Picture this: your country seems to be coming apart. Political processes are unstable, and tyrants and liars occupy positions of power.
Not only that, but your personal life is a mess. It feels like you’ve made irreparable mistakes in your career and relationships.
Everything seems to be falling apart, and you don’t know who to trust.
Wait, that sounds familiar? I was talking about King Lear.
Shakespeare’s King Lear doesn’t usually make the list of the most approachable Shakespeare plays, and maybe with good reason.
It’s bleak, violent, and seemingly downright nihilistic.
At the same time, it carries many warnings that apply to our times. As trust in our institutions erodes and families fall apart, the themes of King Lear are more relevant than ever.
Ultimately, King Lear is a story about people who make all the wrong choices until it’s too late to fix them.
Read this King Lear summary and analysis to learn from Lear’s mistakes - so you don’t have to make them in your own life.
What is King Lear About? (Short Summary)
Aging, conceited King Lear seeks to retire from his kingly duties. He plans to divide his kingdom among his three daughters.
To decide how to split up the kingdom, he calls his daughters before the court and commands them each to proclaim how much they love him.
The two oldest daughters, Goneril and Reagan, give extravagant speeches about their love for the King. His youngest and favorite daughter, Cordelia, refuses to flatter him and says nothing.
In response, the King casts Cordelia out and hands over his power to Goneril and Reagan.
Cordelia leaves to marry the king of France, while Lear begins his retirement.
To Lear’s astonishment, Goneril and Reagan disown the former king, leaving him homeless and destitute. He wanders the moors accompanied only by his Fool, descending into madness.
At the same time, a nobleman named Gloucester has similar family trouble.
Gloucester has one illegitimate son, Edmund, and one legitimate one, Edgar. Edmund makes a play for power by accusing Edgar of trying to kill Gloucester.
Gloucester believes this lie and evicts Edgar, who goes in disguise as a madman to avoid detection. He eventually ends up in Lear’s company, and the two wander the heaths together.
Meanwhile, Cordelia returns with the French army, trying to overthrow her sisters and save her father.
Gloucester attempts to help King Lear, and Goneril penalizes him for this treason by tearing out his eyes. The nobleman is left to wander the moors too.
Goneril and Reagan’s army captures Cordelia and Lear. For a brief time, they are united in prison, with a repentant Lear professing his love for his vindicated daughter.
Edmund commands that Cordelia be executed for treason. As he dies from battle wounds, he changes his mind, but the order had already been carried out.
Meanwhile, we learn that Edmund started affairs with both Reagan and Goneril. Jealous of her sister, Goneril poisons Reagan and then kills herself.
King Lear dies of grief. The kingdom is left to Goneril’s husband Albany, who restores Edgar’s power and invites Edgar to rule with him.
King Lear Themes
At first glance, King Lear seems horrifying. There’s no redemption, just an inescapable spiral of destruction.
Can this devastating political tale apply to your life?
As always with Shakespeare’s plays, when you look beneath the surface, you’ll find eternal themes that speak to you right where you are.
Should You Speak Truth to Power?
King Lear is full of proud, power-hungry characters: Lear, Reagan, Goneril, their husbands, Edmund, and more.
They all have something else in common: they don’t like being called out for what they are.
When Cordelia refuses to flatter her father and points out her sisters’ untruthfulness, he reacts with rage and strips her of her inheritance.
When Goneril and her husband begin torturing Gloucester, eventually tearing out his eyes, an unnamed servant steps in. He tells the couple that he has served them faithfully for years, but has never done them a greater service than to tell them to stop their evil actions.
In response, they kill the servant.
Neither Cordelia nor the servant get any benefit from telling the truth. In fact, they both end up dead for doing the right thing.
Only Lear’s Court Fool can tell him the truth, using dark humor to show him his faults.
So, is Shakespeare warning us that speaking truth to power is too dangerous?
Not quite. After all, even the characters who go along with evil end up dead too.
Instead, Shakespeare hints that in a turbulent political time, no one is safe. Doing the right thing doesn’t guarantee that you’ll end up ok, but neither does going along with wrongdoing.
Shakespeare is giving us a bleak choice. When you’re in a destructive situation with no way out, would you rather go down doing the right thing or the wrong one?
True, most of us will never face deadly political intrigue. But what about when your company is going under, or a nasty situation breaks out at your workplace?
Do you want to be the one scheming to save yourself, or the one who tells the truth even when it doesn’t benefit you?
Broken Families, Broken Society
Lear’s daughters turned on their father. Their cruelty caused him to lose his mind.
However, he disrespects them too. His abusive language towards them hints that Goneril and Reagan have reason to despise him.
Similarly, Gloucester taunts Edmund for his illegitimate status. Eventually, Edmund turns on his father.
In both families, resentment fuels the dysfunctional dynamics that eventually tear them apart. That resentment boils over into political strife, too.
In this play, family tragedy leads to war, because they’re a powerful royal family.
But as political as the play is, it’s also personal.
It’s about individual people whose choices undermine their families.
Can you separate personal treachery from political chaos? Can a country survive when its families are fractured?
How Late is Too Late?
