Shakespeare took the story and unleashed its apocalyptic tragedy, in which everyone dies except Edgar, who is to inherit the realm whose division, at the outset, led to the subsequent chaos that unfolded. The anonymous play, King Leir, on which Shakespeare based his tragedy also ends on a somewhat more upbeat note. But in fact the story of King Lear was originally a happy one, when it first appeared in the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century.

Less than a hundred years after Shakespeare wrote the play, in the 1680s, King Lear was given a rather dramatic (as it were) rewrite by the Poet Laureate, Nahum Tate. Thematically, these various strands work together to reinforce the play’s central concern with madness and reason, blindness and seeing.Īnd Shakespeare cleverly sets up the characters as doubles, opposites, and complements: as Harold Bloom notes in a persuasive analysis of King Lear (in his book Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human), in a play where so many of the major characters speak to each other at some point, it was canny of Shakespeare never to have Lear and Edmund speak a word to each other throughout the entire play, because they are complete antitheses: where Lear is all feeling, Edmund is ‘ice-cold’ and emotionless. Part of the artistic triumph of the play is the way Shakespeare brings all of these apparent contradictions together to create a piece of compelling drama that is moving without being sentimental, despairing but also illuminating.

The king lear by william shakespeare