book review king lear

Book review: “King Lear” by William Shakespeare

Talk about Shakespeare’s great King Lear tends to focus on the action of the play and its meaning.

A self-satisfied monarch, blind to the consequences of his actions, splits his realm in two, giving half to one daughter and half to the other. To his third and dearest daughter, he gives nothing. Her sin: Failing to flatter him enough.

This is a play about loyalty and disloyalty, about parents and children, about wisdom and foolishness, and about the many forms of madness — arrogance, greed, anger, ambition, dementia and pride.

It is a play filled with murders and hangings and a suicide and not one but two eyes being ripped out.

It is a lot like the Book of Job in the Bible in which the central character rails at the unfairness of life. It is a story about pain and stupidity and the cruelty of being a human being, prone to failure.

King Lear is also a work of great literary beauty, and that’s what I want to focus on.

This is, of course, Shakespeare, so we expect great poetry. Here, though, there is a concentrated fierceness to his words that make them seem like knife slashes or the bludgeoning of a baseball bat.

King Lear: “Dry up her organs of increase”

Here is Lear who has finally realized that his daughter Goneril is betraying him. In his condemnation of her, he reaches deep inside his kingly self to curse her with awesome grandeur:

Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful! Into her womb convey sterility! Dry up in her the organs of increase; And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honour her! If she must teem, Create her child of spleen; that it may live, And be a thwart disnatured torment to her! Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth; With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks; Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits To laughter and contempt; that she may feel How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child! Away, away!

The Duke of Cornwall: “Vile jelly”

Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?

The Earl of Glouchester: “This villain of mine”

Earlier in the play, Glouchester, like Lear, is tricked by one of his children. His bastard son Edmund leads him to believe that his legitimate son Edgar wants to kill him and take over his title.

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction; there’s son against father: the king falls from bias of nature; there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves.

Edmund: “Villains by necessity”

When Glouchester leaves the stage, Edmund turns to the audience and, in one of his many asides, readily acknowledges that his betrayal of his father has nothing to do with celestial bodies, but with his own ambition.

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeit of our own behavior — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail; and my nativity was under Ursa major; so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

Fool: “Before thy time”

As the play unfolds, it becomes clear that Lear’s Fool is one of the monarch’s best friends and advisors. He is filled with pity and sorrow to see his formerly majestic lord cast aside like garbage. What’s worse is that Lear’s fate is of his own doing.

If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I’ld have thee beaten for being old before thy time…. Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.

Duke of Burgandy: “Must lose”

Lear disinherits his dearest daughter Cordelia on the day that she is to be engaged to one of two suitors — the Duke of Burgandy or the King of France. When the two enter the throne room, they are told that, because she has been disowned, Cordelia no longer has the dowry that Lear had earlier promised: a third of his kingdom. That settles it for Burgundy, as he tells the young woman.

I am sorry, then, you have so lost a father That you must lose a husband.

The King of France: “Most rich”

The King of France, though, has a different response.

Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor; Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised! Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon: Be it lawful I take up what’s cast away. Gods, gods! ’tis strange that from their cold’st neglect My love should kindle to inflamed respect. Thy dowerless daughter, king, thrown to my chance, Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France: Not all the dukes of waterish Burgundy Can buy this unprized precious maid of me. Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind: Thou losest here, a better where to find.

Edgar: “So many fathom”

By the end of the play, Edgar is taking care of his sightless father who is so despairing that he wants to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff.

Edgar tricks him, and Glouchester falls forward, but, instead of plummeting to his death, lands on the grass in front of him. Even so, Edgar tells him that he has miraculously floated down, safe and sound.

Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air, So many fathom down precipitating, Thou’dst shiver’d like an egg: but thou dost breathe; Hast heavy substance; bleed’st not; speak’st; art sound. Ten masts at each make not the altitude Which thou hast perpendicularly fell: Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again. (When Glouchester asks, “But have I fall’n, or no?”) From the dread summit of this chalky bourn. Look up a-height; the shrill-gorged lark so far Cannot be seen or heard: do but look up.

Regan: “The goodness I intend”

Regan and Goneril are each wanting to share Edmund’s bed, but they fear each other. Regan wants Edmund to tell her that she’s the one she wants.

Now, sweet lord, You know the goodness I intend upon you: Tell me — but truly — but then speak the truth, Do you not love my sister?

Goneril: “Milk-liver’d man”

Goneril is angry that her husband the Duke of Albany isn’t as blood-thirsty and ambition as she is, and she lets him have it.

Milk-liver’d man! That bear’st a cheek for blows, a head for wrongs; Who hast not in thy brows an eye discerning Thine honour from thy suffering; that not know’st Fools do those villains pity who are punish’d Ere they have done their mischief. Where’s thy drum? France spreads his banners in our noiseless land; With plumed helm thy slayer begins threats; Whiles thou, a moral fool, sit’st still, and criest ‘Alack, why does he so?’

Kent: “Reverse thy doom”

The Earl of Kent is perhaps Lear’s closest friend and ally, and, as such, he risks everything to try to talk his king out of his disastrous splitting of his kingdom. Lear won’t hear it, though.

Royal Lear, Whom I have ever honour’d as my king, Loved as my father, as my master follow’d, As my great patron thought on in my prayers… Let it fall rather, though the fork invade The region of my heart: be Kent unmannerly, When Lear is mad. What wilt thou do, old man? Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak, When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour’s bound, When majesty stoops to folly. Reverse thy doom; And, in thy best consideration, cheque This hideous rashness: answer my life my judgment, Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least; Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sound Reverbs no hollowness.

Patrick T. Reardon 7.26.16

Written by : Patrick T. Reardon

For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear

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

The Best Fiction Books » Classic English Literature

By william shakespeare, recommendations from our site.

“ Lear is about all sorts of things but one of the things it’s about is people getting old and not ceding what their kids think they should to them and the kids trying to bully them.” Read more...

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Kathleen Taylor , Science Writer

“I think it’s the most profound of the plays. It’s not one you go to for a jolly night out, Shakespeare was deeply serious in writing this play. It does have its comic aspects, but it’s easily the most profound examination of what it means to be human of anything that I know.” Read more...

Stanley Wells recommends the best of Shakespeare’s Plays

Stanley Wells , Literary Scholar

“ King Lear is a play that changes your life. How could it not? It asks fundamental questions about who we are……..The very first line of the play is ‘I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall’, and that word ‘affected’, affection, becomes everything this play is about. It is about the human soul, about instincts, about how it is important that royalty, for example, has to be earned through decency. It’s a very powerful and very engaged, committed work.” Read more...

René Weis on The Best Plays of Shakespeare

René Weis , Biographer

“Psychologists ask the same question: Do we learn from our mistakes? Or in other words: Do we get wiser as we grow older? Perhaps not on a Learian scale but on a more mundane scale, do we learn from our imprudence? And the answer is no.” Read more...

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Dr Charles Foster

Other books by William Shakespeare

Titus andronicus (arden shakespeare) by jonathan bate & william shakespeare, all the sonnets of shakespeare by paul edmonson, stanley wells & william shakespeare, the art of shakespeare's sonnets by helen vendler & william shakespeare, shakespeare's sonnets by katherine duncan-jones & william shakespeare, illustrated stories from shakespeare by anna claybourne, rosie dickins & william shakespeare, hamlet by william shakespeare, our most recommended books, great expectations by charles dickens, jane eyre by charlotte brontë, wuthering heights by emily brontë, antony and cleopatra by william shakespeare, a midsummer night’s dream by william shakespeare, frankenstein (book) by mary shelley.

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Book Review: King Lear by William Shakespeare

Slowly but surely I’m getting all my reviews done. I’m hoping to finish by September 10. Fingers crossed! Here’s another review for the classic King Lear . I promise that soon my reviews will relate more to contemporary times/YA + NA + A books, but I wanted to include all the books I’ve read this year, including academic (if it wasn’t obvious, I graduated in English, lol). Enjoy the review, let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like to see on this blog! Or if you’ve read this play, feel free to interact/respond to my thoughts. ♥︎ (Also forgot to mention in my last review that my ratings are out of five stars).

So this is my second time reading King Lear , and as usual with any Shakespeare play, it’s a completely different experience the second time you read it (that’s how you know if someone’s a good writer, because you should have a different experience every time you read their piece). It’s one of Shakespeare’s big four tragedies, and it revolves around the complexity of familial relationships, loyalty, love, and trust. If you want to know just my overall thoughts/ratings, skip to the bottom!

Shakespeare’s plays are just too complex to review act by act, so I’m going to review it by overall plot, characters, writing style, etc. First off, the plot. To be honest, whenever I read a Shakespeare play, I don’t usually go, “wow! I love the plot!”. I mean, obviously his better plays have better stories, but King Lear is one of the few exceptions where the characters and relationships are just so well done, that the plot really didn’t matter to me. If I were to review the play strictly on plot, well, it wouldn’t be a very good review. So I’m going to skip over this because it’s not really worth it. There’s enough plot that keeps the story going, but to me, what makes this play so magical and wonderful, is the characters and their relationships.

