King Lear
William Shakespeare
King Lear
SuperSummary
1
Table of Contents
O V ERV IEW
3
C H A P TER S UM M A RIES & A N A LYS ES
6
Acts I-II
6
Act III
12
Acts IV-V
16
C H A RA C TER A N A LYS IS
23
Lear
23
Cordelia
23
Goneril
24
Regan
24
Edgar
24
Edmund
25
Gloucester
25
Kent
25
The Fool
26
27
TH EM ES
How Madness Reveals Truth
27
The Capacity to Endure Human Suffering
27
The Power of Fiction and Disguises
28
S YM B O LS & M O TIFS
29
Blindness
29
Clothing and Nakedness
29
The Storm
29
IM P O RTA N T Q UO TES
31
ES S A Y TO P IC S
41
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TEA C H IN G M A TERIA LS
2
43
Act I
43
Act II
46
Act III
49
Act IV
52
Act V
55
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Overview
King Lear is a play written around 1606 by the English playwright William Shakespeare.
Widely considered one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, King Lear tells the story of a king
who goes mad after bequeathing his fortune and power to his daughters. It is loosely based
on the myth of Leir of Britain, a legendary monarch said to have ruled Ancient Britons in the
eighth century B.C.
This guide refers to the 1999 Pelican Shakespeare edition. Please note that citations in the
Summary section refer to line number rather than page number, so this guide can be used
with different editions of the play.
Plot Summary
Lear, the aging king of an ancient pre-Christian England, decides to retire. He will divide his
kingdom between his three daughters, leaving them and their husbands to rule jointly. But
before he tells them which portion of land they will receive, Lear demands that they answer
one little question: which of them loves him the most?
Lear’s elder daughters, Goneril and Regan, praise their father obsequiously, and he rewards
each of them—along with their husbands, Albany and Cornwall—with a third of the kingdom.
He saves the best land for his favorite daughter, Cordelia. Cordelia, however, refuses to make
a dishonest, toadying display of her love for her father as her sisters have. Outraged at her
resistance, Lear curses and disowns her, ignoring the protests of his loyal advisor Kent, whom
he exiles for his resistance. The King of France nevertheless marries Cordelia on the strength
of her own merits, and Cordelia reluctantly departs, leaving her father in the care of her
sisters.
Meanwhile, Lear’s old friend, the Earl of Gloucester, has his own family troubles.
Unbeknownst to him, his illegitimate son Edmund plots to betray his legitimate son Edgar and
inherit his father’s title himself. Edmund plays on his father’s short temper and his brother’s
trusting nature to trick Gloucester into believing that Edgar plans to kill Gloucester. Pursued
by his father’s men, Edgar flees into the wilderness disguised as the mad beggar Poor Tom.
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Kent also disguises himself as the rough-and-ready Caius and finds his way back into Lear’s
service. He worries that Lear will have more trouble with his daughters than he bargained for,
a suspicion shared by Lear’s beloved Fool.
Having relinquished his power, Lear finds that his temper tantrums no longer hold much sway
over his children. When Goneril objects to his rowdy partying, he violently curses her and
moves to Regan’s house. But Regan also refuses to house his drunken knights. The final
straw comes when Regan puts the disguised Kent in the stocks, an insult to Lear’s authority.
Maddened with rage, Lear runs out onto the wild heath amid a terrible storm. Kent and the
Fool follow.
Out in the storm, Lear loses his mind. As Kent and the Fool try to shelter him, they run into the
disguised Edgar in a hovel. Edgar’s “madness” is so affecting that Lear strips naked in
imitation of him, gaining a new understanding of the suffering of all the poor people in his
kingdom. At last, Lear’s friends manage to get him into the hovel where he falls asleep.
Gloucester arrives and warns them they need to leave. As a war for the kingdom brews
between Goneril and Regan, the king must be protected quickly. Kent hurries Lear away, and
the Fool mysteriously disappears from the play.
Meanwhile, Edmund betrays Gloucester to the sisters, telling them that Gloucester knows of
an invading French army led by Cordelia that intends to restore Lear to the throne. Regan and
her husband Cornwall capture Gloucester and vengefully gouge out his eyes. A horrified
servant who tries to stop them mortally wounds Cornwall in a struggle, leaving Regan open to
accept Edmund’s seductions. Goneril’s husband, Albany, is disgusted and disturbed by his
sadistic in-laws.
The blinded Gloucester is thrown out to wander on the heath, where a horrified Edgar finds
him. Gloucester, not recognizing his son’s voice, asks “Poor Tom” to lead him to a cliff’s edge
so he can kill himself. Edgar pulls a trick on his father, taking him to a patch of flat ground.
When he tries to jump, Gloucester only falls on his face. Edgar, still pretending to be a
stranger, tells him that he miraculously survived his fall.
Meanwhile, Kent leads Lear to safety with the French army and Cordelia. Half-mad and
wandering around with flowers in his hair, Lear meets the broken Gloucester and consoles
him. He also apologizes to Cordelia, having learned to understand his own terrible mistakes.
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On Edmund’s orders, Goneril’s servant Oswald tries to kill Gloucester. Edgar protects his
father, by killing Oswald. On Oswald’s body, Edgar finds a letter from Goneril to Edmund in
which she encourages Edmund to murder Albany and marry her.
As Regan and Goneril are fight over him, Edmund strategizes about how to kill Lear, Cordelia,
and Edgar so he can marry one of the sisters and become king himself. In a great success for
Edmund, the English forces defeat the French and capture the reconciled Cordelia and Lear.
After the victory, Regan and Goneril fight openly over Edmund, but before anyone wins, Regan
dies; Goneril poisoned her. Albany, who learned from the disguised Edgar about Goneril and
Edmund’s plot against him, confronts his murderous wife who commits suicide. Albany joins
Cordelia’s army.
Edgar reveals his identity to Gloucester who dies of the shock. The grieving Edgar then
presents himself in disguise as a challenger to Edmund. The fate of the kingdom will rest on
which brother wins in combat. After a tense swordfight, Edgar defeats Edmund and
dramatically reveals his identity. Dying, Edmund tells his brother that he gave orders for Lear
and Cordelia to be hanged. Edgar and Albany rush to stop the execution, but they are too late:
Cordelia is dead. Lear appears, carrying her dead body and howling with grief. His heart
broken, Lear dies.
Kent, Albany, and Edgar are the only men left standing. Kent excuses himself, intending to
follow his master Lear wherever he goes, even into death. Edgar and Albany are left alone to
rebuild the shattered kingdom. Edgar closes the play with a shellshocked speech, declaring
that the survivors must face this horrific time with honesty.
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Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Acts I-II
Act I, Scene 1 Summary
Two noblemen, Kent and Gloucester, discuss a mysterious political change: the King plans to
relinquish his power and divide his kingdom. Gloucester introduces Kent to his illegitimate
son Edmund, making a few rude jokes about Edmund’s birth.
King Lear arrives and welcomes his family members: his eldest daughter Goneril and her
husband Albany, his middle daughter Regan and her husband Cornwall, and his youngest
unmarried daughter Cordelia. Lear announces he will “shake all cares and business from our
age,/Conferring them on younger strengths while we/Unburdened crawl toward death” (3941). He intends to divide his kingdom between his daughters and to marry Cordelia to one of
two suitors, the King of France or the Duke of Burgundy.
Before relinquishing his kingdom, Lear insists that his daughters tell him: “Which of you shall
we say doth love us most,/That we our largest bounty may extend/Where nature doth with
merit challenge” (51-53).
The two eldest daughters take turns lavishly praising their father. Goneril goes first and
shamelessly flatters him; Regan follows, saying that she loves her father as Goneril does, only
even more. The youngest daughter, Cordelia, listens in horror to this insincere display. When
it is her turn, Lear expects that his favorite daughter will praise him the most. But Cordelia
refuses to speak. Instead, she critiques her sisters’ false flattery.
Enraged by Cordelia’s refusal to play along, Lear banishes her, stripping her of her dowry. The
shocked Kent tries to tell his master this is a terrible mistake, but Lear only turns his fury on
his loyal councillor, banishing him as well.
Without her dowry, Cordelia is left to whichever prince is willing to take her. Burgundy
withdraws his suit, but the King of France sees Cordelia’s wisdom and goodness. She
accepts his offer of marriage and departs for his kingdom.
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As the scene ends, the two elder sisters talk privately, remarking that their father is senile.
They have little sympathy for their exiled younger sister.
Act I, Scene 2 Summary
Edmund, Gloucester’s illegitimate son, delivers a soliloquy on the injustices of his position in
life. He swears allegiance to Nature rather than the customs of a society that denies him rank
and power because his father wasn’t married to his mother: “Why bastard? Wherefore
base,/When my dimensions are as well compact,/my mind as generous, and my shape as
true,/As honest madam’s issue?” (6-9). Embittered by his ill-treatment, he plots to turn
Gloucester against his legitimate brother Edgar and take over the dukedom himself.
Gloucester appears in a flurry, shocked at recent events, including Kent’s banishment,
hostilities between France and England, and Lear’s abdication of the throne. As he bustles in,
Edmund makes an obvious show of hiding a letter, which Gloucester insists on seeing. It is a
fake letter from Edgar, composed by Edmund. In it, Edgar supposedly asks Edmund to
assassinate Gloucester with him. Appalled, Gloucester asks Edmund to investigate further.
He reflects that the astrological signs bode ill; the stars predict war and discord within
families and nations.
When Gloucester leaves, Edmund scoffs at his father’s superstition, maintaining that the
stars have no effect on human character: “I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest
star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing” (131-133). Edgar interrupts his musings.
Edmund tricks him into believing that Gloucester is enraged with him. Although Edmund says
he will try to calm their father down, he warns his brother to carry a weapon. Frightened and
overwhelmed, Edgar departs. Edmund rejoices. His father’s credulity and his brother’s
innocence both serve his purposes.
Act I, Scene 3 Summary
Goneril storms onstage in a huff, asking her servant Oswald if Lear hit one of her men for
provoking his Fool. She is fed up with her father’s behavior. He and his entourage of drunken
knights party day and night in Goneril’s house. She tells Oswald she plans to avoid Lear for a
while and that he should tell her father she’s sick if he asks for her. She also counsels Oswald
and the rest of her staff to be as rude and lazy as they like around Lear and his men.
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Act I, Scene 4 Summary
The banished Kent disguises himself as a rough servant named Caius so he can watch over
Lear; his loyalty to his master outweighs all other concerns. As Caius, he presents himself to
Lear’s crew of knights and quickly earns Lear’s trust when he upbraids Oswald—who, as
Goneril instructed him, is blatantly rude to the former king.
The Fool, Lear’s much-beloved jester, is heartbroken since Lear sent Cordelia away. He now
emerges to read his master a lesson in his mistakes. When he sings a mocking song, and
Lear ominously asks, “Dost thou call me fool, boy?”, he replies, “All thy other titles thou hast
given away; that thou wast born with” (145-47).
