num_pages: 384
description: Shakespeare’s King Lear challenges us with the magnitude, intensity, and sheer duration of the pain that it represents. Its figures harden their hearts, engage in violence, or try to alleviate the suffering of others. Lear himself rages until his sanity cracks. What, then, keeps bringing us back to King Lear? For all the force of its language, King Lear is almost equally powerful when translated, suggesting that it is the story, in large part, that draws us to the play.The play tells us about families struggling between greed and cruelty, on the one hand, and support and consolation, on the other. Emotions are extreme, magnified to gigantic proportions. We also see old age portrayed in all its vulnerability, pride, and, perhaps, wisdom—one reason this most devastating of Shakespeare’s tragedies is also perhaps his most moving.
language: English
title: King Lear
titlecomplete: King Lear
characters: Edgar, Edmund, Duke of Albany, Fool, Earl of Gloucester, Goneril, Leir of Britain, Cordelia, Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Kent, Regan
genres: Read For School, Theatre, Tragedy, School, Drama, Plays, Poetry, Literature, Classics, Fiction
ratings_count: 212567
publisher: Simon & Schuster