1. King Lear (Cordelia’s Farewell by Edwin Austin Abbey—Metropolitan Museum of Art)

2. „Lear himself appears to come from Celtic mythology
„Lear himself appears to come from Celtic mythology. Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Welshman in close contact with Celtic legend, included a Lear or Leir as one of the pseudo-historical kings in his Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1136)” –David Bevington, Shakespeare: Four Tragedies, 558
„Shakespeare’s immediate source for King Lear was an old play called The True Chronicle History of King Leir. It was published in 1605 but plainly was much earlier in style.” 559
„…Shakespeare derived some of his material from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590).” 561
„Edmund is decidedly indebted to the allegorical Vice figure of the late medieval morality play tradition.” 561

3. Changes made by Shakespeare:
No happy ending
Turns Cornwall into a villain and Albany into a belated hero
The storm scene
Adds the parallel plot of Gloucester and Edgar

4. Cordelia: I cannot heave my heart into my mouth, I love Your Majesty according to my bond, no more nor less…Good, my lord, you have begot me, bred me, loved me. I return those duties back as are right fit, obey you, love you, and most honor you. Why have my sisters husbands if they say they love you all? Haply, when I shall wed, that lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry half my love with him, half my care and duty. Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, to love my father all.
Lear: So young, and so untender?
Cordelia: So young, my lord, and true.

5. Edmund: Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law my services are bound
Edmund: Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law my services are bound. Wherefore should I stand in the plague of custom and permit the curiosity of nations to deprive me, for that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base? When my dimensions are as compact, my mind as generous, and my shape as true, as honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us with base? With baseness? Bastardy? Base, base?
1.2

6. Lear: Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, how shall your houseless heads and unfed sides , your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you from seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel that thou mayst shake the superflux to themand show the heavens more just
3.4

7. „In King Lear Shakespeare pushes to its limits the hypothesis of a malign or at least indifferent universe in which man’s life is meaningless and brutal. Few plays other than Hamlet and Macbeth approach King Lear in evoking the wretchedness of human existence.” Bevington, 398