Every character in the play, even Cordelia, makes mistakes. But right up until the last act, most of the characters have the chance to redeem themselves by choosing to do something good.
Most of them don’t.
For instance, Goneril and Reagan compound their crimes of cruelty, adultery, and murder by bickering over the same man. Ultimately, they die by a murder-suicide.
Edmund does try to redeem himself at the last moment. As he’s dying, he tries to remand the order to execute Cordelia, but it’s too late.
Even Lear tries to make up for his mistakes by apologizing to Cordelia and accepting life in prison with her. His repentance comes too late as well: he already started the domino effect that ends in her death.
Shakespeare paints a brutal picture: sometimes it’s just too late to avoid the consequences of our mistakes.
But does that mean we shouldn’t repent of them anyway?
It may have been too late to save Cordelia, but the fact that Edmund tried to do something right adds a glimmer of hope to the play.
What is King Lear’s Tragic Flaw?
King Lear’s tragic flaw is blindness.
He loves to be flattered, so he doesn’t question the motives of people who tell him what he wants to hear.
King Lear is blind to himself as well. He thinks that spending his retirement surrounded by luxury will make him happy, not realizing that his real happiness comes from being with his favorite daughter, Cordelia.
In the words of his daughter Reagan, “He hath ever but slenderly known himself.”
Shakespeare makes sure we can’t miss the theme of blindness in the play.
Gloucester, for example, gets literally blinded. And it’s no coincidence that once he does, he finally begins to “see” things for how they really are.
King Lear’s last line, by the way, is “Look there, look there!” He’s finally learned to see what really matters, but it’s too late for him.
Is King Lear a True Story?
As with many of his plays, Shakespeare based King Lear on a real historical figure.
The historical Lear (or Leir) was a king of Briton before the Romans occupied it. According to the legend, his story has a lot in common with Shakespeare’s play, at least at first.
The historical Lear did have three daughters, one of whom he banished. The two oldest turned against him.
However, the historical Lear legend has a happy ending. The story says that he sought asylum with Cordelia in France, and together they took back the kingdom from the evil sisters.
Shakespeare put his own spin on the story, turning it into a tragedy.
Best King Lear Quotes
“This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.”
-Act 3 Scene 4
Lear has lost everything. He’s wandering on the moors on a stormy night, starting to lose his mind.
This quotation reminds us that adverse circumstances can drive anyone to insanity.
Whether you’re faced with a tough situation in the office or nationwide political instability, beware. Everyone is capable of cracking under pressure - including you.
“We two will sing like birds in a cage.”
-Act 5 Scene 3
King Lear learns too late that the only thing that really matters is being with his loved ones. Reunited with Cordelia, he assures her that they can be truly happy together, chattering like birds, even while caged in prison.
Sadly, his enemies rip Cordelia from him once again.
Learn from Lear’s mistakes: value the ones you love while you still have them.
“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?”
-Act 5 Scene 3
Cradling the body of Cordelia, Lear howls at the unfairness of her death. He asks an unanswerable question: why do people who seem so young, innocent, and worthy of life, die?
When you’ve lost someone you love, the only comfort is knowing that you’re not alone. Others understand what you’re going through.
With this line, Shakespeare captures the agony of losing a loved one. 400 years later, this line is as fresh and raw as if a grieving parent wrote it today.
What is the Main Idea of King Lear?
The poetry may be beautiful, but let’s face it: even this brief King Lear summary is pretty depressing.
So what are we supposed to take away from it? Is the lesson here, “There’s no hope, so don’t try?”
Not exactly. The play seems nihilistic because everyone in it makes bad (and sometimes downright stupid) decisions that lead to their downfall.
But that doesn’t mean everyone has to end up that way.
In the play King Lear, we see things fall apart as the result of bad decisions. We can sit in the audience and judge the characters’ choices.
But when the play’s over, we’re left asking ourselves: if we were in the characters’ shoes, would we have done any better than they did?
By asking ourselves that question, we're able to arrive at the main idea of the play.
What circumstances in our own lives are we comfortably blind to? Which character flaws in ourselves do we love to overlook?
Is our selfishness making our kids or spouse unhappy? Are we the ones at fault in a fight with a friend?
Lear is begging us to learn from his mistakes. “Look there, look there!” he pleads, meaning: don’t be blinded by pride or comfortable lies.
In your political situation and your family, it’s often the things you least want to see that you most need to know.
Facing the uncomfortable truth about ourselves can save our relationships, families, and community. Ignoring our faults, on the other hand, leads to tension, resentment, and destruction.
King Lear gives us a somber warning: try to see things clearly before it’s too late.
Start Reading Shakespeare Now
Thankfully, not all of Shakespeare’s plays are as bleak as King Lear.
Once you begin reading his plays, you’ll discover horror thrillers, side-splitting rom-coms, tales of young love, and more.
In fact, reading Shakespeare will dramatically change your life.
That’s why I wrote a book to get you started on reading (and loving) Shakespeare’s plays.
Get your free copy of The Bard and the Bees: What Shakespeare taught me about sex, evil, and life in the modern world by clicking the link above.
You’ll learn how to go beyond a short King Lear summary and discover the Bard’s riches for yourself.