The question designed by Shakespeare’s King Lear to differentiate his three daughters seems disarmingly simple: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” Yet Lear’s question contains an ambiguity which comes into focus if we reflect on what kind of answer Lear would find adequate. For two kinds of answer to this question are possible, each of which is a response to a subtly different interrogation. The first possibility is that Lear is asking, “Which of you three loves me more than the other two?” In other words, it is an attempt to quantify the amount of love for Lear in each of his daughters and then to place his daughters in an order by reference to those amounts. In this understanding of the words, the answer to Lear’s question is some kind of volume. The second possibility is that Lear is asking, “Which of you three loves me most of anything in the world?” In this version of Lear’s question, he is inquiring into the position he holds in the affections of each of his daughters. The answer in this case is a ranking, rather than a volume.

This is not an ambiguity which exists in the earlier play on the story of King Lear, the True Chronicle Historie of King Leir (performed 1594; printed 1605). There Leir’s question is to discover “which of my daughters loves me best,” and he imagines that they will “contend / Eche to exceed the other in their love.” In other words, in the True Chronicle Historie, Leir’s question is unmistakably a question of volume rather than of ranking. In Shakespeare, Goneril and Regan interpret Lear’s question as a volume question. Regan seeks to overtop Goneril’s response by drawing attention to her own superfluity of emotion:

I am made of that self-mettle as my sister
And prize me at her worth. In my true heart
I find she names my very deed of love,
Only she comes too short.

For Cordelia, however, Lear’s question is rather a matter of ranking, which is why she retorts upon her sisters the fact of their having husbands: “Why have my sisters husbands if they say / They love you all?” Only if Lear’s is a ranking question does the fact of being married create difficulties, since if it were a volume question, it would be possible for Goneril and Regan to exceed each other and Cordelia in love for Lear and yet still to love their husbands more. But when Cordelia contrasts the implications of her own response with that of her sisters—“Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters, / To love my father all”—it is clear that, for her, the love which is owed to a father is of a different kind from the love which is owed to a husband. Husbands and fathers have different dignities, and consequently the different loves that each properly attracts cannot be measured against one another. They are different things. To think otherwise is to be blind to the difference between what Kant called “dignities” and “prices” and hence to be open to the interchangeableness that is characteristic of utilitarianism.

Lear’s question thus indeed divides and fragments his family, albeit not in quite the way he intended. Instead of arranging them in a hierarchy of love for him, it splits them into two moral camps. And this ethical division immediately spreads through the court. When Lear offers Cordelia to Burgundy without a dowry, the language he uses to justify this change is significant: “now her price is fall’n.” Burgundy’s response had been couched in the language of trade: “I crave no more than hath your highness offered, / Nor will you tender less.” But the king of France’s response, which again turns on the language of worth and price, expresses the view that what is without a price can nevertheless be worth most: “Not all the dukes of watrish Burgundy / Can buy this unprized, precious maid of me.” In the person of Kent we see how Lear’s question provokes defiant resistance to what he eventually denounces as “evil” (rather than the milder word, “folly,” that he had initially used). It is a movement up the scale of wrongdoing sufficient to jolt Kent out of his initial courtesy into the “unmannerly” language he will eventually use towards Lear. And just as Cordelia, in refusing to give Lear the answer he wanted, was unmoved by a consideration of the consequences of her silence, so too is Kent unconcerned by Lear’s threats of retribution: “My life I never held but as a pawn / To wage against thine enemies; ne’er fear to lose it, / Thy safety being motive.” The scene ends with Lear’s court ethically fractured as well as politically divided and geographically dispersed, as Kent shapes his old course in a “country new” and Cordelia departs for France.

The sudden disorientation dramatized onstage would have been shared by the play’s first audiences had they been familiar with the True Chronicle Historie of King Leir. Shakespeare took over much material from that earlier play. But he also altered freely what he took, and he did so with a consistent intention, especially in this first scene, which compresses no fewer than the first seven scenes of the True Chronicle Historie. The character of Lear/Leir was changed in particularly significant ways. Shakespeare omitted the references to the recent past and the justification for the love-test carefully set out by the earlier playwright in the first speech of the play, spoken by Leir himself:

Thus to our griefe the obsequies performd
Of our (too late) deceast and dearest Queen,
Whose soule I hope, possest of heavenly joyes,
Doth ride in triumph ’mongst the Cherubins;
Let us request your grave advice, my Lords,
For the disposing of our princely daughters,
For whom our care is specially imployd,
As nature bindeth to advaunce their states,
In royall marriage with some princely mates:
For wanting now their mothers good advice,
Under whose government they have receyved
A perfit patterne of a vertuous life:
Lest as it were a ship without a sterne,
Or silly sheepe without a Pastors care;
Although our selves doe dearely tender them,
Yet are we ignorant of their affayres:
For fathers best do know to governe sonnes;
But daughters steps the mothers counsell turnes.

