The Tragedy of King Lear

Read

1. ACT I.

   King Lear divides his kingdom by a love-test, rewarding the flattery of Goneril and Regan and disinheriting the honest Cordelia, who is married by France and taken away; Kent is banished for defending her. Meanwhile Edmund, Gloucester's bastard, forges evidence to turn his father against his legitimate brother Edgar, and the elder sisters begin to humiliate the father who gave them everything.

   1. Scene 1 — A Room of State in King Lear's Palace.

      Lear stages a public contest of love to apportion Britain. Goneril and Regan lay on extravagant flattery; Cordelia will say only that she loves him 'according to my bond.' Enraged, Lear disinherits and banishes her, and banishes Kent for protesting. Burgundy drops his suit when her dowry vanishes, but France marries her for herself. The elder sisters confer about controlling their unpredictable father.

   2. Scene 2 — A Hall in the Earl of Gloster's Castle.

      Edmund declares himself a servant of 'Nature' and resentful of his bastardy, and gulls his father Gloucester with a forged letter that paints Edgar as plotting parricide. Gloucester blames the disorder on recent eclipses; Edmund privately scorns such astrology as an excuse for human vice.

   3. Scene 3 — A Room in the Duke of Albany's Palace.

      Goneril, tired of Lear and his hundred knights, instructs her steward Oswald to treat the king and his followers with studied coldness to provoke a confrontation.

   4. Scene 4 — A Hall in Albany's Palace.

      The banished Kent, disguised, enters Lear's service. The Fool needles Lear with bitter truths about giving his kingdom away. Goneril demands he halve his retinue; Lear, raging, curses her with sterility and storms off to Regan, beginning to fear for his own sanity.

   5. Scene 5 — Court before the Duke of Albany's Palace.

      Lear sends Kent ahead with letters to Regan. The Fool warns him that Regan will prove no kinder, and Lear, shaken, prays: 'O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!'

2. ACT II.

   Edmund completes his frame-up, driving Edgar to flee and disguise himself as the mad beggar Poor Tom, while Cornwall takes Edmund into favor. Kent is shamefully set in the stocks, and when Lear arrives he finds his daughters united against him: they bargain his knights down to none, and he rushes out into a rising storm rather than submit.

   1. Scene 1 — A court within the Castle of the Earl of Gloster.

      Warned by Edmund of (invented) danger, Edgar flees; Edmund wounds himself to fake a struggle and convinces Gloucester that Edgar tried to kill him. Cornwall and Regan arrive, praise Edmund's 'loyalty,' and take him into their service.

   2. Scene 2 — Before Gloster's Castle.

      Kent picks a quarrel with the smug Oswald outside Gloucester's castle and beats him. Cornwall, to insult Lear through his messenger, claps the king's man Kent in the stocks despite Gloucester's protest.

   3. Scene 3 — The open Country.

      Edgar, hunted, resolves to survive by taking 'the basest and most poorest shape' — Poor Tom, a near-naked Bedlam beggar who mortifies his flesh and babbles of devils.

   4. Scene 4 — Before Gloster's Castle; Kent in the stocks.

      Lear, humiliated to find his man in the stocks, confronts Regan and Goneril, who coldly compete to reduce his train — 'What need one?' Stripped of all attendance and dignity, Lear, half-mad with grief and rage, rushes out into the gathering storm.

3. ACT III.

   Lear rages bare-headed in the storm, his reason cracking, attended only by the Fool and the disguised Kent, and meets Edgar as Poor Tom. Edmund betrays his father's secret loyalty to Lear, and Cornwall and Regan punish Gloucester by tearing out his eyes on stage — a cruelty that costs Cornwall his life at the hands of a horrified servant.

   1. Scene 1 — A Heath.

      In the storm, Kent finds a Gentleman and learns of division between Albany and Cornwall and of a French force landing; he sends word and a token to Cordelia.

   2. Scene 2 — Another part of the heath. Storm continues.

      Lear defies the tempest — 'Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!' — calling on it to flatten an ungrateful world, while the Fool begs him to seek shelter and Kent leads him toward a hovel.

   3. Scene 3 — A Room in Gloster's Castle.

      Gloucester secretly tells Edmund of a letter about the French invasion and his intention to relieve Lear. Edmund resolves to betray this at once to Cornwall: 'The younger rises when the old doth fall.'

   4. Scene 4 — A part of the Heath with a Hovel. Storm continues.

      At the hovel, Lear meets Poor Tom and, seeing the near-naked beggar, sees 'unaccommodated man' — 'the thing itself' — and tears at his own clothes. His pity for the poor and his madness deepen together.

   5. Scene 5 — A Room in Gloster's Castle.

      Edmund hands Cornwall the incriminating letter and denounces his father as a traitor; Cornwall makes him Earl of Gloucester and sends him out of the way of what is to come.

   6. Scene 6 — A Chamber in a Farmhouse adjoining the Castle.

      Sheltering in a farmhouse, the mad Lear holds an imaginary trial of his daughters, arraigning joint-stools as Goneril and Regan. Gloucester returns to warn that there is a plot on Lear's life and that he must be carried toward Dover.

   7. Scene 7 — A Room in Gloster's Castle.

      Cornwall and Regan seize Gloucester, and in the play's cruelest scene gouge out his eyes — 'Out, vile jelly!' One of Cornwall's own servants, sickened, wounds him mortally before being killed; the blinded Gloucester learns it was Edmund who betrayed him.

4. ACT IV.

   The blind Gloucester, led unknowingly by his disguised son Edgar, is talked back from suicide at Dover. Albany recoils from Goneril's monstrousness, Cornwall's death unsettles the sisters' rivalry over Edmund, and Cordelia lands with a French army to seek her father. Lear, found mad and crowned with weeds, is healed by sleep and reconciled with the daughter he wronged.

   1. Scene 1 — The heath.

      The blinded Gloucester, led by an old tenant and then by Poor Tom (his own unrecognized son Edgar), bitterly concludes 'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,' and asks to be led to the cliff at Dover to end his life.

   2. Scene 2 — Before the Duke of Albany's Palace.

      Albany, disgusted by Goneril's cruelty, denounces her — 'Tigers, not daughters' — as news arrives that Cornwall is dead of his servant's wound. Goneril, already drawn to Edmund, fears her widowed sister as a rival.

   3. Scene 3 — The French camp near Dover.

      Kent and a Gentleman speak of Cordelia's tender grief on reading of her father's sufferings — she shook 'the holy water from her heavenly eyes' — and of Lear's shame that keeps him from seeing her. (This scene appears only in the Quarto text.)

   4. Scene 4 — The French camp. A Tent.

      Cordelia, in the French camp, sends soldiers to find her father, who has been seen crowned with wild weeds and singing, and asks the attending Doctor whether his wits can be restored.

   5. Scene 5 — A Room in Gloster's Castle.

      Regan presses Oswald about the letters he carries between Goneril and Edmund, betraying her own jealous designs on Edmund now that she is a widow.

   6. Scene 6 — The country near Dover.

      At imagined 'Dover cliff,' Edgar persuades the blind Gloucester he has fallen and miraculously survived, pulling him back from despair. The mad Lear wanders in, raving with terrible insight about justice and authority. Oswald tries to kill Gloucester and is slain by Edgar, who finds on him Goneril's letter plotting Albany's murder.

   7. Scene 7 — A Tent in the French Camp. Lear on a bed, asleep, soft

      Lear wakes to soft music in Cordelia's care, slowly recognizing her and confessing himself 'a very foolish fond old man.' He kneels; she forgives; the long-broken bond is mended.

5. ACT V.

   The British forces defeat the French; Lear and Cordelia are captured. As the sisters' rivalry over Edmund destroys them both and Edgar at last unmasks and kills his brother in single combat, Edmund's order to hang Cordelia is revoked too late. Lear enters carrying her body, and dies of grief, leaving the survivors to govern a devastated kingdom.

   1. Scene 1 — The Camp of the British Forces near Dover.

      In the British camp the sisters jealously circle Edmund. The disguised Edgar slips Albany the letter proving Goneril's treachery and promises a champion if Albany will sound a trumpet before the battle.

   2. Scene 2 — A field between the two Camps.

      The battle passes; the French lose, and Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoner. Edgar shields his despairing father with hard comfort: 'Men must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is all.'

   3. Scene 3 — The British Camp near Dover.

      Edmund secretly sends Lear and Cordelia to be hanged. Edgar appears armored, defeats Edmund in trial by combat, and reveals himself. Goneril, exposed, poisons Regan and kills herself; the dying Edmund repents and tries to countermand the order, but too late. Lear enters howling, the hanged Cordelia in his arms — 'Never, never, never, never, never' — and dies over her body, leaving Albany, Kent, and Edgar to carry 'the gored state.'

Characters

• King Lear protagonist

  The aging King of Britain, who divides his kingdom among his daughters according to who flatters him most, banishing the one who loves him truly. Stripped of power, retinue, and shelter by the two he rewarded, he descends into madness on a storm-swept heath, recovers a hard-won humility, and dies of grief over the body of the daughter he wronged.

• Cordelia major

  Lear's youngest and dearest daughter, who refuses to flatter him in the love-test — she will love him 'according to my bond, no more nor less' — and is disinherited and banished for her honesty. The King of France marries her dowerless. She returns at the head of a French army to rescue her father, is captured, and is hanged in prison; her death breaks Lear's heart.

• Goneril antagonist

  Lear's eldest daughter, married to the Duke of Albany. She wins a third of the kingdom with extravagant professions of love, then strips her father of his knights and turns him out into the storm. Ruthless and lustful, she pursues Edmund, poisons her sister Regan out of jealousy, and kills herself when her treachery is exposed.

• Regan antagonist

  Lear's second daughter, married to the Duke of Cornwall. As cruel as her sister Goneril, she helps cast Lear out and abets the blinding of Gloucester, even running through the servant who protests. Widowed when Cornwall dies, she competes with Goneril for Edmund and is secretly poisoned by her.

