What follows is the canon’s most unsparing tragedy — family, state, sanity, and weather collapsing together, with a Fool telling the truth in riddles until truth stops helping.
Lear is regularly called the summit of Shakespeare, and the storm scenes justify it: language pushed to the edge of what it can hold. It asks more of a reader than Hamlet or Othello and returns proportionally more. Keep an evening free afterwards; it does not shake off quickly.
Which edition?
The full guide: The Best Editions of Shakespeare’s King Lear →
1Arden Shakespeare, Third Series
Ed. R. A. Foakes · Bloomsbury, 1997
Foakes prints Quarto and Folio in one conflated text, marked so you can see the seams.
2Oxford World’s Classics
Ed. Stanley Wells · Oxford University Press, 2000
The Quarto Lear on its own terms — the play as it first reached print.
3The New Cambridge Shakespeare
Ed. Jay L. Halio · Cambridge University Press
A Folio-based text with patient, unshowy commentary.
4Folger Shakespeare LibraryFirst read? Start here
Ed. Barbara Mowat & Paul Werstine · Simon & Schuster
The gentlest on-ramp to the canon’s most demanding play.
King Lear on screen
1King Lear (1971)
Film · dir. Grigori Kozintsev
2King Lear (1971)
Film · dir. Peter Brook
3Ran (1985)
Film · dir. Akira Kurosawa · inspired by King Lear
4A Thousand Acres (1997)
Film · dir. Jocelyn Moorhouse · inspired by King Lear
5King Lear (2018)
TV film · dir. Richard Eyre
6National Theatre Live: King Lear (2018)
Stage capture · dir. Jonathan Munby
Ian McKellen; broadcast from the Duke of York's
Reading King Lear this year?
Mark it in your record when you finish — one seat, kept for decades.