PlayRenaissance · 1606Study guide · no full textDemanding

King Lear

The play moves from a court to a heath, from ceremony to nakedness. Watch how the language thins out as the world does.

Study guide

This work is still in copyright, so there is no full text on the page. What you get instead: the context, the cast, the ideas and the themes — enough to read it well, and to know exactly what to watch for in the first thirty pages.

“Nothing will come of nothing.”

The cast, in the Character Atlas →Literary devices →Where it sits in time →

Go deeper

Mortality — how other works handle it →Power — how other works handle it →

The castFull atlas →

King Lear

King, abdicating

King Lear · William Shakespeare

Wants: To be loved in proportion to what he is giving away.
Undone by: He keeps the title and expects the obedience, without the power that made either work.

Cordelia

Youngest daughter

King Lear · William Shakespeare

Wants: To love her father without turning it into a performance.
Undone by: She cannot flatter, which in a court is a defect.

Edmund

Bastard son, and the play's strategist

King Lear · William Shakespeare

Wants: To take by wit what birth would not give him.
Undone by: He believes a plan is the same thing as a right.

Now read the first page with all of this in mind.

The notes here are the map; the book is the journey.

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