King Lear

King Lear is the play in which Shakespeare looked hardest at the worst things in human life — ingratitude, cruelty, madness, blindness, homelessness, the death of the innocent — and refused to look away. An old king gives away his kingdom to the daughters who flatter him and banishes the one who loves him; he is stripped, layer by layer, of power, family, home, clothing and reason, until he stands on a heath in a storm, “a poor, bare, forked animal”. In a parallel plot, an old earl trusts the son who betrays him and is blinded for it. By the end almost everyone is dead, and the play’s last word on justice is a father holding his murdered daughter and saying “never” five times.

Many critics consider it Shakespeare’s greatest play; some have found it unbearable. This page tells the whole story — you do not need to have read it — and then explains what it means, why philosophers keep returning to it, and how to use it.

At a glance

Written	c. 1605–06
First printed	1608 (Quarto, The True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters); 1623 (First Folio, The Tragedy of King Lear)
Setting	Pre-Christian Britain — Lear’s court, the castles of Gloucester and Albany, the heath, Dover
Sources	The legend of King Leir in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Holinshed’s Chronicles; an older anonymous play, King Leir (c. 1590s), which ends happily; Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (the blinded king and his sons)
Length	Five acts, about 3,300 lines
Key themes	Nothing; nature; sight and blindness; madness and wisdom; justice; love that cannot speak; the cruelty of the gods

The characters

The family of Lear

• King Lear — King of Britain, “fourscore and upward” (over eighty), proud, choleric, used to absolute obedience. See King Lear.
• Goneril — his eldest daughter, married to the Duke of Albany. Cold, ruthless, ambitious.
• Regan — his second daughter, married to the Duke of Cornwall. If anything crueller than Goneril.
• Cordelia — his youngest, favourite daughter, sought in marriage by the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy. Honest to the point of bluntness; loving beyond words. See Cordelia.
• The Duke of Albany — Goneril’s husband; mild at first, finally the voice of decency.
• The Duke of Cornwall — Regan’s husband; violent and sadistic.

The family of Gloucester

• The Earl of Gloucester — an old nobleman, loyal to Lear, credulous, superstitious, a little coarse.
• Edgar — his legitimate elder son; trusting, then disguised as the mad beggar “Poor Tom”.
• Edmund — his illegitimate younger son; brilliant, charming, utterly without scruple. See Edmund.

Others

• The Earl of Kent — Lear’s blunt, loyal counsellor, banished for defending Cordelia; returns in disguise as the servant “Caius”.
• The Fool — Lear’s jester, who tells him the truth in riddles and songs. See Lear's Fool.
• Oswald — Goneril’s steward, a sycophant.
• The King of France — who marries Cordelia without a dowry.

The two plots

Shakespeare doubles his story. The main plot (Lear and his daughters) is about a father who mistakes flattery for love and drives out the child who truly loves him. The subplot (Gloucester and his sons) repeats the pattern: a father believes the lying son and drives out the faithful one. Lear goes mad; Gloucester goes blind. Each is cared for, in his ruin, by the child he wronged. The parallel turns a family tragedy into a picture of a whole world.

Plot summary

The love test

The play begins with Kent and Gloucester chatting about the coming division of the kingdom. Gloucester introduces his bastard son Edmund, joking crudely about the “good sport at his making”. Edmund says nothing. Remember his silence.

Lear enters and announces his plan: he will “shake all cares and business from our age”, divide Britain among his three daughters, and keep only the title and a retinue of a hundred knights. But first, a test:

Tell me, my daughters… Which of you shall we say doth love us most, That we our largest bounty may extend Where nature doth with merit challenge? (1.1)

Goneril speaks first: she loves him “more than words can wield the matter… dearer than eyesight, space and liberty”. Regan outdoes her: she is “an enemy to all other joys”. Each receives a third of the kingdom.

Then Cordelia. Aside, she has already said: “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.” Lear asks what she can say to draw “a third more opulent than your sisters”.

