King Lear

King Lear is one of William Shakespeare's great tragedies. He probably began writing it around 1603, and the earliest known performance took place at the end of 1606, so it is usually dated to 1605–1606. The play is set in a pre-Roman Britain drawn from an ancient legendary tradition, recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth around 1135 in his History of the Kings of Britain, and it also draws on an earlier play, King Leir, from which Shakespeare took the basic story.

Lear, now elderly, decides to step down from power and divide his kingdom among his three daughters according to how much each professes to love him. Goneril and Regan answer with extravagant flattery, while Cordelia, the youngest and his favourite, refuses to perform her affection and says she loves him as a daughter should. Furious, Lear disowns her and splits her share between her sisters. What follows is his gradual loss of standing: his daughters strip him of his followers and authority, until the old king is cast out and wanders through a storm accompanied only by his Fool and the disguised Earl of Kent.

Alongside this, the play develops a subplot that mirrors the main theme. The Earl of Gloucester is deceived by his illegitimate son Edmund, who persuades him that his legitimate son Edgar plans to kill him. Edgar flees and hides in the guise of a madman and beggar. Gloucester, who helps the king, is brutally punished by the dukes and is blinded. The double plot lets the play compare power, loyalty and betrayal across two social levels.

The tragedy is known for its bleak tone, dense and powerful poetry, and recurring motifs of blindness, madness and human nature. Lear moves from vanity to a depth of suffering that leads him to recognise his error, and the ending, with the deaths of Cordelia and the king himself, is especially harrowing. During the English Restoration, Nahum Tate published a version in 1681 with a gentler ending and a romantic subplot, which displaced Shakespeare's original from the stage until 1838. Since then the original has been regarded as one of the supreme achievements of world literature. In 1821 Percy Bysshe Shelley called it "the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world".