50 Fun Facts About King Lear

What must King Lear's daughters profess to earn their shares of his kingdom?

Love. Goneril and Regan flatter him and get a third each, while Cordelia, the one who truly loves him, will not compete and is disowned.

What is Cordelia's one-word reply when Lear asks what she can say to earn a richer share?

Nothing. Lear tells her to speak again, and when she still will not flatter him he disowns her and splits her share between her two sisters.

Which suitor marries Cordelia even after Lear strips her of her dowry?

The King of France. Burgundy backs out the moment the dowry is gone, but France declares that she is herself a dowry and carries her off to be his queen.

In King Lear, the king says it is 'sharper than a serpent's tooth' to have what?

A thankless child. Lear means Goneril, the first daughter to turn on him, and in the same speech he prays that she will be barren.

Regan, King Lear's middle daughter, is married to which duke?

Cornwall. He and Regan are well matched in cruelty: he puts out the Earl of Gloucester's eyes for helping the king, and she urges him on.

What does King Lear insist on keeping when he abdicates?

A hundred knights. Goneril and Regan whittle the number down until Regan asks why he needs even one, and Lear walks out on them both rather than give way.

Which nobleman, banished for defending Cordelia, returns in disguise to serve King Lear?

The Earl of Kent. He takes the name Caius and gets himself hired by the very king who banished him, and tells Lear who he is only in the final scene.

What punishment do Regan and her husband give King Lear's messenger for brawling with Oswald?

They put him in the stocks. It is a punishment for petty thieves, so using it on the king's own messenger is a deliberate insult, and Lear calls it worse than murder.

Edmund, the Earl of Gloucester's illegitimate son, turns his father against his brother Edgar using what?

A forged letter. Edmund makes a show of hiding it, lets his father demand to read it, and Gloucester finds what looks like Edgar plotting to kill him for his estate.

In King Lear, the fugitive Edgar disguises himself as a mad beggar under what name?

Tom o' Bedlam. Edgar grimes his face with filth and wears only a blanket, and the disguise is so complete that he later guides his own blinded father unrecognised.

Where does King Lear end up raging after his daughters shut their doors on him?

On a heath in a storm. Lear shouts back at the thunder and dares the weather to do its worst, until his Fool and a loyal servant coax him into a hovel.

Which philosopher's Essays, translated by John Florio in 1603, are among King Lear's possible sources?

Montaigne. Shakespeare seems to have read Florio's translation closely: he went back to it for The Tempest, where an old lord's dream of a perfect commonwealth follows the essay on cannibals.

Who mortally wounds Regan's husband as he gouges out Gloucester's eyes?

One of his own servants. The man has served him since boyhood and cannot watch any longer; he wounds his master, and Regan stabs him from behind for it.

Edgar tricks the suicidal Gloucester into believing he has survived a leap from what?

The cliffs of Dover. Edgar describes the dizzying drop so vividly that his blind father believes it, falls forward on flat ground, and is told he survived by a miracle.

In King Lear, blinded Gloucester says the gods kill men for sport as 'wanton boys' kill what?

Flies. Gloucester says it at his lowest, newly blinded and sure the son he wronged is lost to him, while that son stands beside him unrecognised.

How does Regan die in King Lear?

Poisoned by Goneril. Both sisters want Edmund, and Goneril would sooner kill her own sister than lose him; Regan sickens just as she announces she will marry him.

What happens to Goneril after Edmund is mortally wounded in King Lear?

She kills herself offstage. Albany has just confronted her with her own letter plotting his murder, and rather than answer for it she runs off and stabs herself.

How does Edgar finally bring down his treacherous half-brother Edmund in King Lear?

In a trial by combat. Edgar answers the herald's trumpet in armour with his face hidden, strikes Edmund down, and only then says who he is.

How does Cordelia die in King Lear?

Hanged in prison. Edmund ordered it made to look like suicide, and his dying change of heart comes minutes too late: Lear walks in carrying her body.

Which 12th-century writer first recorded Leir, the legendary British king behind Shakespeare's King Lear?

Geoffrey of Monmouth. He claimed his history was translated from a very old British book, a claim historians dismiss as invention, and the same work launched King Arthur into European literature.

In medieval legend, King Leir, the model for Shakespeare's Lear, founded which English city?

Leicester. The name really goes back to an early tribe, the Ligore, perhaps called after a local river; the same chronicle has Leir's father Bladud founding Bath.

Whose Chronicles gave Shakespeare the Lear story as well as Macbeth, Cymbeline and many of his history plays?

Raphael Holinshed. He was hired to help write a history of the whole world; when its printer died the plan shrank to the British Isles, and the result became Shakespeare's favourite quarry.

The Gloucester subplot of King Lear, a blinded father and two sons, comes from which Elizabethan prose romance?

Sidney's Arcadia. In Sidney's tale a king loses his throne and his sight to a scheming bastard son, and the loyal son he had cast off leads him about as a beggar.

How does Shakespeare's King Lear end for the old king himself?

He dies of grief. Lear carries in his dead daughter and dies moments later, still searching her lips for a sign of breath.

In King Lear, which recent omens does Gloucester blame for the kingdom's troubles, a clue to the play's date?

Eclipses. 'These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us,' he says, and a lunar and a solar eclipse really did fall about two weeks apart in autumn 1605.

King Lear's earliest recorded performance was a Christmas show at court for which monarch?

James I. The court watched a king break Britain apart on St Stephen's night 1606, three years after James had joined the crowns of England and Scotland.

Shakespeare wrote the role of Lear for which leading tragedian of his company?

Richard Burbage. He was also the first Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, and when he died an elegy mourned 'kind Lear' among the characters who had died with him.

King Lear's Fool may have been written for which comic actor of Shakespeare's company?

Robert Armin. He took over from the knockabout clown Will Kempe, and Shakespeare's fools changed to suit him, turning sharp-tongued and often wiser than their masters.

Since the 1700s, how have most editors treated the differing 1608 and 1623 texts of King Lear?

Merged them. The Folio drops about 300 of the quarto's lines, a whole scene among them, and adds about 100 of its own, so editors long blended the two into a play that matches neither.

Which writer's 1681 King Lear had a happy ending and an Edgar–Cordelia romance?

Nahum Tate. He called Shakespeare's play a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished, so he cut the Fool and rewarded the good, and for a century and a half audiences saw only his version.

Which actor-manager brought Shakespeare's own text of King Lear back to the London stage in 1838?

William Macready. He put the Fool back after an absence of more than 150 years, but played safe with the casting and gave the part to a young actress, Priscilla Horton.

Which Romantic essayist argued in 1811 that King Lear is essentially impossible to stage?

Charles Lamb. He wanted the play read, not acted, and he had already put it on the page for children: with his sister Mary he wrote Tales from Shakespeare, taking the tragedies himself.

Folklorists class King Lear as a variant of which tale type?

Love Like Salt. In an English version, Cap o' Rushes, the third daughter says she loves her father as fresh meat loves salt, and he turns her out of the house on the spot.

Which director staged King Lear on a huge empty white stage at Stratford in 1962 and later filmed it?

Peter Brook. For the film he took his cast to Denmark in midwinter and shot in black and white among frozen dunes, a landscape as bare as his stage had been.

Who played Lear in the stark black-and-white 1971 British film inspired by the theatre of Beckett?

Paul Scofield. He had first played the part on stage nine years earlier, not as a wronged old giant but as an edgy, capricious old man, so hard to live with that his daughters no longer looked like monsters.

Which Nobel-winning writer's translation did Grigori Kozintsev use for his Soviet film of King Lear?

Boris Pasternak. He had died in 1960, years before the film; out of favour under Stalin, he had turned from his own poetry to translating Shakespeare's tragedies into Russian.

Whose 1983 King Lear for Granada Television was his last Shakespeare role on screen?

Laurence Olivier. He was 75 and frail after serious illness, yet the performance won him an Emmy, nearly forty years after he first played the part at the Old Vic.

Akira Kurosawa's 1985 film Ran moves the Lear story to feudal Japan and replaces the daughters with what?

Three sons. Kurosawa is said to have begun with a parable about the warlord Mori Motonari, famous for three loyal sons, and wondered what would have happened had they been bad.

Kurosawa's Lear film Ran earned four Oscar nominations but won only which award?

Best Costume Design. Emi Wada won it, but the film never competed as best foreign-language film: Japan's industry, on poor terms with Kurosawa, entered a different title.

In Richard Eyre's 2018 BBC film set in a militarised modern London, who played Lear?

Anthony Hopkins. He had played Lear at the National Theatre some thirty years earlier and felt he got it wrong because he was too young; at 80 he judged himself ready.

Jane Smiley's Pulitzer-winning 1991 novel A Thousand Acres retells King Lear on a farm in which US state?

Iowa. Smiley hands the story to the eldest daughter, so the sisters Shakespeare made villains get to give their side and the old farmer looks far less wronged.

Christopher Moore's 2009 comic novel retells King Lear from whose point of view?

The court jester's. Moore names his narrator Pocket and calls the book simply Fool, and he raids other plays as he goes, borrowing the three witches from Macbeth.

Which opera composer planned a King Lear for decades and had a libretto written but never set it?

Giuseppe Verdi. He turned Macbeth, Othello and Falstaff into operas, but Lear beat him: the libretto, Re Lear, sat unset while he took the project up and dropped it again for years.

Which Beatles song fades out on voices from a BBC radio broadcast of King Lear?

I Am the Walrus. John Lennon fed a live radio into the mix, and it happened to be carrying the scene where the steward Oswald is killed, so his dying lines are on the record.

Which actor made his American television debut playing Lear?

Orson Welles. The 1953 live broadcast squeezed the play into little more than an hour, and it did so by cutting Gloucester's sons, Edgar and Edmund, out of the story altogether.

Which actor played King Lear for Trevor Nunn and the RSC in 2007, in a staging later filmed for television?

Ian McKellen. On stage he played the mad scenes naked, but the American broadcaster would not allow that, so the filmed version keeps him partly covered.

Which actress played Lear himself on stage in 2016 and again in 2019?

Glenda Jackson. She had given up acting for politics and sat as a Labour MP from 1992 to 2015, then returned to the stage at 80 by taking on the old king.

Which 18th-century actor-manager first began restoring Shakespeare's lines to the rewritten King Lear then in use?

David Garrick. He cut many of the adapter's lines and at first played the king in the dress of his own day, yet he kept the happy ending his audiences expected.

In his first soliloquy in King Lear, the bastard Edmund declares which force to be his goddess?

Nature. Edmund means the law of the wild as against custom, which brands him a bastard and bars him from inheriting, and he ends the speech vowing to have his brother's land.

Which TV drama is widely read as a modern King Lear?

Succession. Logan Roy's children compete for control of his media empire, and Brian Cox, who plays him, once toured the world as King Lear and wrote a book about it.