As the Fool mocks Lear and his daughters, the furious Goneril enters. She tells her father she
will no longer tolerate his chaotic knights, and he must send at least some of them away. Lear
flies into a rage and curses his eldest child, calling on Nature to “Dry up in her the organs of
increase” so that she’ll never have a child of her own (275). With that, he departs, intending to
go to Regan’s house where he believes he can do what he wants. Goneril sends Oswald
ahead to warn Regan and to tell her to hold firm with their father. Her husband Albany warns
her that this may be a mistake.
Act I, Scene 5 Summary
Lear sends the disguised Kent to deliver a letter to Regan’s castle explaining what happened
at Goneril’s house. Left alone with the Fool, Lear broods. The Fool gently teases him and tries
to warn him that Regan isn’t likely to behave any differently than Goneril.
Lear is shaken by his recent fits of uncontrollable rage. He fears for his sanity, saying, “O let
me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!/Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!” (43-44).
Act II, Scene 1 Summary
Edmund hears rumors about a war brewing between Albany and Cornwall, who both may have
designs on the undivided throne. Regan and Cornwall will visit the Gloucester household that
night, giving Edmund more opportunity to scheme.
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He continues his plot against his own family, telling Edgar: “My father watches. O sir, fly this
place” (20). The enraged Gloucester, Edmund claims, is on Edgar’s trail, and Edmund will need
to pretend to attack his brother in order to keep him safe. Edmund draws his sword, and the
bewildered, frightened Edgar flees into the night. Edmund wounds himself to give the
impression that Edgar injured him.
When Gloucester appears, Edmund spins a tale in which Edgar mutters of patricide and
chants magical charms. Crazed with rage and grief, Gloucester threatens to have his
legitimate son killed and vows to grant Edmund his title and lands, just as Edmund plotted.
Cornwall and Regan arrive and commiserate with Gloucester. They also swear friendship with
Edmund, whom they see as a potentially useful man.
Act II, Scene 2 Summary
Goneril’s steward Oswald meets Kent outside Gloucester’s house. Kent, remembering
Oswald’s rudeness to Lear, is accordingly rude to Oswald, going on an exuberant tirade
against him: Oswald, Kent says, is:
[a] knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, threesuited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking,
whoreson, glass-gazing, superservicable, finical rogue (13-17).
At last, Kent draws his sword, and Oswald screams for help.
Edmund, Gloucester, Regan, and Cornwall overhear the ruckus and confront the two men.
Kent won’t budge, and Cornwall commands him to be put in the stocks for his insolence.
Regan adds that, in spite of his old age, Kent must sit in the stocks all day and all night.
With Kent imprisoned, everyone but Gloucester departs. Gloucester empathizes with Kent and
says he will try to change Cornwall’s mind. Whatever happens, he and Kent both know that
Lear won’t take this well; it is a serious insult for Cornwall to put Lear’s servant in the stocks.
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Act II, Scene 3 Summary
Edgar, on the run, pauses to deliver a soliloquy. Confused and terrified, he considers his
options, all of which are bad. Nowhere is safe, and no friendly face can be trusted. His best
option is to disguise himself as someone no one looks at twice. He decides to dress up as a
vagrant madman called Poor Tom, vowing, “[M]y face I’ll grime with filth,/Blanket my loins, elf
all my hair in knots,/And with presented nakedness outface/The winds and persecutions of
the sky” (9-12). He will chant nonsense, beg for alms, and entirely unmake himself: “Edgar I
nothing am” (21), he says.
Act II, Scene 4 Summary
Lear and the Fool arrive at Gloucester’s house and find Kent in the stocks outside. Lear is
outraged and unbelieving, shocked that Cornwall would dare to disrespect his servant this
way. Kent also tells Lear that Oswald delivered letters from Goneril ahead of his arrival. The
Fool isn’t surprised; this is exactly what he predicted, and he sings cryptic little songs to that
effect.
Lear rushes off and returns with Gloucester who tries to calm him down. Cornwall delayed his
meeting with Lear, refusing to jump at the former king’s command. When Cornwall and Regan
eventually arrive, Lear is furious with them, and they coolly condescend to him. When Goneril
appears, the two sisters present a united face against their father, asking him why he needs
even one servant, let alone his retinue of rowdy knights. As before, Lear flies into a rage,
calling Regan “a boil,/A plague-sore, or embossèd carbuncle,/In my corrupted blood” (222224).
As madness descends upon him, Lear flees from the house, pursued by the Fool and Kent. In
spite of Gloucester’s appalled protests, his family lets him go. There is a violent storm
brewing, and the family is reluctant to follow Lear into it.
Acts I-II Analysis
The first acts of King Lear gather like the storm that breaks at the end of Act II. The play
begins with a queasy lightning flash: Lear’s manipulative question to his daughters. Right
away, readers are exposed to a world in which love is corrupted into a tool for maintaining
power. In relinquishing his kingdom to his children, Lear attempts to exert a deeper power
through emotional backchannels, demanding that his daughters bow to his demands for a
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very specific kind of affection and attention. As Cordelia points out, these demands border on
emotional incest. Something is thoroughly out of order in Lear’s kingdom, and the balance of
nature is about to set it right, through means that no mere human is going to like very much.
The daughters’ different responses to Lear’s manipulation set up one of the play’s big themes:
reality and self-delusion. Cordelia’s refusal to play her father’s game infuriates him because
he doesn’t get to bask in obsequious praise. More than that, however, the refusal is a critique
of Lear’s emotional dishonesty, revealing that his self-image can’t stand up to resistance or
disagreement. He depends on the belief that he’s the finest father and the best king in all the
world, and any threat to that belief shakes his whole worldview. As Regan points out, “[H]e
hath ever but slenderly known himself” (1.1.298-99). Lear, like all the play’s characters, will
reckon with what he really is over the course of the play.
Questions of truth and deception touch on every character’s predicament. The parallel stories
of Edmund and Edgar provide a piquant example. Edmund, Gloucester’s illegitimate son, uses
deception to rise to a noble position that feels truer to his self-image, but this new reality is
based entirely on treacherous falsehoods. Meanwhile, Edgar, the legitimate son, finds truth
through his seemingly false disguise as the mad “Poor Tom.” The play repeatedly insists that
public status and honor are essentially worthless. Contact with reality and with one’s true self
involves complete humility, even abasement. In turn, pride and power sever the play’s
characters from reality and the perceptions of others.
These early acts also set up two contrasting views of man and nature, one of which is
exemplified by Lear and Gloucester, while the other is exemplified by Edmund. Lear and his ilk
profess faith in the old Medieval traditions of noble birth and kingly patriarchy. When this
worldview is shattered by his daughters’ lack of deference, Lear devolves into madness.
Edmund, meanwhile, represents the “New Man” emerging in Shakespeare’s time. This figure
rejects Lear’s Medieval worldview and instead adopts a Hobbesian view of the world in which
all men war against one another for an advantage. This is reflected in Edmund’s selfinterested schemes which recall Machiavelli’s 1513 book The Prince. Though written almost
one hundred years earlier, The Prince remained highly influential in Shakespeare’s era.
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Act III
Act III, Scene 1 Summary
Out on the heath in a raging storm, Kent meets a gentleman who tells him he’s seen Lear,
running wild and shouting into the wind and rain. The conditions are so wild that even “the
cub-drawn bear would couch,/The lion and the belly-pinchèd wolf/Keep their fur dry” (12-14).
Yet the elderly and maddened Lear is exposed to the elements. Kent warns this gentleman
that Albany and Cornwall are secretly plotting against each other and that the King of France
—Cordelia’s new husband—plans to invade and take the country back from these treacherous
dukes. If the gentleman goes to Dover, he can deliver news of Lear’s plight and give Cordelia
Kent’s ring as a token. The gentleman agrees, and Kent rushes off to search for Lear.
Act III, Scene 2 Summary
Lear, followed by the loyal Fool, spits fury at the weather:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!/You cataracts and hurricanoes,
spout/Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks./You sulph’rous and
thought-executing fires,/Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,/Singe my
white head (1-6).
The Fool struggles to get his master to shelter. Lear continues to rage at the sky, and the sky
rages back.
Kent joins the Fool in an attempt to get Lear into the shelter of a nearby hovel. Lear comes
back to himself for a moment, understanding that he’s losing his mind. He also returns to the
people around him, asking the Fool: “How dost, my boy? Art cold?/I am cold myself” (69-70).
He agrees to go to the hovel. The shaken Fool ends the scene with a cryptic prophecy of
confusion and danger in England.
Act III, Scene 3 Summary
Gloucester confides in Edmund: he is appalled by the way Lear’s daughters treat their father.
When he objected, he reports, Cornwall and Regan turned him out of his own house and
forbade him from communicating with Lear.
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He goes on, explaining the two dukes’ secret enmity and telling Edmund he received a
confidential letter about the approaching French invasion. He plans to rescue Lear, regardless
of Cornwall and Regan’s prohibitions.
All of these confidences play right into Edmund’s hands. After his father departs, he vows,
“This courtesy forbid thee shall the duke/Instantly know, and of that letter too,” and relishes
his imminent victory: “The younger rises when the old doth fall” (20-24).
Act III, Scene 4 Summary
Kent leads Lear and the Fool to the hovel. Still bewailing his daughters’ betrayal, Lear hurries
his friends in first. In a moment of lucidity, he pauses to think of all the “poor naked wretches”
(30) enduring this storm with him even now.
Just then, a scream comes from within the hovel, and the Fool rushes out, claiming there’s a
lunatic inside. This is “lunatic” is Edgar, deep in disguise as the beggar Poor Tom. Edgar
raves, speaking of “the foul fiend” and singing snatches of bawdy ballads. Lear takes to this
madman immediately and personally, believing that only treacherous daughters like his own
could have made this man so mad. He deliriously interrogates Edgar and strips off his own
clothing in imitation of this naked beggar. The beleaguered Fool tries to forestall him:
“Prithee, nuncle, be contented; ‘tis a naughty night to swim in” (110-11).
Gloucester arrives. Without recognizing his own son, he hurries the group toward a safe
house. Edgar must listen and keep his disguise up as Gloucester describes his son’s
supposed betrayal, lamenting, “I loved him, friend,/No father his son dearer” (167-68).
Act III, Scene 5 Summary
Edmund delivers his father’s intelligence about the French invasion directly to Cornwall, who
hurries to inform Regan. Cornwall also tells Edmund that his betrayal of his father has made
him the Earl of Gloucester. Edmund will take his father’s title, and Cornwall will treat him as
his own son.
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Act III, Scene 6 Summary
Kent and Gloucester bring Lear to a safe house. Edgar keeps up his mad ranting, speaking of
damnation. Lear, spurred on, hallucinates an imaginary courtroom in which he puts his
daughters on trial while the Fool and Edgar play along with his delusions. Edgar is so moved
to intense pity by Lear’s madness that his tears threaten his disguise.
At last, Lear falls into a troubled sleep. Gloucester and Kent return to collect him in a litter
vehicle and carry him to Dover, where Cordelia’s army will offer him sanctuary.
Everyone departs but Edgar, who remains to reflect on his experience with the king: “How
light and portable my pain seems now,/When that which makes me bend makes the king
bow” (107-108).
