King Lear (play by William Shakespeare)

Storylines

"King Lear" is a so-called double drama, each with a parallel development of conflict in structural terms; it tells the fate of two heroes: that of King Lear and his three daughters, and that of his advisor Count Gloucester and his two sons. At the beginning of the play, Lear banishes his daughter Cordelia and his henchman Kent. Edmund, the illegitimate son of Gloucester, plots against his brother Edgar, causing him to flee. Cordelia, Kent, and Edgar thus form the core group of righteous characters, those individuals who, though ostracized, are loyal to their fathers Lear and Gloucester. The elder daughters Goneril and Regan plot to disempower their wayward father. At the same time, Edmund, concerned only with his own advantage, coldly calculates to stir up his family to appropriate all of his father's inheritance. Regan, Goneril, and Edmund thus form the core group of disreputable characters who rebel against their fathers and seek to seize power. Regan can be sure of the support of her power-mad, brutal husband Cornwall. Goneril's husband, the Duke of Albany, on the other hand, does not allow himself to be drawn into the rebellion; he eventually switches to the camp of the righteous and honorable characters. The catalyst of the two main narratives is the subplot of the invasion of Britain by the French. The landing of the French army at Dover gives the drama an impetus that propels and accelerates events in extreme ways.

Main characters

The stage company of the drama consists of two groups, the family of King Lear and the family of his counselor, the Earl of Gloucester. Lear is old and abdicates. He divides the kingdom among his daughters. Because the youngest, Cordelia fails a love test, he disinherits her and marries her off without a dowry to the French king. The favored older daughters Goneril and Regan and their husbands Duke Albany and Duke Cornwall each receive half of the kingdom. The group of characters surrounding King Lear also includes Oswald, Goneril's obedient and ruthless steward, and the Earl of Kent, Lear's loyal retainer, whom the king banishes for defending Cordelia. The Earl of Gloucester is the father of Edgar and Edmund. The latter is an illegitimate son. Edmund plots against Edgar, so that the latter has to flee and disguises himself as the mad beggar Tom of Bedlam to protect himself from persecution. After his abdication, Lear is initially accompanied by his knights. After his daughters refuse to entertain his retinue, only his jester and the Earl of Kent, disguised as Caius the servant, stand by him.

Narrated time and places of action

The work is set in ancient Britain, usually the time of the action is assumed to be the 8th century BC. Act One begins the action in the king's court. Most of the events in acts two, three, and the beginning of act four alternate between Earl Gloucester's castle and events on a stormy night on the moors. From the second part of Act Four onwards, the places of action are the environs of the town of Dover, the cliffs there, and the army camps of the British and French. Between the first and second acts there is an unspecified period of time in which Cordelia goes to her new home with her husband, the King of France, and prepares to invade the island from there. After the French troops have landed near Dover, the action resumes with the second act. The following narrated time covers one night and the following day.

The exact date of the completion of a first version of the text of the work by Shakespeare himself has not been handed down; the composition of the drama can, however, be narrowed down with a very high degree of certainty to the period between spring 1603 and Christmas 1606.

The earliest possible date of composition of the work (so-called terminus post quem or terminus a quo) is evident from the numerous clear adoptions and borrowings in Edgar's alias Poor Tom's text from Samuel Harsnett's critical treatise A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures concerning public exorcisms of devils and demons by Catholic priests in the 1580s, which was entered in the Stationers' Register on 16 March 1603 and first printed in the same year.

As the latest possible date of the writing of "King Lear" (so-called terminus ante quem), the title page of the first quarto print of 1608 records a previous court performance of the play, which must have taken place on 26 December 1606: 'As it was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall / upon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes. / By his Maiesties seruants playing vsually at the Gloabe / on the Bancke-side'. Although the first quarto edition appeared in 1608, it is certain that the reference to the court performance is to a performance at Christmas in 1606, not 1607, since the entry of the printing rights of the work in the Stationers' Register on 26 November 1607 already refers to this performance at court in similar terms: Mr William Shakespeare his historye of Kynge Lear as yt was played before the kings maiestie at Whitehall yppon St Stephans night at Christmas Last by his maiesties servantes playing usually at the globe on the Banksyde.

On the basis of various textual indications, albeit not entirely free of doubt, such as individual parallels or similarities in wording with the older play The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which appeared anonymously in print in 1605, or presumed references to the lunar eclipse in September 1605 and the solar eclipse in October 1605 in Gloucester's allusion to "these late eclipses in the sun and the moon" (I.ii,100), the current discussion predominantly assumes that the work was composed around 1605; an even later dating to 1606 would mean that Shakespeare would have had to have been working on Macbeth at almost the same time, the composition of which is also assumed to have taken place around 1606.