The first time I read King Lear , I hated Gonerill and Regan with an intense, fiery passion, and I just wanted Lear and Cordelia to run off into the sunset and have the father-daughter relationship they deserve and live their lives to the fullest. Now that I reread the play, I still hate Gonerill and Regan, but I actually hate Lear just as much, and if not, more. He’s such an interesting character, and so well written. He’s a five year old, a teenager, a forty year old, and a senile senior all in one shot. He’s annoying and I want to strangle him but it’s not like one of those characters you want to strangle and they’re also terrible characters. Of course you want to strangle Lear, but you also acknowledge easily how amazing his character depth is. He is as materialistic as he can get, and believes that love is equal to land and treasures. Even though he clearly shows remorse by the end of the play for acting like a dipshit to his daughters (mainly Cordelia), he’s still a really awful father and only believes his daughters love him based on words rather than actions. As for Gonerill and Regan, as I said, I still hate them greatly, but now that I hate Lear just as much, I understand that they really had to deal with the biggest senile baby on the planet as a father and king. Now I mainly hate them for allowing what happened to Gloucester happen, because Gloucester was a pure man who was just deceived the entire time and just wanted to be a good noble person. Kent and Cordelia are also really pure souls who shouldn’t have wasted their time on Lear after he kicked them out, but of course, Kent and Cordelia show how amazing their are by never giving up on him (especially Kent). Edmund was also a dipshit, but he seemed to somewhat redeem himself in the end, and all the other characters working for the bad guys are just boring and useless. Albany (Gonerill’s husband who’s loyal to Lear) is also really boring, but he has some A+ moments cursing out Gonerill in the fourth act. And the fool is just, well, a fool. However, even the boring characters have significance in this play. They play vital roles in the progression of the interesting characters. As for the characters you hate, well, you just love to hate them. And once again, I’d probably die for Cordelia, Kent, and Gloucester, and my heart broke over and over again for them throughout the play.

Ah, isn’t that quote from Kent great? Shakespeare (not surprisingly) always has a way with words that just makes it magical. And when I say magical, I don’t mean in a superior-academic kind of way, I mean like he makes even the crudest topics (which are like 95% of his writing content) sound so beautiful. Seriously, when Lear was ranting and raving to Gloucester/Edgar in the fourth act, I really felt /that/ when he said “let copulation thrive!” (i.e. let’s have more sex). His plays really aren’t as academic/superior as people make them out to be, they just invoke really deep thought while being amazing and funny and all about sex jokes 95% of the time. Of all the Shakespeare plays I’ve read, King Lear is definitely one of my favourites, and a big reason is the language he uses and his way with words.

I realize this review isn’t what I had in mind, and it doesn’t really say much about the play itself. Part of it is because I find it difficult to review a Shakespeare play without invoking a three hour discussion on a super particular aspect of the play. I will say that I am a sucker for familial relationships which is probably why the first time around I wanted Lear and Cordelia to have a happy ending. Now that I realize Cordelia deserved way better (and honestly, so do Regan and Gonerill), I kind of would be interested in exploring the dynamic between the three sisters, which you really don’t see much of. Regan and Gonerill you see quite a bit, but the only time Cordelia is really around them is the beginning of the play. Now I’m wondering how their dynamic sets up the whole play and I’m about to go on a whole tangent so I’ll just end my review here saying great play, amazing characters, amazing relationships, a good plot. So go read the play, because it’s much easier to talk about with people who have read it than just talk about it in a general review.

If any of you have read the play, please let me know what you thought of it in the comments below! If you’ve read other Shakespeare plays, how do you think this one compared to them?

Rating: ★★★★ | GoodReads

The Oxford Culture Review

"i have nothing to say, and i am saying it" – john cage, review: ‘king lear’.

2016 is proving to be the Year of Lear. Shakespeare’s most troubled tragedy seems to be dominating his anniversary year — it’s hitting stages with Anthony Sher and Glenda Jackson in the titular role, and has been the subject of both historical and performance-centered scholarship. It’s also Creation Theatre’s Spring production, currently running at Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford, as part of Oxford’s Shakespeare festival .

Creation Theatre set out to find ‘ unusual spaces ’ to stage their plays, and the Norrington Room has proved to be a pretty perfect space for King Lear. With audience members nestled among the alcoves holding volumes on philosophy, religion, and psychology, there seems to be no more fitting setting for Lear’s descent into madness. The written word is pivotal in Lear — miscommunication and manipulation largely occur via letter, when there is no physical presence to confirm or refute their meaning. So holding the play surrounded by books added an extra layer of horror, Gloucester becoming completely enveloped by the words that bring about his downfall, and Mad Tom’s garbled speech set at odds with the orderliness of the book texts. Plus, the titles emblazoned on the shelves contributed an unobtrusive but pleasing irony — I watched Lear throw himself at the mercy of his daughters, and Cornwall gouge out Gloucester’s eyes, against a backdrop that loudly announced the ‘LOGIC’ and ‘ETHICS’ sections of the shelving. Within this play on language and context, the written word emerged as a site of multiple meaning — treacherous in its oppressiveness, cruel in its ambiguity, and unforgiving in its clarity.

Aside from setting, the production also has another twist — it’s staged with only five actors. You can’t fault the scope of Creation’s vision in this respect. King Lear is full of characters, so to set it with only five players initially seems like a fool’s game. It far outstrips the precedent for Cordelia and the Fool being played by a single actress. Max Gold as King Lear was the only cast member not to hold down multiple roles, with Morgan Philpott single-handedly taking on Edmund, Oswald, Albany, Cornwall, and France, and Natasha Rickman playing not only Kent, but Goneril and Regan as well (often simultaneously).

In many ways, having actors step seamlessly between roles was an inspired idea. It brought out resonances between characters, and the temptation to divide the cast into “good and evil” camps was avoided by casting Kent between two actors, and having the gentle France and sadistic Cornwall played by the same man. It also contributed to the sense of disorientation that Lear experiences as he slowly goes mad (although I imagine that the constant role-swapping might have been immensely confusing for anyone not already extremely familiar with the plot). Furthermore the brilliance of the individual actors was beyond question. Lucy Pearson in particular shone as Cordelia, Edgar/Mad Tom, and the Fool, her angular movements and shrill voice as Tom almost unrecognisable from her stately portrayal of Lear’s banished daughter.

That said, King Lear is so affecting at least partly because it is such a physical play. In the characters of Lear and Gloucester, Shakespeare completely hollows out the human body, staging mental and physical evisceration respectively. They represent two sides of the same coin, and in Gloucester’s case especially the threat of his enemies is decidedly corporeal. Added to this, Gloucester’s physical blindness symbolises his loss of sight regarding his sons; Lear begins the play an upright man and by the middle crawls along the ground, naked, as he fails to cope with the reality of his own making — bodies mean as much as the words.

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For me, therefore, the play lost some of its impact when characters spent half the play represented by scarves or jackets. This technique worked brilliantly for Creation’s staging of Henry V , in Oxford Castle, but here seemed to detract from the sheer physical heaviness of Lear . Edmund’s murder seemed only a fleeting gesture, as Philpott had to immediately step from being dead Edmund to living Albany, commenting on the former’s death. He managed the personality transition admirably, but it left no time to process the passing of one of the play’s major villains. In the same way, the final scene seemed a little disemboweled by the lack of bodies on stage. Nonetheless, even without a physically present Cordelia to weep over, Lear’s final lament for her death was heartbreaking. Alongside his reunion with Gloucester, these were two of the most striking moments of the play, both Michael Sheldon as Gloucester and Gold as Lear playing their parts with quietly understated desperation.

From a technical perspective, the greatest challenge (and, therefore, opportunity) of the play is the storm on the heath. With sound design by Matt Eaton and lighting by Ashley Bale, the storm was for the most part effectively rendered. I particularly enjoyed the incorporation of books as sound effects, giving the written word tangible impact to weave together both the physical and mental destructiveness of the storm. After this sensory battering, however, Lear’s monologue seemed a little lacklustre. It might have benefitted from being underscored by the sounds of the tempest, otherwise the storm seemed to drop away entirely for Lear to speak. This may well have been due to opening night technical issues, but having Lear in control of the storm, rather than at its mercy, battling to be heard, seemed to undermine its all-consuming chaos.

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Sound and lighting also contributed to an underlying theme of the production: namely, the role of technology in Lear’s world of madness and revenge. The play opened to an indistinct electronic soundtrack and cold blue lighting, a combination that has become theatrical convention for a ‘place out of time’. Distressed costumes, sensory disorientation, and some kind of comment on contemporary technology will surely follow, and Creation’s Lear ticked all of these boxes. What I was uncertain about, however, was precisely what commentary was being provided here. There was a play on celebrity culture with Lear handing out his kingdoms in an Oscars-style ceremony, the very public altercation between him and his daughters only made possible through the amplification provided by on-stage microphones. Gloucester’s words about Edgar are recorded and repeatedly played back to him, becoming a literal technological albatross as the voice recorder hangs from his neck, his words taking on a life of their own in mediated form. But “technology” seemed to float as a generalised idea, rather than honing in on a specific aspect to make a critical point. Stephen Hyde’s King Lear , which ran at the O’Reilly last year, targeted film and how the perspective of the cameraman alters the viewer’s perception of a situation, live-broadcasting the onstage action to highlight the one-sidedness of the camera’s gaze. This production might have been enhanced by a similar approach, perhaps making more of the possibilities of the recorded word to run alongside and against the setting saturated with script, and the stage filled with speech.

Creation describe their productions as ‘ eccentric, unexpected, fun, lively, quirky, fast ’. Their interpretation of Lear is certainly all of these, and their cast and creative team have once again proved their extraordinary ability to be able to not only adapt to creative spaces, but to enhance and transform them almost beyond recognition. Their fluid casting may work better for comedy than this inescapably bleak tragedy, but Creation always offer something unique. Their tailor-made productions acknowledge the potential of a space to mould a performance, and their actors are consistently superb. This is a Lear ‘not like any version you’ve seen before’, and you’re unlikely to see one like it again.

To book tickets, please visit Creation Theatre’s website . More information about Shakespeare in Oxford 2016 can be found here .

We are on Twitter @Oxford_Culture , and on Facebook

By William Shakespeare Probably written between 1603 - 1606

General Note: In January 2009 I decided that I�d like to go back and read all the plays of William Shakespeare, perhaps one a month if that works out. I hadn�t read a Shakespeare play since 1959, 50 years ago! But I had read nearly all of them in college. I wanted to go back, start with something not too serious or challenging, and work my way through the whole corpus. Thus I began with The Two Gentlemen of Verona. At this time I have no idea how the project will go, nor if it will actually lead me through the entire corpus of Shakespeare�s plays. However, I will keep a separate page listing each play I�ve read with links to any comments I would make of that particular play. See: List of Shakespeare�s play�s I�ve read and commented on

COMMENTS ON KING LEAR

I wouldn�t have missed this reread, but it just didn�t touch me in way that at least a dozen other of the plays has done.

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King Lear book review

This King Lear book review tries to fit the classical structure of this play into the model that we’ve been using on Books Crier. Read on!

Shakespeare’s King Lear invites us with the magnitude, intensity, and sheer duration of the pain that it pictures. Its characters harden their hearts, engage in violence, or try to alleviate the affliction of others.

Lear himself rages until his rationality cracks. What, then, keeps drawing us back to King Lear ? For all the force of its language, King Lear is almost equally compelling when translated, implying that it is the narrative, to a significant part, that draws us to the piece.

The story tells us about families striving between greed and cruelty, on one side, and help and comfort, on the other. Passions and sensations are incredibly magnified to large dimensions.

Furthermore, we see the elderly defined in all its weaknesses, pride, and, perhaps, wisdom. Perhaps, for this reason, this story is one of the most devastating and moving of all Shakespeare’s tragedies.

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Baptised on April 26, 1564, William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist.

He is often called England’s national poet, and the “Bard of Avon”, whose extant works have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare dies on April 23, 1616.

User Review

The official edition of King Lear from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trustworthy and widely adopted Shakespeare series for scholars and general readers, comprises:

Newly revised information based original versions
Comprehensive explanatory notes
Step-by-step plot reviews
An introduction to understanding Shakespeare
A modern analytical article by a top Shakespeare authority
Fresh images
A guide to further reading

Keep in mind that the main plot has the complete set of characters while the sub-plot, due to its supporting function, is a simpler one. For these reasons, the sub-plot is more centered on the conflict between its sub-protagonist and sub-antagonist

Archetype Distribution

character spoilers

Protagonist = King Lear | Edmund (sub-plot)

Lear is the central character of the main plot, the title figure, and the guy who sets the action of the story. It is his retirement that fires all of the central chaos.

Most of the other roles align themselves either

or against him:

Goneril and Regan

who are clearly immoral and treacherous

Moreover, Lear goes through a classic (un)growing-as-a-person process.

In my opinion, Edmund is the protagonist of the sub-plot since it is he that pushes it forward when he decides to pull the carpet from under Gloucester and Edgar's feet.

Antagonist = Goneril and Regan | Edmund

Main Character = Cordelia | Edgar

King Lear os NOT the main character!

We do not see the story through his eyes. We do not agree with his actions.

Impact Character = Antagonists and King Lear

The central philosophical conflict in the story is

and how strong bad can become and mess up everything for everyone, even bringing madness or blindness to people.

Guardian = Kent (physical), The Fool (mind)

Contagonist - Albany and Cornwall, and Oswald | Edmund

Sidekick = Kent and Gloucester (to Lear);

Skeptic= Lear and Gloucester | Gloucester

Emotion = King Lear

Reason = Regan

Dramatic Structure

King Lear's structure follows a classic five-part* paradigm inherited from old Aristotelean times. We will try to fit the story into our dramatic structure model used in this website.

* formerly called acts , but renamed here to avoid conflict or confusion

The play has a sub-plot that runs parallel to, and interacts with the main plot but is presented with a little time mismatch of convenience so we can establish the link between them. The analysis will be done step-by-step with those plots "side-by-side".

Let's see what we can come up with.

The first part is the Exposition, or Presentation phase, the segment of the play which introduces the Ordinary World and important characters.

It is Archaic Britain, just before Christianity.

King Lear is getting old, has three daughters, and no male heir.

Gloucester despises his bastard son, Edmund.

This part presents the conflicts and actions that become a major trouble for the protagonist to solve.

It's is curious to mention that, in my opinion, in this story, it is not the Antagonist that sets off the trigger, but, in fact, King Lear, the Protagonist, himself

The segment establishes the main areas of conflict which will drive the story forward.

Without a Prince to succeed him, King Lear decides to split the kingdom among his daughters to avoid any conflicts after his death.

The trigger places struggles between:

Lear x Cordelia , who is honest, uncompromising
Lear x Goneril and Regan, his other two daughters, who are vicious
Cornwall and Edgar x Edmund wants to take their place and power

This act usually is a longer segment that presents the rising action phase where a series of tests and complications build up to:

recounting and/or preparation

(A sequence of plot sections)

Here we witness the increasing action as the first conflicts develop.

Lear increasingly loses the respect from his people, as well as his power.
We see a gap open up between the King and, Goneril and Regan.
The subplot, centered on Gloucester, and his sons, also develops.

At the same time, this part marks the beginning of a conspiracy orchestrated by Edmund, Goneril, and Regan, now associated villains of the stories.

O moment of crisis, or near=deth for the Protagonist usually happens at this point

King Lear’s central section is the peak sequence, where the action reaches a turning point and when the major crisis occurs.

The height of this play could hardly make a bigger dramatic effect. It centers on a violent storm for Lear. An enormous physical impact represents a turmoil that rages his mind into madness.

The Gloucester subplot also reaches its peak when cruel Cornwall and Regan make The Earl blind in a torture session.

Mid-point is a position in the story that brings enlightenment to the crisis and gives the protagonist new energy to continue his journey.

The recovery sequence begins as King Lear moves towards its resolution.

Edgar (still disguised) reunites with Gloucester and Cordelia returns to Lear.

Recount/Preparation

The King also begins to recover his sanity. Amongst the elements which suggest that the story may be moving towards a good-triumphing-over-evil happy ending are the deaths of Cornwall and Oswald.

Ultimately, however, these signs of a more just world only serve to heighten the catastrophe that unfolds as we move into this section.

The play concludes with a resolution to the various conflicts but not in any way which suggests a simple moral resolution.

The ‘evil’ characters (Goneril, Regan, Edmund) all die but so do Lear and Cordelia establishing the tragic aspect of the story

The play ends with Edgar as he is the one chosen to restore peace to the kingdom.

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2 thoughts on “ King Lear book review ”

I find King Lear one of the most important stories to understand the parallel plots. There is a great movie version of that takes place in the old west. The actor is Patrick Strewart. Quite good indeed. Thanks for the great post.

Hello, Loney,

Thanks for sharing. I saw that movie. I liked it too. Cheers!

King Lear: Everything You Need to Know in 5 Minutes

We’ve done the research, so you can bluff your way through. Here’s a quickfire guide to the wild, wicked world of King Lear . Compiled by Andy McLean.

The story of King Lear in five simple steps

1. Splitting a kingdom (and a family): Retiring as ruler of Britain, King Lear splits his kingdom between his two elder daughters Goneril and Regan after they flatter him – but he disowns his youngest (and favourite) daughter Cordelia after she refuses to fawn over him. Banished from Britain, Cordelia weds the King of France.

2. Daddy issues: Lear and his entourage intend to live in the homes of Goneril and Regan but the two daughters have other ideas. After a vicious argument, Lear is left to fend for himself outdoors amidst a wild storm with only his loyal Fool for company. From here, Lear’s descent is rapid: he loses his temper, his way, and his mind.

3. Oh brother: Meanwhile, another family feud is brewing in the Earl of Gloucester’s household. His illegitimate son Edmund tricks the Earl into thinking his legitimate son Edgar is plotting to kill him. In fear for his own life, Edgar flees and disguises himself as a lunatic beggar called Poor Tom.

4. Eye of the storm: When the Earl of Gloucester tries to help Lear; Goneril and Regan accuse Gloucester of treason, have his eyes plucked out, and cast him out into the storm. Gloucester soon staggers into the path of his son Edgar (still pretending to be Poor Tom), as well as Lear and Lear’s Fool.

5. The bitter end: The French army invades Britain, finds a humbled Lear, and reconciles him with Cordelia. Goneril and Regan compete for the affections of Edmund until Goneril’s jealousy gets the better of her – she fatally poisons her sister, then takes her own life. Edgar kills Edmund, but not before Edmund reveals Cordelia has been captured and executed. Lear dies of a broken heart.

