King Lear, perhaps Shakespeare's most profoundly searching and disturbing tragedy, is the story of a foolish and self-indulgent king who learns, late in life and after terrible suffering, the value of self-knowledge. The play asks the ancient questions about God and the meaning of pain with uncompromising directness, but provides no reassuring answers...

King Lear, probably dating from 1605, was first printed in a quarto version in 1608 and in a different form in the First Folio of 1623. It is the third In Shakespeare's great sequence of four tragedies: Hamlet (1600-01) and Othello (1602-1604) precede it, and Macbeth (1606) follows. It possesses the widest emotional and thematic reach of them all, occupying a space which achieves an almost abstract, symbolic quality while at the same time offering a painful concreteness of experience: it is both intensely personal and impressively universal, tackling the great questions of suffering and morality ('is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?') within the context of a social conscience CO! I have ta'en too little care of this') and an anguished questioning of God (or the gods, who, it seems, 'kill us for their sport').