Act III, Scene 7 Summary
Goneril, Regan, Albany, Cornwall, and Edmund meet to plot revenge on Gloucester, whom
they’ve captured for supporting Cordelia and rescuing Lear. Goneril and Edmund depart to
prepare for war, leaving Regan and Cornwall to deal with Gloucester.
The bloodthirsty couple tie Gloucester up and interrogate him, ignoring his cries for decency
and mercy. When he doesn’t give them the answers they want, Cornwall puts out one of his
eyes. Regan won’t be satisfied until he puts out the other. But as Cornwall moves to do just
this, one of his horrified servants, horrified tries to fight him off. After a bloody struggle,
Cornwall kills him and completes the job, blinding Gloucester as he recites these terrible
words: “Out, vile jelly./Where is thy luster now?” (84-85).
When Gloucester howls for Edmund, Cornwall and Regan reveal that Edmund betrayed him.
They throw him out into the storm again to “smell/his way to Dover” (94-95). Cornwall realizes
his servant mortally wounded him.
The scene ends as two traumatized servants make plans to help the unfortunate Gloucester,
bandaging his bleeding eye sockets and finding him a guide.
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Act III Analysis
Act III contains one of the most famous scenes in all of world literature: Lear’s mad caper in
the storm. An image of man as a tiny, angry, frightened speck amid wild nature, the storm
scene is at once harrowing and blackly comical. Through this confrontation between despair
and absurdity, the play’s most vivid picture of the human condition emerges.
As Lear leaps around naked and Edgar rants and raves, a strange coherence emerges from
their lunacy. While Edgar’s madness is feigned and Lear’s is true, both men come to a deeper
understanding of their own natures—and human nature—through their seeming disconnect
from reality. For Edgar, the externalizing of his internal predicament as a loveless exile driven
to despair by treachery provides a strange relief; his mad-speak is as inventive and exuberant
as it is horrific. For Lear, the sight of Edgar’s naked misery brings him to the realization that
every man, himself included, is nothing but a “poor, bare, forked animal” (3.4.108). It’s through
this realization that Lear finds his way to empathy for the first time—an empathy that
demands he relinquish his puffed-up self image as mighty king. Later, this behavior will be
referred to as “reason in madness.” This runs counter to Edmund and Cornwall’s “madness in
reason,” a self-interested rationality that results in so much blood and death.
These scenes also mark the beginning of Edgar’s role as an artist. Just as Edgar externalizes
his misery in a kind of performance art, he provides a model and a mirror for Lear. Lear sees
himself in Edgar, even accusing Edgar’s nonexistent daughters of having brought him to this
pass, and finds a curious relief in that seeing. While the play offers no pat answers to
questions of human suffering and human evil, it suggests that one way to grapple with these
concepts is by creating artistic reflections of them—the better to see them, feel them, and
even play with them. The poet John Keats would later remark on this quality in King Lear,
writing that its truthfulness makes it beautiful even though it depicts horrors.
But art isn’t a total solution to the mysteries of evil and pain, and Gloucester’s gruesome
blinding makes that very clear. This scene is at once symbolic—Gloucester, who has proven
so bad at seeing what’s true, can only see what’s real after he loses his literal eyes—and
nastily concrete. The sadistic Cornwall’s cry, “Out, vile jelly./Where is thy luster now?” (3.7.8485), returns us once more to the irreducible facts of the human body: its vulnerability and its
mortality.
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Acts IV-V
Act IV, Scene 1 Summary
Having resigned himself to his terrible circumstances, Edgar believes he’s hit such an
absolute low that there’s nowhere to go but up. At that moment, he sees the blinded
Gloucester led by an old man and concludes, “The worst is not/So long as we can say, ‘This is
the worst’” (27-28).
Edgar presents himself as a guide to the miserable Gloucester, who wants to be led to the
cliffs of Dover, where he can throw himself to his death. The old man leading Gloucester
protests that Edgar is a madman; Gloucester, unperturbed, replies, “‘Tis the time’s plague
when madmen lead the blind” (48). Although Edgar can barely keep up his act, he agrees to
guide his father to the cliffs.
Act IV, Scene 2 Summary
Goneril, Oswald, and Edmund discuss changes they’ve observed in Albany, who now seems to
have qualms about his family’s behavior, particularly Goneril’s. Goneril is neither surprised nor
upset. She wants to marry Edmund now, and Albany can die for all she cares. Goneril and
Edmund part with a kiss, and she sighs, “O, the difference of man and man:/To thee a
woman’s services are due;/My fool usurps my body” (26-28).
Albany enters and roundly curses his wife, accusing her of vicious cruelty to her father whom
he remembers as a good and righteous king. Goneril retorts that she doesn’t expect Albany to
step up and repel the French invaders.
In the midst of their fight, a messenger brings news that Cornwall, stabbed by his servant
during Gloucester’s blinding, is dead. Aghast to hear of the blinding, Albany wonders why
Edmund didn’t stand in Cornwall’s way. Privately, he asks the messenger for more of the
story.
Act IV, Scene 3 Summary
Kent meets with a gentleman who brings news of the invasion. The King of France rushed
home to deal with a domestic problem, leaving behind a general to take charge of the war.
Cordelia, who remains in England, was horrified to hear of her father’s suffering. Kent remarks
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that human personalities must be determined by the stars; how else could such a kind
woman have two villainous sisters.
Kent tells the gentleman that, though Lear is safe, he will resist seeing his loyal daughter.
Lear’s terrible choices, Kent adds, “sting/His mind so venomously that burning
shame/Detains him from Cordelia” (46-48). Kent, meanwhile, must take care of some secret
business. He leaves Lear in the gentleman’s care.
Act IV, Scene 4 Summary
Cordelia consults with a doctor about her father. She laments that Lear was discovered,
completely mad, singing to himself and wearing a crown of flowers and weeds. She wonders
desperately if anything can cure him; the doctor advises her that what he needs is sleep.
Cordelia sends men to find her father so she can keep him under her protection.
A messenger arrives to tell Cordelia that the British forces are marching toward them.
Cordelia prepares for war, motivated by love rather than power. She says, “No blown ambition
doth our arms incite,/But love, dear love, and our aged father’s right” (27-28).
Act IV, Scene 5 Summary
Regan and Oswald discuss imminent war plans. Regan is less interested in the details of the
fight than in Goneril’s communications with Edmund. Like her elder sister, Regan wants to
marry him and feels her claim is better. She tells Oswald, “My lord is dead; Edmund and I have
talked,/And more convenient is he for my hand/Than for your lady’s” (33-35).
Act IV, Scene 6 Summary
Edgar claims to have led Gloucester to the cliffs of Dover. In reality, they are on a flat patch of
ground. Edgar falsely describes the dizzying view from the heights above the sea: “The
murmuring surge/That on th’ unnumb’red idle pebble chafes/Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look
no more, Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight/Topple down headlong” (20-24). At first,
Gloucester is suspicious, noting that the ground feels pretty flat and that his guide’s voice
has changed. Ultimately, he accepts Edgar’s fiction and prepares himself for death.
But when he tries to throw himself over the imaginary cliff, Gloucester merely falls on his
face. Using a new voice, Edgar tells him that he survived a fall from a terrible height,
characterizing the event as a miracle. He adds that Gloucester’s guide was a thousand-nosed
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demon and that Gloucester was saved by some divine intervention. Shaken, Gloucester
resolves to endure his pain until he dies naturally.
The mad Lear arrives wearing his flower crown. He speaks nonsense, seeing imaginary
animals and phantom daughters while singing songs about lechery, corruption, and the
stench of mortality. Like the Fool and Edgar before him, Lear’s madness demonstrates more
understanding of the world than his sanity did.
Gloucester recognizes his king by the sound of his voice, but Lear does not recognize
Gloucester. In his insanity, Lear mocks him, telling him to read nonexistent papers that
Gloucester couldn’t see even if they existed and admonishing him, “What, art mad? A man
may see how this world goes with no eyes” (150-151).
Finally, Lear recognizes Gloucester and sits down to console him as he weeps. “Thou must be
patient,” he tells him: “We came crying hither;/Thou know’st, the first time that we smell the
air/We wawl and cry” (178-80).
Cordelia’s gentlemen arrive to take Lear to safety. He impishly runs away from them. Edgar
collects news of the impending battle from one of these gentlemen and then reintroduces
himself to Gloucester as a sane man offering to guide him.
Oswald interrupts them and intends to murder Gloucester. Edgar fights and slays him. With
his dying breath, Oswald tells Edgar to carry a letter to Edmund. It is a love letter from Goneril
in which she begs Edmund to kill Albany and marry her. Edgar vows to stand in Edmund’s
way. But first, he must take his father to a safe place.
Act IV, Scene 7 Summary
Cordelia and Kent reunite. She thanks him profusely for taking care of her father. The doctor
tells Cordelia that Lear is now safely asleep, bathed, and dressed. Upon seeing him, Cordelia
is deeply moved by the sight of her frail old father asleep after his ordeal, remarking, “Was
this a face/To be opposed against the jarring winds?” (32-33).
Still apparently mad, Lear wakes up and chides Cordelia for waking him from death. Yet he
quickly comes back to himself, newly humbled and self-aware. He tells her, “Pray, do not
mock me./I am a very foolish fond old man […] And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my
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perfect mind […] Do not laugh at me;/For, as I am a man, I think this lady/To be my child
Cordelia” (61-72). Cordelia weeps as father and daughter reconcile.
Kent and a gentleman discuss the imminent war and the bloody battle to come.
Act V, Scene 1 Summary
At the head of a crowd of soldiers, Edmund and Regan discuss Albany’s wavering and
Oswald’s disappearance. Regan quizzes Edmund on whether he slept with Goneril, which he
denies.
Goneril and Albany interrupt this conversation. Albany tells them that Lear is with Cordelia.
Goneril suggests that they all unite against France since France is their common enemy. As
Goneril and Regan jockey to prevent each other from being with Edmund alone, the three exit
together.
Edgar appears to Albany in disguise, gives him a letter, and tells him that if the English forces
are victorious over the French, Albany should sound a trumpet to summon a champion who
will help him.
Edmund reappears and tells Albany it is time to fight. Left alone, Edmund addresses the
audience. Having sworn love to both Goneril and Regan, he muses over whether to sleep with
“[b]oth? One? Or neither? Neither can be enjoyed,/If both remain alive” (59-60). He also vows
that if his forces win the battle, both Cordelia and Lear will receive no mercy.
Act V, Scene 2 Summary
Edgar leads Gloucester away from the battle, concealing him in the shadow of a tree. Shortly
thereafter, he returns and tells Gloucester that all is lost. With Cordelia’s forces defeated,
Gloucester must flee. Gloucester resists, wanting only to die, but Edgar chides him: “What, in
ill thoughts again? Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming
hither;/Ripeness is all” (9-11). Gloucester follows him.
Act V, Scene 3 Summary
The triumphant Edmund enters with his captives, Lear and Cordelia, and instructs guards to
take them to prison. Cordelia laments their fate, saying she could tolerate her own fall but not
her father’s. Lear gently calms her: “Come, let’s away to prison./We two alone will sing like
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birds i’ th’ cage” (8-9). Edmund sends an ominous soldier after them with bloody instructions.
Albany demands that Edmund surrender the captives so that Albany may treat them fairly.