Families, friends and foes

Meet the characters in the play

King Lear Long-time ruler of Britain. Royal family patriarch. Has cooked up a half-baked plan to relinquish power and hand over to the next generation. Also: indulged, impulsive, and irritable.

Cordelia Lear’s youngest daughter is devoted to him but refuses to pander to his whims. Cordelia tells it like is.

Goneril Lear’s eldest daughter is sycophantic to his face but disparaging behind his back. She lusts for power and for Edmund (see below) – and she’ll go to any lengths to get what she wants.

Regan Lear’s second daughter shares all her sister’s worst traits and secret lusts – putting the two of them on an inevitable collision course.

Duke of Albany Goneril’s husband is a man of conscience who gradually summons the courage to stand up to her. Blissfully unaware of his wife’s desire for Edmund.

Duke of Cornwall Regan’s husband is domineering, ambitious and cruel (and those are his best qualities). He also has a vindictive streak. He, too, is blissfully unaware of his wife’s desire for Edmund.

Oswald Right-hand man to Goneril. Lies, deception, violence – it’s all in a day’s work for Oswald.

Earl of Kent Lear’s trusted supporter, Kent is brave, outspoken, and loyal. Even after he is banished, Kent disguises himself as a peasant named Caius to protect Lear from his enemies.

Earl of Gloucester Gloucester is a steadfast supporter of King Lear and loving father of adult sons Edgar and Edmund. Quietly courageous but easily led astray.

Edgar The legitimate son of Gloucester, Edgar is principled and devoted to his father. For most of the play, he disguises himself as a vagabond named Poor Tom.

Edmund The conniving bastard son of Gloucester revels in anarchy. Routinely ingratiates himself to others then betrays them. Gleefully plays his father off against his brother; and plays Goneril off against Regan – all with dreadful consequences.

Fool Lear’s licensed “fool” is whip-smart, unswervingly loyal, and unafraid of speaking truth to power.

Big picture, tiny details

King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s most radical plays and is revered for its exploration of human nature on many levels.

On the one hand, this epic story poses the biggest questions humans can ask: Is there a God? If so, is that God merciful or malicious? How fragile is the line between social order and chaos? What happens when ageing autocrats lose their grip on power? What are the consequences when leaders abuse their authority by rewarding flatterers and punishing dissenters? From religion to politics to the meaning of life, Shakespeare wrestles with all these issues and more.

On the other hand, King Lear explores the minutiae of family relationships in all their messy glory. The families in this play are riddled with contradictions – from affection and alliances to psychological cruelty and succession disputes. Family members seek to compare love through words (e.g. Goneril and Regan’s public displays of affection) or quantify love through numbers (e.g. the number of knights the daughters permit their father to have).

Despite their lofty status, the families in this play are driven by animalistic urges like jealousy, lust, and greed. As Albany puts it:

Humanity must perforce prey on itself,

Like monsters of the deep.

Gradually, Lear discovers that his own genes are beyond his control. He is undermined by his ageing body and mind, as well as by his offspring. Nature humbles Lear and makes him realise his flaws and frailties.

Quote, Unquote

King Lear is a goldmine of sparkling lines. Here are three famous quotes and some reflections from actors who have uttered them:

Go thrust him out at gates and let him smell His way to Dover

Judy Dench (in her book Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent ): “There’s no end to [Regan’s] vindictiveness. She says and does some appalling things – asks for Gloucester to be hanged, yanks him by the beard, urges her husband to pluck out his other eye – she really sticks the boot in. But her behaviour is the consequence of her life up until now … there’s a whole host of antagonisms and tensions.”

O, I have taken too little care of this.

John Bell (in his book On Shakespeare ): “[Lear’s] pain finds relief in the violence of the storm – he exults in it and starts to come to his senses. He suddenly realises that the hungry and homeless are constantly exposed to these forces of nature.”

Lear: Who is it that can tell me who I am? Fool: Lear’s shadow.

Oliver Ford Davies (in his book Shakespeare’s Fathers and Daughters ): “The key to Lear, in the first two acts at least, seems to me his lack of self-knowledge… This lack of self-awareness makes him in a sense unknowable, which for actors is both perplexing and liberating, giving rise to a huge spectrum of interpretation… is he now a shadow of his former self? Lear’s journey, baffled and blind about himself as he is, is to come to terms with this.”

Five fast facts

1. Acting royalty: The role of King Lear is highly prized among actors. Overseas, Lears have included Anthony Hopkins, Brian Cox and Glenda Jackson. In Australia, Lears have included Evelyn Krape, Tom E Lewis and John Bell (in fact, Bell performed the role in three separate productions down the years).

2. Back to the future: In 1984, a young actor named Robert Menzies starred as Edgar in a Nimrod Theatre production of King Lear . Forty years later, in Bell Shakespeare’s 2024 production , Robert returns to the play, this time in the title role.

3. Happily ever after? Shakespeare borrowed the King Lear story from a history book and a pre-existing play, but he cleverly twisted the plot in many places. The anguish at the end of Shakespeare’s version was so confronting that it was rewritten by Nahum Tate in 1681 and that adaptation – with a happy ending – held stage for 170 years. It wasn’t until the 1850s that Shakespeare’s version became popular again.

4. King Leer: It wasn’t the ending, but the leery language that saw King Lear revised by Thomas Bowdler. In 1815, critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge also complained the play was too crude: “Shakespeare’s words are too indecent to be translated… his gentlefolk’s talk is full of coarse allusions such as nowadays you could hear only in the meanest taverns.” So, for a while there, a G-rated version took hold.

5. British is best? Notably, this play is about Britain , not England. While Elizabeth II was Queen of England, the word “England” appeared 224 times in Shakespeare’s plays. The word “Britain” didn’t appear in any of his scripts until the Scottish King James I took the English throne in 1603. By the time Shakespeare completed King Lear in 1606, the Union Jack flag was flown for the first time and James was campaigning hard to unite the British Isles.

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King Lear intends to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, so that he can enjoy old age without the burdens of power. He has planned a ceremony in which each daughter will state how much she loves him, before an audience of nobles including Lear's long-trusted advisor, Kent , the Earl of Gloucester , and two suitors for his youngest daughter's hand, Burgundy and France . During the ceremony, his elder daughters, Goneril and Regan each profess to love Lear more than anything in the world. However, his youngest daughter, Cordelia , refuses to play along; when her turn comes, she says that she loves Lear "no more, no less" than she should as a daughter. Enraged, Lear strips her of her dowry, and banishes Kent when the latter attempts to intercede on Cordelia's behalf. France says he will marry Cordelia even without a dowry. Lear then tells the gathered nobles that he will keep one hundred knights and alternate months living with Goneril and her husband, Albany , and Regan and her husband, Cornwall .

Back at Gloucester's palace, Edmund , Gloucester's illegitimate son, plans to displace his legitimate brother, Edgar , as Gloucester's heir by turning Gloucester against Edgar. Edmund tricks Gloucester into thinking that Edgar is conspiring to kill him. Meanwhile, Goneril, with whom Lear has gone to live first, becomes angry with her father and his knights for causing chaos in her household. She orders her steward Oswald to treat Lear coldly. Meanwhile, the banished Kent returns to Lear in disguise, offers his services, and is accepted as part of Lear's company. Goneril criticizes Lear for his knights' rowdiness and demands that he dismiss half of them. Deeply insulted and angered, Lear curses Goneril and prepares to leave to go and stay with Regan along with his Fool and his other followers.

Back at Gloucester's castle, Edmund's conspiracy moves along. After Edmund tricks Edgar into fleeing, Gloucester, convinced of Edgar's evil intentions, condemns him to death, declaring Edmund his legitimate heir. Cornwall and Regan arrive at Gloucester's castle and welcome Edmund into their service. Outside, Kent and Oswald arrive with letters for Regan from Lear and Goneril. Kent insults Oswald and challenges him to fight. Roused by the disturbance, Cornwall puts Kent into the stocks—even though such an action is disrespectful to Lear. Elsewhere in the countryside, Edgar disguises himself as a mad beggar "Poor Tom" in order to escape the death sentence declared by his father. Lear himself arrives at Gloucester's castle. Upset to find his man Kent (still in disguise) in the stocks, he grows increasingly angry when Cornwall and Regan refuse to see him. Shortly after Regan finally comes out, Goneril arrives. Lear quarrels bitterly with both, as Regan joins Goneril in claiming that Lear does not need to maintain any attendants of his own. When each says that he may stay with them only if he dismisses all of his knights, Lear rushes, mad with rage, into a brewing storm. Cornwall, Regan, and Goneril lock up Gloucester's castle to keep Lear out.

Searching for Lear, Kent, who has been released from the stocks, meets a Gentleman who tells him that Lear and the Fool are alone in the storm. Kent tells the Gentleman that French forces are on their way to England. He gives the Gentleman his purse along with an identifying ring to bring to Cordelia, and asks the Gentleman to tell her about the injustice that Lear has suffered. Meanwhile, Lear has gone mad and is raging against the storm, while the Fool begs him to seek shelter. When Kent finds them, he leads them toward a hovel. Back inside the castle, Gloucester confides in Edmund that he has decided to try to help Lear; he also reports that he has received a letter about the French invasion. After Gloucester leaves to find Lear, Edmund tells the audience that he will betray his father to Cornwall.

