Alongside Hamlet, King Lear is generally ranked as Shakespeare’s greatest achievement. The play was written at some time during 1603-6, when Shakespeare appears to have been at the very height of his dramatic powers. The story is based on the legend of a prehistorical King of Britain, who suffered from ungrateful children but the complexity and sophistication of theme and language brought to the plot by Shakespeare utterly transcends these fairly basic origins.

At the beginning of the play, the ageing King Lear has made the disastrous decision to abdicate his throne and live with whichever of his three daughters promises to love him and respect him in his declining years – i.e., the tragic flaw that prefigures the inevitably terrible ending has been enacted before the play even begins. The two older sisters, Goneril and Regan go through the motions as they are expected to do; unfortunately, the youngest and best loved daughter, Cordelia, refuses to play the game, answering instead that she will love her father purely according to the bond that unites them and wondering why her sisters had husbands if they ‘loved their father all.’ Lear’s pride does not allow him to compromise and Cordelia is banished, along with her new fiancé, who is destined to become the King of France. Lear then cavorts to his daughter’s place with a troop of unruly knights whom he expects to be fed and housed as they desire. The remaining daughters cause him to shuttle between their two residences with his expectations constantly diminishing. Ultimately, he is forced into the wilderness alone and wanders half-naked through the worst storm anyone has ever seen.

The atmosphere of cruelty and the breaking of bonds between family members and between ruler and ruled is reinforced by sub-plots involving Edmund and the Duke of Gloucester. Edmund, the ‘bastard,’ behaves as a completely amoral individual in a universe which is at best indifferent to human suffering and at worst actively fosters suffering and misery. As a result, he forces his legitimate brother to be thrown out of his inheritance and, also, to be forced to wander naked on the moor, where he confronts Lear. The Duke of Gloucester, meanwhile, does his best to act as a trusted advisor to the king but has his eyes gouged out by the treacherous daughters and their equally unpleasant husbands. As is common with Shakespearian tragedies, the bodies begin to pile up and, after all of the cosmic suffering endured in language of the highest intensity (for example in the ‘Blow wind and crack your cheeks’ speech), the only peace that is on offer for England is an invasion by the King of France and his wife Cordelia – for a modern analogy of how this would have been considered by Shakespeare’s audience, consider the invasion of Cambodia by the Vietnamese army as the means of defeating the Khmer Rouge.