little strangely especially towards the end of your piece.

Well spotted, Ken – thanks to your eagle eye, I’ve updated the post but do let me know if there are any remaining inconsistencies (Cordelia was erroneously named in place of Goneril at one point, but this is now fixed).

My pleasure – not often I catch one on you! But with such a dense plot, it is no surprise. Lear, I find, needs a couple of stiff drinks to be ready to swallow, as it were…

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Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir ? Should we refer to Shakespeare’s original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations? When turning from page to stage, the critical view on King Lear is skewed by the fact that for almost half of the four hundred years the play has been performed, audiences preferred Naham Tate's optimistic adaptation, in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after. When discussing King Lear , the question of what comprises ‘the play’ is both complex and fragmentary. These issues of identity and authenticity across time and across mediums are outlined, debated, and considered critically by the contributors to this volume. Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the leading international contributors to King Lear: New Critical Essays offer major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of King Lear . This book is an up-to-date and comprehensive anthology of textual scholarship, performance research, and critical writing on one of Shakespeare's most important and perplexing tragedies. Contributors Include: R.A. Foakes, Richard Knowles, Tom Clayton, Cynthia Clegg, Edward L. Rocklin, Christy Desmet, Paul Cantor, Robert V. Young, Stanley Stewart and Jean R. Brink

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Jeffrey Kahan is Associate Professor of English at the University of La Verne in California, and completed his Ph.D at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. He is the author of Reforging Shakespeare  (1998) and The Cult of Kean (2006) and editor of Shakespeare Imitations, Parodies and Forgeries, 1710-1820 (3 vols. Routledge, 2004).

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Critical essays on King Lear, William Shakespeare

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Originally published in 1984. With selections organised chronologically, this collection presents the best writing on one of Shakespeare’s most studied plays. The structure displays the changing responses to the play and includes a wide range of criticism from the likes of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Moulton, Granville-Barker, Orwell, Levin, Stampfer, Gardner and Speaight interspersed with short entries from Keats, Raleigh, Freud and others. The final chapter by the editor elucidates his own thoughts on Lear, building on his commentary in the Introduction which puts the collection in context.