e for him. The two elder women, Goneril
and Regan, vow that they love him intensely; the youngest,
Cordelia, can only tell him that she cares for him as a daughter
should. He curses and casts off Cordelia, who is taken to wife by
the King of France.

Gloucester, deceived by his bastard Edmund, casts off Edgar his
son.

King Lear, thwarted and flouted by Goneril and Regan, goes mad, and
wanders away with his Fool. Gloucester, trying to comfort him
against the wishes of Goneril and Regan, is betrayed by his bastard
Edmund, and blinded. He wanders away with Edgar, who has disguised
himself as a madman.

Regan's husband is killed. Seeking to take Edmund in his stead, she
rouses the jealousy of Goneril, who has already made advances to
him.

Cordelia lands with French troops to repossess Lear of his kingdom.
She finds Lear, and comforts him. In an engagement with the
sisters' armies, she and Lear are captured.

Edmund's baseness is exposed. He is attainted and struck down.
Goneril poisons Regan, and kills herself. Edmund, before he dies,
reveals that he has given order for Lear and Cordelia to be killed.
His news comes too late to save Cordelia. She is brought in dead.
Lear dies over her body.

Albany, Goneril's husband, Kent, Lear's faithful servant, and
Edgar, Edmund's slayer, are left to set the kingdom in order.

The play of _King Lear_ is based upon a fable and a fairy story. It
illustrates the most terrible forms of treachery, that of child against
father, and father against child. It is the most affecting and the
grandest of the plays.

The evil which makes the action springs from two sources, both fatal.
One is the blindness or fatuity in Lear, which makes him give away his
strength and cast out Cordelia. The other, equally deadly, but more
cruel in its results, springs from an unrepented treachery, done long
before by Gloucester, when he broke his marriage vows to beget Edmund.
Memory of the sweetness of that treachery gives to Gloucester a
blindness to the boy's nature, just as a sweetness, or ease, in the
treachery of giving up the cares of kingship (against oath and the
kingdom's good) helps to blind Lear to the natures of his daughters.

The blindness in the one case is sentimental, in the other wilful. Being
established, fate makes use of it. One of the chief lessons of the plays
i