King LearWilliam Shakespeare
About King Lear
Shakespeare's , written around 1605, begins with a political act that the play treats as the source of everything that follows. An aging king divides his kingdom among his daughters on the basis of their professions of love, disinherits the one who refuses to flatter him, and banishes the counselor who objects. Within two acts the king is on a heath in a storm, stripped of retinue, clothing, and sanity. By the end he is carrying the body of his hanged daughter.
The play sets a domestic tragedy and a political tragedy inside each other and will not let them come apart. Lear's question to his daughters, who loves him most, is at once a father's and a sovereign's, and the disaster proceeds from treating the bond of kinship as a transaction. The Gloucester subplot doubles the main action. A father who cannot tell his loyal son from his treacherous one is blinded on stage and led by the son he disowned. The repetition insists that the failure is not Lear's alone but a pattern in the nature of fathers and the nature of kingship.
What the play adds to the tradition's treatment of family and of good and evil is the weight it gives to suffering without consolation. Lear on the heath speaks for the poor naked wretches he had never considered as king, and the play's refusal to rescue Cordelia is Shakespeare's rejection of the happy ending his sources supplied. The moral order the characters appeal to is present only as the absence they feel. is the Syntopicon's central text on the family as a natural bond prior to the state, and on evil treated as a force that cannot be balanced within the action it ruins.