Edmund weasels his way around this request, and Albany warns him he shouldn’t take
liberties: he’s a subject, not a brother. Regan rebukes Albany, warning him that when she
marries Edmund, the two men will be brothers. Goneril pushes back, and the two women
squabble over Edmund in Albany’s face.
Based on the letter Edgar gave him, Albany arrests Edmund on charges of treason. He sounds
the trumpet to summon the mysterious champion Edgar promised. Regan, overcome with a
sudden sickness, is carried away. In private, Goneril gloats that she poisoned her sister.
The champion appears: It is Edgar himself in another disguise. He accuses Edmund of
treachery and conspiracy and challenges him to a final duel. The brothers battle, and Edgar
mortally wounds Edmund.
Albany produces Goneril’s letter to Edmund, confirming the charges against him and
implicating her. Desperate, Goneril runs away.
The dying Edmund readily admits to all of the charges laid at his feet and asks who it is that
killed him. Edgar reveals himself at last, and Edmund marvels, “The wheel is come full circle”
(176).
Edgar explains to Albany that Gloucester is dead. When Edgar revealed his identity,
Gloucester’s “flawed heart—/Alack, too weak the conflict to support—/‘Twixt two extremes of
passion, joy and grief,/Burst smilingly” (199-202). Moved by this story, Edmund asks Edgar to
go on; Edgar duly recounts his reunion with the disguised Kent, during which the two men
shared their stories of exile.
A gentleman rushes in screaming that Goneril poisoned Regan and killed herself. Kent arrives
asking after Lear, and Albany demands that Edmund tell them where the king and his
daughter are. Edmund, slowly dying, reflects on the deaths of the two women who loved him
and makes a new resolve: “Some good I mean to do,/Despite of mine own nature” (248-49).
Before he is carried away to die offstage, he tells Albany to rush to the castle to halt Lear and
Cordelia’s execution.
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But it is too late. Lear appears carrying Cordelia’s hanged body and crying “Howl, howl, howl!”
(263). The stunned onlookers watch as Lear wails over his daughter’s corpse: “Why should a
dog, a horse, a rat, have life,/And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,/Never, never,
never, never, never” (313-15). In despair, Lear too dies.
Shocked and grieving, Albany turns to Kent and Edgar, begging them to rule the kingdom.
Kent refuses, saying he has other work to do: “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go./My master
calls me; I must not say no” (328-29).
Edgar and Albany are left alone to try to heal the broken state. Edgar closes the play with
these solemn words: “The weight of this sad time we must obey,/Speak what we feel, not
what we ought to say./The oldest hath borne most; we that are young/Shall never see so
much, nor live so long” (330-33).
Acts IV-V Analysis
The agony of the last acts of King Lear is all the powerful because Shakespeare sets readers
up for a happier ending than he delivers. Shortly before the tragic conclusion, many
characters come to terms with their ordeals and find ways to endure. Edgar uses the power of
language to persuade Gloucester that, even blind and miserable, his life is a miracle. Lear
finds an impish kindness in the depths of his madness, begs Cordelia’s forgiveness, and
faces imprisonment with humble courage. Edmund has a deathbed change of heart and
renounces his villainies, remembering that he was once beloved. But all these glimmers of
hope meet with a universe full of incomprehensible cruelty.
The end of the play is famously brutal. Lear howls over Cordelia’s corpse, speaking words that
will resonate with anyone who has ever grieved: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have
life,/And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,/Never, never, never, never, never”
(5.3.313-15). Here, Lear confronts the horrors of human evil and the final incomprehensibility
of mortality. His chilling refrain of “Never” suggests a man trying to make himself understand
a word in a foreign language. Cordelia’s death is unnatural but also inevitable; as Macbeth
remarks of his dead wife in his eponymous play, “She should have died hereafter.” Death
comes to all, and that is the final inscrutable darkness everyone must confront.
The senselessness of Cordelia’s death was deeply disturbing to audiences throughout the
play’s life. One watcher, the 17th-century playwright Nahum Tate, was so appalled by this
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ending that he rewrote the play to rescue Cordelia and marry her off to Edgar. But
Shakespeare’s King Lear offers no such consolations. How humans live in the face of
arbitrary, senseless death is the play’s great question.
King Lear offers only a ghost of an answer, a spark in the darkness. By the end of the play,
nearly everyone is dead or about to be dead—the loyal Kent implies that he’ll follow Lear into
death. Only Albany and Edgar remain. Edgar, who transformed his pain into art over the
course of the play, gets the final words, a commentary on words themselves. In order to
“obey” the gravity of this hideous moment, Edgar says they must “[s]peak what we feel, not
what we ought to say” (5.3.331). To speak the truth is to admit what we do not know and to
refuse to escape into fantasy and self-delusion as so many characters do during the play.
Only by meeting pain head-on can humans live complete and honest lives.
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Character Analysis
Lear
Lear is a mighty figure and a titan among Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. But he’s also a smallminded, ill-tempered, and self-involved old man—at least at the start. Lear’s initial bad
decision to ask his daughters how much they love him before he’ll give them his kingdom
sets the scene for the whole play. This demand suggests a world where love is nothing but an
expression of power. Lear is fortunate to be truly loved by Cordelia, Kent, and his Fool, who
refuse to play along with his manipulative game.
As his plan backfires, Lear rediscovers his connection to reality over the course of the play.
When he goes mad in the midst of a terrible storm, his madness paradoxically reconnects
him to reality: he remembers that he, like Edgar’s beggar “Poor Tom,” is a “poor, bare, forked
animal” (3.4.108), a mortal being in a painful and unpredictable world. Over the rest of the
play, he acts on what he’s learned, consoling the blinded Gloucester, humbling himself before
the wronged Cordelia, and submitting to imprisonment with a wisdom that comes from a
sense that there are things in this world more important than power and status.
But this isn’t a morality play—at least, not in the conventional sense—and Lear receives no
reward for his education in harsh reality. Instead, he is forced to endure his beloved
daughter’s senseless death. In his lament over her body, Lear asks the profound, broken,
human question about the mortality of those we love: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have
life/And thou no breath at all?” (5.3.313-14)
Cordelia
Alone among her sisters, Cordelia is a truth-teller. Like Edgar, she’s a victim of her family’s
schemes, shortsightedness, and selfishness. Unlike Edgar, she’s a shrewd seer right from the
start, well aware that Lear’s manipulations fly in the face of real love. Cordelia’s profound
courage and goodness are at first visible only to a few other clear-eyed characters: Kent, the
Fool, and the King of France, who marries her and later helps her mount an invasion to save
her father.
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Cordelia is Lear’s favorite, but he only comes to understand his daughter’s true worth after he
rejects her for refusing to play along with his games. Her brutal and preventable death speaks
to the play’s unflinching engagement with the world’s injustices. When the 17th-century
playwright Nahum Tate reworked King Lear to be a little more palatable for squeamish
audiences, he was so appalled by this ending that he rescued Cordelia and married her off to
Edgar.
Goneril
Goneril is the eldest of Lear’s daughters. Like her sister Regan, she is conniving and selfish.
But she’s also pitiable. She seems to be the least favorite of Lear’s daughters. Less tricky
than Regan and less beloved than Cordelia, she’s set up to fail from the start in Lear’s “wholoves-me-most?” contest. And when Lear turns on her in anger, his curse entreating the gods
to make her infertile draws attention to the fact that this eldest daughter, married for some
time, is still childless. Her unhappy marriage to Albany degenerates over the course of the
play, and when Regan’s lust for Edmund imperils Goneril’s own claim on Edmund’s heart,
Goneril turns to murder, poisoning her own sister.
Regan
Regan is the middle child of the Lear family and the cleverest schemer of the bunch. Her
cunning play off Goneril’s initial love-speech—“I love you just like Goneril says, but even
more!”—suggests that she’s learned manipulation and power-lust at her father’s knee. Regan
becomes steadily more frightening over the course of the play. She takes sadistic pleasure in
gouging out Gloucester’s eyes and instructing that he be thrown out to “smell/his way to
Dover” (3.7.94-95). Her eventual death-match with Goneril over Edmund’s favor—a deathmatch she loses—suggests a poisonous dynamic running deep in Lear’s family: these two
sisters have been trained to believe that love and power are commodities that must be won at
any cost.
Edgar
The earnest, trusting Edgar grows up fast over the course of the play. Gloucester’s legitimate
son, he is easily fooled by the machinations of his half-brother Edmund. When he flees into
the night, he chooses the least comfortable disguise he can, becoming the naked lunatic
“Poor Tom.” His time as Poor Tom is as transformative for him as it is for Lear. In enacting
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the role of a gibbering and impoverished beggar, he comes into contact with a deep reality
about human life: we’re all a suit of clothes and a roof away from our helpless animal nature,
and we rely on each other to keep the wolves away
Edgar also becomes an artist through his disguise, constructing a vivid imaginary “cliff of
Dover” to save his father’s life. When Edgar concludes that humans must “speak what we feel,
not what we ought to say,” he’s refers to the truths that art can reveal as well, as the honesty
of a person like Cordelia or Kent.
Edmund
The illegitimate Edmund is a charismatic, eloquent, and ruthless villain—right up until the end
of his life. Embittered by his father Gloucester’s scorn for him, Edmund becomes obsessed
with climbing the social ladder. He spends most of the play turning families against each
other to further his own ends. He sows division between his father and his brother, and he
encourages Goneril and Regan to fight—and ultimately die—for his love. But when Edgar at
last defeats him, some glimmer of humanity seeps out of Edmund. Remembering that
“Edmund was beloved,” he tries to stop Cordelia and Lear’s executions—executions he
ordered. Many of the play’s questions about fate and character center on this complex figure.
Gloucester
The Earl of Gloucester, like his friend and counterpart Lear, begins the play hot-tempered and
small-minded. Openly scornful of his illegitimate son Edmund, he is a despotic parent,
demanding perfunctorily that Edmund show him his private correspondence. Unfortunately
for him, this demand plays right into Edmund’s plan to disinherit his innocent half-brother
Edgar. Gloucester’s immediate willingness to believe that his loving son Edgar wishes to kill
him suggests his fearful limitations. Like Lear, he is so self-involved he can’t recognize love or
treachery where he finds them. Ironically, it’s only after Gloucester is violently blinded that he
can see the truth.
Kent
The heartbreakingly loyal Kent sticks by Lear no matter what, understanding that the king
needs support most when he is at his worst. Like Edgar, Kent finds freedom in his disguise.
As Caius, he is able to speak bluntly for the first time. He takes great pleasure in doing so, as
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in Act 2, Scene 2 when he gleefully and colorfully insults Goneril’s servant Oswald. A
pragmatist, Kent focuses on getting Lear out of the storm at all costs. But when his master
finally dies, he is unable to continue living.
The Fool
Like Kent and Cordelia, the Fool is willing to speak truth to power. Unlike Kent and Cordelia,
the Fool gets away with it, precisely because he is a fool. This is a recurring character
archetype that emerges in some form in most of Shakespeare’s plays, including As You Like It
and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A licensed jester who is allowed to say things to the King
that no one else could, the Fool is the first to get through to Lear. He has genuine affection
for his “nuncle Lear,” the same kind of honest love that motivates Cordelia to tell Lear what he
really doesn’t want to hear. Some productions even cast the same actor as Cordelia and the
Fool; they’re never on stage together. The Fool follows Lear willingly into the terrible storm,
after which he disappears without explanation, mysteriously absorbed into the play’s
darkness.
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Themes
How Madness Reveals Truth
The lunatics of King Lear—pretended and actual—are forever in closer contact with reality
than the seemingly sane. This is evident in the Fool, whose job is to veil the harsh truth in the
garb of nonsense riddles and bawdy songs. The same is true of Edgar, who capers naked in
his shocking disguise as Poor Tom, and Lear himself. The play’s madmen, either implicitly or
explicitly, reveal one of the play’s central truths: Every human is, at root, a frail and fallible
mortal.
Lear’s madness is especially poignant and meaningful. Lear feels madness creep up on him
throughout the play. In private conversation with the Fool, Lear expresses his fear of this
ultimate loss of control: “O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!/Keep me in temper; I
would not be mad!” (1.5.43-44). But within his madness, Lear finds release. His ravings in the
storm unleash deep rage, but they also bring him closer to others. Fully in touch with his own
helplessness, Lear finds empathy for the Fool, Edgar, and all poor people wandering through
the storm. Lear’s madness also allows him to empathize with the blinded Gloucester, whom
he consoles like a weeping child.
Madness takes everything from Lear, only to restore him to a richer and more truthful reality.
Descending to his most abased depths, he discovers his weakness and also his connection
to everyone who lives. Lear acknowledges this when he cries out, “Reason in madness!”
(4.6.168–169). By contrast, Edmund, Cornwall, and the other schemers of the play exhibit the
inverse of his declarative: madness in reason. By acting on rational self-interest, these
characters leave untold death and destruction in their wake.
The Capacity to Endure Human Suffering
King Lear turns an appalled eye on the depth and breadth of human pain. At one of the play’s
most agonizing moments, when the shocked Edgar gapes at his blinded father, he marvels,
“The worst is not/So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’” (4.1.27-28). In King Lear, there is
a seemingly bottomless well of pain in the world—enough that, as Lear points out, babies’ first
act upon joining the human drama is to cry helplessly.
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What’s more, the play suggests, human suffering goes deeper than any earthly redemption.
Toward the end of the play, many of the characters allow their terrible suffering to transform
them, as they come into closer contact with truth and empathy for the people around them.
When the villainous Edmund gets caught up in this redemptive movement, using his last
breath to try to stop the executions of Lear and Cordelia, there is a glimmer of true hope. This
hope is dashed moments later, when Lear enters carrying the body of his only truly loving
child, the play’s most uncomplicatedly good character.
Edgar’s final words speak to the last possible spark in the cavernous darkness of the play’s
ethical world. Those who try to make it through the ordeal of life must “Speak what we feel,
not what we ought to say” (5.3.331). All that humans can do in the face of suffering, Edgar’s
closing lines suggest, is to try to speak truth to it, to keep our eyes steady on the reality of
pain, and not to flee into fantasies of power and privilege.
The Power of Fiction and Disguises
While the world of King Lear is unrelentingly dark, it is not without its beauties. In a play
intensely focused on reality and falsehood, it makes sense that one of the most powerfully
redemptive moments comes through fiction, the art that straddles the gap between those
poles. Edgar’s vivid word-picture of an imagined cliff of Dover is, on one hand, a barefaced lie.
He leads his father to level ground and invents a sea-cliff for him to leap over. But he uses
that lie to bring his father to a poignant truth. In spite of Gloucester’s blindness and in spite of
his heartbreak and suffering, Edgar sends him over the edge of the imaginary cliff to remind
him, “Thy life’s a miracle” (4.6.55).
Fiction also appears as a theme in Edgar and Kent’s disguises. Both men are downtrodden
and cast from the favor of men to whom they feel true love and loyalty. Both externalize their
feelings of exile in their costumes: Kent becomes the rugged soldier Caius, while Edgar
becomes the utterly abased madman Poor Tom. These humble disguises paradoxically grant
their wearers new powers. In confronting and enacting the emotional truth of their
circumstances, both Kent and Edgar become exuberant, virtuosic speakers and inventors.
The play suggests that the inventiveness and emotional truth of fiction provide a way for
humans to acknowledge and connect with reality. Edgar and Kent’s fictions bring them
strange joy in an unendurable world and allow them to communicate the will to live to the
sufferers around them.
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Symbols & Motifs
Blindness
Blindness manifests most literally in King Lear through the unfortunate Gloucester, whose
eyes Regan and Cornwall gouge out. Only after this hideous loss does Gloucester see all that
he was blind to before: the loyalty of his betrayed son Edgar, the heartless cruelty of the false
Edmund, and the pure malice of his erstwhile allies.
In the literal case of Gloucester, as well as in a heap of metaphorical references scattered
throughout the play, blindness is paradoxically related to sight. The characters repeatedly
demonstrate how one’s own prejudices and fears can blind someone to reality. The two
fathers of the play, Lear and Gloucester, are so hampered by their own petty insecurities and
egoism that they cannot perceive what is true. They must lose their “eyes” and their “I”s—
meaning, their identities—to truly see reality. Part of that seeing is the capacity to see oneself
and to know oneself to be weak, foolish, and flawed.
Clothing and Nakedness
When the mad Lear meets the disguised, raving, and naked Edgar in the storm, he takes a
shine to him and quickly strips off his own clothes to imitate this “philosopher.” As in so
many moments in this play, what at first appears to be absurd reveals a deep truth. Lear’s
literal and symbolic nakedness reflect what his maturation. He learns that the difference
between a king and a beggar is largely an outward performance. Beneath the ermine robe, a
king is just as mortal, fleshly, and weak as a scraggly lunatic. Here, nakedness represents
vulnerability and truthfulness. Specifically, Edgar’s nakedness is a form of speech that tells
Lear a truth he cannot hear any other way.
The Storm
A wild storm brews ominously for much of the first half of the play. When it breaks, and Lear,
Kent, the Fool, and Edgar flail around exposed to the wind and rain, catastrophe turns its
other face and becomes enlightenment.
The storm here represents the incomprehensible and unpredictable power of that which is
beyond human: nature, divinity, fate, and death. Taking a good battering from this storm—that
is, truly confronting his own smallness, weakness, and mortality—deeply alters Lear, forcing
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him to understand that he’s a “poor, bare, forked animal” (3.4.108) just like everyone else. In
this suffering, there is a paradoxical salvation. Lighting illuminates as much as it destroys.
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Important Quotes
1. “Tell me, my daughters/(Since now we will divest us both of rule,/Interest of territory, cares
of state),/Which of you shall we say doth love us most,/That we our largest bounty may
extend/Where nature doth with merit challenge.”
(Act I, Scene 1, Lines 48 - 53)
Lear’s fateful question tells us a great deal about his character. His demand that his
daughters flatter him before he will give them the land is a form of emotional terrorism and a
private tyranny born of insecurity and power-hunger. That his two eldest daughters readily
play along suggest that this is not an unfamiliar pattern in the royal family. Over the course of
the play, this inflated, egocentric king will have to learn that he, like everyone else, is just a
mortal man.
2. “Good my lord,/You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I/Return those duties back as are
right fit,/Obey you, love you, and most honour you./Why have my sisters husbands, if they
say/They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,/That lord whose hand must take my plight
shall carry/Half my love with him, half my care and duty:/Sure, I shall never marry like my
sisters,/To love my father all.”
(Act I, Scene 1, Lines 95 - 104)
Cordelia’s retort to Lear’s emotional demands is both reasonable and revealing. She works
like a logician, pointing out that it doesn’t make much sense to get married if all your love
goes to your father. But this argument is also emotive, suggesting a squeamish incestuous
current in Lear’s claims to his daughters’ love.
3. “[…] Why brand they us/With base? with baseness? Bastardy base? Base?/Who, in the
lusty stealth of nature, take/More composition and fierce quality/Than doth, within a dull,
stale, tired bed,/Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops/Got ‘tween asleep and wake? Well
then,/Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land./Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund/As
to th’ legitimate. Fine word, “legitimate.”/Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,/And my
invention thrive, Edmund the base/Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper./Now, gods, stand
up for bastards.”
(Act I, Scene 2, Lines 9 - 22)
Edmund’s first soliloquy is a masterpiece of broad villainy. Edmund introduces himself and
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his motives plainly: he wishes to be a self-made man, regardless of society’s prejudices
against his illegitimacy, and he is willing to trample both his father and brother to gain power.
His sense of self is straightforward yet mysterious; he blames “Nature” for his cruelty while
his conscience about his own behavior is utterly untroubled. Although he later criticizes the
idea that the stars determine people’s actions and fates, he is invested in the notion that he
was immutably made, which excuses his villainy as inevitable.
4. “Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear!/Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend/To make
this creature fruitful./Into her womb convey sterility,/Dry up in her the organs of increase,/And
from her derogate body never spring/A babe to honor her. If she must teem,/Create her child
of spleen, that it may live/And be a thwart disnatured torment to her./Let it stamp wrinkles in
her brow of youth,/With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks,/Turn all her mother’s pains
and benefits/To laughter and contempt, that she may feel/How sharper than a serpent’s tooth
it is/To have a thankless child.”
(Act I, Scene 4, Lines 272 - 275)
Lear’s infamous curse is terrifying in its grotesquerie. Here, Lear invokes Nature, begging this
cruel goddess to inflict a demonic child on Goneril, one that will wrack both her body and her
heart. His images are as invasive as they are ugly. His vivid imagination of Goneril’s failing
body projects his own fear and loathing of age onto his daughter. Lear once more oversteps,
unable to see his daughter as a separate creature from himself.
5. “Look, sir, I bleed.”
(Act II, Scene 1, Line 42)
When Edmund wounds himself in order to cast suspicion on Edgar, he repeatedly draws his
father Gloucester’s attention to this injury—but without much avail. This moment, in which
Edmund tries to get a little attention even in the midst of a doubly treacherous plot, hints at
the ugly interconnections between power and love—or lack thereof—in these complicated
families. Gloucester, caught up in revenge, cannot see his son’s injury; when he eventually
swears to make Edmund his heir, his choice has less to do with affection for his bastard son
than vengefulness against the legitimate.
6. “A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glassgazing, superservicable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd
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in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward,
pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining
if thou deny’st the least syllable of thy addition.”
(Act II, Scene 2, Lines 13 - 22)
Kent’s rant against Oswald is exuberant and pointed. A cautious diplomat in his former life,
the costumed Kent discovers a zestful love of language in the freedom of his lowly disguise.
But the points he makes here are also meaningful. In attacking Oswald’s slavish
acquiescence to Goneril’s instructions, he makes it clear that the selfish actions of men who
stand for nothing oil the way for real cruelty.
7. “Whiles I may 'scape,/I will preserve myself: and am bethought/To take the basest and
most poorest shape/That ever penury, in contempt of man,/Brought near to beast: my face I'll
grime with filth;/Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots,/And with presented nakedness
outface/The winds and persecutions of the sky./The country gives me proof and
precedent/Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,/Strike in their numb'd and mortified
bare arms/Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;/And with this horrible object, from
low farms,/Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills,/Sometimes with lunatic bans,
sometimes with prayers,/Enforce their charity. Poor Turlygod, poor Tom,/That's something
yet: Edgar I nothing am.”
