Act One: The Division of the Kingdom · König Lear

In the palace of King Lear of Britain, the Earl of Gloucester and the Earl of Kent were talking, while they waited for the king. With Gloucester was a young man, whom he presented to Kent, with a coarse joke, as his son: Edmund, born out of wedlock, "the whoreson," who had been abroad nine years and would go again. Gloucester had another son, Edgar, his legitimate heir, "no dearer in my account."

Then the king came in, with his three daughters and their husbands and suitors: Goneril, the eldest, married to the Duke of Albany; Regan, married to the Duke of Cornwall; and Cordelia, the youngest, the king's favourite, unmarried, for whose hand the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy were competing.

Lear was over eighty, and tired of ruling. He had decided to "shake all cares and business from our age," and divide his kingdom among his three daughters, keeping only the name of king and a train of a hundred knights. And he had devised a ceremony: each daughter should say how much she loved him, so that "we our largest bounty may extend where nature doth with merit challenge."

Goneril began: "Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter; dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty; beyond what can be valued, rich or rare; no less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour . . . a love that makes breath poor and speech unable." Lear gave her a third of the kingdom, with its forests and rivers and meadows. Regan outbid her: she was made of the same metal as her sister, but her sister came too short; she was an enemy to all other joys, and found herself happy only in her father's love. Lear gave her a third.

Cordelia, listening, had said to herself: "What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent." Now her father turned to her: "Now, our joy . . . what can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters? Speak."

"Nothing, my lord."

"Nothing?" "Nothing." "Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again."

"Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. I love your majesty according to my bond, no more nor less." He had begot her, bred her, loved her; she returned those duties back as were right fit — obeyed him, loved him, and most honoured him. "Why have my sisters husbands, if they say they love you all?" When she married, half her love would go with her husband.

"So young, and so untender?" "So young, my lord, and true." "Let it be so: thy truth then be thy dower!" In a towering rage, Lear disowned her — "Here I disclaim all my paternal care, propinquity and property of blood" — and divided her third between her two sisters and their husbands. He would live with each of them in turn, a month at a time, with his hundred knights.

The Earl of Kent, his oldest and most loyal follower, tried to stop him: "Be Kent unmannerly when Lear is mad . . . Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least, nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds reverb no hollowness." "Kent, on thy life, no more!" Lear banished him too, on pain of death if he were found in the kingdom in ten days.

Then he offered Cordelia to her suitors, without a dowry. The Duke of Burgundy, regretfully, declined. But the King of France took her as she was: "Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor, most choice forsaken, and most loved despised, thee and thy virtues here I seize upon." She said goodbye to her sisters, knowing them: "Use well our father." "Prescribe not us our duty," said Regan.

When they were alone, the two elder sisters talked coldly together. "You see how full of changes his age is . . . He always loved our sister most; and with what poor judgement he hath now cast her off appears too grossly." "'Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself." They must act together, and quickly, against his rash whims.

Edmund, the bastard, alone, made his own declaration:

"Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law my services are bound." Why should he be called base, and bastard, because he was born out of marriage, and a few months after his brother? His dimensions were as well compact, his mind as generous, his shape as true. "Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land . . . Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed, and my invention thrive, Edmund the base shall top th' legitimate. I grow; I prosper. Now, gods, stand up for bastards!"

He had forged a letter, in Edgar's hand, proposing that the two brothers kill their father and share his revenues. He let his father catch him hiding it, pretended reluctance, and let him read it. Gloucester, already shaken by the banishments and by the eclipses of the sun and moon — "these late eclipses . . . portend no good to us" — believed it at once: "O villain, villain! . . . Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish villain!" Edmund offered to arrange for him to overhear Edgar's guilt. When Gloucester had gone, Edmund laughed at his father's faith in the stars: "This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeits of our own behaviour — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars." Then he warned Edgar, his "credulous" brother, that their father was furious with him, and that he must hide and go armed.

At the Duke of Albany's palace, Goneril complained to her steward, Oswald, that her father's knights were riotous, and that he upbraided her on every trifle; she told Oswald to put on a "weary negligence" towards the old man and his followers.

Kent, banished, had disguised himself, roughened his speech, and came back to serve his master as a plain servant called Caius. Lear took him on. When Oswald was insolent to the king — "My lady's father" — Kent tripped him up and threw him out.

And Lear's Fool came in: the king's jester, who loved Cordelia and had pined since she went to France. In riddles and songs and bitter jokes he told the king the truth that no one else would: "Nuncle," he said, "thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gav'st thy golden one away." "Dost thou call me fool, boy?" "All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with." He had made his daughters his mothers, and given them the rod, and put down his own breeches.

Goneril came in, and demanded that he reduce his train of knights, who made her court like a riotous inn. Lear could not believe it. "Does any here know me? This is not Lear . . . Who is it that can tell me who I am?" "Lear's shadow," said the Fool. In a fury, Lear cursed her — called on Nature to make her barren, or, if she must have a child, to give her one that would torment her, "that she may feel how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!" He found that fifty of his knights had already been dismissed. He would go to Regan; she, at least, was kind and comfortable.

On the way, the Fool went on jesting, and Lear, half listening, began to feel the ground move under him: "I did her wrong" — Cordelia. "O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!"