King Lear – Interesting Literature

A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies; indeed, some critics have considered it the greatest. It is certainly one of the bleakest. The plot and subplot deftly weave together the principal themes of the play, which include reason, madness, blindness of various kinds, and – perhaps most crucially of all – the relationship between a father and his children. Before we offer some words of analysis of King Lear, it might be worth recapping the plot of the play.

The Three Siblings Theme in Folk Tales and Fiction

By Apostolos Doxiadis

“Once upon a time, a long long time ago, there were three brothers.” So begins the story of my new novel, Three Little Pigs. The words are spoken by an old man, living in what is described as “a benevolent institution, somewhere in the Alps.” He is no fool and knows that such an opening will make what follows sound like a fairytale. But even more than the formulaic phrase, “once upon a time,” a trademark of a fairytale if ever there was one, what gives an archaic echo to his words is the reference to “three brothers.”

Five Fascinating Facts about King Lear

Fun facts about one of Shakespeare’s most popular tragedies

1. The original story on which Shakespeare based King Lear had a happy ending. King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s must-read plays. Yet less than a hundred years after the Bard wrote the play, it was given a rather dramatic (as it were) rewrite by Poet Laureate, Nahum Tate. Yet this is not the full truth. It is often said that Shakespeare wrote the tragedy of King Lear and then Nahum Tate rewrote the ending as a happy one. This much is true, but what is little known is the fact that the story of King Lear was originally a happy one, when it first appeared in the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. The anonymous play, King Leir, on which Shakespeare based his tragedy also ends on a somewhat more upbeat note.