The King Lear characters fall into two families that mirror each other: an old king who trusts the daughters who flatter him and banishes the one who loves him, and an old earl who trusts the son who deceives him and hunts the one who is loyal.
Around them stand a handful of people who stay loyal at great cost, among them a banished lord in disguise and a Fool who tells the king the truth. This guide covers every major character in King Lear, grouped by family and loyalty, with the key lines that reveal each one. For the plot, the themes, and the play’s most famous lines, see our full guide to King Lear.
At a Glance
Here are the major characters in King Lear and their roles in the play.
Lear and His Daughters
The main plot begins with a public test of love. Lear asks his three daughters which of them loves him most and promises the largest share of the kingdom to the winner.
King Lear
Lear is an old king, “Fourscore and upward” by his own account, who wants to give up the work of ruling while keeping “The name and all th’ addition to a king.” He plans to divide Britain among his daughters, and he turns the division into a contest of flattery. When his favorite, Cordelia, will say only that she loves him according to her duty, he answers, “Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again,” and when she will not, he disowns her. He banishes Kent for defending her. Soon Goneril and Regan strip him of his knights and shut him out in a storm, and he goes mad.
Lear begins the play as a man who cannot tell love from its performance, and the play takes everything from him until he can. Regan says of him that “he hath ever but slenderly known himself,” and his journey is toward that knowledge. On the heath he thinks for the first time of the “Poor naked wretches” of his kingdom and admits, “O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this.” When he wakes in Cordelia’s care, the proud king calls himself “a very foolish fond old man” and asks her forgiveness. The recognition comes too late to save either of them.
Goneril
Lear’s eldest daughter wins her share of the kingdom with the play’s most extravagant declaration: “Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter, / Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty.” Once Lear is living in her house, she orders her servants to neglect him, demands that he dismiss half his knights, and calls him an “Idle old man / That still would manage those authorities / That he hath given away.” Lear answers with a savage curse, calling on Nature to make her childless.
Goneril is the more decisive of the two sisters, and the one who acts first. She scorns her husband Albany’s “milky gentleness,” falls in love with Edmund, and plots her husband’s murder so that she can marry him. When she learns that Regan also wants Edmund, she poisons her sister. Exposed by a letter, she takes her own life offstage. As Edmund puts it, “The one the other poisoned for my sake, / And after slew herself.”
Regan
Regan outbids her sister in the love test, claiming that Goneril “comes too short” of her own devotion. When Lear arrives at her house, she treats him as a senile child: “O sir, you are old. / Nature in you stands on the very verge / Of his confine.” She and Goneril bargain his knights down from a hundred to fifty to twenty-five, and when Lear cries “I gave you all,” she answers coldly, “And in good time you gave it.”
Regan’s cruelty is more physical than her sister’s. She plucks the bound Gloucester by the beard, urges her husband on as he blinds him, and when a servant draws his sword to stop the torture, she takes a sword and kills him from behind. After Cornwall’s death she competes with Goneril for Edmund, and she dies of the poison her sister gives her. Critics often see the sisters as nearly interchangeable, but Regan tends to follow where Goneril leads, and then goes further.
Cordelia
Lear’s youngest daughter is the one who loves him, and the one who will not say so on command. As her sisters speak, she asks herself in an aside, “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.” Asked what she can say to earn the richest third, she answers, “Nothing, my lord,” and explains, “I love your Majesty / According to my bond, no more nor less.” Disowned and left without a dowry, she is rejected by the Duke of Burgundy and taken by the King of France: “Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor.”
Cordelia is offstage for most of the play, but her absence shapes it. She returns at the head of a French army to rescue her father, and in their reunion, when Lear says she has cause to hate him, she answers with two words repeated: “No cause, no cause.” Her refusal to flatter can look proud or stubborn in the first scene, but her forgiveness shows that her plainness was love all along. After the French army is defeated she is captured with Lear and hanged on Edmund’s orders, and her death is Shakespeare’s own change to the older story, in which she survives.
Gloucester and His Sons
The subplot repeats the main plot in another family. A father believes the child who lies to him, rejects the child who is true, and pays for it with terrible suffering.
The Earl of Gloucester
Gloucester opens the play joking crudely in front of his illegitimate son Edmund about the “good sport” of the boy’s conception. He is loyal to Lear but credulous, and he believes in omens: “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.” Edmund easily convinces him that Edgar is plotting his murder, and Gloucester has his true son hunted as an outlaw.
