king lear · shakespeare

Shakespeare's darkest tragedy, from around 1606, begins with an old king dividing his kingdom by asking his daughters how much they love him, and ends on a heath and in a prison with almost everyone dead. It is about the stripping away of everything, power, sight, reason, family, and whether anything like justice or love survives the stripping.

William Shakespeare, King Lear, edited by Stephen Orgel (Penguin Books, 2016). Read in full, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors.