King Lear: Plot and Context

PLOT

1. Lear banishes the daughter who loves him (Cordelia) and gives his kingdom to his two unloving daughters.
2. The daughters ignore the provisos of his inheritance and banish him.
3. Meanwhile, Gloucester, an adviser of Lear’s, believes his “unlawful” son Edmund’s slander about Edgar, his legitimate son; Edgar gets banished before Gloucester discovers Edmund’s the villain.
4. Cordelia finds her father and wages war against her sisters; Edgar finds and comforts his banished father.
5. Cordelia and Lear both die because of Edmund’s trickery; Edgar is left to run the kingdom.

CONTEXT

1. Lear’s unqualified love for his daughters echoes the doctrine of the “divine right of kings” invoked and articulated by King James I.
2. Elizabethan and Jacobean culture had several ways to reinforce hierarchy: land, dress, and performance. Edmund’s bastardy calls to mind these cultural forms of ranking.
3. The Jacobean laws of inheritance and primogeniture inform the play’s two plots.
4. The book is filled with references to pagan gods who administer punishments of various kinds. This pagan mythology is crucial to understanding the play’s meaning.
5. Shakespeare got the story from ancient English chronicles, and he controversially changed the “real-world” ending. In the chronicle, Cordelia lives.