King Lear

King Lear Review

King Lear is the play that breaks the rules. Every other great tragedy offers some form of structural consolation — Hamlet’s revenge is completed, Macbeth’s tyranny is ended, Othello recovers his self-knowledge in his final speech. Lear offers none of this. Cordelia is hanged. The good die, the wicked die, and the old king dies holding the body of his youngest daughter asking whether she might yet be alive. The wheel has come full circle, and there is nothing to show for it.

This is not a flaw. It is the play’s argument. Shakespeare is testing, with forensic deliberateness, how much suffering a dramatic structure can bear without collapsing into meaninglessness — and what he discovers is that the structure does not collapse, that it holds, that the suffering has a philosophical coherence even without a moral point. Lear is punished far beyond what his initial vanity deserves. Gloucester loses his eyes for loyalty. Cordelia dies for honesty. The play does not explain this. It just shows it.

What makes Lear endurable — what keeps it a play rather than a document of despair — is the quality of the human connections within it. The scenes between Lear and the Fool on the heath; the blinded Gloucester led by his unrecognized son Edgar; the reunion of Lear and Cordelia, brief and ruinous, in Act IV — these are moments of such concentrated feeling that they work against the darkness rather than being cancelled by it. The play insists that love is real even in a world that does not reward it.

Dr Johnson famously could not bear to re-read the final scene. That response is the play working exactly as intended.

This Folger Shakespeare Library edition presents the Folio text with full critical and textual notes.

Reviewed edition: Folger Shakespeare Library / Simon & Schuster (ISBN 074347574X)

The Two Texts

King Lear exists in two distinct early versions: the 1608 Quarto and the 1623 First Folio, which differ significantly — the Folio omits around 300 lines present in the Quarto, while the Quarto lacks passages that appear in the Folio. For most of the twentieth century, editors conflated the two texts into a single composite version. Since the 1980s, many scholars have argued that the two texts represent different stages of the play, possibly reflecting different productions, and some modern editions print them separately. The question matters for readers because the composite text can present a Lear that neither version actually contains.

The Folio text tends to be the preferred basis for most current critical and performing editions, including the Folger edition, but the existence of the two versions is a reminder that Shakespeare’s plays were working documents, revised in response to performance and circumstance, not fixed literary artifacts.

The Gloucester Plot and Why It Is Not Secondary

The subplot involving Gloucester and his two sons — the legitimate Edgar and the illegitimate Edmund — is sometimes treated as a structural convenience, a doubling device that amplifies the main plot. It is more than this. Edmund is one of Shakespeare’s most fully realized villains and, in a different play, would be its protagonist: his opening soliloquy — “Thou, nature, art my goddess” — is a coherent philosophical position, a rejection of legitimacy as a social fiction, that the play takes seriously before refuting it. His manipulation of his father and his brother is conducted with the same cold intelligence that Iago brings to Othello’s destruction.

The parallel between Lear and Gloucester — each brought to ruin by a willingness to believe bad children and reject good ones — creates the play’s structural argument: this is not one man’s tragedy but a picture of how a particular kind of blindness works, in different social contexts, with the same results. When the blinded Gloucester says he stumbled when he saw, and Edgar replies that men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither, the play is doing something no subplot could do: it is deepening the argument rather than replicating the plot.

The Historical Background

King Lear was written around 1605-1606, during the reign of James I, who had recently unified the English and Scottish crowns and whose views on kingship and inheritance were of direct contemporary relevance. The play was performed before James I at court in December 1606. The historical Lear appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae and in other chronicle sources; there was a pre-Shakespearean play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, from the 1590s, which Shakespeare used as a source and which ends with Lear’s restoration and happy reunion with Cordelia. Shakespeare’s decision to end the play with Cordelia’s death — a departure from his source — is one of the most significant artistic choices in the history of drama.

Kurosawa’s Ran and the Play’s Adaptations

The play’s power has generated one of the most distinguished bodies of adaptation in the theatrical and cinematic repertoire. Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 film Ran — set in feudal Japan, with the three daughters replaced by three sons — is frequently cited as among the greatest films ever made, and as one of the most faithful Shakespearean adaptations in spirit while being free in letter. The film’s vision of warfare, betrayal, and the collapse of an old order is entirely consonant with the play’s argument, and Kurosawa’s use of color and landscape to externalize Hidetora’s (Lear’s) internal devastation is something that no stage production can replicate. Other significant adaptations include Edward Bond’s 1971 play Lear, Peter Brook’s landmark 1962 production with Paul Scofield, and Nahum Tate’s 1681 adaptation that gave the play a happy ending — which held the stage for nearly 150 years before Lamb and Hazlitt’s criticism helped restore Shakespeare’s text.

Reading Lear on the Page

Shakespeare wrote the storm scenes — Lear on the heath, the Fool, Poor Tom — for an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars, as well as the Globe, and the demands they make on the reader differ from those made on the spectator. On the stage, the storm is partly a physical experience — wind machines, lighting, the actors shouting into real noise. On the page, the storm is language alone: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” The verse in these scenes is among the most extraordinary Shakespeare wrote, because it is simultaneously speech and weather, character and environment, internal state and external fact. Reading slowly, attending to the rhythm and imagery, is the only way to receive what the scenes are doing.