Cordelia: Nothing, my lord. Lear: Nothing? Cordelia: Nothing. Lear: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.

Cordelia explains: she loves him “according to my bond, no more nor less”. Why have her sisters husbands, if they love their father all? When she marries, half her love will go to her husband. Lear is enraged. He disowns her — “Here I disclaim all my paternal care” — and divides her share between Goneril and Regan.

Kent protests — “be Kent unmannerly / When Lear is mad” — and tells the king he has done wrong: “Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least.” Lear banishes him on pain of death.

The Duke of Burgundy, learning that Cordelia now has no dowry, withdraws his suit. The King of France takes her anyway: “Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor, / Most choice forsaken, and most lov’d despis’d.” Cordelia leaves, telling her sisters, “I know you what you are.” Alone, Goneril and Regan agree that the old man’s rashness must be managed: “We must do something, and i’ th’ heat.”

Edmund alone, in one of the great villain’s soliloquies:

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound. Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom… For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?… Now, gods, stand up for bastards! (1.2)

He forges a letter in which Edgar seems to plot against their father, shows it to Gloucester, and convinces the old man that Edgar wants him dead. Gloucester blames the stars: “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.” Edmund mocks him when he leaves: “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune… we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion.” Then he warns Edgar to flee.

5. Lear lives with Goneril, with his hundred riotous knights. She orders her steward Oswald to treat him with “weary negligence”. Kent returns in disguise and is taken into Lear’s service; he trips Oswald when the steward insults the king. The Fool enters, and begins his relentless truth-telling: Lear has given away everything — “Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gav’st thy golden one away.” Goneril demands that Lear reduce his train. Lear, stunned, asks: “Does any here know me? This is not Lear… Who is it that can tell me who I am?” The Fool: “Lear’s shadow.” Lear curses Goneril with sterility — one of the most terrible curses in drama — and rides off to Regan. “O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!”

The stripping

Edmund stages a fake sword-fight with Edgar and wounds himself to make it seem that Edgar attacked him. Gloucester proclaims Edgar an outlaw. Cornwall and Regan, arriving at Gloucester’s castle, take Edmund into their service.

Kent, quarrelling with Oswald, is put in the stocks by Cornwall — an insult to the king whose messenger he is. Edgar, hunted, decides to disguise himself as a naked madman, a “Bedlam beggar”, Poor Tom: “Edgar I nothing am.”

Lear arrives, finds his messenger in the stocks, and cannot believe it. Regan and Cornwall refuse at first to see him. Then Goneril arrives, and the two sisters together strip his retinue: Goneril would allow fifty knights; Regan twenty-five; then “What need you five-and-twenty? ten? or five?” — “What need one?” Lear answers with one of Shakespeare’s great speeches on human need:

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… You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, As full of grief as age; wretched in both… No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both That all the world shall — I will do such things — What they are yet I know not, but they shall be The terrors of the earth! You think I’ll weep: No, I’ll not weep. (2.4)

The storm begins. Lear rushes out into it with the Fool. The daughters shut the doors: “Shut up your doors… ‘tis a wild night.”

The storm and the heath

The storm. On the heath, Lear defies the elements:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout… Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain! Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters: I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness… (3.2)

“I am a man / More sinned against than sinning.” But even here, something new begins: Lear notices the Fool shivering — “Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? art cold? I am cold myself.” For the first time, he thinks of someone else’s suffering.

Kent leads them to a hovel. Before entering, Lear prays — not for himself but for the poor:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides… 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. (3.4)

This is the moral turning point of the play: the king who demanded love discovers compassion — too late to rule by it.

In the hovel they find Poor Tom (Edgar), naked, babbling about devils. Lear, fascinated, sees in him the truth of humanity:

Is man no more than this? Consider him well… Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! (3.4)

He tears off his clothes. See The Storm on the Heath.

