King Lear
The member's edition. The leader's edition adds notes for whoever opens the discussion: the sources and what Shakespeare changed, the Quarto and Folio where they differ, the play's argument about the gods and where it is made, and a question to start a fight.
Read it
King Lear is in the public domain. The whole play is on this page, scene by scene, every harder word glossed where it stands; the same text sits in the Society's library, the Armarium, inside the Complete Works.
Start reading → Contents Read along in the Armarium: the words light up →Listen free
The LibriVox full-cast reading (2006): Andy Minter as Lear, Kristin Hughes as Cordelia, Rosalind Wills and JemmaBlythe as Goneril and Regan, John Gonzalez as Edmund, Simon Taylor as Edgar, Denny Sayers as Kent, Sean McGaughey as the Fool. Five tracks, one an act, about three and a half hours. It plays here, keeps your place in every act, and works from the lock screen on an iPhone or Android phone.
Recorded for LibriVox and hosted by the Internet Archive; the reading is in the public domain. The files play from the Archive; on a phone, download an act on Wi-Fi.
Kindle + Audible
Whispersync links a Kindle book to its Audible narration: own both, and your phone keeps one place between them, so you can read at home and pick up by ear in the car where you stopped.
The Arkangel Shakespeare on AudibleFor the ear the Society's standing choice is the Arkangel Shakespeare's full-cast recording (Trevor Peacock as Lear, Clive Merrison as the Fool; about three hours), on Audible. For the page, the Folger edition. The two do not sync; read the Folger, listen to Arkangel, and let the page here keep your place.
King Lear was played at court on St Stephen's night, 1606, and written in the year or two before. The story is old: Geoffrey of Monmouth tells it, Holinshed and Spenser and the Mirror for Magistrates repeat it, and an anonymous play of King Leir was in print in 1605, and in every one of them Cordelia wins and the old king gets his crown back. Shakespeare added Gloucester and his sons from Sidney's Arcadia, the Fool from nowhere, the storm, the madness, and the ending. The play exists in two texts, the Quarto of 1608 and the Folio of 1623, which differ by some three hundred lines and in the shape of the last act; most editions, and this one, print them together.
It is the play the Society has been walking toward through the Henriad and the comedies: a king who gives away the kingdom instead of taking it, a father and his daughters instead of a father and his son, a storm instead of a battle, and nothing, which is the word the play turns on, instead of the crown. The Society's way in is to read it as the play's own characters read the world: as a question about whether the gods are just, asked by a pagan king in a Christian playhouse, and answered by a daughter who says no cause, no cause. Read it slowly, and read the last scene aloud, once.
A note on the text
The text is Project Gutenberg's Complete Works (ebook #100, the PG Shakespeare Team's text), as canon-corpus cuts it into speeches for the Armarium, where the play sits inside shakespeare as king-lear; nothing is cut. It is a conflated text, the Quarto of 1608 and the Folio of 1623 together, as editions have printed the play since the eighteenth century; the mock trial of III.vi is Quarto only, the Fool's prophecy in III.ii is Folio only, and the last scene's Lear dies differently in each. Line numbers are counted as canon-corpus counts them.
Persons
Everyone in the book, alphabetically by surname, with the parts they are in.
The Great Ideas
Each of Adler's Great Ideas the book touches, with the parts where it does. Ideas marked in gold are from the Society's own Syntopicon Addendum and link to it.
Scripture
Every quotation and clear allusion, in canonical order, with the King James text.
Glossary
Every harder word, A to Z, glossed in the sense it has here. Each links to the place it is used. Rarity is measured by how seldom the word turns up in English at large; the commonest words are never glossed.
Lines Worth Keeping
Every line the Society marked, in order.
Potent Quotables
The book's most-quoted lines, as first-letter study cards: read the first letters and say the line, then check it against the full text.
The Armarium Shelf
Books in the Society's library that the companion sends you to, and which parts send you there.
Memory Work
The Potent Quotables, and every line worth keeping ( of them), as decks for the Mnemonicon.
Download the Potent Quotables or the whole deck, then in the Mnemonicon choose Import and pick the file. Importing both adds nothing twice.
To study the glossary's words with spaced repetition, open the Vocabularium.