What happens in King Lear

An old king decides to retire and split his kingdom among his three daughters, handing the largest share to whoever says she loves him most. Goneril and Regan pour out lavish flattery and take their land. Cordelia, the youngest and his favorite, refuses to perform. She says she loves him as a daughter should, no more and no less. Lear, enraged by her honesty, disowns her and divides her share between the other two. When his loyal earl Kent defends her, Lear banishes him as well. The King of France marries Cordelia without a dowry, while Goneril and Regan quietly agree to manage their father between them.

A second family mirrors the first. The Earl of Gloucester has two sons, the legitimate Edgar and the bastard Edmund. Edmund resents his place, swears his loyalty to nature and appetite rather than law, and forges a letter that frames Edgar as plotting their father’s death. Gloucester believes it at once. Edmund then warns Edgar that their father is hunting him, and Edgar is forced to flee, disguising himself as a mad beggar called Poor Tom, smeared with dirt and half naked. Edmund, smooth and ambitious, sets about climbing over both of them toward the earldom.

Lear soon learns what his bargain bought. Goneril cuts down his train of knights and treats him with cold contempt, so he rides to Regan, expecting kindness. Instead the sisters tighten the screws together, stripping his followers one by one until they ask why he needs any at all. Lear, breaking, rushes out into a gathering storm rather than yield. On the heath he rages at the wind and the thunder, with only his Fool and the disguised Kent beside him. There he meets Poor Tom and begins to lose his reason, fixed on the sight of a near-naked man as the truth of what a human being really is.

Gloucester secretly helps the old king toward Dover, where Cordelia has landed with a French army to save her father. Edmund betrays him for it. Cornwall, Regan’s husband, has Gloucester bound and gouges out both his eyes, though a horrified servant wounds Cornwall to death first. Blinded and cast out, Gloucester wanders the heath in despair until Edgar, still hiding his name, finds him and guides him. At the cliffs of Dover, Edgar tricks his father into a harmless fall that the old man believes is a miracle, and slowly talks him back from wanting to die.

The sisters, meanwhile, both want Edmund, and the rivalry curdles. Cordelia finds Lear, mad and crowned with weeds, and wakes him gently with music; he kneels to her and asks forgiveness, and his mind begins to clear. But the battle goes against them. Edmund’s forces win, and he takes Lear and Cordelia prisoner, secretly ordering them killed. Then everything collapses at once. Edgar appears in armor, challenges Edmund, and cuts him down. Goneril, exposed, has already poisoned Regan and now stabs herself. The dying Edmund confesses his crimes and tries to call off the execution, but too late. Lear enters carrying Cordelia’s body, howling, hanged before the reprieve could reach her. He recognizes Kent at last, then dies of grief over his daughter. Albany hands what is left of the kingdom to Kent and Edgar. Kent, half in the grave himself, will not stay to rule it.