Immediately one notices three important changes Shakespeare made to this inherited material. First, he eliminated the Christian setting of the play which Leir invokes when referring to his dead queen. Second, he almost completely suppressed any reference to Lear’s queen (there is only one line in the play which glances at her past existence, which is perhaps inadvertent on Shakespeare’s part). Third, whereas all Leir’s daughters are unmarried when the True Chronicle Historie begins, in King Lear Goneril and Regan have been married before the beginning of the action. The second and third of these changes have the effect of making Lear’s actions inscrutable. In the True Chronicle Historie, a clear reason for the division of the kingdom is implied. The play begins in a moment of natural change for the state, with the death of the queen and the need for the daughters to marry. We are given a coherent and rational (if, in the event, misguided) political motivation for the events which set the action of the play in motion. In King Lear, by contrast, we hear only the rumor and surmise of Kent and Gloucester in the opening lines and Lear’s enigmatic, ambiguous darker purpose. Our sense of the significance of these differences continues if we compare Leir/Lear’s motives for stepping aside from the throne. Leir is motivated by exhaustion and piety:

The world of me, I of the world am weary,
And I would fayne resigne these earthly cares,
And thinke upon the welfare of my soule:
Which by no better meanes may be effected,
Then by resigning up the Crowne from me,
In equal dowry to my daughters three.

This may be unwise, but it would be harsh to criticize it as indifferent to the public good. Compare the triviality and self-indulgence of the considerations which motivate Lear’s decision:

And ’tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths, while we
Unburthen’d crawl toward death. . . .
Only we shall retain
The name, and all th’ addition to a king; the sway,
Revenue, execution of the rest,
Beloved sons, be yours.

The gap between these two justifications for retirement is evident if we reflect on how improbable it is that Lear, so intoxicated with himself at the beginning of the play, would ever have entertained Leir’s insight that “the world of me is weary.”

The tendency of Shakespeare’s revisions to the character of Leir/Lear becomes even clearer when we consider how he altered the purpose of the love test. In the True Chronicle Historie, the love test is both practical and public-spirited, bound up in Leir’s concern for the state. Cordella has refused to marry any of the “divers Peeres” by whom she has been solicited, but Leir comes up with a plan to outmaneuver her resistance:

I am resolv’d, and even now my mind
Doth meditate a sudden stratagem,
To try which of my daughters loves me best:
Which till I know, I cannot be in rest.
This graunted, when they joyntly shall contend,
Eche to exceed the other in their love:
Then at the vantage will I take Cordella,
Even as she doth protest she loves me best,
Ile say, Then, daughter, graunt me one request,
To shew thou lovest me as thy sisters doe,
Accept a husband, whom my selfe will woo.
This sayd, she cannot well deny my sute,
Although (poore soule) her sences will be mute:
Then will I tryumph in my policy,
And match her with a King of Brittany.

This again is very different from what we are given in Shakespeare. His Lear bribes his daughters into making protestations of love by dangling in front of them the possibility of a larger share of the kingdom:

Tell me, my daughters,
Since now we will divest us both of rule,
Interest of territory, cares of state,
Which of you shall we say doth love us most,
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge.

The Leir of the True Chronicle Historie is certainly misguided, but he is also undeniably well intentioned. The same cannot be said for the sly, childish, and vain old man of King Lear. So far, then, Shakespeare’s changes to the opening of the received dramatic version of the story show him making the king less admirable, less disinterested, more capricious, and more selfish.

One further change to the opening of the play is worth considering. In the True Chronicle Historie, a corrupt courtier, Skalliger, tells Gonorill and Ragan that Leir is going to ask them to declare their love. They have an opportunity to prepare extravagant speeches beforehand, as they explicitly state to the audience:

GON. I will so flatter with my doting father,
As he was ne’re so flattred in his life.
Nay, I will say, that if it be his pleasure,
To match me to a begger, I will yeeld:
For why, I know what ever I do say,
He meanes to match me with the Cornwall King.

RAG. Ile say the like: for I am well assured,
What e’re I say to please the old man’s mind,
Who dotes, as if he were a child agayne,
I shall injoy the noble Cambrian Prince:
Only, to feed his humour, will suffice,
To say, I am content with any one
Whom heele appoynt me; this will please him more,
Then e’re Apolloes musike pleased Jove.