The mock trial. In a farmhouse, Lear — now mad — puts his absent daughters on trial with a joint-stool standing in for Goneril, the Fool and Poor Tom as judges. “Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?”

The Fool vanishes. His last line in the play: “And I’ll go to bed at noon” (3.6). He never appears again — one of Shakespeare’s great mysteries.

The blinding of Gloucester. Meanwhile, Gloucester has secretly helped the king and received a letter about a French army landing to restore him. Edmund betrays him to Cornwall. In the most horrifying scene in Shakespeare, Cornwall and Regan tie the old man to a chair, Regan plucks his beard, and Cornwall gouges out one of his eyes. A servant, unable to bear it, draws his sword and wounds Cornwall — and is stabbed from behind by Regan. Cornwall tears out the other eye: “Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?” Gloucester cries for Edmund — and Regan tells him it was Edmund who betrayed him. In that instant he understands: “O my follies! Then Edgar was abus’d.” Regan: “Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell / His way to Dover.” See The Blinding of Gloucester.

Dover

Gloucester and Poor Tom. The blind Gloucester, led by an old man, meets Poor Tom — his own son Edgar, whom he does not recognize. Gloucester speaks the play’s bleakest line about the gods:

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; They kill us for their sport. (4.1)

He asks Tom to lead him to the cliffs of Dover, intending to throw himself off.

Albany turns. Goneril, now in love with Edmund (as is the widowed-to-be Regan), despises her “milk-livered” husband Albany. But Albany has learned of Gloucester’s blinding and turns on her: “You are not worth the dust which the rude wind / Blows in your face… Tigers, not daughters.” News comes that Cornwall has died of his wound.

Cordelia lands. In the French camp near Dover, Cordelia hears of her father’s madness — he wanders crowned with weeds and wild flowers — and weeps; Kent describes her tears as “pearls from diamonds dropp’d”.

The Dover cliff. Edgar leads his blind father to what he says is the edge of a terrifying cliff — describing the dizzying height in vivid detail, though they are on flat ground. Gloucester kneels, renounces the world, and falls forward — onto the flat earth. Edgar, changing his voice, pretends to be a stranger at the bottom of the cliff who saw him fall from a great height and survive: “Thy life’s a miracle.” Gloucester resolves: “Henceforth I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself.” Edgar has saved his father from despair with a theatrical illusion — a scene that is either profoundly moving or grotesquely absurd, and both. See The Dover Cliff.

Lear and Gloucester meet. Then Lear enters, mad, crowned with flowers — and meets the blind Gloucester. Their dialogue is the heart of the play. Gloucester recognizes the voice: “Is’t not the King?” Lear: “Ay, every inch a king.” Lear’s madness becomes a terrible lucidity about the world:

A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears: see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places, and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?… Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?… And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office… Through tattered clothes small vices do appear; Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks… (4.6)

And:

When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools. (4.6)

Edgar, watching: “O, matter and impertinency mixed! Reason in madness!”

Oswald arrives to kill Gloucester for the reward; Edgar kills him and finds on his body a letter from Goneril to Edmund, plotting her husband’s murder.

The reunion. In the French camp, Lear wakes from a healing sleep, in fresh clothes, to music, and sees Cordelia. He thinks he is in hell, and she a spirit in heaven: “Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead.” Slowly he recognizes her:

Pray, do not mock me: I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind… Do not laugh at me; For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia.

Cordelia: And so I am, I am. Lear: Be your tears wet? yes, faith. I pray, weep not: If you have poison for me, I will drink it. I know you do not love me; for your sisters Have, as I do remember, done me wrong: You have some cause, they have not. Cordelia: No cause, no cause. (4.7)

“No cause, no cause” — two words that answer the whole first scene. See Lear Wakes: "No Cause, No Cause".

The end

The battle. The British forces under Edmund and Albany defeat the French. Lear and Cordelia are captured. Cordelia wants to confront her sisters; Lear does not care — he has her:

No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison; We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies… And take upon’s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies… (5.3)

Edmund sends a captain after them with a secret order — to hang Cordelia and make it look like suicide.

