King Lear
When I first read King Lear, back in college, my professor said it was "about everything." Indeed, King Lear deals with almost all human emotions, but also centers on nature and its wrath. The words "nature" and "natural" appear several times. Also, it deals with madness. "Fools and madmen," Lear's fool says, identifying those around him.
At the outset of the play, the elderly Lear decides to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. In a case of extreme narcissism, he asks his daughters to express their love for him. The two eldest, Goneril and Regan, go on and on about their love, though they don't mean it, and think him a doddering old man. His youngest, Cordelia, whom he really loves the most, refuses to play the game, and simply states that she loves him as a daughter should. Outraged, he banishes her, as well as his servant Kent, who takes her side.
Later Lear will be rejected by his other two daughters, and realizes his folly. He and his fool go out on the heath in a storm, subject to the ravages of nature. Kent, unwilling to leave his king, disguises himself and gets a job as a servant and dutifully follows.
Meanwhile, Shakespeare creates a subplot (the Lear, or Leir, story was part of British mythology already) involving the Earl of Gloucester and his two sons. His legitimate son is Edgar, who is good and true, and his bastard son, Edmund, is a low-down villain. Edmund forges a letter that suggests that Edgar is going to betray Gloucester, and so he is declared a traitor. Edgar also takes to nature, disguising himself as a madman called Tom O'Bedlam. Tom's most frequent words are "Poor Tom's a-cold."
Thus we have two families erroneously casting off children, and in both cases this leads to characters being cast into nature. Gloucester also wanders the heath, and ends up getting his eyes gouged out by Regan and her husband, Cornwall. Edgar finds him, though Gloucester doesn't recognize his voice.
In addition to the Gloucester subplot, Shakespeare also changed the ending of the usual tellings of the tale. Where in most, Cordelia and Lear are reconciled, Shakespeare isn't so kind. Cordelia, married to the King of France, leads an invasion, but is defeated. She is executed, and Lear stumbles on stage, carrying her corpse (when asked what the key to playing Lear was, John Gielgud said, "A light Cordelia") and in sorrow, dies himself. Edgar does kill Edmund, though, and Regan and Goneril are both dead. After the re-opening of the theaters, the ending was changed to a happy ending, sometimes having Edmund and Cordelia marry, even though they don't meet in the play and she is already married. This was how it was done for 150 years, until the 19th century, when actors such as Edmund Kean restored the original ending.
King Lear is not an easy play to read or to watch. It's very long, and much of it is with characters who are falsely representing themselves. But if you can get beyond that, it is very beautiful and deeply poignant. It shows characters who express the profoundest loyalty, especially Kent, and love in the most unusual circumstances. Beyond familial love, the affection Lear has for his fool, who is of course the wisest character in the play, tweaks the heart.
The ending is also a bit strange, in that so many characters die offstage. The fool disappears completely in the last act (which allows many productions to use the same actor to play both him and Cordelia--Ruth Wilson did this in the most recent Broadway production). Lear simply announces he is dead. But there is a very satisfying death scene. Oswald, Goneril's steward, and one of the most awful characters in the play (which is saying something) is killed by Edgar, and utters the line, "O, untimely death!" which was made famous by being audible at the end of The Beatles' "I Am The Walrus" (we also hear Edgar call him a "serviceable villain.")
The death of Cordelia is one of the saddest instances in any of Shakespeare, as Lear carries her on stage and then tries to detect a breath in her. He thinks she may still be alive, but then realizes she is dead. Try and hear this and not feel moved: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all?”
Some of the well-known lines from the play:
“How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child!”
“I am a man more sinned against than sinning.”
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!"
“Nothing can come of nothing.”
"Meantime we will express our darker purpose."
"Ay, every inch a king."
There are also some of the best insults in all of the canon:
"You are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face."
"Thou are a boil, a plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle, in my corrupted heart."
Kent lets Oswald have it in a brilliant string of put-downs:
"A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition."
King Lear is another example of how Shakespeare anticipated psychology. Lear and Gloucester, especially, are victims of mistrustful parenting, while Goneril and Regan are examples of children who turn against their parents (for the most vicious reasons). A standard joke about psychotherapy is that everyone's problems get blamed on parents, but in King Lear that works both ways: a father's problems can be traced to children. Also, like a Disney film, King Lear has no mothers. Perhaps that is what was needed--some good old-fashioned motherly advice.
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