Of all of Shakespeare's works, King Lear is undoubtedly the one in which the author has come closest to the height and quality of the one tragic poet greater than any that the world has ever seen born in history. It is the most Aeschylean of his works, the most elemental and primordial, the most oceanic and titanic in its conception. –A.C. SWINBURNE

The sturdy poetry of King Lear, the variety and scope of human experience it encompasses, the magnitude of emotions it triggers, and certainly its relentless ending make it one of the darkest, most agitated, and disturbing works ever written for the theater. And just the immense dramatic range of Lear inspires awe.

In its scenes, taking place in closed rooms or in the outdoors, in palace halls or in a hermit’s hut, pass kings and beggars, lords and servants, scholars and madmen, knights, soldiers, courtiers, and spies, while the feelings it evokes range, sometimes with sudden and violent shifts, from pure love to the most unyielding hate, from kindness and tenderness to the most brutal psychological and physical violence, from romantic passion to revulsion, from rage and murderous conflict to the sweetest reconciliation.

Without fear of being accused of pathological bardolatry, I would say that King Lear is perhaps the ultimate work of tragic poetry regardless of era, history, place, language, nation, gender, or race, throughout all of Western civilization, as we are accustomed to calling it, but also now in the East, since it seems to have recognized and assimilated tragedy as a necessary representational model for its own priorities.

King Lear leaves behind a moral desolation, a barren land orphaned, deprived of every moral blessing, in which the legitimacy of power remains an open problem like a wound, although the feelings and emotions that unfolded within this entanglement, above all else the others of love, have lost none of their ambiguous prestige in human affairs.

COVER IMAGE: The title page of King Lear from the Quarto edition of 1608.