Out on the heath, having reached the hovel, Lear, Kent, and the Fool find Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, inside. Gloucester finds them soon after, and leads them to the shelter of a house. Inside Gloucester's castle, Edmund tells Cornwall about Gloucester's decision to help Lear and hands over the incriminating letter from France. In return, Cornwall makes Edmund Earl of Gloucester. Back in the house, hiding from the storm, Lear hallucinates that Goneril and Regan are on trial before himself, Edgar, and the Fool. Gloucester returns, tells Kent that Goneril, Regan, and their husbands are plotting Lear's death, and asks Kent to rush Lear to Cordelia, who has landed with France at Dover. Back inside the palace, Cornwall sends men to capture Gloucester and sends Edmund and Goneril to tell Albany that the French have landed. When Cornwall's forces bring in the captured Gloucester, Cornwall and Regan pull out Gloucester's eyes as punishment for his treachery. However, Cornwall's Servant attempts to stop him; they end up dueling. Although Regan stabs the servant in the back, Cornwall receives a wound that will eventually kill him. Regan throws the now blinded Gloucester out of his own castle. Two servants take pity on Gloucester, and decide to try to help him find Poor Tom, who they know is Edgar in disguise.

Outside Gloucester's palace, Edgar, still disguised as Poor Tom, meets his blinded father. Deeply moved, he agrees to show him the way to Dover. Meanwhile, Goneril and Edmund have traveled back to her palace to fetch Albany. However, Oswald meets them and reports that Albany has changed. Goneril quickly sends Edmund away. When Albany emerges, he berates her for her brutality to her father. In response, she criticizes him for becoming cowardly. A messenger arrives, interrupting their argument with news of both the death of Cornwall from the wound his servant gave him as well as the blinding of Gloucester.

In the French camp, Kent and a Gentleman discuss Cordelia's love of Lear, which has brought her back to Britain at the head of an invading French army. Kent reports that Lear himself is in Dover and, although he has spells of sanity, he is too ashamed to see Cordelia. In the camp, Cordelia herself sends a search party after her father. Back at Gloucester's palace, Regan questions Oswald about Goneril and Edmund. She states her feeling that, now that she is a widow, she should marry Edmund and asks Oswald to convince Goneril of the logic of this. As Oswald hurries off with a letter for Edmund from Goneril, Regan adds that she will show favor to anyone who kills the blinded Gloucester. Meanwhile, hoping to cure Gloucester of his despair, Edgar pretends to lead him to the cliffs of Dover (they are actually on flat ground). When Gloucester jumps, to commit suicide (in fact just fainting and falling), Edgar then hurries over to him while pretending to be someone who saw Gloucester jump, and telling Gloucester that the fact that he survived is a miracle. Lear shows up, raving mad; he jabbers at Gloucester about lechery, the abuse of power, and other human faults. When some of Cordelia's search party turn up, Lear runs off. Just then, Oswald happens upon Edgar and Gloucester. He attempts to kill Gloucester but Edgar kills him. In Oswald's purse, Edgar finds letters from Goneril to Edmund plotting Albany's death so that they can marry. In the French camp, Lear is awakened by the doctor treating him and is reunited with Cordelia.

At her camp, at the start of the battle, Goneril argues with Albany; she tells herself that she would rather lose the war against the French than let Regan marry Edmund. Edgar, still disguised as a peasant, brings Goneril's letter to Edmund, describing her plot against Albany, to Albany then quickly leaves, with instructions that Albany must summon him with three blows of a trumpet after the battle with the French, if the British have won. While Edgar places Gloucester beneath a tree to rest, the battle takes place off stage. In the battle, Britain defeats France and Lear and Cordelia are captured by Edmund. Edmund sends them to jail, then sends a Captain after them with secret instructions to kill them both. Summoned by Albany's Herald, Edgar arrives in disguise and fights and wounds Edmund, who, dying, admits to all his treacheries. Edgar identifies himself and explains that, right before coming, he revealed himself to Gloucester; Gloucester died in that moment of a mix of grief and joy. Goneril has poisoned Regan beforehand, in the hopes of securing Edmund for herself; however, when he dies, she also stabs herself. Before he dies, Edmund admits that he sent his Captain to hang Cordelia and kill Lear. Albany sends soldiers running off to try to save them. However, it is too late: Lear emerges from the prison with Cordelia's body in his arms, mad with grief. He explains that he killed the Captain who hung her but was too late to save her life. Lear dies of his sorrow on the spot. Only Albany and Edgar remain to pick up the pieces, as Kent concludes that he soon must follow his master (i.e., kill himself, too).

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The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images (left)

King James I of England, in a portrait attributed to John de Critz, circa 1606; William Shakespeare, in a portrait attributed to John Taylor, circa 1610

Even by its own standards of extremity, King Lear ends on a note of extraordinary bleakness. The audience has just been through the most devastating scene in all of theater: Lear’s entrance with his dead daughter Cordelia in his arms and the words “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” coming from somewhere deep inside him. All is, as Kent puts it, “cheerless, dark, and deadly.”

Albany, the weak, widowed, and childless man who is all that remains of political authority, goes through the ritual end-of-play motions of rewarding the good and punishing the bad, but these motions are self-consciously perfunctory. When he says, “What comfort to this great decay may come/Shall be applied,” we know that the comfort will be small and cold. Albany promises to restore Lear to his abandoned kingship, but the old king utterly ignores the offer of power, and promptly dies.

Albany then tries to appoint Edgar and Kent as joint rulers, but Kent replies that he, too, intends to die shortly. No one, it seems, is willing to perform the necessary theatrical rites of closure, to present even the pretense that order has been restored. And so the only possible ending is the big one. Because the play cannot end, the world must end. In the original version that Shakespeare completed in 1606, the last lines are Albany’s:

The oldest have borne most. We that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Why will the young not live to be old? Because the end of the world is coming. The bad news does not end there. This is not even the Christian apocalypse, in which the bad are damned to Hell and the good ascend into the eternal bliss of Heaven. We’ve just seen a version of that last judgment, with the rather pitiful Albany playing God the Father:

All friends shall taste The wages of their virtue, and all foes The cup of their deservings….

This assurance of just deserts is immediately undercut by one of the most terrifying images of injustice, Lear’s raging at a universe in which dogs, horses, and even rats have life but his daughter will never have any again, in this world or the next: “Never, never, never.” This is why King Lear was so unbearable that it was Nahum Tate’s infamous version, with its happy ending for Lear, Cordelia, and Edgar, that held the stage from 1681 to 1843, and why a critic as discerning as Samuel Johnson supported Tate’s alterations on the grounds that Shakespeare’s ending violates the natural human desire for justice. Johnson admitted to finding the original ending so upsetting that he did not reread it until his duties as an editor of Shakespeare forced him to do so.

This aversion is not unreasonable. King Lear is not apocalyptic, it is far worse. Instead of deserved damnation and merited salvation, there is merely the big fat O, the nothing that haunts the play, the “O, O, O, O!” with which Lear expires. Even Shakespeare seems to have thought twice about this utter annihilation of hope and justice. When he rewrote the play, probably two or three years after its first performance in 1606, he allowed Lear (and the audience) one little moment of merciful illusion. Instead of that terrible “O, O, O, O!,” Lear is permitted to lapse with his dying breath into the fantasy that Cordelia’s dead lips are moving after all. It is as if even Shakespeare, watching his own play, could not quite bear its unyielding ferocity.

That such a play is possible at all is one of the great wonders of human creation. That it was written by a liveried servant of a Calvinist king who devoutly believed in salvation and damnation, and performed at his court, seems almost inexplicable. Or at least it seemed inexplicable before James Shapiro’s wonderfully illuminating The Year of Lear .

Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 , published in 2005, broke new ground in the subtlety, vividness, and richness of its explorations of the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and their immediate social and political settings. * He repeats that achievement for 1606, an astonishing year in which Shakespeare finished the first version of King Lear , probably wrote all of Macbeth , and almost certainly wrote and staged Antony and Cleopatra . Shapiro plunges these tragedies back into the whirlpool of plots and plagues, of religious and political anxieties, from which they emerged. He does not drown them in historical detail, but he does bring them before us still wet from their struggle to emerge from the urgent currents of politics and power.

Shapiro has a marvelous ability to use his formidable scholarship, not to pluck out the heart of Shakespeare’s mysteries, but to put the beating heart of the contemporary back into them. His great gift is to make the plays seem at once more comprehensible and more staggering. The better we understand the immediate materials with which Shakespeare was working and the political pressures to which he was responding, the more profoundly we can appreciate the alchemy of his transformations.

To see Shakespeare as a court official working to please his political masters is not to reduce him to the level of functionary or propagandist. It is to marvel anew at the ways in which he could use even such humbling demands as sources of imaginative energy. Though it may be incidental to his purpose, Shapiro effectively overturns the Romantic conception of the artist as the champion of freedom over necessity. We begin to see a Shakespeare for whom the distinction between freedom and necessity is scarcely relevant. Here is Shakespeare as an opportunist in every sense, a political operator taking advantage of a shift in power and a voracious artist for whom the need to please new masters is not a restriction but a creative stimulus.