The reckoning. Albany confronts Edmund with Goneril’s letter. A herald’s trumpet sounds; an unknown armoured knight answers the challenge — Edgar — and mortally wounds Edmund in single combat. Edgar reveals himself, and tells how he led his blind father, and how, when he finally revealed himself to him, Gloucester’s heart, “Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / Burst smilingly.”

News comes: Goneril has poisoned Regan and stabbed herself. Their bodies are brought in. Edmund, dying, sees them: “Yet Edmund was belov’d” — the love he never had. And then, at last, he tries to do good: “Some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature.” He reveals his order to kill Cordelia. They send a runner to stop it.

Too late.

Enter Lear, with Cordelia dead in his arms. Lear: Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones: Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever… She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass; If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, Why, then she lives.

Kent: “Is this the promised end?” Edgar: “Or image of that horror?”

Lear says he killed the slave who was hanging her. He barely recognizes the faithful Kent. Then, holding Cordelia:

And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life! 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! Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir. Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, Look there, look there! (5.3)

He dies — perhaps believing, at the last moment, that she breathes. See The Death of Cordelia.

Kent refuses to stay: “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go; / My master calls me; I must not say no.” The last words (given to Edgar in the Folio, Albany in the Quarto):

The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most: we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

The great themes

Nothing

The word “nothing” runs through the play like a crack through ice. Cordelia’s “Nothing, my lord”; Lear’s “Nothing will come of nothing” (an echo of the ancient principle ex nihilo nihil fit — see Nothing from Nothing); the Fool’s “Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” — “Why, no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing”; Edgar’s “Edgar I nothing am”; Gloucester’s “Nothing” when Edmund hides the letter. Lear begins by demanding everything be put into words and ends in a world where the most important things — Cordelia’s love, her breath — are “nothing” that can be measured. See Nothingness.

Nature

What is “natural”? For Lear, it is natural that children owe parents love and gratitude; his daughters are “unnatural hags”. For Edmund, nature is a goddess of raw force and appetite, who owes nothing to “the plague of custom” — laws, legitimacy, inheritance. For Lear on the heath, nature is the storm, indifferent and terrible. The play stages a philosophical war between two views of nature — as moral order (the medieval and Christian view, the view of Thomas Aquinas‘s natural law) and as amoral force (the view of Niccolò Machiavelli and, later, Hobbes and Friedrich Nietzsche). The literary critic John F. Danby’s Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (1949) made this the key to the play.

Sight and blindness

Lear “sees” nothing at the start — he cannot see Cordelia’s love or Goneril’s coldness: “See better, Lear,” Kent tells him. Gloucester has eyes and is blind to Edmund; blinded, he sees: “I stumbled when I saw.” Lear, mad, tells the blind Gloucester: “A man may see how this world goes with no eyes.” Literal blindness becomes insight.

Madness and wisdom

The play has three kinds of madness: the professional “folly” of the Fool, who speaks truth because he is licensed to be absurd; the feigned madness of Poor Tom; and Lear’s real madness, through which he reaches his deepest wisdom — about justice, authority, sex, power and human need. “Reason in madness.”

Clothes and the naked self

Lear asks his daughters to “reason not the need”; on the heath he tears off his “lendings” to become “the thing itself”. The play keeps asking what a human being is without the clothes of rank, property and custom — the question Jean-Jacques Rousseau would ask about natural man and Jean-Paul Sartre about existence before essence.

Justice and the gods

Does anyone up there care? The characters’ answers range across the whole spectrum of theology:

• Gloucester: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; they kill us for their sport.”
• Edgar: “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us.”
• Albany, on hearing of Cornwall’s death: “This shows you are above, you justicers.”
• Lear: “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?”

