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ReadingRate edition

King Lear

William Shakespeare, 1606

112 pages · 27,834 words · about 3 hours · regard 97 of 100

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King Lear divides his kingdom between his daughters Goneril and Regan, who flatter him, and banishes Cordelia, who will not. Within two acts, both daughters have stripped him of his retinue, turned him out into a storm, and left him to the heath. Lear spends Act 3 raging against the wind and rain with only his Fool and the disguised Kent for company, gradually losing his hold on sanity and gaining, in exchange, a kind of terrible clarity about what kings and fathers actually are. Running in parallel, the Earl of Gloucester is betrayed by his bastard son Edmund, blinded by Cornwall, and led across England by the legitimate son he had cast out — Edgar, now disguised as the mad beggar Poor Tom. The two plots rhyme with each other in ways that neither can fully explain. Shakespeare writes in verse that moves between formal grandeur and sudden plainness: 'Nothing will come of nothing' and 'Pray you undo this button.' The storm scenes are the most ambitious attempt in English drama to put a mind's disintegration onto a stage. The ending offers no restoration — Cordelia dies, Lear dies holding her body, and the survivors speak without conviction. What the deaths mean, whether they testify to a just universe or an indifferent one, is a question the play raises and refuses to answer.

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