The story
King Lear is a tragedy by Shakespeare. The first recorded performance was at Whitehall Palace before King James I on 26 December 1606, and the play was printed in 1608. Lear, an old king of Britain, decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters according to how much each claims to love him. Goneril and Regan flatter him, while the youngest, Cordelia, answers honestly and is cast out. The two elder daughters then strip him of his power and dignity, and he wanders mad on a stormy heath, while a parallel plot follows the Earl of Gloucester and his sons.
Shakespeare drew on the old chronicle story of King Leir, on an earlier anonymous play, and on Sidney's Arcadia for the Gloucester subplot, and he made the ending far bleaker than his sources. The play was written for the King's Men after Hamlet and Othello, in a period when James I was pressing for a union of England and Scotland, and the theme of a divided kingdom would have been timely. Two early texts survive, the 1608 quarto and the 1623 Folio, and they differ enough that modern editors often print both.
For a century and a half audiences did not see Shakespeare's version. In 1681 Nahum Tate rewrote it with a happy ending in which Cordelia lives, and that version held the stage until the early nineteenth century. Since then the original has been seen as one of the supreme works of European drama, the subject of Kurosawa's film Ran (1985) and of countless productions.
Why it mattered
- The play pushed tragedy toward the unredeemed and the absurd, an influence on twentieth century dramatists such as Samuel Beckett.
- Tate's 1681 adaptation shows how long audiences resisted Shakespeare's harsher ending, a case study in changing taste.
- Its themes of aging, power and family loyalty have been transplanted to many cultures, as in Kurosawa's Ran.
Sources
- King Lear Encyclopedia.com
- Behind King Lear, History Revealed The New York Review of Books
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