All Formats & Editions

This edition of King Lear is especially designed for students, with accessible on-page notes and explanatory illustrations, clear background information, and rigorous but accessible scholarly credentials. This edition includes illustrations, preliminary notes, reading lists (including... Read Full Overview

First performed about 1805, King Lear is one of the most relentlessly bleak of Shakespeare's tragedies. Probably written between Othello and Macbeth, when the playwright was at the peak of his tragic power, Lear's themes of filial ingratitude, injustice,... Read Full Overview

John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work is available both individually and as a set, and each contains... Read Full Overview

King Lear, widely considered Shakespeare's most deeply moving, passionately expressed, and intellectually ambitious play, has almost always been edited from the revised version printed in the First Folio of 1623, with additions from the quarto of 1608. Now for the first time,... Read Full Overview

William Shakespeare

"No man will ever write a better tragedy than Lear" wrote once George Bernard Shaw.King Lear is to our days one of the most intense representations of human suffering and kinship and one of the most staged plays.

A new translation of Shakespeare's great tragedy that renews it for today's audiences.

Here are the books that help teach Shakespeare plays without the teacher constantly needing to explain and define Elizabethan terms, slang, and other ways of expression that are different from our own. Each play is presented with Shakespeare's original lines on each left-hand... Read Full Overview

King Lear tells the tale of a King in pre-Roman Britain. Lear transfers his holdings and power to two of his three daughters after the two profess their affection for him. His third daughter refuses to fawn over him and gets nothing.Once the two daughters have power, they treat... Read Full Overview