Masterful, poignant. My only complaint was the treatment of women in this play. Goneril and Regan are cast as excellent villains, but misogyny weakens their characterizations by the end of the play. Cordelia haunts the play and Lear, but she is barely present as a character. I wish she was more fleshed out and her sisters' evil was not so closely linked with female sexuality.

Would be cooler if my teacher didn't ruin it for me :)

This was heartbreaking

I loved this play. I understand now why it is one of the most popular Shakespeare plays and why it is so often referenced as the Shakespearian tragedy.

...not sure what I made of this. It didn’t shock or move me and I couldn’t always parse what point it was making when it got philosophical.

King Lear is supposedly Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy but I don’t see a peer to Hamlet here, not to mind a superior. I mean... unless it’s his greatest tragedy because its characters are the most miserable? I’m not sure though that that’s the actual quality one desires in the search for what makes a tragedy great.

I think what I really need to do is see Lear staged and re-visit but for now this place-holder view is as much of a shrug as anything.

Reading this at the same time as Titus Andronicus really downplayed the dark elements of this play. It's nowhere near as bad as that one.

I found myself enjoying this Shakespearean play more than most others I’ve read. Don’t quite know what I’m going to focus on for my essay though…

this was really good (even if Lear was a raging misogynist at times)!

i also love cordelia

This was, not only the first Shakespeare I’ve ever read start to finish, but it was the first play I’ve ever read. While I enjoyed it, I think that Nice Peter and George Watsky’s epic rap battle “Dr. Seuss vs. William Shakespeare” really sums up how I feel about reading this play:

“I entertain a child of any age.
You’ve got to translate what you said on the opposite page.”

I think I COULD have mostly understood it without a little research, but after each act, I read a synopsis of what had just happened and it really solidified what I had read. I might not be smart enough to fully comprehend Shakespeare, but I enjoyed King Lear and might read another of his plays in the future.

My favourite Shakespeare so far! So intense and such a well crafted story