King Lear
King Lear the aging King of Britain, has decided to step down from the throne and divide his kingdom evenly among his three daughters Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. First he puts his daughters through a sort of test, asking each to tell him just how much each daughter loves him. Goneril and Regan, Lear's older daughters, give their father flattering answers. But Cordelia, Lear's youngest and favorite daughter, remains silent, saying that she has no words to describe how much she loves her father "Love, and be silent." Lear flies into a rage and disowns Cordelia, "Nothing comes from nothing!" The King of France, who has been courting Cordelia, says that he still wants to marry her even without her land, and she accompanies him to France without her father's blessing. Lear quickly learns that he has made a bad decision. His older daughters, Regan and Goneril, swiftly begin to undermine the little authority Lear still upholds. Lear's servants and knights have noticed that Goneril's servants no longer obey their commands. Lear sends a command to Goneril, telling her that he wants to talk with her. When Goneril's steward, Oswald, is rude to Lear, Kent gets into a fight with him and beats him. Lear's Fool arrives, an
eat thunderstorm, accompanied by his Fool and by Kent, a loyal nobleman in disguise. When Gloucester realizes that Lear's daughters have turned against him, he decides to help Lear in spite of the danger. He is discovered, and the vicious Regan and her husband Cornwall blind him. One of Cornwall's servants suddenly steps in, saying that he cannot stand by and let this happen. Cornwall draws his sword, and the two fight. The servant wounds Cornwall, but Regan grabs a sword from another servant and kills him before he can do any more. Angrily, the wounded Cornwall gouges out Gloucester's one remaining eye. He ends up being led by his son Edgar--in disguise as Poor Tom--toward the city of Dover, where King Lear has also been brought. The protagonist of this story are Cordelia, Edgar, and King Lear himself. The antagonist of this story are Lear's two older daughters Goneril, Regan, and Edmund. In Dover, a French army lands as part of an invasion led by Cordelia in an effort to save her father. Meanwhile, Edmund has become romantically entangled with both Regan, now a widow, and Goneril, whose husband Albany is increasingly on Lear's side. They conspire to kill Albany. King Lear is one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies. Written around the year 1605, between Othello and Macbeth, it is usually ranked with those two plays, and with Hamlet, as one of Shakespeare's "great" tragedies. Some critics feel that King Lear is in fact Shakespeare's best tragedy, or even his best play. King Lear is less often performed than these other tragedies, and is also less often studied. The central conflict is brilliantly conceived. Just as Lear mistakenly believes that Cordelia has wronged him and his other daughters have served him, so Gloucester jumps to the conclusion that Edgar opposes him and Edmund defends him when in both cases precisely the opposite is true. The horrific consequences of these misjudgments intertwine and drive the action along The conflict is resolved by death, at the end of the play most of
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Approximate Word count = 1369
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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