100 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.

King Lear was kept off London's main stages for a decade because of which British monarch's illness?

George III had himself gone mad, so a play about a mad old king was thought too close to home from 1811 to 1820; both big theatres staged it again soon after he died.

Donald Wolfit supposedly drank eight bottles of what during each of his 1944 King Lear performances?

Guinness reportedly fuelled a performance one leading critic called the greatest Shakespearean acting he had reviewed, given on a Stonehenge-like set by the last great actor-manager.

Which 1990 sequel echoes King Lear with an ageing patriarch whose daughter dies in his arms?

The Godfather Part III deliberately borrows from the play: Michael Corleone tries to retire from crime, and stepping down throws his domain into anarchy.

Goneril, eldest of King Lear's daughters, is married to which nobleman, who later turns on her?

Duke of Albany is the title of the mild husband she despises; horrified by her cruelty, he denounces her as a traitor and is one of the few left alive at the end.

The title of Ran, Akira Kurosawa's samurai film based on King Lear, can be translated as what?

Chaos is what follows when the warlord Hidetora hands power to his heirs, in what was then the most expensive Japanese film ever made.

Which Star Trek captain played John Lear in King of Texas, a 2002 TV western based on King Lear?

Patrick Stewart's John Lear is a cattle baron in the independent Texas of the 1840s, and because cable channel TNT made the film it could keep a bleaker, more violent ending.

Which actress played Cordelia opposite Emma Thompson's Goneril in the 2018 BBC film of King Lear?

Florence Pugh played the youngest daughter, with Emily Watson as Regan, in a film the BBC co-produced with Amazon Studios and gave a 21st-century setting.

Which phrase about ending where one began does the dying Edmund use of fortune's wheel in King Lear?

Come full circle is how Edmund sums up his fall: the brother he cheated has just beaten him, leaving him back at the bottom where he started.

Which bird, once said to feed its young on its own blood, does King Lear compare his daughters to?

Pelican daughters, he calls them: in the old fable the mother bird wounds her breast to feed her chicks, and Lear feels his own flesh and blood are draining him the same way.

Which Russian novelist's attack on King Lear provoked Orwell's 1947 essay defending Shakespeare?

Leo Tolstoy denounced Shakespeare as a bad dramatist whose fame rested on propaganda by German professors; Orwell traced the quarrel to a clash between religious and humanist views of life.

Which suitor abandons his pursuit of Cordelia in King Lear the moment her father cancels her dowry?

The Duke of Burgundy admits he will take her only with the portion first promised, and Cordelia answers that a man who courts a fortune will never be her husband.

What does King Lear call for in the opening scene to show how he has carved up Britain?

A map is the first thing Lear demands, proof that the shares were already drawn before any daughter spoke; the speeches were meant as a public show, not a real contest.

What is the mad King Lear wearing on his head when he is spotted singing in the fields?

A crown of weeds and wild flowers, nettles and hemlock among them, has replaced the gold one he gave away, and Cordelia sends troops out to bring him in.

What does King Lear start doing when a near-naked beggar convinces him man is only a bare animal?

Tearing off his clothes is Lear's bid to become the bare creature he sees before him, until the Fool begs him to calm down because it is no weather for a swim.

How does King Lear plan to split his retirement between Goneril and Regan once he hands over power?

A month with each in turn was the plan, with both daughters paying for his followers, but Goneril has lost patience with the arrangement inside the first fortnight.

How does the blinded Gloucester die in King Lear, according to the account his son Edgar gives?

His heart bursts 'smilingly', torn between joy and sorrow, when Edgar finally admits that the beggar who has been guiding him is the son he wrongly cast out.

What does King Lear believe he sees stirring with the dead Cordelia's breath in the final scene?

A feather seems to move, and for a moment he cries that she lives; he had just asked for a looking-glass to see whether her breath would mist it.

Which small fastening does the dying King Lear ask someone to undo just before his last breath?

A button is the last thing the once all-powerful king asks for help with, and he thanks the helper politely before turning to look at Cordelia's lips.

What insult does Regan add in King Lear while her bound host Gloucester is questioned as a traitor?

She plucks his beard, an outrage against an old man in his own house that Gloucester calls most ignobly done, moments before the scene turns far more violent.

What does the furious King Lear call down on Goneril in a curse as he quits her house?

Sterility is the curse, and he adds that any baby she does bear should grow up spiteful enough to stamp wrinkles into her young face.

Which of his father's beliefs does Edmund mock in King Lear as an excuse for human failings?

Astrology is 'the excellent foppery of the world' to Edmund, who jokes that he would be exactly the same villain whichever star had twinkled over his conception.

What does Edmund deliberately wound in King Lear to make his father believe Edgar attacked him?

His own arm is the price of the trick: Edmund cuts it once Edgar has fled, remarking that he has seen drunkards do worse for fun, then shouts for help.

When King Lear wakes from madness in Cordelia's tent, what does he first take his daughter to be?

A spirit is his first guess, because he believes he has died and is being dragged out of the grave, bound on a wheel of fire while she is a soul in bliss.

What does Goneril accuse King Lear's followers of when she insists that he send half of them away?

Riot and debauchery, she says, have made her palace feel more like a tavern or a brothel; Lear calls her a liar and insists his men are the choicest in the land.

Which piece of furniture stands in for Goneril when the mad King Lear holds a mock court?

A stool plays the accused: Lear names a beggar and his Fool as the judges, and the Fool apologises that he mistook 'Goneril' for a joint-stool.

Where do King Lear and his Fool first take shelter after being shut out of Gloucester's castle?

