74 pages • 2-hour read
King Lear
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
How Madness Reveals Truth
The lunatics of King Lear—pretended and actual—are forever in closer contact with reality than the seemingly sane. This is evident in the Fool, whose job is to veil the harsh truth in the garb of nonsense riddles and bawdy songs. The same is true of Edgar, who capers naked in his shocking disguise as Poor Tom, and Lear himself. The play’s madmen, either implicitly or explicitly, reveal one of the play’s central truths: Every human is, at root, a frail and fallible mortal.
Lear’s madness is especially poignant and meaningful. Lear feels madness creep up on him throughout the play. In private conversation with the Fool, Lear expresses his fear of this ultimate loss of control: “O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!/Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!” (1.5.43-44). But within his madness, Lear finds release. His ravings in the storm unleash deep rage, but they also bring him closer to others. Fully in touch with his own helplessness, Lear finds empathy for the Fool, Edgar, and all poor people wandering through the storm. Lear’s madness also allows him to empathize with the blinded Gloucester, whom he consoles like a weeping child.
Madness takes everything from Lear, only to restore him to a richer and more truthful reality. Descending to his most abased depths, he discovers his weakness and also his connection to everyone who lives. Lear acknowledges this when he cries out, “Reason in madness!” (4.6.168–169). By contrast, Edmund, Cornwall, and the other schemers of the play exhibit the inverse of his declarative: madness in reason. By acting on rational self-interest, these characters leave untold death and destruction in their wake.
The Capacity to Endure Human Suffering
King Lear turns an appalled eye on the depth and breadth of human pain. At one of the play’s most agonizing moments, when the shocked Edgar gapes at his blinded father, he marvels, “The worst is not/So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’” (4.1.27-28). In King Lear, there is a seemingly bottomless well of pain in the world—enough that, as Lear points out, babies’ first act upon joining the human drama is to cry helplessly.
What’s more, the play suggests, human suffering goes deeper than any earthly redemption. Toward the end of the play, many of the characters allow their terrible suffering to transform them, as they come into closer contact with truth and empathy for the people around them. When the villainous Edmund gets caught up in this redemptive movement, using his last breath to try to stop the executions of Lear and Cordelia, there is a glimmer of true hope. This hope is dashed moments later, when Lear enters carrying the body of his only truly loving child, the play’s most uncomplicatedly good character.
Edgar’s final words speak to the last possible spark in the cavernous darkness of the play’s ethical world. Those who try to make it through the ordeal of life must “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (5.3.331). All that humans can do in the face of suffering, Edgar’s closing lines suggest, is to try to speak truth to it, to keep our eyes steady on the reality of pain, and not to flee into fantasies of power and privilege.
The Power of Fiction and Disguises
While the world of King Lear is unrelentingly dark, it is not without its beauties. In a play intensely focused on reality and falsehood, it makes sense that one of the most powerfully redemptive moments comes through fiction, the art that straddles the gap between those poles. Edgar’s vivid word-picture of an imagined cliff of Dover is, on one hand, a barefaced lie. He leads his father to level ground and invents a sea-cliff for him to leap over. But he uses that lie to bring his father to a poignant truth. In spite of Gloucester’s blindness and in spite of his heartbreak and suffering, Edgar sends him over the edge of the imaginary cliff to remind him, “Thy life’s a miracle” (4.6.55).
Fiction also appears as a theme in Edgar and Kent’s disguises. Both men are downtrodden and cast from the favor of men to whom they feel true love and loyalty. Both externalize their feelings of exile in their costumes: Kent becomes the rugged soldier Caius, while Edgar becomes the utterly abased madman Poor Tom. These humble disguises paradoxically grant their wearers new powers. In confronting and enacting the emotional truth of their circumstances, both Kent and Edgar become exuberant, virtuosic speakers and inventors.
The play suggests that the inventiveness and emotional truth of fiction provide a way for humans to acknowledge and connect with reality. Edgar and Kent’s fictions bring them strange joy in an unendurable world and allow them to communicate the will to live to the sufferers around them.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence