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William Shakespeare. English poet, dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet and considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time. King Lear in brief King Lear divides his kingdom among the two daughters who flatter him and banishes the third one who loves him. His eldest daughters both then reject him at their homes, so Lear goes mad and wanders through a storm. His banished daughter returns with an army, but they lose the battle and Lear, all his daughters and more, die. Characters. Lear: king of Britain. Goneril: Lear's ruthless oldest daughter and the wife of the duke of Albany. Regan: Lear's middle daughter and the wife the duke of Cornwal. Cordelia: Lear's youngest daughter, disowned by her father for refusing to flatter him. Duke of Cornwall. Duke of Albany. Earl of Kent. Earl of Gloucester. Edmund: illegitimate (bastard) son to Gloucester. Edgar: Gloucester's older, legitimate son. Fool: Lear's jester, who uses double-talk and seemingly frivolous songs to give Lear important advice. Oswald: steward to Goneril. Plot. The story opens in ancient Britain, where the elderly King Lear is deciding to give up his power and divide his realm amongst his three daughters, Cordelia, Regan, and Goneril. Lear's plan is to give the largest piece of his kingdom to the child who professes to love him the most, certain that his favorite daughter, Cordelia, will win the challenge. Goneril and Regan, corrupt and deceitful, lie to their father with sappy and excessive declarations of affection. Cordelia, however, refuses to engage in Lear's game, and replies simply that she loves him as a daughter should. Her lackluster retort, despite its sincerity, enrages Lear, and he disowns Cordelia completely. When Lear's dear friend, the Earl of Kent, tries to speak on Cordelia's behalf, Lear banishes him from the kingdom. Meanwhile, the King of France, present at court and overwhelmed by Cordelia's honesty and virtue, asks for her hand in marriage, despite her loss of a sizable dowry. Cordelia accepts the King of France's proposal, and instantly leaves Lear with her two cunning sisters. Kent, although banished by Lear, remains to try to o protect unwitting King from the evils of his two remaining children. He disguises himself and takes a job as Lear's servant. Now that Lear has turned over all his wealth and land to Regan and Goneril, their true natures surface at once. Lear and his few companions, including some knights, a fool, and the disguised Kent, go to live with Goneril, but she reveals that she plans to treat him like the old man he is while he is under her roof. So, Lear decides to stay instead with his other daughter, and he sends Kent ahead to deliver a letter to Regan, preparing her for his arrival. However, when Lear arrives at Regan's castle, he is horrified to see that Kent has been placed in stocks. Kent is soon set free, but before Lear can uncover who placed his servant in the stocks, Goneril arrives, and Lear realizes that Regan is conspiring with her sister against him. Gloucester arrives back at Regan's castle in time to hear that the two sisters are planning to murder the King. He rushes away immediately to warn Kent to send Lear to Dover, where they will find protection. Kent, Lear, and the Fool leave at once, while Edgar remains behind in the shadows. Sadly, Regan and Goneril discover Gloucester has warned Lear of their plot, and Cornwall, Regan's husband, gouges out Gloucester's eyes. A servant tries to help Gloucester and attacks Cornwall with a sword - a blow later to prove fatal. News arrives that Cordelia has raised an army of French troops that have landed at Dover. Regan and Goneril ready their troops to fight and they head to Dover. Meanwhile, Kent has heard the news of Cordelia's return, and sets off with Lear hoping that father and daughter can be reunited. Gloucester too tries to make his way to Dover and on the way, finds his own lost son, Edgar Tired from his ordeal, Lear sleeps through the battle between Cordelia and her sisters. When Lear awakes, he is told that Cordelia has been defeated. Lear takes the news well, thinking that he will be jailed with his beloved Cordelia - away from his evil offspring. However, the orders have come, not for Cordelia's imprisonment, but for her death. Despite their victory, the evil natures of Goneril and Regan soon destroy them. Both in love with Gloucester's conniving son, Edmund (who gave the order for Cordelia to be executed), Goneril poisons Regan. But when Goneril discovers that Edmund has been fatally wounded by Edgar, Goneril kills herself as well. As Edmund takes his last breath he repents and the order to execute Cordelia is reversed. But the reversal comes too late and Cordelia is hanged. Lear appears, carrying the body of Cordelia in his arms. Mad with grief, Lear bends over Cordelia's body, looking for a sign of life. The strain overcomes Lear and he falls dead on top of his daughter. Albany, Edgar, and the elderly Kent are left to take care of the country under a cloud of sorrow and regret. King Lear Characters analysis Lear's basic flaw at the beginning of the play is that he values appearances above reality. He wants to be treated as a king and to enjoy the title, but he doesn't want to fulfill a king's obligations of governing for the good of his subjects. Similarly, his test of his daughters demonstrates that he values a flattering public display of love over real love. He doesn't ask "which of you doth love us most," but rather, "which of you shall we say doth love us most?". Most readers conclude that Lear is simply blind to the truth, but Cordelia is already his favorite daughter at the beginning of the play, so presumably he knows that she loves him the most. Nevertheless, Lear values Goneril and Regan's fawning over Cordelia's sincere sense of filial duty. An important question to ask is whether Lear develops as a character-whether he learns from his mistakes and becomes a better and more insightful human being In some ways the answer is no: he doesn't completely recover his sanity and emerge as a better king. But his values do change over the course of the play. As he realizes his weakness and insignificance in comparison to the awesome forces of the natural world, he becomes a humble and caring individual. He comes to cherish Cordelia above everything else and to place his own love for Cordelia above every other consideration, to the point that he would rather live in prison with her than rule as a king again. Cordelia Cordelia's chief characteristics are devotion, kindness, beauty, and honesty-honesty to a fault, perhaps. She is contrasted throughout the play with Goneril and Regan, who are neither honest nor loving, and who manipulate their father for their own ends. By refusing to take part in Lear's love test at the beginning of the play, Cordelia establishes herself as a repository of virtue, and the obvious authenticity of her love for Lear makes clear the extent of the king's error in banishing her. For most of the middle section of the play, she is offstage, but as we observe the depredations of Goneril and Regan and watch Lear's descent into madness, Cordelia is never far from the audience's thoughts, and her beauty is venerably described in religious terms. Indeed, rumors of her return to Britain begin to surface almost immediately, and once she lands at Dover, the action of the play begins to move toward her, as all the characters converge on the coast. Cordelia's reunion with Lear marks the apparent restoration of order in the kingdom and the triumph- and forgiveness over hatred and spite. This fleeting moment of familial happiness makes the devastating finale of King Lear that much more cruel, as Cordelia, the personification of kindness and virtue, becomes a literal sacrifice to the heartlessness of an apparently unjust world. Edmund Of all of the play's villains, Edmund is the most complex and sympathetic. He is a consummate schemer, a Machiavellian character eager to seize any opportunity and willing to do anything to achieve his goals. However, his ambition is interesting insofar as it reflects not only a thirst for land and power but also a desire for the recognition denied to him by his status as a bastard. His serial treachery is not merely self-interested; it is a conscious rebellion against the social order that has denied him the same status as Gloucester's legitimate son, Edgar. "Now, gods, stand up for bastards," Edmund commands, but in fact he depends not on divine aid but on his own initiative. Hejs the ultimate self-made man, and he is such a cold and capable villain that it is entertaining to watch him work, much as the audience can appreciate the clever wickedness of lago in Othello. Only at the close of the play dees Edmund show a flicker of weakness. Mortally wounded, he sees that both Goneril and Regan have died for him, and whispers Yet Edmund was beloved". After this ambiguous statement, he seems to repent of his villainy and admits to having ordered Cordell's death. His peculiar change of heart, rare among Shakespearean villains, is enough to make the audienee wonder, amid the carnage, whether Edmund's villainy sprang not from some innate cruelty but simply from thwarted, misdirected desire for the familial love that he witnessed around him. Goneril is a classic villain. She embodies this bylying to her father about how much she loves him and by acting to erode Lear's authority and position. Se's married to the Duke of Albany, but as she rebels against her father and seeks power, her relationship with her husband deteriorates until the two of them actively loathe one another. She begins an affair with Edmund. When he's killed, she poisons her sister Regan and stabs herself. Regan is a cruel villain who feigns love for her father but betrays him for power. She causes others pain and dies at the hands of her own sis