King Lear

Alone among her sisters, Cordelia is a truth-teller. Like Edgar, she’s a victim of her family’s schemes, shortsightedness, and selfishness. Unlike Edgar, she’s a shrewd seer right from the start, well aware that Lear’s manipulations fly in the face of real love. Cordelia’s profound courage and goodness are at first visible only to a few other clear-eyed characters: Kent, the Fool, and the King of France, who marries her and later helps her mount an invasion to save her father.

Cordelia is Lear’s favorite, but he only comes to understand his daughter’s true worth after he rejects her for refusing to play along with his games. Her brutal and preventable death speaks to the play’s unflinching engagement with the world’s injustices. When the 17th-century playwright Nahum Tate reworked King Lear to be a little more palatable for squeamish audiences, he was so appalled by this ending that he rescued Cordelia and married her off to Edgar.

Goneril is the eldest of Lear’s daughters. Like her sister Regan, she is conniving and selfish. But she’s also pitiable. She seems to be the least favorite of Lear’s daughters. Less tricky than Regan and less beloved than Cordelia, she’s set up to fail from the start in Lear’s “who-loves-me-most?” contest. And when Lear turns on her in anger, his curse entreating the gods to make her infertile draws attention to the fact that this eldest daughter, married for some time, is still childless. Her unhappy marriage to Albany degenerates over the course of the play, and when Regan’s lust for Edmund imperils Goneril’s own claim on Edmund’s heart, Goneril turns to murder, poisoning her own sister.

Regan is the middle child of the Lear family and the cleverest schemer of the bunch. Her cunning play off Goneril’s initial love-speech—“I love you just like Goneril says, but even more!”—suggests that she’s learned manipulation and power-lust at her father’s knee. Regan becomes steadily more frightening over the course of the play. She takes sadistic pleasure in gouging out Gloucester’s eyes and instructing that he be thrown out to “smell/his way to Dover” (3.7.94-95). Her eventual death-match with Goneril over Edmund’s favor—a death-match she loses—suggests a poisonous dynamic running deep in Lear’s family: these two sisters have been trained to believe that love and power are commodities that must be won at any cost.

The earnest, trusting Edgar grows up fast over the course of the play. Gloucester’s legitimate son, he is easily fooled by the machinations of his half-brother Edmund. When he flees into the night, he chooses the least comfortable disguise he can, becoming the naked lunatic “Poor Tom.” His time as Poor Tom is as transformative for him as it is for Lear. In enacting the role of a gibbering and impoverished beggar, he comes into contact with a deep reality about human life: we’re all a suit of clothes and a roof away from our helpless animal nature, and we rely on each other to keep the wolves away

Edgar also becomes an artist through his disguise, constructing a vivid imaginary “cliff of Dover” to save his father’s life. When Edgar concludes that humans must “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” he’s refers to the truths that art can reveal as well, as the honesty of a person like Cordelia or Kent.

The illegitimate Edmund is a charismatic, eloquent, and ruthless villain—right up until the end of his life. Embittered by his father Gloucester’s scorn for him, Edmund becomes obsessed with climbing the social ladder. He spends most of the play turning families against each other to further his own ends. He sows division between his father and his brother, and he encourages Goneril and Regan to fight—and ultimately die—for his love. But when Edgar at last defeats him, some glimmer of humanity seeps out of Edmund. Remembering that “Edmund was beloved,” he tries to stop Cordelia and Lear’s executions—executions he ordered. Many of the play’s questions about fate and character center on this complex figure.

The Earl of Gloucester, like his friend and counterpart Lear, begins the play hot-tempered and small-minded. Openly scornful of his illegitimate son Edmund, he is a despotic parent, demanding perfunctorily that Edmund show him his private correspondence. Unfortunately for him, this demand plays right into Edmund’s plan to disinherit his innocent half-brother Edgar. Gloucester’s immediate willingness to believe that his loving son Edgar wishes to kill him suggests his fearful limitations. Like Lear, he is so self-involved he can’t recognize love or treachery where he finds them. Ironically, it’s only after Gloucester is violently blinded that he can see the truth. 

The heartbreakingly loyal Kent sticks by Lear no matter what, understanding that the king needs support most when he is at his worst. Like Edgar, Kent finds freedom in his disguise. As Caius, he is able to speak bluntly for the first time. He takes great pleasure in doing so, as in Act 2, Scene 2 when he gleefully and colorfully insults Goneril’s servant Oswald. A pragmatist, Kent focuses on getting Lear out of the storm at all costs. But when his master finally dies, he is unable to continue living.