A hovel is all the land has left to offer its former king; before going in, he prays for the homeless poor and admits he took too little care of them while he ruled.

King Lear, whose characters swear by Apollo and Jupiter, is set in which period of Britain's past?

Before the Romans came is the setting: the chronicle Shakespeare used places Lear around 800 BC, so the Roman gods he swears by are as out of place as his dukes.

Which stage practice may explain why Cordelia and the Fool never appear together in King Lear?

Doubling of parts is the theory: one boy player could have taken both, since the Fool only arrives after Cordelia has gone abroad and vanishes before her return.

What does the dying Edmund try to do in King Lear's last scene, hoping to manage one good deed?

Halt an execution is his one late kindness: he admits he has signed away the lives of Lear and Cordelia and sends his sword as a token, but the reprieve comes too late.

Which Elizabethan epic poem, first published in 1590, contains an earlier King Lear story?

The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser's vast tribute to Elizabeth I, has its own Cordelia, one of several earlier versions of the legend that Shakespeare could draw on.

In the legend behind King Lear, what becomes of Cordelia after her restored father dies?

She reigns as queen in the old chronicle, so the deaths of both father and daughter that end Shakespeare's play were his own bleak change to the story.

Which churchman's 1603 attack on exorcisms gave Edgar his mad-beggar vocabulary in King Lear?

Samuel Harsnett, later Archbishop of York, wrote A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, and its date helps scholars place the play no earlier than 1603.

Which fiend does the disguised Edgar blame in King Lear for squints, harelips and mildewed wheat?

Flibbertigibbet, the beggar says, walks the night until cockcrow; the name survives as an old word for a flighty chatterer.

Which Romantic poet called King Lear the most perfect specimen of dramatic art in an 1821 essay?

Percy Bysshe Shelley gave that verdict in A Defence of Poetry at a time when London audiences could only watch the play in a rewritten version with a happy ending.

Which young Romantic poet wrote an 1818 sonnet about sitting down to read King Lear once again?

John Keats said the play 'appeared to demand the prologue of a sonnet', and rereading it pushed him from romance toward the starker style of his Hyperion.

Which 18th-century critic found Cordelia's death in King Lear unbearable and backed a happy ending?

Samuel Johnson reasoned that the public had decided the matter, since the rewritten version, in which Cordelia survives, had driven Shakespeare's ending off the stage.

Which Viennese thinker argued that Cordelia in King Lear stands for Death itself?

Sigmund Freud wrote that when Lear finally carries his dead daughter on stage, she is teaching him to make friends with the necessity of dying.

Which Polish critic's essay pairing King Lear with Beckett's Endgame shaped the 1971 British film?

Jan Kott read the play as a forerunner of absurdist theatre, a clownish 'tragedy of the grotesque' that mocks every promise of heaven on earth or after death.

Which Victorian star's 1892 King Lear cut almost half the text, including Gloucester's blinding?

Henry Irving dropped 46 per cent of the lines to make room for spectacle, and took the look of his production from Ford Madox Brown's painting Cordelia's Portion.

Which Soviet composer scored Grigori Kozintsev's 1971 King Lear with an ironic fanfare for the king?

Dmitri Shostakovich gave the film a trumpet fanfare for Lear that grows more ironic as he falls, plus a five-bar 'Call to Death' marking each character's end.

Pauline Kael said the 1971 British film of King Lear should be retitled after which horror movie?

Night of the Living Dead was her alternative title for a film she said she did not just dislike but hated, though The New York Times called the same production exalting.

Which French director's 1987 King Lear cast Molly Ringwald as Cordelia and gave Woody Allen a cameo?

Jean-Luc Godard signed the deal on a napkin at Cannes and delivered a film set after Chernobyl, in which a descendant of Shakespeare tries to recover the lost plays.

Which Ronald Harwood play follows a fading actor struggling through one more performance of King Lear?

The Dresser drew on Harwood's own years as dresser to Donald Wolfit, the model for 'Sir', and the 1983 film earned Oscar nominations for both its leads.

Which 2014 novel opens with an actor dying on stage as King Lear on the evening a pandemic begins?

Station Eleven begins in a Toronto theatre, where the 51-year-old star playing Lear collapses mid-performance while a trainee paramedic watches from the audience.

Jacob Gordin's 1892 New York reworking of King Lear opened a great era of theatre in which language?

Yiddish audiences made the play a landmark: its star Jacob Adler had recruited Gordin to give the immigrant stage serious drama in place of operetta.

Which American actor played King Lear in Central Park in 1973, with Raul Julia as his Edmund?

James Earl Jones led a mixed-race cast for the New York Shakespeare Festival, and the performance was filmed and broadcast to the whole country by PBS.

Which British playwright's 1971 rewrite of King Lear has the king building a wall against enemies?

Edward Bond made his Lear a paranoid autocrat who ends the play trying to dig up the wall he began, a first gesture toward undoing his own tyranny.

Which actor marked his ninetieth birthday by playing King Lear one last time for BBC radio in 1994?

John Gielgud was joined by Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins and Emma Thompson as his daughters, in a cast gathered for the BBC by Kenneth Branagh.

Which Alien and Chariots of Fire actor played King Lear at the National Theatre in 1997?

Ian Holm won a major acting award for the stage run, and the version filmed by its director Richard Eyre brought him an Emmy nomination when it reached American television.

Which Fox hip-hop drama about a record-label boss and his heirs was based in part on King Lear?

Empire also borrowed from The Lion in Winter, its co-creator said, and one TV critic summed the show up as a sudsy retooling of the tragedy set to hip-hop.