(Act II, Scene 3, Lines 5 - 21)
As he flees capture and death at the hands of his own father, Edgar externalizes his own inner
experience. The world around him having gone mad, Edgar finds his best disguise in the
costume of a mad, self-tormenting beggar. This is a pragmatic disguise—no one wants to
look at a madman—but also a portentous one. As Poor Tom, Edgar—like Gloucester in his
costume as Caius—will encounter truths about human life that complacent comfort only
conceals. With a loss of identity comes the discovery of reality.
8. “Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put 'em i' the paste alive; she
knapped 'em o' the coxcombs with a stick, and cried 'Down, wantons, down!' 'Twas her brother
that, in pure kindness to his horse, buttered his hay.”
(Act II, Scene 4, Lines 120 - 124)
The Fool’s seemingly nonsensical interjections often play a blackly comic role, deflating the
King’s agonies. Here, he compares Lear’s anguished “rising heart” to a pie full of live eels and
makes a crude sexual joke along the way. The Fool, like Edgar, brings Lear back down to
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earth, reminding him of the animal simplicity beneath all his assumed grandeur.
9. “You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need./You see me here, you gods, a poor
old man,/As full of grief as age; wretched in both./If it be you that stir these daughters'
hearts/Against their father, fool me not so much/To bear it tamely; touch me with noble
anger,/And let not women's weapons, water-drops,/Stain my man's cheeks. No, you unnatural
hags!/I will have such revenges on you both,/That all the world shall—I will do such things
—/What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be/The terrors of the earth. You think I'll
weep./No, I'll not weep./I have full cause of weeping, but this heart/Shall break into a hundred
thousand flaws,/Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!”
(Act II, Scene 4, Lines 271 - 286)
Lear’s outburst at his elder daughters brings the dangerous complexity of the Lear family’s
relationships to the breaking point. Raging and storming, Lear loses his grip on himself. He is
at once terrifying and pitiful as he searches for words strong enough to communicate his
fury. He is also tormented by the knowledge that he is losing touch with his sanity; even as he
attempts to make a show of overwhelming power, he despairs of his own mind. This is the
speech of a man divided against himself, and that internal division is externalized in his
fracturing family.
10. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!/You cataracts and hurricanoes,
spout/Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks./You sulph’rous and thoughtexecuting fires,/Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,/Singe my white head. And thou,
all-shaking thunder,/Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,/Crack nature’s molds, all
germens spill at once,/That makes ingrateful man.”
(Act III, Scene 2, Lines 1 - 9)
Lear’s famous cry in the storm shows an external world fully inhabited by a madman’s
thoughts. The storm ominously mirrors all the divisions and furies of the play’s families; Lear,
losing his mind, reads it as an image of rage and a destroyer of reason. Those “thoughtexecuting” thunderbolts, for instance, could be read either as killing thought, or moving as
fast as Lear’s own uncontrollable mind. When he hopes the storm will “crack nature’s molds,”
he reaches out for utter destruction of matter and order alike. Nature itself is thrown off
balance, and all will pay for it.
11. “I'll speak a prophecy ere I go:/When priests are more in word than matter;/When brewers
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mar their malt with water;/When nobles are their tailors' tutors,/No heretics burned, but
wenches' suitors;/When every case in law is right,/No squire in debt, nor no poor
knight;/When slanders do not live in tongues,/Nor cutpurses come not to throngs;/When
usurers tell their gold i' th’ field,/And bawds and whores do churches build—/Then shall the
realm of Albion/Come to great confusion./Then comes the time, who lives to see't,/That going
shall be used with feet./This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time.”
(Act III, Scene 2, Lines 81 - 96)
The Fool’s ominous prophecy, like Lear’s address to the storm, foretells a world turned upside
down. It does so in a prescient, almost postmodern style. After his fairy-tale account of an
upended world, the Fool attributes this prophecy to Merlin, who hasn’t been born yet. In this
curious instant, the Fool breaks both the fourth wall and the timeline of the narrative, reaching
out to his audience as a contemporary who nevertheless lays claim to a home in the distant
past. Lear’s world is so scrambled that even its fictional reality is fragile and uncertain.
12. “Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,/That bide the pelting of this pitiless
storm,/How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,/Your looped and windowed
raggedness, defend you/From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en/Too little care of this!
Take physic, pomp;/Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,/That thou mayst shake the
superflux to them,/And show the heavens more just.”
(Act III, Scene 4, Lines 30 - 38)
Lear’s storm-tossed epiphany leads to a new experience of empathy. In his moments of
lucidity between mad fits, he is suddenly able to feel the pain of the poor and to notice his
Fool’s shivering. Madness, in driving Lear from his egocentric but fragile self-image as a
powerful king, puts him in contact with a reality it’s all too easy and convenient for the
wealthy and powerful to ignore. This speech occurs immediately before the disguised Edgar
appears as “Poor Tom,” and Lear’s crazed embrace of this “philosopher” is colored by a
genuine moment of revelation.
13. “A servingman, proud in heart and mind; that curled my hair, wore gloves in my cap, served
the lust of my mistress' heart, and did the act of darkness with her; swore as many oaths as I
spake words, and broke them in the sweet face of heaven. One that slept in the contriving of
lust, and waked to do it. Wine loved I deeply, dice dearly; and in woman out-paramoured the
Turk. False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness,
dog in madness, lion in prey. Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks betray thy
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poor heart to woman. Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from
lenders' books, and defy the foul fiend. Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind; Says
suum, mun, ha, no, nonny. Dolphin my boy, my boy, sessa! let him trot by.”
(Act III, Scene 4, Lines 85 - 101)
Edgar’s invented backstory for Poor Tom has a wild poetry; like Gloucester, Edgar finds
liberation in his disguise, and his invention here is far more detailed than it would need to be
for the mere sake of concealment. There is relish and humor as well as darkness. By
concocting this fiction, Edgar, becomes an artist. Like the Fool’s nonsense songs, Edgar’s
inventions and nonsense are meaningful, touching on sexual perfidy and animal lusts
concealed beneath perfume and gloves.
14. “Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the
water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets,
swallows the old rat and the ditch dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; who is
whipped from tithing to tithing, and stock-punished and imprisoned; who hath had three suits
to his back, six shirts to his body, horse to ride, and weapon to wear; But mice and rats, and
such small deer, Have been Tom's food for seven long year. Beware my follower. Peace,
Smulkin; peace, thou fiend!”
(Act III, Scene 4, Lines 128 - 139)
As Edgar’s mad-scene develops, his imagination populates not his back-story as a
servingman and a madman. Poor Tom’s imagined abasement—eating rotting animals and
cow pies, drinking foul green water—is a nightmare version of real suffering. But there’s also a
bitter comedy here, as there is in the rest of this scene: it’s so grim, the reader has to laugh.
15. “Out, vile jelly./Where is thy luster now?”
(Act III, Scene 7, Lines 84 - 85)
Cornwall’s sadistic words as he blinds Gloucester are matched in spite a few lines later when
Regan leaves the maimed old man to “smell his way to Dover.” This merciless attack marks
the true death of order and civilization in Lear’s England. As Gloucester notes, he is Regan
and Cornwall’s host, and they break every code of hospitality and human conduct through
their gruesome act. The queasily tangible image of “vile jelly” suggests the reduction of all
that is human to mere foul matter in this new, chaotic world order.
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16. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;/They kill us for their sport.”
(Act IV, Scene 1, Lines 37 - 38)
The blinded Gloucester’s famous, pithy, and bitter summation of the human condition speaks
to his despair. This is an utterly hopeless worldview, a response to a life that seems painful
and indifferent to the point of cruelty. This theme of blows upon blows upon blows, seemingly
without reason, will return until the end of the play.
17. “Come on, sir; here's the place: stand still. How fearful/And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so
low!/The crows and choughs that wing the midway air/Show scarce so gross as beetles.
Halfway down/Hangs one that gathers samphire—dreadful trade;/Methinks he seems no
bigger than his head./The fishermen that walk upon the beach/Appear like mice; and yond
tall anchoring bark,/Diminished to her cock; her cock, a buoy/Almost too small for sight. The
murmuring surge/That on th’ unnumb’red idle pebble chafes,/Cannot be heard so high. I'll
look no more,/Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight/Topple down headlong.”
(Act IV, Scene 6, Lines 11 - 26)
Like the Fool’s prophecy, Edgar’s construction of an imagined cliff of Dover gestures at the
fictionality of the stage. The vivid picture Edgar draws here creates a reality; Shakespeare
would evoke a “real” cliff on stage in exactly the same way as this pretended one, through
language. That Edgar uses this fiction to restore some hope to his father’s heart is one of the
few glimmers of redemption in the play’s grim world.
18. “What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears.
See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and,
handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?”
(Act IV, Scene 6, Lines 150 - 154)
Lear’s madness makes him into a philosopher. His scene with Gloucester is at once poignant
and funny; it even inspired Samuel Beckett’s dark comedy, Waiting for Godot. Here, he also
raises one of the play’s ongoing paradoxes: Physical blindness—and, by extension,
impairment and suffering generally—allows for a new and more truthful kind of seeing.
Through his ordeal, Lear now understands that title and position are nothing more than
costumes.
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19. “If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes./I know thee well enough; thy name is
Gloucester./Thou must be patient. We came crying hither;/Thou know'st, the first time that
we smell the air/We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee. Mark […] When we are born, we cry
that we are come/To this great stage of fools.”
(Act IV, Scene 6, Lines 176 - 183)
As Lear consoles Gloucester, he connects them both back to their babyhood. Old age,
sometimes read as a second infancy, brings the two suffering friends back to a new simplicity
of understanding. This touching scene also connects to the play’s ideas about the
malleability of reality: the world is a “stage of fools,” a play acted by idiots—which may put the
reader in mind of a similar idea, less gently delivered, in Macbeth, of humans as nothing but
bad actors delivering lines.
20. “Pray, do not mock me./I am a very foolish fond old man,/Fourscore and upward, not an
hour more nor less;/And, to deal plainly,/I fear I am not in my perfect mind./Methinks I should
know you, and know this man:/Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant/What place this is;
and all the skill I have/Remembers not these garments; nor I know not/Where I did lodge last
night. Do not laugh at me;/For, as I am a man, I think this lady/To be my child Cordelia.”
(Act IV, Scene 7, Lines 61 - 73)
When Lear reunites with Cordelia, he is waking from a much-needed sleep—a richly symbolic
image of a return to reality. The fuddled Lear finally tells the simple, humble truth: he is a
foolish old man losing his mind, but Cordelia is his true daughter. Part of coming to grips with
the world, the play suggests, is gaining the self-knowledge to recognize one’s own limitations.
21. “What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming
hither;/Ripeness is all.”
