In brief
An old king of Britain decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, and asks each to say how much she loves him. Goneril and Regan perform. Cordelia, the youngest and the favourite, answers “Nothing, my lord” (1.1), and he disinherits her and banishes the Earl of Kent for objecting. The two elder daughters strip him of his knights and shut him out in a storm, where he goes mad in the company of his Fool and a naked beggar. The beggar is Edgar, son of the Earl of Gloucester, driven into hiding by the forgeries of his bastard half-brother Edmund. Gloucester helps the king and has his eyes put out for it. Cordelia lands with a French army, finds her father and forgives him, and they lose the battle. Goneril poisons Regan and kills herself. Edgar fights Edmund and fatally wounds him, and Edmund, dying, remembers that he has ordered Cordelia hanged. The reprieve arrives too late. Lear carries in her body, and dies over it.
That ending is Shakespeare’s own invention. Every earlier telling he is known to have used lets Cordelia win, and for 157 years the stage preferred it that way. It also survives in two versions that differ at the moment of his death.
The argument
The companion page on Hamlet calls that play a demand for proof. King Lear begins with the same demand aimed at the wrong object. “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” (1.1) is an auction, with land as the prize. When Cordelia will not bid he replies in the language of accounts: “Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.” The arithmetic goes on after he has given up the kingdom. Goneril and Regan count down his hundred knights until Regan asks “What need one?”, and he answers “O, reason not the need” (2.4).
From there the play strips him. On the heath he thinks for the first time of the “Poor naked wretches” he governed, then looks at Edgar and sees the bottom of it: “Thou art the thing itself” (3.4). Gloucester walks the same road in a harsher form. Blinded and put out of his own gates, he says “I stumbled when I saw” (4.1). Waking in Cordelia’s care, Lear offers the old reckoning once more: she has cause to hate him. She answers “No cause, no cause” (4.7), which is the play’s reply to the first scene, because it refuses to count.
What kind of world this is stays an open question, and is meant to. Edmund prays “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” (1.2). Gloucester concludes “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods” (4.1). Edgar tells his dying brother “The gods are just”, with the evidence that “The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes” (5.3). I find that the most repellent line in the play, and I think we are meant to.
The ending
Look at how Cordelia actually dies. By now those who ordered it are dead or changing their minds. Albany spends the first part of the last scene on a duel, a letter and the deaths of the sisters, and then cries “Great thing of us forgot!” Edmund says “Some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature”, and Albany shouts “Run, run, O, run!” Then he prays, “The gods defend her!”, and the next thing in the text is the stage direction “Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms” (5.3).
So she is killed by a delay of minutes, by men with other things on their minds. That is why I reject both great readings of the scene. A. C. Bradley proposed in 1904 that we could call the poem The Redemption of King Lear, and argued that Lear dies of “an unbearable joy”, believing she breathes. Jan Kott read the same scene as a grotesque under empty heavens. Each wants a verdict, and so do the bystanders: “Is this the promis’d end?” asks Kent, and Albany says “Fall, and cease!” No end comes. Lear says “Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never!” and then, in the next line, “Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.”
The man who wanted a kingdom’s worth of love now says thank you for help with a button. The reconciliation in 4.7 happened and the hanging happened, and neither pays for the other. Her love was not wasted, because it existed, and it was not rewarded. That refusal to balance the books is what audiences could not bear, and I think it is the most honest thing in Shakespeare.
Bradley’s joy has a textual problem as well. He starts Lear’s last speech with a cry “represented in the oldest text by a four-times repeated ‘O’”, and goes straight to “Look there, look there!” Those two never stand together in an early printing. The 1608 Quarto has the cry and no “Look there”. The Folio has “Look there” and no cry. His reading was made from a text Shakespeare’s company never used.
The shape of the play
The structure is a doubling. Gloucester, like Lear, rejects the true child, trusts the false, and is cast out and cared for by the one he wronged. Lear loses his mind and keeps his eyes; Gloucester loses his eyes and keeps his mind. Their great scene together comes at Dover (4.6).
Before it comes the strangest trick Shakespeare wrote: Edgar leads his father to an imagined cliff on a flat stage, so that the old man can throw himself off it and fall on his face. And the Fool simply stops, with “And I’ll go to bed at noon” (3.6). His fate gets one ambiguous line at the end, “And my poor fool is hang’d!”, which may mean Cordelia.
The voices
Lear’s language moves from the most inflated in the canon to the plainest. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” (3.2) is a king still giving orders, this time to weather. By the end he has “I am a very foolish fond old man” (4.7), with no word in it longer than two syllables. His madness speaks in fierce prose with its politics intact: “a dog’s obeyed in office” (4.6).
The Fool works in jingles that tell the king what no courtier can. “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”, Lear asks, and hears “Lear’s shadow” (1.4). Edgar’s beggar talk, “Poor Tom’s a-cold” (3.4), takes some of its devils from Samuel Harsnett’s attack on fraudulent exorcism, so the most desolate voice in the play is partly quoted from a pamphlet about fakes.
Two Lears
This is a different problem from Hamlet’s, where one printing is an obvious oddity. Here both early texts are serious. The Quarto of 1608 calls the play a True Chronicle Historie; a second quarto of 1619 was largely reprinted from it. The Folio of 1623 calls it The Tragedie of King Lear. The Quarto has about 285 lines the Folio lacks, the Folio about 100 the Quarto lacks, and they differ in at least a thousand words.
The differences have a pattern. Only the Quarto has the mock trial of the daughters, “I will arraign them straight” (3.6), the scene describing Cordelia reading Kent’s letters (4.3), the servants who bring “flax and whites of eggs” to Gloucester’s face (3.7), and Albany’s rebuke to his wife, “Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile” (4.2). Only the Folio has the Fool’s prophecy of Merlin (3.2). The Folio’s Albany is a smaller man, and Edgar speaks the last four lines there, where the Quarto gives them to Albany under the heading “Duke”.
At the death they part completely. In the Quarto Lear says “neuer, neuer, neuer”, three times, then “O, o, o, o” and “Breake hart, I prethe breake”, so that he seems to die wanting death. In the Folio the word comes five times, he says “Looke there, looke there”, and “Breake heart, I prythee breake” is given to Kent. The famous five nevers belong to the Folio.
Alexander Pope began merging the two, assuming both were damaged copies of one lost original. Madeleine Doran suggested in 1931 that they had separate histories, and Michael Warren and Gary Taylor reopened the matter in the late 1970s; The Division of the Kingdoms (1983), which they edited, argued for two versions, the later a revision. The Oxford Complete Works of 1986 printed both. Duncan Salkeld argued in 2021 for the single lost text, with the Quarto’s errors arising from dictation in the printing house. I think revision the better account, though whose hand made the cuts remains open.
The free text linked here, Project Gutenberg’s #1532, names no editor and is the usual conflation. It keeps the mock trial and the servants from the Quarto, and takes Merlin, the five nevers, “Look there, look there!” and Edgar’s closing speech from the Folio. The originals are free: the Quarto and Folio at the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and the Folio in old spelling as Gutenberg #2266.
The happy ending
In 1681 Nahum Tate rewrote the play. His History of King Lear cuts the Fool, gives Cordelia and Edgar a love story, restores Lear to the throne and ends with Edgar declaring that “truth and virtue shall at last succeed”. It should not be dismissed as vandalism, since it restored the outcome the old story had always had. David Garrick brought back much of Shakespeare’s language while keeping the survival. Edmund Kean tried the tragic ending in 1823 and went back to Tate after three performances. Only in 1838 did William Macready give Covent Garden Shakespeare’s ending and the Fool. Apart from Kean’s three nights, for those 157 years no theatre audience saw Cordelia die.
Samuel Johnson’s note in his edition of 1765 is the best thing written on Tate’s side. Shakespeare, he says, “has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles”. Then he confesses that he “was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor”. That sentence reports what the ending does to an intelligent reader who is not trying to be impressive.
The people
Lear
Lear is vain, violent and frightened of being old. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth” (1.4) comes from a man who has just asked the gods to make his daughter sterile, and his suffering never washes this away.
Cordelia
Cordelia speaks little more than a hundred lines. Her refusal in the first scene has a touch of her father’s pride.
Goneril and Regan
The sisters are monstrous, and they have a real complaint: a hundred riotous knights would try anyone. Regan is the crueller, calling for Gloucester’s second eye.
Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund
Gloucester jokes coarsely about Edmund’s conception in the opening lines, in Edmund’s hearing, which tells you where the hatred comes from. Edgar hides from his blind father until moments before the old man’s death (5.3), a delay that kills. Edmund’s baffled “Yet Edmund was belov’d” (5.3) is the nearest he has to a reason for his one good deed.
Kent
Kent serves in disguise the king who banished him, and has the last word on the death: “Vex not his ghost” (5.3).
How it was made
The legend goes back to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century history, in which Cordelia restores her father and rules after him. Shakespeare’s main source was probably the second edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587). He also knew the anonymous play King Leir, acted at the Rose in April 1594 and printed in 1605, in which the old king is alive and restored at the end. The Gloucester plot comes from Sidney’s Arcadia, and Spenser’s Cordelia hangs herself.
The likeliest date is 1605–06; the play was given before King James on 26 December 1606. No source has this death of Lear over his daughter’s body.
Readers and critics
Tolstoy’s attack, published in 1906, retells the plot with a straight face to show it is absurd, and calls the old King Leir “incomparably and in every respect superior” to Shakespeare’s adaptation. George Orwell answered in “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (Polemic, 1947). Orwell allows that there is “no test of literary merit except survival”, and asks why Tolstoy hated this play above all others. He suggests resemblance: an old man who gave up his estate, title and copyrights and still expected to be treated as a sage. In 1910 Tolstoy left home and died at a railway station. Orwell has the better of it, but Tolstoy noticed what admirers pass over, that the opening is a fairy tale and much of the plot runs on disguises nobody sees through.
Jan Kott’s essay “King Lear, or Endgame”, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (English 1964), set the play beside Beckett and read Gloucester’s fall at Dover as a clown’s turn on an empty stage. It helped to shape Peter Brook’s production of 1962 with Paul Scofield, and it needs help from the text. A reviewer in 1964 reported that where Shakespeare’s servants bring flax and egg-white to Gloucester’s face, Brook’s pushed him away. Tate deleted the bleakness and Brook deleted the kindness. Each had to edit the play to make it say one thing.
Afterlives
Brook filmed his version in 1971, the same year as Grigori Kozintsev’s Soviet film, with a text by Pasternak. Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) gives a warlord three sons. Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), set on an Iowa farm and told by the eldest daughter, takes Goneril’s side and supplies a reason.
How to read it
- Get an edition that marks the differences. R. A. Foakes’s Arden (1997) conflates, but marks each passage found only in the Quarto or the Folio. René Weis’s Longman parallel text sets them on facing pages. The Folger text is free online.
- Read the last scene twice. Once in the free text and once in the Quarto. Ask what each Lear thinks he sees.
Read next
- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (about 429 BC). The other blinded king, in a plot built on what a man cannot see.
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet (about 1600). The companion tragedy of proof, and a different kind of textual problem.
- Samuel Beckett, Endgame (1957). The play Kott read beside this one, with the blindness and the servant left in and everything else removed.