And then Cordelia, the innocent, dies anyway, minutes after Albany cries, “The gods defend her!” The play gives no answer — or rather, the ending is its answer. This is why it is so often read beside the problem of evil (see Suffering & Evil and Ivan Karamazov’s Rebellion — Returning the Ticket) and beside The Absurd.

Love that cannot speak

Cordelia’s tragedy begins because she will not turn love into rhetoric. The play tests every kind of love — flattery (Goneril, Regan), loyalty (Kent), the Fool’s devotion, Edgar’s care for his father, Edmund’s lust and ambition — and finds the truest love in those who say least. Its final couplet: “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

Interpretations

Christian redemption. A. C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904) suggested the play might be called “The Redemption of King Lear”: through suffering, Lear learns humility and love; Cordelia is a Christ-like figure who redeems him.

The absurd. Jan Kott (Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1964) read it as an absurdist play akin to Beckett’s Endgame — the Dover cliff “suicide” as a clown’s pantomime on an empty stage, the universe meaningless. Peter Brook’s austere 1962 production and 1971 film followed this reading.

Political. Lear’s madness-speeches about “the great image of authority”, justice and beggars make the play a critique of power and inequality — a king who learns what his subjects suffer only when he becomes one.

Philosophical. Stanley Cavell’s essay “The Avoidance of Love” (in Must We Mean What We Say?, 1969) argued that Lear’s tragedy is his avoidance of being known — he stages the love test because he cannot bear Cordelia’s real love, which would expose him. Martha Nussbaum and others have used it to discuss vulnerability and moral luck.

Tolstoy’s dissent. Leo Tolstoy, in “Shakespeare and the Drama” (1906), called the play absurd, its language bombastic, its storm ridiculous. George Orwell’s reply, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (1947), argued that Tolstoy — who had renounced his estate and title and was betrayed by his family — hated Lear because he was Lear.

The ending that was rewritten

In 1681 the poet Nahum Tate rewrote the play: Lear survives and regains his throne, Cordelia marries Edgar, and there is no Fool. Tate’s version held the stage for 157 years; Dr Johnson approved, writing that “Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity”, and that he had been “so shocked by Cordelia’s death” that he could not bear to reread the last scenes. Shakespeare’s ending was restored by the actor William Macready in 1838.

Adaptations

• Akira Kurosawa, Ran (1985) — Lear as a Japanese warlord with three sons, in blazing colour and battle.
• Grigori Kozintsev, Korol Lir (1971) — the great Soviet film, with music by Shostakovich.
• Peter Brook (1971) — stark black-and-white Beckettian version with Paul Scofield.
• Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (1991) — Pulitzer Prize novel moving the story to an Iowa farm, told from the eldest daughter’s point of view.
• Ian McKellen, Laurence Olivier, Anthony Hopkins and Glenda Jackson (as a female Lear, 2016–19) are among famous Lears. The joke in the theatre: you are too young to play Lear until you are too old to carry Cordelia.

Keywords

Love test

Lear's demand that his daughters measure their love in words — the original sin of the play.

The double plot

Lear and his daughters mirrored by Gloucester and his sons.

Poor Tom

Edgar's disguise as a naked "Bedlam beggar" — the image of "unaccommodated man".

The Fool

The licensed jester who tells the king the truth; vanishes after Act 3.

The heath

The bare, storm-swept place where Lear loses everything and finds compassion.

Lendings

Clothes — and everything else borrowed from society that covers the "thing itself".

Quarto and Folio

The two early texts of the play (1608 and 1623), which differ significantly.

Hamartia

Aristotle's "tragic error" — Lear's pride and blindness in the love test.

Using King Lear in conversation

• On flattery versus honesty: Cordelia’s “Nothing, my lord” — the cost of refusing to perform love.
• On ingratitude: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!” (1.4).
• On injustice and privilege: “Through tattered clothes small vices do appear; / Robes and furred gowns hide all.”
• On cosmic indifference: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods.”