In Shakespeare no one has any warning of what Lear intends. Goneril and Regan are presumably as taken aback as anyone else when their father suddenly starts playing the terribly unfair, but also terribly dangerous, game of the love test. Whereas in the True Chronicle Historie, Gonorill and Ragan are unmasked as scheming villains from the outset, in King Lear, at least in the first scene, the moral coloring of Goneril and Regan is not made explicit and unmistakable for us in the same way. And this is sustained to some extent beyond the first scene. In the True Chronicle Historie, Gonorill complains bitterly to Skalliger about her father’s reproofs of her self-indulgence and extravagance:

GON. I prithy, Skalliger, tell me what thou thinkst:
Could any woman of our dignity
Endure such quips and peremptory taunts,
As I do daily from my doting father?
Doth’t not suffice that I him keepe of almes,
Who is not able for to Keepe himselfe?
But as if he were our better, he should thinke
To check and snap me up at every word.
I cannot make me a new fashioned gowne,
And set it forth with more then common cost;
But his old doting doltish withered wit,
Is sure to give a sencelesse check for it.
I cannot make a banquet extraordinary,
To grace my selfe, and spread my name abroad,
But he, old foole, is captious by and by,
And sayth, the cost would well suffice for twice.
Judge then, I pray, what reason ist, that I
Should stand alone charg’d with his vaine expence,
And that my sister Ragan should go free,
To whom he gave as much, as unto me?
I prithy, Skalliger, tell me, if thou know,
By any meanes to rid me of this woe.

The equivalent, much shorter, speech in Shakespeare lays the emphasis elsewhere:

By day and night he wrongs me; every hour
He flashes into one gross crime or other
That sets us all at odds. I’ll not endure it:
His knights grow riotous, and himself upbraids us
On every trifle.

After the adjustments to the received account to which the audience has been exposed in the first scene, it would not be hard for them to extend at least a measure of credibility toward this portrait of a peevish and captious old man. Unlike in the True Chronicle Historie, we are not immediately alienated from Goneril and Regan.

Why should Shakespeare have chosen to recast the opening so that Lear, a character with whom he will eventually wish us to feel at least a measure of sympathy, emerges as less admirable than the play’s first audience was probably expecting him to be? And why do Goneril and Regan, whom he will eventually lead us to repudiate, initially command a degree of sympathy, and perhaps even a trace of admiration, from the audience?

King Lear is remarkable for the number of characters who invite moral re-assessment from the audience. This is true in both directions. There are a number of characters from whom we feel a measure of early estrangement but who in the end have a stronger claim on our sympathies than we had originally allowed: Lear himself, Cordelia, Albany, Edgar. Then there are characters from whom we feel obliged steadily to distance ourselves as the action proceeds: Goneril, Regan, Oswald, and especially Edmund. And as we have seen by comparing the first scene of King Lear with the equivalent material in the True Chronicle Historie, Shakespeare seems to have deliberately adjusted his sources to accentuate this effect of moral revision.

Edmund is perhaps the character about whom we revise our moral estimation most sharply. And this revision of judgement is particularly salient, since Shakespeare seems to have gone out of his way to make this character attractive to us in Act I, scene ii. This is a long and complex scene, falling into five distinct parts: (1) the invocation of “Nature,” (2) the entry of Gloucester and his deception by use of the forged letter, (3) Edmund’s mockery of Gloucester’s superstitions about astrology, (4) the entry of Edgar and his deception by Edmund, and (5) Edmund’s final gleeful resolve to have lands by wit, if not by birth. Edmund remains onstage throughout, beginning and ending this predominantly prose scene with two verse soliloquies. Another way of describing the structure of the scene would be to say that it consists of two episodes of trickery, each framed by a direct address from Edmund to the audience. So Edmund here commandingly but also improvisationally shapes the action as he chooses and comments on it amusingly to the audience. He is presented to us as a character in the mold of others whom Shakespeare’s first audiences would have trusted and liked: in particular the skeptical, disengaged, witty choric figures of the comedies—Berowne in Love’s Labours Lost, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, even perhaps Rosalind in As You Like It. Edmund’s dramatic profile and stage signature encourage the audience, at this early stage of the play, to like and to trust him.

