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William Shakespeare, c.1605–1606
Substantive A-Level notes for one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies. Act-by-act plot summary including the Gloucester subplot, detailed character profiles, thematic analysis, Jacobean context, 15+ key quotations with critical interpretation, symbol and motif tracking, and exam-style essay questions with planning notes for AQA and OCR specifications.
Shakespeare structures King Lear around two parallel plots: the main plot of Lear and his three daughters, and the subplot of the Earl of Gloucester and his two sons. Both centre on a father's fatal misjudgement of his children, and the two strands intertwine geographically and thematically until they collide on the heath and at Dover.
The aged King Lear announces his intention to divide Britain among his three daughters — Goneril, Regan and Cordelia — and to pass authority to them while retaining the title of king. He stages a public “love-test” in which each daughter must declare how much she loves him. Goneril and Regan respond with extravagant flattery; Cordelia, refusing to prostitute her affection in words, says she loves her father “According to my bond, no more nor less.” Enraged, Lear disowns and disinherits her. The Earl of Kent attempts to intervene and is banished. The King of France, recognising Cordelia's virtue, marries her without a dowry. Meanwhile Edmund, the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, hatches a plot against his legitimate brother Edgar, forging a letter that supposedly proves Edgar plans patricide. Gloucester believes Edmund instantly. Goneril and Regan, now sharing power, agree to curb their father's authority and his retinue of one hundred knights.
Edmund persuades Edgar to flee, then wounds himself to feign an attack and frame his brother; Gloucester proclaims Edgar an outlaw. Edgar disguises himself as “Poor Tom,” a Bedlam beggar. Kent, also in disguise as “Caius,” takes service with Lear and is placed in the stocks by Cornwall and Regan as a calculated insult to the king. Goneril and Regan together strip Lear of his knights, reducing his retinue from one hundred to fifty, to twenty-five, to ten, to five, until Regan asks “What need one?” Wounded to the soul and refusing to weep, Lear rushes out into a gathering storm, accompanied only by his Fool. Cornwall, Regan and Goneril shut the castle doors against him.
On the heath, Lear rages against the elements: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” The storm externalises his inner turmoil and figures the collapse of the natural and political order. He encounters Edgar as Poor Tom and, seeing in him “unaccommodated man,” begins to descend into madness while simultaneously gaining moral insight. Gloucester secretly helps the king and tells Edmund of a French invasion intended to restore Lear. Edmund betrays his father to Cornwall. In one of the most brutal scenes in Shakespeare, Cornwall and Regan put out Gloucester's eyes on stage — “Out, vile jelly!” A loyal servant draws his sword in protest and mortally wounds Cornwall before being killed himself. The blinded Gloucester is thrust out of his own gates to “smell his way to Dover.”
The two plots converge. Edgar, still disguised, leads his blind father towards the cliffs of Dover. Gloucester, despairing, attempts suicide; Edgar stages a fall from an imaginary cliff to convince him the gods have miraculously preserved his life. Lear, garlanded with weeds and entirely mad, meets the blinded Gloucester on the beach in one of the play's most harrowing scenes: “A man may see how this world goes with no eyes.” Cordelia has landed with French forces. Goneril and Regan now both lust after Edmund, exposing the rottenness of their alliance. Albany, Goneril's husband, recoils from his wife's cruelty. Lear is recovered to Cordelia's camp; awakening from sleep, he kneels before his daughter and, in tears, calls himself “a very foolish, fond old man.”
The British forces under Edmund defeat the French; Lear and Cordelia are captured. Lear imagines a contented prison life with Cordelia: “We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage.” Edmund, however, secretly orders Cordelia's execution. Goneril poisons Regan out of jealousy and then kills herself. Edgar, in armour, challenges and fatally wounds Edmund; the brothers reconcile. Edmund repents and tries to revoke his order, but too late: Lear enters carrying Cordelia's body, howling. Gloucester, off-stage, has died of joy and grief on learning Edgar's identity. Lear dies broken over Cordelia's corpse, gazing at her lips. Albany and Edgar are left to “sustain the gor'd state” in a kingdom emptied of authority.