• Kent major

  The Earl of Kent, blunt and fiercely loyal to Lear. Banished for defending Cordelia, he returns in disguise under the name Caius to serve the king he loves, sharing his fall through storm and madness. At the end he reveals himself, and, his master dead, prepares to follow him: 'I have a journey, sir, shortly to go.'

• Gloucester major

  The Earl of Gloucester, whose family plot mirrors Lear's. Deceived by his bastard son Edmund into believing his legitimate son Edgar a traitor, he is betrayed in turn, accused of helping Lear, and has his eyes put out on stage by Cornwall and Regan. Blind and despairing, he is secretly guided and saved by the disguised Edgar, and dies when his heart bursts 'twixt joy and grief.

• Edgar major

  Gloucester's legitimate son, framed by his brother Edmund and forced to flee. He disguises himself as 'Poor Tom,' a mad, near-naked Bedlam beggar babbling of devils, and in that role shelters Lear in the storm and secretly tends his own blinded father, even staging a fake leap from Dover cliff to cure his despair. He survives to defeat Edmund in trial by combat and, in the Folio, to rule.

• Edmund antagonist

  Gloucester's illegitimate son, a charming, cold-blooded schemer in the mould of the stage Machiavel. Resenting the stigma of bastardy, he forges evidence against his brother Edgar, betrays his father to blinding, and rises to command the British army while playing Goneril and Regan against each other. Defeated by the disguised Edgar, he repents too late to save Cordelia, whose death he had ordered.

• Fool supporting

  Lear's court jester, who alone may speak hard truths to the king, telling him in riddle, song, and bitter joke that he was a fool to give everything away. Devoted to Cordelia, he accompanies Lear into the storm and his wits' collapse, then disappears from the play after Act 3.

• Albany supporting

  The Duke of Albany, Goneril's husband, who grows from passive complicity into moral revulsion at his wife's cruelty. By the end he condemns Goneril and Edmund, takes the side of justice, and is left — with Edgar and Kent — to govern the ruined kingdom.

• Cornwall antagonist

  The Duke of Cornwall, Regan's husband and the play's most openly brutal villain. He sets Kent in the stocks and, in the play's cruelest scene, gouges out Gloucester's eyes — but is fatally wounded by one of his own servants who can bear no more.

• Oswald supporting

  Goneril's steward, a vain, servile courtier who does his mistress's dirty work. Contemptuous of the fallen Lear and an enemy of the disguised Kent, he is killed by Edgar while trying to murder the blind Gloucester, and dies carrying Goneril's incriminating letter to Edmund.

• King of France minor

  The King of France, who, when Cordelia is disinherited and rejected by Burgundy, marries her without a dowry for her own worth — 'thou art most rich, being poor.' He later sends the army with which she returns to rescue Lear.

• Duke of Burgundy minor

  A suitor for Cordelia's hand who withdraws his offer the moment Lear strips her of her dowry, exposing the conditional nature of his 'love' — 'Peace be with Burgundy! / Since that respects of fortune are his love, / I shall not be his wife.'

• Gentleman minor

  A speech-prefix shared by several unnamed gentlemen and courtiers: the knight who reports to Kent in the storm (3.1), the gentleman attending on Cordelia who describes her grief (4.3), and others who carry news through the play.

• Knight minor

  One of the hundred knights of Lear's retinue, who in 1.4 notices the cold neglect Goneril's household now shows the king.

• Curan minor

  A courtier who, in 2.1, brings Edmund word of rumored war between Cornwall and Albany and of Regan and Cornwall's expected arrival, helping Edmund time his plot against Edgar.

• Old Man minor

  An aged tenant of Gloucester's who leads the newly blinded earl, grieving that he has served Gloucester and his father for eighty years, before Edgar takes over guiding him.

• Doctor minor

  The physician who attends the rescued Lear in the French camp, prescribing rest and the music that accompanies his waking, and judging his madness curable: 'the great rage / ... is kill'd in him.'

• Messenger minor

  Various messengers who carry letters and report events, including the news of Cornwall's death and of the advancing armies.

• Captain minor

  The officer Edmund suborns in 5.3 with a written order to hang the captured Cordelia in prison and report it as suicide — 'know thou this, that men / Are as the time is.'

• Officer minor

  An officer of the British forces in Act 5, attending on Edmund and Albany.

• First Servant minor

  Cornwall's servant who, unable to watch the blinding of Gloucester, draws his sword against his master and mortally wounds him before being killed from behind by Regan.

• Second Servant minor

  One of Cornwall's servants who, after the blinding, resolves to help the maimed Gloucester and fetch Poor Tom to lead him.

• Third Servant minor

  Another of Cornwall's servants who joins in tending the blinded Gloucester after their master's cruelty.

• Albany and Cornwall ensemble

  Speech-prefix for the two dukes speaking together in 1.1, urging the enraged Lear to forbear as he reaches for his sword against Kent.

Cross-references

• Folger Shakespeare
• MIT plain text
• Wikipedia