Gloucester’s turning point is an act of courage. Against the orders of Cornwall and Regan, he helps the mad king escape to Dover, and for this Cornwall puts out his eyes. Only then does he learn that Edmund betrayed him. “I stumbled when I saw,” he says, and in despair he sums up the bleakest view in the play: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport.” Led by Edgar, whom he does not recognize, he tries to kill himself, and Edgar saves him with a trick. He dies offstage, as Edgar later reports, when his son finally reveals himself to him.
Edgar
Gloucester’s legitimate son begins as a trusting young man whom Edmund dismisses as “a brother noble, / Whose nature is so far from doing harms / That he suspects none.” Proclaimed a traitor, he disguises himself as Poor Tom, one of the mad beggars of the countryside, and gives up his own identity: “‘Edgar’ I nothing am.” As Poor Tom he meets Lear in the storm, and he becomes the guide of his own blinded father.
Edgar is the character who changes most. He goes through a series of disguises, each one closer to his true self, until he appears as an armed knight, defeats Edmund in single combat, and names himself. Along the way he speaks some of the play’s hardest-won lines, including “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst,’” and “Ripeness is all.” In the Folio text he speaks the play’s last words, beginning “The weight of this sad time we must obey”; in the 1608 Quarto those lines belong to Albany.
Edmund
Gloucester’s illegitimate son is the play’s great schemer, and he introduces himself in a soliloquy that rejects the law that makes him an outsider: “Thou, Nature, art my goddess.” He resents being branded “base” and “bastard” when he is as able as his brother, and he ends the speech with a battle cry: “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!” He forges a letter to ruin Edgar, betrays his father to Cornwall, and becomes Earl of Gloucester himself.
Edmund is witty and clear-sighted. He mocks his father’s belief in the stars and insists that people are responsible for their own natures. He courts both Goneril and Regan at once, and he orders the deaths of Lear and Cordelia. Mortally wounded by Edgar, he accepts his fate, “The wheel is come full circle; I am here,” and when the bodies of the two sisters are brought in, he says, “Yet Edmund was beloved.” He then tries to undo his last crime: “some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature.” His reprieve arrives too late to save Cordelia.
Those Who Stay Loyal
Two characters stay with Lear through everything. One is banished and comes back in disguise; the other has no power at all except the license to tell the truth as a joke.
The Earl of Kent
Kent is the only lord who stands up to Lear in the first scene. When the king disowns Cordelia, Kent tells him bluntly, “Be Kent unmannerly / When Lear is mad,” and urges, “See better, Lear.” He is banished for it. He immediately disguises himself as a plain servant, gives his age as forty-eight, and offers his services to the king, who hires him without recognizing him.
Kent is loyalty in its simplest form. He trips up Goneril’s insolent steward, is put in the stocks for beating him, and follows Lear into the storm, repeatedly urging his master to take shelter. At the end, when Albany offers him a share in ruling the kingdom, he declines, because he expects to follow Lear into death: “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go; / My master calls me. I must not say no.”
The Fool
Lear’s Fool is the one person allowed to tell the king he has been foolish, and he does so constantly, in riddles, songs, and jokes. He tells Lear that he gave away his crown and kept nothing, “Now thou art an O without a figure,” and sums up the king’s mistake in one line: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” The jokes are bitter, but he stays with Lear in the storm when almost everyone else has abandoned him.
The Fool is also the play’s great mystery. He first appears only after Cordelia has left for France, and he disappears after the mad trial scene in Act 3, never to return. His last line in the Folio, “And I’ll go to bed at noon,” is a joke on Lear’s own words. What becomes of him is never explained, a puzzle explored in the Closer Reading below.
The Husbands and Suitors
The daughters’ husbands and suitors take opposite sides as the story unfolds, and their choices help decide who lives and who dies.
The Duke of Albany
Goneril’s husband seems weak at first, uneasy about her treatment of Lear but unwilling to stop it. As the cruelty of the sisters grows, especially after the blinding of Gloucester, he turns openly against his wife. He must still fight the French army that has come to restore Lear, because it is an invasion of his country, but he tries to protect Lear and Cordelia after the battle and confronts Edmund with his treason.
