What follows is an overall summary and scene-by-scene breakdown of our next play, The Tragedy of King Lear. It’s an especially difficult and complicated tragedy, so for the first time in my life, I actually made use of Cliff Study Notes to help me understand the play before I wrote this in 2001!

King Lear has been called, by no less an authority than the poet Shelley, “the most perfect specimen of dramatic poetry in the world”. The story is famous for wonderful lines, such as “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” and has inspired other masterpieces, including Akira Kurosawa’s classic “RAN“. At the same time it is rarely performed, especially by amateur groups, because it is so difficult to do it justice.

Shakespeare based his tragedy King Lear on a very old British tale. Variations of the story are found around the world. One of them goes like this: The king asks his three daughters how much they love him. The first says she loves him like gold and silver; the second, like diamonds and rubies. The youngest enrages him when she says she loves him like salt. She is banished from the kingdom, and eventually marries another king. Years later the father visits this king for a banquet, but doesn’t recognize his daughter. She orders all the food to be served without any salt, so the father realizes that salt is really more valuable than gold and jewels.

Shakespeare’s sources include Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannia (written in Latin circa 1135) and another play The True Chronicle History of King Leir, by an unknown author, which appeared in print approximately the same time as Shakespeare’s Lear. The subplot with Gloucester and his sons was taken from the novel Arcadia by Shakespeare’s contemporary Sir Philip Sidney. It is also possible that he was inspired by real-life events. According to one account, in 1603 an old knight with three daughters was caught up in a court battle over his estate. Only the youngest daughter defended her father; her name was Cordell. If this report is accurate, the parallels are certainly compelling!

There are two important themes of this play: obedience and love to fathers, and loyalty and fidelity to kings. To Shakespeare and his contemporaries it was as unthinkable to betray a king, chosen by God, as it was to betray one’s own father. The evil characters, primarily Goneril, Regan and Edmund, do both. It is necessary that they be punished for their crimes at the end of the play. It is Shakespeare’s decision that even Cordelia and Lear must also die that marks this as a supreme tragedy.

In other versions of the story, some older than Shakespeare’s, some more recent, the playwrights changed the story to give it a happy ending. A London playwright named Nahum Tate rewrote the play in 1679 to have Cordelia marry Edgar and live happily ever after. Believe it or not, this version survived on the stage for the next hundred years, and it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that Shakespeare’s version was restored in all its splendor.

The story is so complicated that different people have different views of the meaning. Some people, for example, see it as a Renaissance version of the medieval morality play (an allegorical story in which the hero, called “Everyman”, meets all the dangers and temptations of the world before he finds salvation.) Even though the story takes place before Christianity came to England, some people have even seen it as a version of the story of Jesus Christ, with Cordelia playing the part of Jesus. They say that Cordelia has to die so that King Lear can go to heaven. According to them, Cordelia’s name shows that she is the perfect person: “Cor-” is the French word for “heart”, and “-delia”, if you rearrange the letters, spells “ideal”.

A few useful terms to remember:

Royal “We” – to set themselves apart from regular people, kings and queens sometimes talk about themselves in the plural. In the first scene Lear says “Meantime we shall express our darker purpose” instead of “I shall express my…” Here he is employing the royal “we”.

The Fool, or jester, was often a member of the royal court. His job was to make the king laugh and take his mind off the troubles of government. Sometimes the jester was deformed or mentally deficient, but often he was a talented singer, juggler and storyteller. Jesters were given the special (as Goneril says, “all-licensed”) privilege of saying what they really thought and what the king really needed to hear.

In Shakespeare, “coxcomb” means the red crest that hangs down from the head of a rooster. Because it’s the color of blood, it also means blood running down a man’s head, especially a bloody nose. In King Lear, The Fool also uses the word to mean the cap he wears, a floppy hat that hangs down at the ends like the skin on the head of a rooster. These hats, sometimes with bells on them, were common attire for jesters.

There are two metaphors in the play involving birds: the pelican and the cuckoo. There was a folktale in Shakespeare’s day that the mother pelican feeds her babies with blood from her chest. No one knows where this false belief came from — perhaps they saw a pelican feeding fish to her babies, and they thought that the fish blood was the pelican’s blood. For whatever reason, Shakespeare sometimes used the pelican as a symbol of children hurting their parents. The cuckoo is a bird that lays its egg in another bird’s nest. The baby cuckoo hatches and then takes all the food away from the babies of the birds that built the nest. This is used as a symbol of ingratitude.

Vocabulary

• alms – charity
• base – low, dirty, common
• bastard – child born to two parents who aren’t married to each other. In Shakespeare’s day, much more than today, this was a great shame and disgrace.
• Bedlam – short for Bethlehem, the name of an insane asylum in London. Even today, the word means a place where the people all seem crazy.
• benison – gift
• century – one hundred soldiers
• choler – anger
• conceive – understand; also, become pregnant
• dispatch – quickly
• dotage – old age
• dower, dowry – the money that parents pay to the family of the man who marries the parents’ daughter
• fain – prefer
• Fie! – That’s wrong! or That’s bad!
  fond – stupid
• forbear – stop, don’t
• fortnight – two weeks (“fourteen nights”)
• issue – children
• kibes – blisters, sores on the foot
• moiety – half
• motley – clothes with bright alternating colors, associated with court jesters
• murther – murder
• nuncle – a term of endearment, probably short for “my(mine) uncle”
• parricide – killing one’s father
• scape – escape
• solus – (from the Latin) alone
• stocks – a wooden box that fastens around the legs of criminals. They are left outside helpless to defend themselves from people throwing mud, etc. It was reserved for the lowest, worst criminals.
• swoon – faint
• twain – two
• unburthen – unburden, relieve responsibilities
• vouched – promised
• whoreson – same as bastard, but this term is much more insulting

Plot Summary

ACT 1
SCENE 1
Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester, makes a good first impression on Kent.
Lear decides to put his responsibilities on his daughters and trusts them to still treat him as King. Both Goneril (married to the Duke of Albany) and Regan (married to the Duke of Cornwall) make fine speeches, so Lear rewards them with rich properties. When he turns to Cordelia, his favorite daughter, she doesn’t think it proper to use flattery to get power. Lear disowns her. Kent comes to her defense, and Lear banishes him. Goneril and Regan conspire, out of fear that their father will turn on them next.
The king of France agrees to marry Cordelia even without a dowry or her father’s blessing.

