Thank you for coming. Today's lecture is on King Lear.

So King Lear has its first recorded performance at Court on Boxing Day, 1606, St Stephen's Day, 1606.

As we go through the lecture, you'll be able to judge for yourself how suitable it is for festive entertainment. It's published as a quarto

in 1608 and in a substantially different version in the folio in 1623. Part of what I'm going to be

talking about today is some locations of difference between those two early texts.

But the question I'm structuring the lecture around today is just how sad is King Lear, just how sad is this play?

So as usual, we'll start with a brief synopsis.

The play is the story of an aged king of ancient Britain who decides to

abdicate and who sets his daughters a rhetorical contest to see which of them loves him most.

Inevitably, of course, he picks the bad ones, the flattering ones, the insincere ones,

his elder two daughters,

Reagan and goneril, and banishes his loyal younger daughter because her declaration of love

is brusque and unwelcome. She leaves for France with her new husband, the King of France.

The older daughters turn against their father, he's cast off into a storm

accompanied by his fool, and he becomes increasingly mad. When Cordelia returns with French armies

to reinstate her father, they are reunited, but the battle turns against them, and she is

captured and at the end killed, whereupon her father also dies.

And this story of filial ingratitude is interwoven with a parallel story in which Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester, attempts to discredit his half-brother Edgar and the suffering caused to their father at the Earl of Gloucester.

He is blinded quite literally by Goneril and her husband Cornwall.

Edgar disguises himself as Tom of Bedlam to accompany his father, and in the end, Edmund, Goneril, Reagan, Leah, Cordelia, Gloucester, and apparently the fool, are all dead.

So I'm conscious that, as always, this question around which I'm working is an inadequate one, asking just how sad is King Lear titers or perhaps

tumbles into the banal. But Terry Eagleton's observation on tragedy here is a useful one.

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