King Lear
The Tragedy of King Lear emerged from a convergence of historical chronicles and folk traditions in the early 17th century. Shakespeare drew heavily on Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, published in 1587. This text itself traced the story back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote about the semi-legendary Brythonic figure Leir of Britain in the 12th century. While some scholars have linked the name Lear to the Brythonic god Lir or Llwyd, etymological evidence suggests no direct connection exists between them.
Beyond written history, the play absorbed elements from anonymous sources like King Leir, which was published in 1605. Other influences included John Higgins' The Mirror for Magistrates (1574) and Montaigne's Essays, translated into English by John Florio in 1603. Samuel Harsnett's A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures (1603) provided specific language used by Edgar while feigning madness. The narrative also mirrors the common folk tale known as Love Like Salt, classified as Aarne, Thompson type 923, where a father rejects his youngest daughter for an honest statement of love that displeases him.
Shakespeare made significant innovations to these source materials. In Geoffrey of Monmouth's account, Cordelia restores Lear to the throne and succeeds him as ruler after his death. Shakespeare changed this outcome to ensure both Lear and Cordelia die at the end. He also created the subplot involving Gloucester, Edgar, and Edmund from Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, written between 1580 and 1590. This source featured a blind Paphlagonian king and his two sons, Leonatus and Plexitrus. Characters such as the Fool, Oswald, and Edmund's Captain were invented entirely by Shakespeare, adding layers not present in any prior version.
Modern editors derive their texts from three extant publications: the 1608 quarto (Q1), the 1619 quarto (Q2), and the 1623 First Folio (F1). Q1 contains many errors and muddles, while Q2 was based on Q1 but introduced corrections alongside new errors. The differences between these versions are substantial enough to challenge traditional editorial practices. Q1 includes 285 lines absent from F1, whereas F1 contains around 100 lines missing from Q1.
At least a thousand individual words differ between the two texts, each displaying distinct styles of punctuation. About half the verse lines in the Folio appear either as prose or differently divided in the Quarto. Early editors like Alexander Pope conflated these texts, creating the modern version commonly used since that time. They operated under assumptions that the differences did not indicate re-writing by the author, believing instead that Shakespeare wrote only one original manuscript which is now lost.
In 2021, Duncan Salkeld endorsed this view, suggesting Q1 was typeset by a reader dictating to the compositor, leading to slips caused by mishearing. Other editors such as Nuttall and Bloom have suggested Shakespeare himself may have been involved in reworking passages to accommodate performances and other textual requirements. As early as 1931, Madeleine Doran proposed that the two texts had independent histories, with these differences being critically interesting. This argument gained wider discussion in the late 1970s when revived by Michael Warren and Gary Taylor.
The New Cambridge Shakespeare has published separate editions of Q and F, while the most recent Pelican Shakespeare edition contains both the 1608 Quarto and the 1623 Folio text alongside a conflated version. The New Arden edition edited by R. A. Foakes offers a conflated text indicating those passages found only in Q or F. Both Anthony Nuttall of Oxford University and Harold Bloom of Yale University have supported the idea that Shakespeare revised the tragedy at least once during his lifetime.
John F. Danby argued in his 1949 work Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature that Lear dramatizes contemporary meanings of nature. Words like nature, natural, and unnatural appear over forty times in the play, reflecting debates about what nature truly was during Shakespeare's era. These words find symbolic expression in Lear's changing attitude toward thunder. Two strongly contrasting views of human nature exist within the play: one represented by Lear, Gloucester, Albany, and Kent, exemplifying the philosophy of Bacon and Hooker; another embodied by Edmund, Cornwall, Goneril, and Regan, akin to later Hobbesian views.
Psychoanalytic interpretations offer further insight into the psychological dynamics at play. Coppélia Kahn provides an analysis of the maternal subtext found in the absence of legitimate mothers. She suggests Lear's old age forces him to regress into an infantile disposition, seeking love traditionally satisfied by a mothering woman. In this reading, Cordelia becomes a mother figure whose refusal to dedicate herself to him as more than a father resists incestuous undertones. The situation reverses parent-child roles, making Lear's madness a childlike rage due to deprivation of filial or maternal care.
Sigmund Freud asserted that Cordelia symbolizes Death itself. When Lear rejects his daughter at the beginning, he is rejecting death. His unwillingness to face the finitude of his being culminates when Cordelia forces the realization of his mortality. Harold Bloom refers to Edmund as Shakespeare's most original character, noting his pure Machiavellianism lacks Oedipal motives present in other villains like Iago. Edmund has no passions whatsoever and never loved anyone, distinguishing him from all other characters created by Shakespeare.
From the Restoration until the mid-19th century, the performance history of King Lear was not Shakespeare's version but Nahum Tate's 1681 adaptation titled The History of King Lear. This popular revision omitted the Fool entirely and introduced a happy ending where both Lear and Cordelia survive. It also developed a love story between Cordelia and Edgar, two characters who never interact in Shakespeare's original text, which ends with their marriage.
