King Lear

Overview

King Lear was written around 1605 and 1606 and survives in two substantially different versions: a quarto of 1608 and the folio text of 1623. The folio cuts about three hundred lines from the quarto, including a whole scene in which two gentlemen discuss the French invasion and a mock trial Lear conducts on the heath, and it adds around a hundred lines the quarto lacks. Most crucially they differ at the end, over who speaks the last speech and over what Lear says in his final moments. Editors used to blend them. Some modern editions print them separately and argue that Shakespeare revised his own play. Whichever you read, know that there is more than one Lear.

The source was an existing play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which ends happily, with Leir restored. Shakespeare took the plot, added the Gloucester family from an episode in Sidney’s Arcadia, and then killed everyone. He also added the Fool, who has no source and no equivalent anywhere else in the drama of the period.

The play’s structure is a double plot, and this is the thing to hold onto. Two old men, two sets of children, two acts of misjudgement, two journeys out of the house into the weather. Shakespeare had never used a subplot that doubles the main action so exactly, and the repetition is what turns a family disaster into an argument about the universe.

What happens

Act 1. Lear divides the map and asks his daughters to compete. Goneril and Regan deliver; Cordelia says she loves him according to her bond, no more and no less. He disinherits her, splits her share between her sisters, and banishes Kent for objecting. The King of France marries her without a dowry. Meanwhile Edmund shows Gloucester a forged letter in which Edgar proposes to murder him. Lear moves in with Goneril and finds his knights unwelcome; the Fool tells him he has made himself nothing; Lear curses his daughter and leaves for Regan’s.

Act 2. Edgar flees and disguises himself as a mad beggar. Kent returns in disguise as a servant and is put in the stocks by Regan’s household. Regan and Goneril, negotiating together, cut Lear’s retinue from fifty to twenty-five to none. He goes out into the coming storm rather than bargain further, saying that reason is not the need.

Act 3. On the heath: the king, the Fool and Kent, joined by the beggar Edgar in a hovel. Lear tears at his clothes, holds a trial of an imaginary Goneril, and begins to talk about the poor naked wretches he never thought about before. Gloucester, who has helped Lear reach Dover, is betrayed by Edmund, and Cornwall and Regan put out his eyes onstage. A servant kills Cornwall and is killed.

Act 4. Blind Gloucester, led by Edgar whom he does not recognise, asks to be taken to the cliff at Dover so he can throw himself off; Edgar stages the fall and the survival to cure him of despair. Lear, crowned with weeds, meets him there and talks about authority, adultery and the smell of mortality. Goneril and Regan both want Edmund. Cordelia lands with a French army and is reunited with her father, who wakes thinking he is in hell and does not at first believe she can forgive him.

Act 5. The French lose. Edmund sends Lear and Cordelia to prison with secret orders. Edgar appears armoured and anonymous and kills Edmund in single combat. Goneril poisons Regan and kills herself. Edmund, dying, confesses the order. It is too late: Lear enters carrying Cordelia’s body, having killed the man who hanged her, and dies over her, either in despair or in the delusion that she is breathing, depending on which text and which reading you take. Kent will not survive him. Edgar, or Albany, is left to say that this weight cannot be borne.

How to read it

Give yourself a long uninterrupted sitting for acts 3 and 4, which are the hardest and the greatest. If the density defeats you, read a scene summary first and then the scene; you lose nothing, because the play’s power is not in surprise.

Track the word nothing, which appears in the first scene and keeps returning, and track clothing: robes, furred gowns, borrowed garments, the king tearing at his own. Both are how the play thinks.

Read the Fool carefully instead of past him. His jokes are the clearest analysis of the situation anyone offers, and he disappears in the middle of act 3 with a single line and no explanation.

Notice that the play sets up several consolations and demolishes each one. Edgar’s stoicism about ripeness, Albany’s confidence that heaven is punishing the wicked, Gloucester’s cure at the imaginary cliff, and the audience’s reasonable hope in act 5 that Cordelia will be saved, which Shakespeare deliberately encourages before taking it away.

Watch it as well as read it. Brook, Kozintsev and Kurosawa’s Ran each solve the play differently, and Ian McKellen’s and Simon Russell Beale’s Lears are both filmed. A good annotated text, the Folger or the Arden, is essential, since the storm scenes have some of the most textually unstable lines in Shakespeare.

Questions it raises

• Cordelia refuses to compete and her refusal destroys her family. Is she right, and could she have answered otherwise?
• What does Lear learn in the storm, and does the play suggest the price was worth paying?
• Edmund argues that legitimacy is an accident and nature is his goddess. Where exactly is he wrong?
• The gods are invoked in almost every scene and never act. Is this a play about a godless world or about people misreading one?
• Why does the Fool vanish, and what happens to the play’s tone once he is gone?
• If Cordelia’s death serves no purpose at all, what is a tragedy for?