I have read a reasonable amount of Shakespeare, both through school and many more after. I have particularly enjoyed a lot of the tragedies, and I had been led to believe that Lear was the greatest of these.

For me, the problem with the play is both the nature and presentation of Lear's tragic flaw. To me Lear's flaw is that he is a gullible idiot. Idiot for deciding that the best way to arrange affairs after his retiral is to have a popularity contest between his daughters with no guarantees regarding his own safety and gullible for accepting Regan and Goneril on face value.

As far as the structure of the play goes, I did not like that the idiocy is already underway when we arrive on the story. In the other great tragedies, we are given time to see the development of our Tragic Hero. Macbeth takes at least an act and a half before he starts cutting people up. Hamlet takes the bulk of the play before failing to realise that sometimes backs are for stabbing and Othello's own brand of jealous idiocy takes about four acts to come to a head. We, the audience/reader, are given proper time to see the seeds of the flaw take root and grow, and it allows far more sympathy with the characters. With Lear, we are in at the deep end form Act one, scene one and from there it's just the road to madness. I don't see Lear in the role of the tragic hero - the great man with a great flaw, and to be honest I read the whole play with an air of diappointment.

That said there is much to be said for this play. There is an interesting theme of the changing in "nature" or "order" from the old guard represented by Lear, his fool, Kent and Edgar to the newer, more scheming order of Regan and Goneril, Edmund and the other Dukes. One of my pleasures in reading Shakepeare is trying to see the where they plays fit in the History fo the time, and Lear is probably early Stewart, so a theme of the passing of the torch from one Dynasty to the other is apt. I also wonder about the powerful king leaving his kingdom to be fought over by three siblings - I see in this a reflection of the children of Henry VIII - the first two's rules being plagued by politicking and treachery and the last poor, sweet, misunderstood child away before her time and without heir. On balance then, my internal historian has decided that this must have been conceived and written in the last days of Elizabeth's reign before James VI came to power. Shakespeare must have had a trepidation about the new King and new patron nad I wonder if this is the reason for the bleakness of the ending.

This has gotten rather longer than intended. I wonder if I would be as well posting it as a review in a mildly altered form...