In April 1603, James VI of Scotland, then just thirty-six, began his long ride from Edinburgh to London, where he would succeed the childless Elizabeth I as James I of England. This was an unlikely event: Henry VIII had gone to the considerable trouble of breaking with Rome and marrying six wives in order to secure the future of his Tudor dynasty. Yet it was Henry’s sister Margaret, who married into the Scottish Stuarts, whose descendants would rule in seventeenth-century Britain. The irony was surely not lost on Shakespeare. Macbeth also goes to a lot of a trouble to create a dynasty but it is Banquo’s heirs who will reign.

For Shakespeare, James’s arrival was double-edged. The new king and his wife were much more interested in the theater than Elizabeth had been and the most immediate beneficiary of James’s patronage was Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Almost immediately, James chose Shakespeare and his eight core collaborators to be the King’s Men. Their new title was not merely symbolic: as of May 1603 Shakespeare was an official of the court as Groom of the Chamber. He and his fellow shareholders were each issued with four and a half yards of red cloth to make the royal livery in which they were allowed to appear on state occasions.

This royal patronage imposed new demands. Typically, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had performed for Elizabeth two or three times a year. As the King’s Men, they performed for James nine times in 1603–1604, ten times the following year, and ten times again in 1605–1606—more court appearances in the first three years of James’s reign than in all of Elizabeth’s. Shapiro reckons that around twenty of Shakespeare’s previously written plays were probably staged for James in these years.

The royal demand for more Shakespeare plays had grown but the supply was running short. By his own prodigious standards, Shakespeare was in a relatively fallow period. In those first three years of the Jacobean era, he wrote just two plays, Measure for Measure and Timon of Athens (with Thomas Middleton), even though he was no longer appearing as an actor at the Globe and presumably had more time to write. He seems to have been spending more time in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, using his earnings from his theatrical career to build up his status as a prosperous landowner. Whatever the reason, Richard Burbage, who played all of the main tragic roles in the King’s Men, had to admit to the court in January 1605 that they had “no new play that the queen has not seen” and could offer only an old comedy, Love’s Labours Lost . Their star playwright would have to get his acts together.

If Shakespeare was under pressure to produce new material, he was also under pressure to produce a new kind of material and indeed to imagine a new place. Before James became king, Shakespeare was an English playwright. Now he had to be a British playwright. James’s big project was the political unification of the entire island. In his opening address to the London Parliament in 1604, he compared his accession to an indissoluble marriage: “What God hath conjoined then, let no man separate. I am the husband, and all the whole isle is my lawful wife.” The silver medal minted to commemorate his accession acclaimed James as the “emperor of the whole island of Britain,” and his coronation medal hailed him as “Caesar Augustus of Britain.”

But the forging of a new identity for James’s “Great Britain” was a formidable ideological challenge. The London Parliament had no enthusiasm for a full union. Scotland and England had long been mutually antagonistic countries. In Henry IV, Part 1 , Prince Hal jokes that the widely admired English border warlord Hotspur “kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast.” Now there could be no more jokes about killing Scots by the dozen. Shakespeare put on the king’s livery imaginatively as well as literally. On the fundamental question of what country he was in, he became his master’s voice. King Lear and Macbeth are British, not English, plays. Lear is “King of Britain”; Macbeth is overthrown by a joint Scottish/English army. Shapiro reports that the words “England” or “English” appear 356 times in Shakespeare’s pre-Jacobean plays but only thirty-nine times after James took power in London. Conversely, “Britain” appears only twice in the Elizabethan plays but twenty-nine times in those written under James.

The great pleasure of The Year of Lear is that Shapiro allows us to feel the movement of Shakespeare’s quicksilver mind as he seizes on James’s political and religious obsessions and makes them his own. Indeed, what comes across most strongly is Shakespeare’s genius for transforming what is, objectively, a servile relationship with his sovereign, master, and employer into a breathtaking act of appropriation. Shakespeare doesn’t just write to James’s order—he somehow manages to absorb James’s interests into his own imagination. In fact—though Shapiro does not go this far—it does not seem unreasonable to think of Shakespeare treating James (who was, after all, attempting to alter the consciousness and identity of his subjects) as a fellow dramatist, and then doing what he always did with fellow dramatists: taking their best ideas and plots and reprocessing them.

Tate, London

‘King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia’; painting by James Barry, 1786–1788

Robert Greene’s famous complaint about the young Shakespeare—“an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers”—is not entirely unjustified, though of course Shakespeare used the feathers he plucked from others to make wings that could fly in previously unimagined directions. This is essentially what he does with James. He plucks the king’s obsessions and ideological projects and uses them to beautify his own work. It is an astonishingly adept combination of deference and impudence, the King’s Man at once serving and stealing from his boss.

Some of what Shakespeare took from James is obvious enough. The idea of Britain in Lear and Macbeth is a direct response to the king’s insistence that England and Scotland are to be treated as a single entity. James’s interest in witchcraft is catered to in Macbeth . The king’s understandable concern with the evils of regicide feed into the same play, whose first and last acts feature the killing of Scottish kings. But Shapiro uncovers deeper layers of influence. He catches Shakespeare in the act of reading up on subjects known to be of concern to James and, in the process, discovering not just new themes but even new words.

The most striking example is James’s deep curiosity about demonic possession. The king personally examined an allegedly possessed young woman, Anne Gunter, and arranged for her veracity to be tested by an acknowledged expert on true and false possession, Samuel Harsnett, who published A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures in 1603. Shakespeare, picking up on the king’s curiosity, read Harsnett’s book. Over eighty passages in King Lear are indebted to the Declaration ’s descriptions of people acting as if they are possessed—the very guise that Edgar takes on when he becomes Poor Tom, the wandering beggar. No single book is the source of as many unusual words and phrases in Shakespeare as the Declaration , from which he culls, for example, “meiny,” “propinquity,” “auricular,” “gaster,” “yoke-fellow,” and “vaunt-courier.” Some of the names of devils that torment Poor Tom are taken directly from Harsnett: Puff, Pure, Frateretto, Flibbertigibbet, Mahu, Smulkin, Obidicut.

What matters, though, is not just Shakespeare’s taking up of James’s concerns, but the way he makes them his own. The language and gestures of demonic possession allow Shakespeare to use the king’s interest as springboards for his own imaginative leap into the abysses of mental breakdown. The storm scenes of King Lear are like nothing Shakespeare or anyone else ever wrote, with the deranged Lear conducting his mock trial of his absent daughters, the Fool throwing in snatches of sense and nonsense, of songs and proverbs, and Edgar’s Poor Tom performance reaching into the darkest corners of madness to pluck out a terrible poignancy:

The foul fiend haunts Poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale. Hoppedance cries in Tom’s belly for two white herring. Croak not, black angel: I have no food for thee.

What begins as an opportunist keeping an eye out for what will appeal to his new master ends as some of the strangest, most searingly painful language ever spoken on the stage. For James, the state of being possessed is an object of rational inquiry. Shakespeare turns it into a heartbreaking image of the agonies that lie beyond all reason.

Even more influential on Shakespeare is the king’s concern with “equivocation.” The word appears just once in Shakespeare before Macbeth , and even then it seems to be a mere synonym for ambiguity. By 1606, it has acquired a more specific meaning, one that Macbeth himself explicates when he says that “I…begin/To doubt th’equivocation of the fiend,/That lies like truth.” In these early years of James’s reign, the practice of equivocation, of constructing lies that have the appearance of truth, acquired an urgent political currency. The Gunpowder Plot of November 1605, in which a well-organized group of Catholic conspirators installed thirty-six barrels of gunpowder under the chamber where Parliament was to meet, with the aim of killing James, his heir Prince Henry, and the entire government, concentrated royal attention on the threat of Catholic disloyalty.

A particular source of anxiety was the Catholic doctrine of “mental reservation,” which allowed those being questioned under oath to give answers that seemed true even while they withheld the real truth. Shapiro quotes a broadsheet ballad that sums up the accusation against Catholic leaders: “The Pope allows them to equivocate,/The root of their abhorred intents to hide.” That Shakespeare expects the previously arcane word to be widely understood and associated with religious treason is evident from the monologue of the Porter in Macbeth , imagining who might be hammering on the gate as if it were the gate of Hell:

Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.

Yet just as Poor Tom takes the language of feigned possession and pushes it into a terrifying psychological terrain, Macbeth as a whole seizes on James’s political interest in equivocation and propels it far beyond the boundaries of its immediate political meaning. In James’s world, equivocators are identifiable people. They are Catholics infected with a Jesuitical doctrine. They can be found out and punished by those who are not equivocators—good loyal Protestants. But this is not what happens in Macbeth . In the play, equivocation rules. The witches are the greatest of all equivocators—they lie like truth with ingenuity and aplomb. And their deceptions are completely successful: Macbeth does not grasp their treachery until it is far too late.

