King Lear
William Shakespeare (1606)
“A king gives away everything and discovers, too late, that power was all he was — and that the children who flattered him were never his children at all.”
Characters in King Lear
by William Shakespeare · 1606 · 8 characters analyzed
Cast: King Lear, Cordelia, Edmund, Goneril and Regan, Gloucester, Edgar, The Fool, Kent.
Character Analysis
A king who has confused love with performance and power with identity. His tragedy is not that he is foolish — he is capable of profound insight — but that he achieves that insight through a process of destruction that cannot be undone. By the time he is a better human being, everyone who made his humanity worth living for is dead.
Formal verse that cracks under pressure. Increasingly long speeches that spiral rather than conclude. In madness: rapid associative prose, street-level vocabulary, direct address to strangers.