Lear is “fourscore and upward” — over eighty — and has ruled so long that he has never been contradicted. His first act in the play, the love test, reveals everything: he needs love to be said, publicly, extravagantly, and measured in exchange for land. When his youngest daughter refuses to perform, he cannot bear it.
What follows is one of the great arcs in literature: a man stripped of power (his daughters take his knights), family (they shut him out), home (he wanders the heath), clothing (he tears it off), and reason (he goes mad). And in losing everything, he discovers what he never knew as king: compassion for “poor naked wretches”, the injustice of “robes and furred gowns”, the hollowness of authority (“a dog’s obeyed in office”), and the love of Cordelia, who answers his guilt with “No cause, no cause.”
His final moments — carrying Cordelia’s body, asking for a mirror to see if she breathes, “Never, never, never, never, never”, and dying as he cries “Look there, look there!” — are among the most devastating in drama.
How actors play him: as a terrifying tyrant (Paul Scofield), a wounded father (Ian McKellen), a frail old man (Laurence Olivier at 75), or, in Glenda Jackson’s 2016 performance, a woman playing a man for whom gender no longer matters.
Use him for pride, ageing, the hunger for praise, the discovery of compassion through suffering, and parents who mistake flattery for love.
See King Lear, Cordelia, The Storm on the Heath, The Death of Cordelia.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Is Lear a tyrant who deserves his fate, or an old man more sinned against than sinning?
Lines to Remember
3 quotationsHow sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!
Context & when to use it
For ingratitude, especially of children.
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Context & when to use it
Lear’s daughters strip him of his retinue, asking why he needs any knights at all.
For human dignity beyond bare necessity.
Through tattered clothes small vices do appear; robes and furred gowns hide all.
Context & when to use it
For injustice, privilege and hypocrisy in the justice system.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsThe Storm on the Heath
Shut out by his daughters, Lear rages at the storm, prays for the poor, and meets “unaccommodated man” in the naked Poor Tom.
Cordelia
Lear’s youngest daughter, who will not flatter, is disinherited, returns to rescue him, forgives him with “No cause, no cause” — and is hanged.
The Dover Cliff
Edgar leads his blind father to a “cliff” that isn’t there, lets him leap, and convinces him he has survived by a miracle — curing his despair with a theatrical trick.
The Death of Cordelia
Lear enters carrying his hanged daughter, howling, searching for her breath with a mirror and a feather — “Never, never, never, never, never.”
Lear's Fool
The king’s jester, who tells Lear the truth in riddles, songs and jokes — and vanishes from the play after the storm.
Nirvāṇa
The Buddhist goal — the “blowing out” of the fires of greed, hatred and delusion, the end of suffering and of rebirth. The Buddha described it as unborn and unconditioned, and refused to say whether the awakened exist after death.