Even more disturbingly, though, it is not just the evil witches who equivocate. Almost everybody does—the good and the bad. Poor Lady Macduff engages in classic equivocation when her son asks her whether his father is a traitor. The nobleman Ross equivocates when he tells Macduff that his wife and children are “at peace,” withholding the news that they are at peace because they have been butchered. In one of the queasiest scenes in all of Shakespeare, the “good” Malcolm launches into an elaborate set of lies to Macduff about his own character. He explains this as a test of Macduff’s loyalty, but its effect is morally vertiginous. We begin to wonder whether Malcolm, who will replace Macbeth, may not in fact be lying like truth, whether he may not be the monster he has accused himself of being. What happens in the play is not that lies and truth are eventually unraveled, but that they come to feel like the same thing. In a vicious world, the play asks, who can survive without lying, and who can tell deception from honesty?

Because Macbeth picks up on so many cues from James—witches, equivocators, Scottish dynastic origins—it is easy to miss what it does not do. In making the untrustworthiness of appearances and of language a universal condition of life under arbitrary power, Shakespeare avoids the immediate political agenda of identifying them with a specifically Catholic amorality. We get some sense of why he might have done this from Shapiro’s startling researches into Shakespeare’s own connections to the Gunpowder Plot. Shakespeare probably did not know the main plotters (though two of the leaders were nephews of the same Edward Arden to whom Shakespeare claimed a familial connection when he applied for a coat of arms), but he certainly knew many of those caught up in the chaos and repression that followed its discovery.

As it happened, the main center for the wider conspiracy was in Shakespeare’s native Warwickshire. The arms depot for the Catholic uprising that was to follow the murder of the king was just a few miles north of his own town of Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare’s family and business interests were centered. A strip of land rented by Shakespeare himself abutted Clopton House, which in turn was rented by the conspirators as the nerve center for their rebellion. Shakespeare’s longtime next-door neighbor in Stratford, George Badger, was arrested with a cache of Catholic vestments, crucifixes, chalices, and relics. Other neighbors, including the man who would later sign as a witness to Shakespeare’s will, were brought in as a jury to examine the hoard. Other Catholic townspeople, whom Shakespeare would have known well through business and family connections, were suspected of involvement and marched off to the Tower of London.

We will never know what Shakespeare thought of the Gunpowder Plot, but thanks to Shapiro we can say with some confidence that he knew very well the human cost for Catholic recusants whose lives were destroyed by it. In Macbeth , he does not blame Catholics for the moral chaos of equivocation. He blames power itself, and its infinite capacity to corrupt language and corrode humanity. In Lady Macduff’s equivocal answers about whether her husband is a traitor, we catch the terror of all those under interrogation trying desperately to use words to evade death.

The most remarkable thing is that this deep skepticism about power does not work against Shakespeare’s efforts to please the man in power. It originates with them. Because he so thoroughly appropriates James’s concerns, he can at once inhabit them and transform them. Nowhere does this work so strangely and so disturbingly as in King Lear . There is no doubt that the impetus for the play is to support James’s campaign to unify Britain by showing the horrors of a disunited kingdom. Lear’s dismembering of his kingdom is the negative correlative of James’s destiny to make its body whole again. An anonymous play about Lear (or Leir), The True Chronicle History of King Leir , first staged around 1590, was printed in 1605 by a publisher who obviously saw the relevance of the story to James’s project of reinventing Britain. Shakespeare clearly admired this opportunism. In the first printed version of his own play, he sometimes absent-mindedly uses “Leir” instead of Lear.

Shakespeare, of course, deepened the existing drama immensely, adding the entire subplot of Gloucester and Edgar and the madness that overthrows the old king’s mind. But the most radical shift is at the end. The True Chronicle History is a moral tale with a happy outcome: Leir is reunited with Cordelia and restored to his kingdom. This is in keeping with the original story told in Holinshed’s Chronicles , but more importantly it allows for an image of restored unity and reinforced authority that suits James’s purposes. Shakespeare doesn’t just change this ending; he assaults it with that extraordinary psychological violence in which the very idea of a satisfactory (let alone a happy) ending is exploded.

King Lear cannot end because authority cannot be restored. This impossibility results from Shakespeare’s greatest act of opportunism. James’s interests have given him the opportunity to write a play about the collapse of all political order and that in turn gives him the opportunity to show what authority really looks like when it is not propped up by power. In King Lear , it is the old king himself, speaking to the viciously blinded Gloucester, who utters the most savage attack on all authority:

Lear : A man may see how the world goes with no eyes; look with thy ears. See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thy ear: handy-dandy, which is the thief, which is the justice? Thou has’t seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?

Gloucester : Ay, sir.

Lear : An the creature run from the cur, there thou mightst behold the great image of authority. A dog’s obeyed in office.

There is no going back from this. If the great image of authority is a cur biting the heels of a beggar, what does it matter who is king? Even the blind can see how the world goes: put a dog on the throne and men will bow before it. When Albany offers Lear the restoration of his kingdom, the old man does not even hear him. The divine right of kings, so insistently upheld by James, has become a thing of nothing. The King’s Man in his red royal livery plucked his master’s anxiety about the need for unquestioned authority and used it to summon up the deeper fear that, in their most secret selves, must haunt all kings.

November 19, 2015

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Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times . His book Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life was reissued this year. (September 2024)

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Book Review On King Lear

King Lear is one of the four great tragedies written by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is one of the most renowned English writers of all time. As with many different works of Shakespeare, the general themes of life, death and nature are prevalent throughout the play.

Of course, being written in ‘Ye’ Old English,’ it isn’t a piece of literature that just anyone can read. In fact, it highly recommends that you have a dictionary on hand when reading the play. Even for people who have a firm grasp of the English language have trouble with Shakespeare.

King Lear, in essence, is about humility, hubris, and the process of which King Lear goes from the arrogant man that he is and becomes a more humbled version through the plights and conflicts presented to him throughout the play. Additionally, other relevant themes are prevalent throughout the game including; rule vs chaos, justice vs mercy, redemption, family, man vs nature, nature and gods.

These are themes usually present within most of Shakespeare’s plays, however, within King Lear these issues are abundant.

Regarding character development, Shakespeare is a master. He indeed creates living sculptures within his literary devices to capture the essence of what a human being is. Even the antagonist, Edmund, comes off as ‘human.’ It’s hard to hate someone when he douses with sympathy, despite the fact that he’s the textual “villain” of the story.

Shakespeare managed to capture the very essence of humanity within every character. Even ones that don’t seem as important provide a unique angle to the story that furthers the plot and creates a more intricate tale telling mechanism that means something to the reader.

Regarding writing style, it is quite difficult for those who don’t dominate the English language and even painful for those who do. To fully understand everything you’ll have to slowly read the lines, make sure you know what they are saying and don’t be afraid to look up the meaning of the words in a dictionary. These days people use their phones so having a dictionary on hand isn’t too complicated.

Nonetheless, the transition you as the reader experience as King Lear goes from being a prominent nobleman to a raging lunatic, ultimately holding the dead body of his excellent daughter in his arms will make you question your morality.

It is the power of well-written literature. We see the characters through our reactionary perceptive filters. What this does is allow us to relate to the events that are occurring within the plains of fantasy, allowing us to question our moral fabric without having to risk any compromise within our moral structure.

King Lear beautifully captures the essence of humanity and lays it out on the table for all to see. There are many personal lessons one could take away from it if you allow yourself to dive deep into the literature .

I know that some people would probably be dismayed by the language barrier. However, it is worth a read.

Out of all of the four great tragedies of Shakespeare, King Lear is probably the rawest of them all. Of course, Shakespeare also has gruesome tales such as Titus, but that’s a whole other story.

Even compared to Hamlet, which is probably one of his most renowned works alongside Romeo and Juliet, King Lear is, in my opinion, the best. There is a broad sense of reality interweaved between the lines that speak to the very essence of your spirit.

I guess this is why Shakespeare is so renowned. He managed to tap into the core of what it means to be human. He sheds light in the darkness within our beings that we would much rather hide out of plain sight. King Lear takes those “dark thoughts” and places them out in the open for everyone to see.

I think one of the underlying notes within King Lear is that our perception is limited to our experience. As King Lear undergoes his transformation, new paradigms are instilled expanding his knowledge of the world as it is and not as how he perceived it.

However, ultimately King Lear is a story of redemption and reconciliation. It’s about facing your demons and coming out the victor.

If you haven’t read King Lear, I highly recommend that you do. If you allow yourself to be taken in by the story, you too can discover a sliver of the darkness that resides in all of us. Perhaps, your transformation won’t be as lunatic as that of King Lear.

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King Lear dramatizes the story of an aged king of ancient Britain, whose plan to divide his kingdom among his three daughters ends tragically. When he tests each by asking how much she loves him, the older daughters, Goneril and Regan, flatter him. The youngest, Cordelia, does not, and Lear disowns and banishes her. She marries the king of France. Goneril and Regan turn on Lear, leaving him to wander madly in a furious storm.

Meanwhile, the Earl of Gloucester’s illegitimate son Edmund turns Gloucester against his legitimate son, Edgar. Gloucester, appalled at the daughters’ treatment of Lear, gets news that a French army is coming to help Lear. Edmund betrays Gloucester to Regan and her husband, Cornwall, who puts out Gloucester’s eyes and makes Edmund the Earl of Gloucester.

Cordelia and the French army save Lear, but the army is defeated. Edmund imprisons Cordelia and Lear. Edgar then mortally wounds Edmund in a trial by combat. Dying, Edmund confesses that he has ordered the deaths of Cordelia and Lear. Before they can be rescued, Lear brings in Cordelia’s body and then he himself dies.

