King Lear
- Written By William Shakespeare
King Lear
- William Shakespeare
A king gives away his kingdom. His daughters keep the rest.
King Lear is old, and he wants to stop ruling before ruling stops him. He calls his three daughters before the court and asks each to express how much they love him, with the largest portion of the kingdom going to the one whose declaration he deems greatest. Goneril and Regan perform their affection in extravagant terms. Cordelia, who truly loves him best, refuses to turn her devotion into a speech, and says so. Lear, furious, disinherits her on the spot and banishes the one advisor honest enough to object.
The kingdom divided, Lear discovers what his daughters’ love was actually worth. Goneril and Regan, now holding all the power he signed away, waste no time stripping him of his retinue and his authority. Within a week, the former king is turned out into a storm with nothing but a fool for company. On the blustery heath, grief curdles toward madness. Meanwhile a parallel betrayal unfolds in the house of Gloucester, where a bastard son’s ambition turns father against legitimate son and costs the old man his eyes.
Shakespeare strips a king down to a “poor, bare, forked animal” and asks what’s left when title, family, and reason all fall away at once. Few tragedies go as far, or as fast, in answering that question, and few endings land as hard as this one does, when Lear finally understands just what he has thrown away.
“Nothing will come of nothing.”
About the Author
- William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and built his career in London’s vibrant theatrical world, where he became a playwright, actor, and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Over the course of two decades, he produced a body of work that revolutionized English drama and reshaped the Western literary canon — plays that fused poetry with biting humor, psychological insight, and a startlingly modern sense of character. His tragedies, comedies, and histories have been performed continuously for more than four hundred years, translated into every major language, and adapted into countless forms.
King Lear was likely written around 1605–1606 and first performed at court before King James I that winter. Shakespeare drew on old chronicle material — a legendary pre-Roman British king whose story appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (circa 1136-38) and in an earlier, unrelated play on the same king — and rewrote it into something far darker than any of his sources.
Many scholars consider it Shakespeare’s bleakest tragedy, and one of his most formally daring: a double plot, a fool who speaks more sense than anyone at court, and an ending that refuses the consolations tragedy usually offers. It remains among his most staged and most debated plays, read anew by each generation as a study in familial love, obligation, and power.