SCENE 2
Edmund forges a letter implicating his half-brother Edgar in plotting against Gloucester. He pretends to be reluctant to implicate Edgar, then pretends to help Edgar by warning him of the danger from Gloucester, and convinces him to flee the castle.

SCENE 3
Goneril tells Oswald to be slack in his duties to the king, and to encourage the other servants to do the same.

SCENE 4
Kent disguises himself and attaches himself to the king’s party. Oswald’s insolence outrages Lear and Kent.
Lear’s Fool mocks Lear for dividing his crown in half and giving it away to his daughters. Goneril criticizes Lear for allowing his company to become disorderly.
Lear disowns Goneril.

SCENE 5
Lear prepares to go to Regan.

ACT 2
SCENE 1
Regan comes to visit Gloucester. Edmund fakes a fight with Edgar to make himself look innocent, and tells his father more lies about Edgar. Regan associates Edgar with the unruly behavior of the knights in Lear’s party. She asks Gloucester to mediate between Goneril and Lear.

SCENE 2
Kent picks a fight with Oswald, insults Cornwall and Regan, and gets put in the stocks. This is unthinkable; treating the messenger of the king this way is the same as insulting the king himself.

SCENE 3
Edgar disguises himself as a mad beggar.

SCENE 4
Lear arrives, is outraged that Kent has been put in stocks. Cornwall and Regan take their sweet time coming to see him. Regan doesn’t give Lear the sympathy he’s looking for, and suggests he’s in the wrong in his dispute with Goneril.
Goneril arrives, and she and Regan talk down to Lear. He runs off in a rage, with a storm approaching, and Cornwall, Regan and Goneril agree to leave him to the elements.

ACT 3

SCENE 1
Kent discusses with a gentleman how France is invading, and there is a growing split between Cornwall and Albany. Kent sends the gentleman to seek out Cordelia.

SCENE 2
Lear and his Fool spend the night outside in the storm. Kent persuades him to move into a mud hut to get out of the rain.

SCENE 3
Gloucester tells Edmund that he will defy Cornwall and help the king. Edmund immediately goes to Cornwall with the news.

SCENE 4
Lear meets Edgar, disguised as a madman, in the mud hut. Gloucester finds Lear, and invites him to better shelter. Lear takes a liking to the madman, and insists on dragging him along.

SCENE 5
Cornwall rewards Edmund for betraying Gloucester.

SCENE 6
Gloucester leaves the king at a farmhouse. Lear and the Fool stage a mock trial of Regan and Goneril.
Gloucester returns, warning that the king should immediately leave for Dover.

SCENE 7
Regan and Cornwall imprison Gloucester and treat him badly, then put his eyes out. The servant rebels against Cornwall doing this. They fight. One of the servants dies, but Cornwall is badly wounded.

ACT 4
SCENE 1
Edmund finds his father blinded, being led by an old man. Still pretending to be a madman, he agrees to lead Gloucester to the cliffs of Dover.

SCENE 2
Goneril tells Edmund that she loves him more than she loves her husband Albany, who is mild-tempered. She quarrels with Albany, who is angry at her for hurting her father so much. A messenger says that Cornwall died of his wounds. Goneril is worried that this will leave Regan free to have Edmund for herself.

SCENE 3
Kent and the Gentleman are in the French camp, where Cordelia has also returned to find her father.

SCENE 4
Cordelia orders that her father be found and helped. She learns that the enemy armies are approaching.

SCENE 5
Regan finds out that Goneril is sending letters to Edmund. She sends one of her own, and orders Oswald to kill Gloucester.

SCENE 6
Edgar tells Gloucester that they are on the edge of a cliff, even though the ground is level. Gloucester “jumps off” and faints. When he revives, Edgar takes on a new character and tells him that he miraculously floated down the cliff. Lear enters, raving. Cordelia’s people arrive to take the king to safety, but he runs away from them.
Oswald finds Gloucester, and is about to kill him, but Edgar kills Oswald instead. Edgar reads Goneril’s letter.

SCENE 7

Kent reveals himself to Cordelia. The doctor tends to Lear. Cordelia cries over him.

ACT 5
SCENE 1
Regan schemes to steal Edmund from Goneril, and vice versa. Edgar, in disguise, gives the letters to Albany.
Edmund debates whether Goneril or Regan would be better for his ambitions.

SCENE 2
Battle. Edgar leaves Gloucester under a tree, then comes to get him with the news that Cordelia and Lear have been captured.

SCENE 3
Edmund gives instructions to a soldier to kill Lear and Cordelia in prison. Regan rewards Edmund for his valor by agreeing to marry him. Albany then produces the letters, and accuses Edmund of treason.
Edgar appears, fights with Edmund, defeats him. Goneril admits that she gave poison to Regan, then stabs herself. Too late, Edmund repents his orders to have Cordelia killed. Lear comes in with Cordelia’s body. He dies too.