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Introduction to King Lear

Summary of king lear.

After Cordelia leaves the king divides the kingdom between Goneril and Regan. Unfortunately for Cordelia suitor, the Duke of Burgundy cancels their marriages after she is sent away from the kingdom. However, the bad event turns for good when the King of France approaches Cordelia. He values Cordelia’s honesty and takes her as his wife. King Lear’s kingdom has already shared between Goneril and her husband, the Dukes of Albany, and Regan and her husband the Dukes of Cornwall. So, he assumes that he can live alternatively with each of his daughters.

The Earl of Kent returns from his exile and disguises as a servant to King Lear to stay with him. Unfortunately, the Earl of Kent sees King Lear curses his elder daughter Goneril for insults against him and for criticizing his judgment before leaving. Without informing Regan, King Lear decides to live with her in Cornwall. During his arrival, she is not at the palace and has gone to visit Gloucester. When King Lear arrives at Gloucester’s place searching for Regan, she publicly despises and insults him along with his followers . She particularly insults the court jester, the Fool.

Here, King Lear starts falling into despair because of his both daughters. He begins to miss Cordelia and regrets abandoning Cordelia. On the night he leaves, there is a great storm. King Lear begins to go mad. The King and the Fool have no option but wander on the common land until Gloucester offers them shelter. Then he asks the Earl of Kent’s help to take them to the coast. They want to meet Cordelia who lands with a French army to fight against her sisters and their husbands. She decides to protect her father. Gloucester decides to leave them and returns.

Meanwhile, Edmund becomes a messenger between the sisters Goneril and Regan, and both sisters flirt with Edmund, without one telling the other. Edmund persuades the dutchess of Cornwall, Regan that Gloucester, his father is an enemy. He lies to her that he is in touch with the kingdom of France to help Lear. He tells her that King Lear seeks revenge as he was turned away by Regan. Regan shows her cruelty and utmost contempt and punishes Gloucester assuming that he betrayed her. She plucks his eyes and is about to leave him on the street. Shockingly, when Gloucester is being blinded, a servant kills Cornwall. However, Regan continues to rule her part of the kingdom with Edmund’s help.

The Albany’s army is led by Edmund. As the French forces are overtaken, King Lear and Cordelia are arrested. Out of jealousy and to gain Edmund’s affection, Goneril poisons Regan. Edgar is now pretending as a loyal knight, challenges Edmund to a duel with him. Edmund is mortally wounded. Goneril commits suicide knowing she lost Edmund. While dying, Edmund confesses all mistakes and frees Cordelia. Sadly, the tragedy continues and Cordelia is hanged to her death. Hearing the news, King Lear breaks down, carries Cordelia’s body in his arms, and dies of a broken heart. Albany and Edgar reorder the kingdom and work on ending the civil wars.

Major Themes in King Lear

Major characters in king lear, writing style of king lear, analysis of literary devices in king lear.

The above-given lines taken from different acts show the use of alliteration that means the use of consonant sounds in quick succession in a line. For example, /h/, /th/, /b/ and /p/sounds have occurred in these lines.

In the above examples, vowel sounds appear after some pauses in such a way that they create a sort of melodious impacts in the verses. The sounds of /ee/, /ae/ and /ow/ are used in the above lines.

“He always loved our sister most, and with what poor judgment he hath now cast her off appears too grossly” (Act-I, Scene-I, Lines, 290-292).

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King Lear by William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare, William James Rolfe (Creator) 3.91. 223,275 ratings7,343 reviews. Shakespeare's King Lear challenges us with the magnitude, intensity, and sheer duration of the pain that it represents. Its figures harden their hearts, engage in violence, or try to alleviate the suffering of others. Lear himself rages until his sanity cracks.
Book review: "King Lear" by William Shakespeare
It is a story about pain and stupidity and the cruelty of being a human being, prone to failure. King Lear is also a work of great literary beauty, and that's what I want to focus on. This is, of course, Shakespeare, so we expect great poetry. Here, though, there is a concentrated fierceness to his words that make them seem like knife slashes ...
A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare's King Lear
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) King 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 ...
Analysis of William Shakespeare's King Lear
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.
King Lear by William Shakespeare
King Lear is the story of King Lear (obviously), who, wanting to distribute his kingdom among his three daughters, makes his decision based on who loves him the most. While the elder two daughters, who are married, say that they love him more than anything in the world, earning their shares of the kingdom, the youngest daughter, Cordelia, says ...
King Lear
King Lear, George Frederick Bensell. King Lear is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare.It is loosely based on the mythological Leir of Britain.King Lear, in preparation for his old age, divides his power and land between his daughters Goneril and Regan, who pay homage to gain favour, feigning love.The King's third daughter, Cordelia, is offered a third of his kingdom also, but refuses to ...
King Lear
Kathleen Taylor, Science Writer. "I think it's the most profound of the plays. It's not one you go to for a jolly night out, Shakespeare was deeply serious in writing this play. It does have its comic aspects, but it's easily the most profound examination of what it means to be human of anything that I know.".
Book Review: King Lear by William Shakespeare
Slowly but surely I'm getting all my reviews done. I'm hoping to finish by September 10. Fingers crossed! Here's another review for the classic King Lear.I promise that soon my reviews will relate more to contemporary times/YA + NA + A books, but I wanted to include all the books I've read this year, including academic (if it wasn't obvious, I graduated in English, lol).
King Lear
Early printed texts. The textual history of King Lear is complicated, from its first printing to how it is edited today.The play first appeared in 1608 as a quarto titled True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear (Q1). That version of the play is in itself confusing: some verse lines are erroneously divided or set as prose, prose lines are sometimes set as verse, and the book ...
King Lear Study Guide
Historical Context of King Lear. In the period in which King Lear was written—from 1604 to 1607—King James VI, King of Scotland and England, was trying to persuade English Parliament to approve the union of the two countries into one nation. (It was James who first used the term "Great Britain" to describe the unity of the Celtic and Saxon ...
Review: 'King Lear'
Review: 'King Lear'. 2016 is proving to be the Year of Lear. Shakespeare's most troubled tragedy seems to be dominating his anniversary year — it's hitting stages with Anthony Sher and Glenda Jackson in the titular role, and has been the subject of both historical and performance-centered scholarship. It's also Creation Theatre's ...
Book review -- KING LEAR By William Shakespeare
KING LEAR By William Shakespeare Probably written between 1603 - 1606. General Note: In January 2009 I decided that I'd like to go back and read all the plays of William Shakespeare, perhaps one a month if that works out. I hadn't read a Shakespeare play since 1959, 50 years ago! But I had read nearly all of them in college.
King Lear book review
The Book. The official edition of King Lear from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trustworthy and widely adopted Shakespeare series for scholars and general readers, comprises:. Newly revised information based original versions; Comprehensive explanatory notes; Step-by-step plot reviews; An introduction to understanding Shakespeare
King Lear: Everything You Need to Know in 5 Minutes
Shakespeare borrowed the King Lear story from a history book and a pre-existing play, but he cleverly twisted the plot in many places. The anguish at the end of Shakespeare's version was so confronting that it was rewritten by Nahum Tate in 1681 and that adaptation - with a happy ending - held stage for 170 years. ...
King Lear by William Shakespeare Plot Summary
King Lear intends to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, so that he can enjoy old age without the burdens of power. He has planned a ceremony in which each daughter will state how much she loves him, before an audience of nobles including Lear's long-trusted advisor, Kent, the Earl of Gloucester, and two suitors for his youngest daughter's hand, Burgundy and France.
Behind 'King Lear': The History Revealed
The audience has just been through the most devastating scene in all of theater: Lear's entrance with his dead daughter Cordelia in his arms and the words "Howl, howl, howl, howl!" coming from somewhere deep inside him. All is, as Kent puts it, "cheerless, dark, and deadly.". Albany, the weak, widowed, and childless man who is all ...
Book Review On King Lear
Book Review On King Lear. Posted on February 2, 2018 February 2, 2018 Author Joan Young Comment(0) 1842 Views. King Lear is one of the four great tragedies written by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is one of the most renowned English writers of all time. As with many different works of Shakespeare, the general themes of life, death and nature ...
King Lear
Scene 1. Enter, with Drum and Colors, Edmund, Rega. Shakespeare's King Lear challenges us with the magnitude, intensity, and sheer duration of the pain that it represents. Its figures harden their hearts, engage in violence, or try to alleviate the suffering of others. Lear himself rages until his sanity cracks.
King Lear
Introduction to King Lear. King Lear is one of the popular Shakespearean tragedies. It was originally written in 1605 or 1606, and performed in 1606 on St. Stephen's Day. However, it was published after two years in 1608 in a quarter where it was listed as history, though, later it was performed with its full title as The Tragedy of King Lear.
King Lear (1983) Review
King Lear (1983) Review. King Lear (1983) Director: Michael Elliott. Making full use of mist-filled, shadowy, Bronze Age set designs inspired by Stonehenge and druid mysteries, Michael Elliott's made-for-television film features the final appearance of Sir Laurence Olivier in a Shakespeare play. Olivier was 75 years old at the time of his ...

Book review: “King Lear” by William Shakespeare

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