(Act V, Scene 2, Pages 9 - 11)
Edgar, exhorting Gloucester to keep going in spite of all his suffering, provides him with an
injunction rather than a platitude. “Ripeness,” here, seems to be a resignation to what the
world gives you. It is a form of acceptance in tune with Lear’s realizations about his own
weaknesses. Gloucester will nonetheless die soon, but his heart will “burst smilingly” at the
revelation that his true son has been leading him all along.
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22. “No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:/We two alone will sing like birds i' the
cage:/When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,/And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll
live,/And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh/At gilded butterflies, and hear poor
rogues/Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,/Who loses and who wins; who's in,
who's out;/And take upon's the mystery of things,/As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear
out,/In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,/That ebb and flow by the moon.”
(Act V, Scene 3, Pages 8 - 19)
Lear’s gentle speech to Cordelia brings all of the ways he’s changed into relief. He peacefully
surrenders kingship, self-interest, and self-righteousness; he knows that part of this vision
involves seeking forgiveness. Thus, to live is to be one of “God’s spies”: no longer blind, but a
seer.
23. “Thou’st spoken right; ’tis true./ The wheel is come full circle; I am here.”
(Act V, Scene 3, Pages 175 - 176)
Here, Edmund undergoes a major reversal, seeing his downfall as part of the spinning of
fortune’s wheel and as the inevitable consequence of his own actions. His slow death alters
him in many ways: he feels sudden empathy for his father, for Lear, and for Cordelia, whom he
tries to save with his last breath. His “I am here” is rather like Lear’s acknowledgement of his
own foolishness. In death, the slippery, treacherous Edmund must acknowledge exactly who,
where, and what he is.
24. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,/And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no
more,/Never, never, never, never, never.”
(Act V, Scene 3, Pages 313 - 315)
Lear’s lament over Cordelia’s body is one of the most famous and beautiful expressions of
grief in the English language. Much of his language in these final moments turns on
repetitions. His unbelieving litany of “never”s brings home the true incomprehensibility of
death.
25. “The weight of this sad time we must obey,/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to
say./The oldest hath borne most; we that are young/Shall never see so much, nor live so
long.”
(Act V, Scene 3, Pages 330 - 333)
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Edgar closes the play with these lines, which echo the first scenes—in which Cordelia speaks
what she feels, not what she ought to say—and Edgar’s own experiences in disguise, when he
gets at the felt truth through a strange, lunatic kind of art. These are the words of a man
coming to grips with reality, as all the characters of the play must. That reality is not an
uplifting one: Edgar has seen too much incomprehensible pain and death to feel cheery about
the prospect of kingship. But there is the tiniest flicker of hope in the fact that Edgar, unlike
his predecessor, will be a king who knows himself and knows from the start that the world is
full of pain.
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Essay Topics
1. What does King Lear’s use of literal and metaphorical blindness suggest about the play’s
vision of the world? What’s the meaning of seeing in this play?
2. Why does Lear ask his daughters the fateful question at all? What does the first scene
reveal about Lear’s character, and how does Lear’s question relate to the terrible events that
follow?
3. Lear’s Fool disappears without a trace after the storm scenes. Why might this be? What
does the Fool mean to the first half of the play, and why might he not fit into the second half?
4. What role does disguise play in King Lear? How do Edgar and Kent’s disguises change
them? For example, consider how they speak in and out of disguise.
5. King Lear, with its three daughters—the elder two villainous, the youngest virtuous—at first
seems to be structured like a fairy tale. But that fairy tale turns grimly realistic pretty fast.
How and why does the play work with and against the shape of a fairy tale or folk tale?
6. What do you make of Edmund’s deathbed repentance? Consider Edmund’s last scene in
light of the rest of the play. Does his remorse strike you as genuine? And is his sudden turn
consistent with his actions up to this point?
7. There’s a notable lack of mothers in King Lear: Lear and Gloucester are both single fathers,
and none of the daughters have children. Why might that be? How does the absence of a
“Queen Lear” or a “Countess of Gloucester”—or a “Gloucester’s mistress,” for that matter—
work with the play’s themes?
8. Edmund introduces himself with a big speech about human nature: Only idiots, he says,
believe that their character is determined by the stars. How does the rest of the play reflect
on that idea? What roles do fate and randomness play in the world of King Lear?
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9. Write a scene in the Lear household that takes place when the daughters are all children.
What do you imagine home life might have been like for Lear’s daughters? Why might the
sisters have the relationships with each other and with their father that they do? Reread their
scenes carefully to inform your imagination.
10. Take a close look at Edgar’s last lines. Why did Shakespeare choose to end the play on
this note? How does speaking “what we feel, not what we ought to say” relate to the horrible
tragedies the survivors have just witnessed?
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Teaching Materials
How to use
Use these Teaching Materials to assess comprehension and facilitate analysis of a
challenging text.
Reading-check questions can be used after students read chapter sets independently or as a
group. Reading-check, reading comprehension, multiple-choice, and/or short-answer
questions can be used as formative assessment tools as readers proceed through the book
unit, or as summative assessment tools after the completion of the chapter set or book. Use
the questions to review aloud after reading multiple chapter sets, or after completing the book
in preparation for the unit test.
Questions can also be utilized in lesson planning and unit design.
Use questions as:
Discussion starters (examples throughout)
Entrance and exit “tickets”
Writing activity ideas
Prompts to create opportunities for finding evidence and support in the text, employing
critical thinking skills, and practicing test-taking skills
Reading-Check, Discussion, and Quiz Questions
Act I
READING CHECK
1. Which of Lear’s three daughters refuses to flatter him when he demands to know who loves
him most?
Answer: Cordelia
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2. Who is banished by Lear for defending Cordelia’s behavior and objecting to her
banishment?
Answer: Kent
3. Who offers to marry Cordelia after she is banished from her father’s kingdom?
Answer: the King of France
4. How are Edgar and Edmund related?
Answer: Edmund is Edgar’s illegitimate half-brother.
Discussion Suggestion: Use the above question to introduce discussion on how Edmund’s
ambitions, despite his illegitimate status, cast him as the “New Man” emerging in
Shakespeare’s time, who rejects the Medieval Era’s emphasis on noble birth as the signifier of
one’s worthiness to rule.
5. According to the forged letter, Edgar asks Edmund to assassinate whom?
Answer: their father, Gloucester
6. What is the source of the argument between Goneril and Lear that causes Lear to leave?
Answer: Lear’s retinue of 100 rowdy knights
7. To whose home does Lear go after his argument with Goneril?
Answer: Regan’s
QUIZ
1. Weary of his kingship, what does Lear decide to do at the beginning of the play?
A) remain king but entrust Gloucester with running his kingdom
B) divide his realm amongst his three daughters
C) retire and cede his territory to the King of France
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D) wait for Regan and Goneril to take action
2. What explanation does Cordelia give for why she loves Lear less completely than Regan
and Goneril say they do?
A) She recalls ways in which Lear mistreated her as a child.
B) She has no interest in inheriting part of Lear’s kingdom.
C) She reserves one-half of her love for her future husband.
D) She is too melancholy to profess love for anybody.
3. Why does the King of France say he still wants to marry Cordelia, even after she’s been
disinherited?
A) He is impressed by the virtuous nature Cordelia showed in answering Lear honestly.
B) He says he would rather inherit nothing than inherit a mere third of Lear’s kingdom.
C) He says Cordelia’s physical beauty makes her an attractive wife regardless of her wealth.
D) He is desperate for a wife and is willing to marry a woman with no inheritance.
4. What is the source of Edmund’s resentment?
A) Gloucester disinherited him because Edmund is a lazy drunk.
B) Cordelia rejected his marriage proposal without providing a reason.
C) Edgar will receive all Gloucester’s lands and titles because Edmund is an illegitimate son.
D) Gloucester refuses to pay Edmund’s gambling debts to teach him a lesson.
5. What is Edmund’s attitude toward his father’s beliefs regarding astrology?
A) He does not understand astrology, but he supports his father in his beliefs.
B) He wholeheartedly shares those beliefs after a lengthy study of astrology.
C) He has no opinion of astrology and does not care what his father believes.
D) He thinks his father’s beliefs are superstitious, as he would be an illegitimate son no
matter his astrological sign.
6. After being banished, why does Kent disguise himself as a servant named Caius?
A) to watch over Lear and remain loyal to him
B) to observe Lear and report on his activities to Goneril
C) to spy on Edmund and expose his treachery to Lear
D) to hide from Albany and Cornwall who want him dead
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7. Who is most forceful in reproaching Lear to his face about giving his land and fortune to
Regan and Goneril? (short answer)
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. B. Lear plans to bequeath everything to his three daughters, though not before demanding
to see an exaggerated display of flattery.
2. C. Cordelia loves and obeys Lear as she believes a dutiful daughter should—no more, no
less. To claim all her love is reserved for Lear would be a lie and an insult to her future
husband.
3. A. The King of France is deeply impressed that Cordelia would risk losing everything in an
effort to remain honest and upright.
4. C. The fact that Edmund will never inherit his father’s land and titles simply because he is
illegitimate causes him to reject the Medieval social order that dictates this.
5. D. Just as Edmund rejects the old social structures, so too does he reject the superstitions
undergirding them.
6. A. Kent’s banishment does not alter his sense of duty with respect to his sovereign, Lear.
7. The Fool. This is consistent with Shakespearean conventions and the social conventions of
Medieval courts, in that the fool or jester often provided the king with the wisest—and
harshest—counsel.
Act II
READING CHECK
1. Who are Regan and Goneril’s husbands, respectively?
Answer: the Duke of Cornwall and the Duke of Albany
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2. Which two characters do Regan and Cornwall enlist in service of their schemes in Act II,
Scene 1?
Answer: Edmund and Gloucester
3. What do Regan and Cornwall do to Kent after his altercation with Oswald?
Answer: imprison him
4. What is the weather like outside when Regan turns Lear away?
Answer: It is storming.
5. Which characters follow Lear outside after his fight with Regan in Act II, Scene 4?
Answer: the Fool and Kent
QUIZ
1. How does Edmund suffer a sword wound in Act II, Scene 1?
A) Edgar stabs him in an argument.
B) He stabs himself intentionally.
C) He cuts himself accidentally.
D) Highwaymen attack and rob him.
2. Why does Kent hate Oswald so much, going so far as to draw his sword on him?
A) Oswald had an affair with Kent’s wife.
B) Oswald owes Kent money.
C) Oswald is jealous of Kent.
D) Oswald insulted Lear.
3. What does Edgar disguise himself as in Act II, Scene 3?
A) a madman
B) a knight
C) a steward
D) a prince
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Discussion Suggestion: Use the above question to jumpstart a discussion on how Edmund’s
and Edgar’s predicaments are mirror images of one another; consider the ways in which
Edmund uses deception to rise to a noble status, while Edgar uses deception to lower himself
in status in pursuit of larger truths.
4. How would you describe Lear’s attitude at Regan and Cornwall’s home?
A) full of vigor and charm
B) calm and collected
C) bored and lethargic
D) full of rage but impotent
5. How does Regan respond to Lear’s request that she let him inside?
A) She enthusiastically welcomes him with open arms.
B) She cautiously lets him in under certain conditions.
C) She refuses and tells him to go back to Goneril’s.
D) She imprisons him with Kent.