Tate admired Shakespeare's natural genius but sought to augment his work with contemporary standards guided by neoclassical unities of time, place, and action. He described the tragedy as a heap of jewels unstrung and unpolished yet dazzling in disorder. Other changes included giving Cordelia a confidante named Arante and adding titilating material such as amorous encounters between Edmund and both Regan and Goneril. Scenes were added where Edgar rescues Cordelia from attempted kidnapping and rape, and one where Cordelia wears men's pants revealing her ankles.
The play ended with a celebration of the King's blest Restauration, an obvious reference to Charles II. In the early 18th century, writers like Joseph Addison began expressing objections to this approach. Writing in The Spectator on the 16th of April 1711, Addison stated that while King Lear is admirable as Shakespeare wrote it, reformed according to chimerical notions of poetical justice, it has lost half its beauty. Despite these criticisms, Tate's version prevailed on stage for nearly 150 years until Edmund Kean reinstated the tragic ending in 1823.
Charles Lamb established the Romantics' attitude toward King Lear in his 1811 essay On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considering its fitness for stage representation. He argued the play is essentially impossible to be represented on stage, preferring to experience it in the study. Seeing Lear acted meant seeing an old man tottering about the stage with a walking stick turned out by his daughters on a rainy night, which appeared painful and disgusting rather than grand. Reading stimulated imagination instead of appealing merely to senses.
John Philip Kemble introduced more of Shakespeare's text while preserving three main elements of Tate's version: the love story, omission of the Fool, and happy ending. William Macready performed Shakespeare's version freed from Tate's adaptations at Covent Garden in 1838. The restored character of the Fool was played by actress Priscilla Horton, described by one spectator as fragile, hectic, beautiful-faced, and half-idiot-looking. Helen Faucit's final appearance as Cordelia dead in her father's arms became one of the most iconic Victorian images.
By mid-century, actor-manager traditions declined, replaced by structures where major theatre companies employed professional directors as auteurs. Donald Wolfit played Lear in 1944 on a Stonehenge-like set, praised by James Agate as the greatest piece of Shakespearean acting since he began writing for the Sunday Times. Peter Brook set the action simply against a huge empty white stage at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1962. This effect caught both human pathos and universal scale according to scholar Roger Warren. Some lines from the radio broadcast were later used by The Beatles to add into their song I Am the Walrus.
The first film adaptation of King Lear was a five-minute German version made around 1905 which has not survived. The oldest extant version is a ten-minute studio-based production from 1909 by Vitagraph attempting to cram as much plot as possible into its runtime. Two silent versions titled Re Lear were made in Italy in 1910; Gerolamo Lo Savio filmed his on location while dropping the Edgar sub-plot. Louis Feuillade's 1911 French adaptation Le Roi Lear Au Village used a contemporary setting.
Grigori Kozintsev's Korol Lir and Peter Brook's film starring Paul Scofield date from the early 1970s. Pauline Kael hated Brook's production, suggesting an alternative title Night of the Living Dead, yet Robert Hatch called it excellent filming and Vincent Canby described it as exalting with exquisite terror. The film drew on ideas of Jan Kott observing that King Lear was precursor to absurdist theatre with parallels to Beckett's Endgame. Critics complained the world commences dark, colorless, and wintry leaving Lear, land, and audience nowhere to go.
Akira Kurosawa's Ran became the most expensive Japanese film ever made at the time. It tells the story of Hidetora, a fictional 16th-century Japanese warlord whose attempt to divide his kingdom among three sons leads to estrangement and civil war. Unlike cold drab greys of Brook and Kozintsev, Kurosawa's film is full of vibrant colors: yellows, blues, greens for external scenes; browns and ambers for interiors. Emi Wada won an Oscar for her color-coded costumes for each family member's soldiers. Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres set in 1990s Iowa forms another major adaptation confronting disturbing sexual dimensions.
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Common questions
What sources did William Shakespeare use to write King Lear?
William Shakespeare drew heavily on Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande published in 1587. He also incorporated elements from anonymous sources like King Leir which was published in 1605 and John Higgins' The Mirror for Magistrates from 1574.
When were the different versions of King Lear first published?
Modern editors derive their texts from three extant publications including the 1608 quarto known as Q1 and the 1619 quarto known as Q2. The third version is the 1623 First Folio or F1 which contains around 100 lines missing from the earlier quarto editions.
How did Nahum Tate change the ending of King Lear during the Restoration period?
Nahum Tate's 1681 adaptation titled The History of King Lear omitted the Fool entirely and introduced a happy ending where both Lear and Cordelia survive. This popular revision developed a love story between Cordelia and Edgar who never interacted in Shakespeare's original text and ended with their marriage.
Who argued that Edmund is Shakespeare's most original character in King Lear?
Harold Bloom refers to Edmund as Shakespeare's most original character noting his pure Machiavellianism lacks Oedipal motives present in other villains like Iago. Edmund has no passions whatsoever and never loved anyone distinguishing him from all other characters created by Shakespeare.
What film adaptations of King Lear were released in the early 1970s?
Grigori Kozintsev's Korol Lir and Peter Brook's film starring Paul Scofield date from the early 1970s. Pauline Kael hated Brook's production suggesting an alternative title Night of the Living Dead yet Robert Hatch called it excellent filming and Vincent Canby described it as exalting with exquisite terror.