Albany is one of the few major characters left alive at the end, with Edgar and Kent. He tries to restore order, offering to return the kingdom to Lear and to reward those who stayed loyal, but Lear’s death overtakes him. His gradual awakening makes him a quieter counterpart to Gloucester: another man who comes to see clearly only after much of the damage is done.
The Duke of Cornwall
Regan’s husband is the most openly brutal man in the play. He puts Kent in the stocks, rewards Edmund with his father’s title, and in the play’s most horrifying scene puts out Gloucester’s eyes himself, crying “Out, vile jelly!” as he takes the second one.
Cornwall is also the first of the villains to be punished. During the blinding, one of his own servants, a man who says he has served him since childhood, draws his sword to stop him and wounds him before Regan kills the servant. Cornwall dies of the wound soon afterward, a sign that even in this world ordinary people can refuse to go along with cruelty.
The King of France and the Duke of Burgundy
Cordelia’s two suitors appear only in the first scene, but they reveal the difference between love and calculation. Burgundy withdraws his suit once Cordelia has no dowry. France marries her anyway, telling Burgundy that “Love’s not love / When it is mingled with regards that stands / Aloof from th’ entire point,” and that Cordelia “is herself a dowry.”
Other Characters
A few smaller parts matter to the story. Oswald, Goneril’s steward, carries her letters and does her bidding, insulting Lear at her command and earning a beating from Kent. He later tries to kill the blind Gloucester for the reward on his head and is killed by Edgar. The First Servant, Cornwall’s own man, is the one who draws his sword to stop the blinding of Gloucester and dies for it. An Old Man, Gloucester’s tenant for “these fourscore years,” leads his blinded master until Poor Tom takes over.
A Closer Reading: “And My Poor Fool Is Hanged”
Cordelia and the Fool never share the stage. She leaves in the first scene; he enters in the fourth. Just before he appears, a knight tells Lear that “Since my young lady’s going into France, sir, the Fool hath much pined away,” and Lear cuts him off: “No more of that. I have noted it well.” The Fool then spends the next two acts saying what Cordelia was banished for saying, that Lear has given everything to the wrong daughters. After the mad trial in Act 3, scene 6, he vanishes. Cordelia returns in Act 4.
At the very end, with Cordelia dead in his arms, Lear says:
And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all?
Most editors read “poor fool” as a term of tenderness for Cordelia, who has just been hanged. But the character the play names the Fool is the one who disappeared, and nothing in the text says what happened to him. Some scholars have gone further and suggested that the two parts were played by the same actor in Shakespeare’s company, which would explain why they never meet. The theory is disputed, since many believe the Fool was written for the company’s comic actor Robert Armin, but it has survived because the play itself invites it.
Whether or not the parts were doubled, the play treats Cordelia and the Fool as two forms of the same role: the one who loves Lear enough to tell him the truth, and who is punished for it. Cordelia says nothing to flatter him and loses her inheritance. The Fool says everything, under cover of jokes, and follows his master into the storm. In Lear’s last cry the two merge. The king who began the play unable to recognize love now grieves for it under a single name, and it no longer matters which of them he means.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the characters in King Lear, answered briefly.
Who Is the Main Character in King Lear?
Lear himself, the old king whose decision to divide his kingdom sets the tragedy in motion. The Earl of Gloucester is the central figure of the subplot, which mirrors Lear’s story.
Who Is the Villain in King Lear?
Edmund is the chief schemer, but the play has several villains. Goneril and Regan drive their father out into the storm, and Cornwall blinds Gloucester.
Why Does Lear Banish Cordelia?
Because she refuses to join her sisters in a public display of flattery. She says she loves him “According to my bond, no more nor less,” and Lear, who expected her to outdo her sisters, hears it as coldness and disowns her.
What Happens to the Fool in King Lear?
The play never says. The Fool disappears after Act 3, scene 6. Lear’s line “And my poor fool is hanged” in the final scene may refer to him, but most editors think it refers to Cordelia.
Who Survives at the End of King Lear?
Of the major characters, only Edgar, Kent, and Albany are alive at the end, and Kent expects to die soon. Lear, Cordelia, Gloucester, Goneril, Regan, Edmund, and Cornwall all die.
Related Reading
Three pages that take King Lear and its characters further.