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. B. Edmund does this to frame Edgar, in an effort to convince Gloucester to have his
legitimate son killed.
2. D. The ever-loyal Kent is aghast at the disrespect Oswald shows Lear.
3. A. As a madman, Edgar hopes to find truth in deception.
4. D. This is indicative of Lear’s rapidly deteriorating mental state.
5. C. Now that Regan has her inheritance, she has little patience for her father.
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Act III
READING CHECK
1. Who plans to invade Britain to wrest power from Albany and Cornwall?
Answer: the King of France
2. Who remains at Lear’s side while Kent searches for him?
Answer: the Fool
3. To what type of shelter does Kent lead Lear and the Fool to avoid the storm?
Answer: a hovel
4. Edmund plans to betray his father to whom?
Answer: Cornwall
Discussion Suggestion: Use the above question to discuss the parallels between Edmund’s
betrayal of his father and Regan and Goneril’s betrayal of theirs; explore these generational
conflicts with special attention to Edmund’s line, “That which my father loses—no less than
all. The younger rises when the old doth fall.”
5. Which character do Lear, Kent, and the Fool find inside their shelter with them?
Answer: Edgar
6. By what nickname does Edgar refer to himself while disguised?
Answer: Poor Tom
7. In Lear’s hallucination, which characters are put on trial?
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Answer: Regan and Goneril
8. Who wounds Cornwall in an attempt to stop him from harming Gloucester?
Answer: a servant
QUIZ
1. According to Kent, what is the nature of the relationship between Albany and Cornwall in
Act III?
A) strong, inseparable allies
B) open enemies vying for control of Britain
C) apparent allies who are secretly plotting against one another
D) disinterested parties barely aware of one another’s actions
2. What does the Fool do to close out Act III, Scene 2?
A) deliver a prophecy
B) run back out into the storm
C) give a soliloquy mocking Lear
D) stab and murder Kent
3. Why do Regan and Cornwall drive Gloucester out of his home?
A) for secretly plotting against them with Lear
B) for refusing to house their knights on his estate
C) for merely expressing pity for Lear
D) for the misdeeds of his son, Edmund
4. What best describes Lear’s reason for tearing off his clothes in the shelter?
A) He is unbearably feverish, suffering physical illness.
B) He feels he has been reduced to a mere animal, like Poor Tom.
C) He wants to give his clothes to Kent, who is cold.
D) He is delusional and believes it is bedtime.
Discussion Suggestion: Use the above question to discuss how, through Lear’s real madness
and Edgar’s feigned madness, important truths are revealed to each man about the human
condition.
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5. Why does Gloucester speak openly of his son’s supposed betrayal in Edgar’s presence?
A) He does not recognize Edgar.
B) He is referring to Edmund, not Edgar.
C) He is attempting to provoke Edgar.
D) He has already forgiven Edgar.
6. How does Edmund become the new Earl of Gloucester?
A) His father, the current Earl of Gloucester, gives up this title to him.
B) He murders the current Earl of Gloucester.
C) Albany gives him this title in return for betraying Cornwall.
D) Cornwall gives him this title in return for betraying his father.
7. What major development is revealed by the letter that Gloucester shows Edmund and
Edmund later shows Cornwall? (short answer)
8. In what way do Regan and Cornwall physically harm Gloucester before throwing him out
into the storm? (short answer)
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. C. Although Albany and Cornwall appear to be working together, each wishes to rule Britain
alone.
2. A. His prophecy predicts that Britain will descend into chaos.
3. C. Regan and Cornwall are so full of contempt for Lear that the mere suggestion of pitying
him is enough to draw their ire.
4. B. Lear feels that he, like Poor Tom, is “no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal.”
5. A. Edgar’s disguise and actions are so convincing that his own father does not recognize
him.
6. D. The title is a reward for Edmund’s loyalty and the culmination of his attempts to force his
way into the nobility through Machiavellian manipulation and ingenuity.
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7. The French army has landed in England.
8. They gouge out his eyes.
Act IV
READING CHECK
1. Who agrees to lead Gloucester to the cliffs of Dover?
Answer: Edgar
2. Whom does Goneril want to marry after growing disillusioned about Albany?
Answer: Edmund
3. At the end of Act IV, Scene 2, whose death is reported to Albany by a messenger?
Answer: Cornwall’s
4. Who wrote the letter addressed to Edmund that fixates Regan in Act IV, Scene 5?
Answer: Goneril
5. In Act IV, Scene 5, who is Edmund going to kill “in pity of his misery,” according to Regan?
Answer: Gloucester
6. How does Gloucester survive what he believes is a jump from the cliffs of Dover?
Answer: Edgar led him to a patch of flat ground, not the cliff’s edge.
7. How does Oswald die?
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Answer: Edgar kills him in a fight after Oswald attempts to murder Gloucester.
8. Where are Cordelia and Lear finally reunited?
Answer: a French military camp
QUIZ
1. Why does Gloucester want to go to Dover?
A) to rendezvous with the King of France and the French Army
B) to catch up with Lear, whom he still pities
C) to find Edgar, who he believes currently resides there
D) to throw himself off the cliffs to his death
2. Why does Goneril grow disillusioned with Albany?
A) She suspects Albany has aligned with Regan against her.
B) Albany no longer approves of her increasingly immoral behavior.
C) Albany has grown too bloodthirsty and violent for her.
D) She now doubts Albany possesses the intelligence to carry out her plans.
3. To what is Kent referring when he says, “It is the stars. The stars above us govern our
conditions”?
A) how different Edmund is from Edgar
B) how different Cordelia is from her sisters
C) the causes of Lear’s mental deterioration
D) his own continued loyalty to Lear
Discussion Suggestion: Use the above question to discuss the extent to which outcomes and
actions in King Lear are determined by uncontrollable fate versus divine intervention or
human agency. Which characters believe that destiny is controlled by the stars? Which do
not? What themes does Shakespeare convey through these competing philosophies?
4. According to Kent, why will Lear resist seeing Cordelia?
A) He is ashamed of disinheriting her.
B) He is still angry that she wouldn’t devote all her love to him.
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C) He is infuriated that her husband invaded Britain.
D) In his madness, he forgets who she is.
5. What most motivates Cordelia as she prepares for battle in Act IV, Scene 4?
A) ambition to amass power
B) hatred of her sisters
C) love for her father
D) allegiance to France
6. What is a reason that explains why Regan believes she is more suitable than Goneril to be
Edmund’s wife?
A) Regan is more beautiful.
B) Regan’s claim to the realm is stronger than Goneril’s.
C) Regan believes Goneril will die in the battle.
D) Regan is a widow.
7. Why does Regan regret letting Gloucester live after blinding him?
A) As long as Gloucester lives, Edmund cannot inherit his title.
B) Gloucester possesses a legitimate claim to her realm.
C) Gloucester will inspire pity from the masses, driving them against Regan.
D) Gloucester has allied with Goneril against her.
8. Why is it ironic when Lear finally acknowledges the falseness of his daughters’ flattery in
Act 4, Scene 6?
A) because Lear makes more sense in madness than he did when sane
B) because Lear himself is a notorious giver of false flattery
C) because Lear is wearing a crown of weeds, which symbolize flattery
D) because his daughters never offered their flattery
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. D. Blinded, betrayed, and miserable, Gloucester sees no reason to go on living.
2. B. Both Goneril and Oswald are deeply dismayed by Albany’s dramatic change in attitude
toward their schemes.
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3. B. Kent believes that Cordelia’s loving spirit must be the result of preordained forces, given
her sisters’ cruelty.
4. A. Lear deeply regrets the unkindness and narcissistic need for flattery he displayed at the
beginning of the play.
5. C. On the eve of battle, Cordelia says, “No blown ambition doth our arms incite, But love,
dear love, and our aged father’s right.”
6. D. Regan tells Oswald, “My lord is dead. Edmund and I have talked, And more convenient is
he for my hand.”
7. C. Of Gloucester, Regan says, “Where he arrives, he moves All hearts against us.”
8. A. One of the play’s major themes is the extent to which sensible truths are revealed
through bouts of so-called madness.
Act V
READING CHECK
1. What does Edmund plan to do with Lear if his army is victorious?
Answer: kill him
2. Which of the two factions wins the battle in Act V, Scene 2?
Answer: the British (Regan, Edmund, etc.)
3. What happens to Cordelia and Lear in the immediate wake of the battle?
Answer: They are imprisoned.
4. Who is the “champion” that Albany heralds after the battle, according to Edgar’s
instructions?
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Answer: Edgar himself
5. Who poisons Regan?
Answer: Goneril
6. How does Cordelia die?
Answer: Her jailer kills her, at Edmund’s instruction.
7. After Lear dies, which two characters does Albany want to rule the kingdom?
Answer: Kent and Edgar
QUIZ
1. What is Albany’s primary motivation for joining forces with Regan’s army?
A) to enact revenge on Lear
B) to please his wife Goneril
C) to oppose the French invasion
D) to get closer to Edmund
2. How does Albany learn that Goneril plans to have him killed?
A) He overhears her talking about it with Edmund.
B) He discovers it in the letter Edgar gives him.
C) Edmund brags to Albany about it.
D) Regan reveals it while sharing Goneril’s plan to marry Edmund.
3. What does Edgar say to convince Gloucester to save himself after the battle?
A) “The gods are just.”
B) “Thy life’s a miracle.”
C) “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
D) “Men must endure.”
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Discussion Suggestion: Use the above question to discuss Shakespeare’s theme that the will
to keep on living, even—and perhaps especially—amid abject suffering, is a virtue in and of
itself, with an emphasis on how this reflects 16th and 17th century Christian values.
4. What is Edmund’s excuse for wanting to keep Lear and Cordelia detained?
A) They may try to kill themselves to avoid the shame of defeat.
B) He wants them to suffer so they will be more forthcoming in interrogations.
C) Their presence may divide the troops’ loyalties.
D) Albany will be lenient towards them because he is married to Cordelia’s sister.
5. For what crime does Albany try to arrest Edmund?
A) murder
B) treason
C) impersonating a noble
D) theft
6. How does Goneril die? (short answer)
7. What happens to Gloucester after Edgar reveals his identity?
A) Infuriated, he attempts to kill Edgar.
B) He wanders off without a word.
C) His heart bursts, and he dies.
D) He joins Edgar’s side, and they confront Edmund.
8. How does Albany learn of Edmund’s plans to have Lear and Cordelia killed in custody?
A) from Edmund himself
B) from Lear and Cordelia after they escape
C) from a letter intercepted by Edgar
D) from Goneril who brags about it
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. A. Unlike other characters with whom he is aligned, Albany is driven not by ambitions for
power or personal grievance; he wants to protect British sovereignty against an invading
force.
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2. B. Edgar retrieved the letter after killing Oswald and, disguised, delivers it to Albany.
3. D. This sentiment is one of the play’s most important themes.
4. C. Edmond’s true agenda, however, is to have them murdered.
5. B. The rationale is that Edmund refused Albany’s orders to turn Lear and Cordelia over to
him.
6. She commits suicide.
7. C. Edgar explains this to Edmund after mortally wounding him.
8. A. Edmund reveals this in his dying breath, to do “some good.”
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