'King Lear': the end
The famously bleak ending of King Lear could so easily have been different. In fact, so different it could have been a comedy, a knife-edge that makes it all the more cheerless, dark and deadly.
Read More'King Lear': blindness and seeing
The central metaphor of King Lear is blindness and seeing: this essay explores that idea.
Read More'King Lear': Albany and Kent
Kent and Albany are lesser characters in King Lear, but each plays an important part, giving us insights into key ideas of the play.
Read More'King Lear': cheerless, dark and deadly
This essay examines the utter bleakness of King Lear, a play in which there is no mitigation of darkness, no religious consolation.
Read More'King Lear': the opening scene
Shakespeare doesn’t waste time at the starts of his great tragedies; in fact, all four open disconcertingly with a sense of confusion and un-ease. In King Lear again we are pitched straight into the middle of a rather flustered conversation, which hits on a central theme of this play – division and disorder.
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