King Lear
An aging king divides his kingdom among his daughters based on flattery and loses everything. Shakespeare pushed tragedy past Aristotle here into something crueler and more cosmic. The storm scene on the heath remains the most devastating depiction of human madness ever staged.
King Lear opens on a premise several readers call flimsy on its face: a king divides his kingdom by demanding, in effect, “how much you love me and I will give it to you,” and everything after is built on that shaky floor. The plot piles up fast, two families running in parallel with a large cast introduced all at once, and the archaic verse lands flatter on the page than its reputation promises. Finding anyone to root for gets harder as it goes. One reviewer says flatly they “was not enamored with any of the characters,” another reports feeling “disgusted with their actions,” and a third sums up the experience: “Honestly didn’t enjoy this as much as I had expected to.” Five acts of accumulating cruelty with little relief wears down patient readers, and one prestige staging draws its own complaints, a lead performance called hard to follow, the production judged too grim to enjoy sitting through.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
