A king foolishly divides his kingdom between his scheming two oldest daughters and estranges himself from the daughter who loves him. So begins this profoundly moving and disturbing tragedy that, perhaps more than any other work in literature, challenges the notion of a coherent and just universe. The king and others pay dearly for their shortcomings--as madness, murder, and the anguish of insight and forgiveness that arrive too late combine to make this an all-embracing tragedy of evil and suffering.

In King Lear, Shakespeare pushes to its limit the hypothesis of a malign or at least indifferent universe in which human life is meaningless and brutal. Few plays other than Hamlet and Macbeth approach King Lear in evoking the wretchedness of human existence, and even they cannot match the devastating spectacle of the Earl of Gloucester blinded or Cordelia dead in Lear's arms. The responses of the chief characters are correspondingly searing. "Is man no more than this?" rages Lear."Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare,forked animal as thou art" (3.4.101-7). Life he calls a "great stage of fools," an endless torment: "the first time that we smell the air / We wawl and cry" (4.6.179-83). Gloucester's despair takes the form of accusing the gods of gleeful malice toward humanity: "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods; / They kill us for their sport" (4.1.36-7). Gloucester's ministering son Edgar can offer him no greater consolation than stoic resolve:"Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither; / Ripeness is all" (5.2.8-10). These statements need not be read as choric expressions of meaning for the play as a whole, but they do attest to the depth of suffering. In no other Shakespearean play does injustice appear to triumph so ferociously, for so long, and with such impunity. Will the heavens countenance this reign of injustice on earth? Retribution is late in coming and is not certainly the work of the heavens themselves. For, at the last, we must confront the wanton death of the innocent Cordelia--a death no longer willed even by the villain who arranged her execution. "Is this the promised end?"(5.3.268) asks the Earl of Kent, stressing the unparalleled horror of the catastrophe.

Introduction

King Lear on Stage

King Lear on Film

The Playhouse 

KING LEAR

Date and Text

Textual Notes

Shakespeare's Sources 

Further Reading

Memorable Lines