The question of comedy arises within the scene itself. Edgar comes onstage just as Edmund is speaking of him: “Pat, he comes like the catastrophe of the old comedy.” This is more than just a casual jibe, because the whole shape and tone of this scene is comic, to the point where we might almost call it a scene extracted from a comedy and inserted into a tragedy. Edmund has some of the characteristics of a stock comic figure, the trickster or clever servant. Moreover, the deceiving of the old and foolish by the young, irreverent, and freethinking is a comic paradigm which Shakespeare has used in earlier comedies: for instance, in the gulling of Malvolio by Maria and Feste in Twelfth Night or the discomfiting of Shylock by Portia in Merchant of Venice. We are tempted, then, initially to misread this scene as an instance of the comic, and therefore finally benign, defeat of age and credulity by wit, youth, and presence of mind.

This scene also makes it clear that Edmund is a proto-utilitarian. His defiant declaration “All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit” makes clear that he can see no difference between the expedient (“fit”) and the right (“meet”). For Edmund the expedient and the right are equivalent, just as he can see no difference between baseness and legitimacy. Only later in the play, when we have seen what results from this episode of high-spirited invention, do we form a more severe judgement of the moral stance that Shakespeare here seems to have deliberately made so alluring to us. Such inappropriate or “off-key” intrusions of the comic into the realm of tragedy can have a baleful yet powerful effect, as in Goneril’s sarcastic response (“An interlude!”) to Albany’s bitter translation of the erotic entanglements of Edmund, Regan, and Goneril into the complicated yet superficial patterns of a farce:

For your claim, fair sister,
I bar it in the interest of my wife.
’Tis she is subcontracted to this lord,
And I her husband contradict your banns.
If you will marry, make your loves to me:
My lady is bespoke.

The moral atmosphere of King Lear is quite different from that of the True Chronicle Historie, in which we are never called upon to revise or re-open a moral judgement we have passed on a character. In the earlier play, everyone remains statically “in character” from the beginning to the end.

There are, I think, two reasons for this ethical unfixedness in Shakespeare. The first is that it ensures that the audience of King Lear enjoys no sense of an impregnable superiority of moral insight; Lear, Gloucester, and Edgar all make errors of moral judgement, and so do we, insofar as we respond sensitively to the early scenes of the play. The audience cannot congratulate itself on any greater perceptiveness than that possessed by the main characters, and this is in the end a way of enlisting our sympathy all the more strongly in favor of characters whom, had the play been differently organized (or had it been a comedy), we might have been tempted to dismiss as simply stupid or impercipient. The second reason is that Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that our moral identities are not fixed and that we do not enter the world with a moral character which then remains unchanged whatever we happen to do. Rather, we create our own moral characters through our actions, which somehow remain within us and become constitutive of our selves. We become the people who possess the moral characters we have acted out.

This perhaps makes King Lear seem rather skeptical, even relativistic, about moral values. The play presents us with a shifting surface of moral instability, in which our perceptions of the probity of individual characters can change with disorienting results. But in the midst of this flux, Shakespeare also repeatedly shows us characters taking moral stands against what they instinctively see as wrong. These characters are moved to act in defiance of all learned behavior, and at severe cost to themselves, to oppose what they intuitively perceive to be outrageous actions. Cordelia and Kent are two such characters. But another example would be the anonymous servant in Act III, scene vii, who, despite being (as we later learn) “bred” in the service of Cornwall, is so outraged by the blinding of Gloucester that he turns on his master, in defiance of the habits of his whole life and in reckless disregard of the consequences:

Hold your hand, my Lord.
I have serv’d you ever since I was a child,
But better service have I never done you
Than now to bid you hold.

The messenger uses a striking word, employed neither beforehand nor afterward by Shakespeare, when he reports these events to Albany: “A servant that he bred, thrilled with remorse, / Opposed the act.” Today “thrilled” has become purely metaphorical and means something like “deeply and pleasurably excited.” But the fundamental and literal meaning of the word, and still the primary meaning in Shakespeare’s day, is “pierced.” So used, the word denotes a certainly intense but not necessarily pleasant experience; moreover, an experience in some way visceral, physical, and also unintended and unsummoned by the one who suffers it. This sense of the word is echoed twice later in Act IV: first, when Kent asks the Gentleman, “Did your letters pierce the Queen to any demonstration of grief?” and later, when Edgar, on seeing the distracted King Lear, exclaims, “O thou side-piercing sight!” This idiom of physical penetration is powerfully suggestive of certain characters’ moral behavior; an intuitive perception of right or wrong is followed by a deliberate decision to adhere to the right, no matter how inexpedient the consequences may be for them personally. Against them, Shakespeare places the “serviceable villain[s]” whose moral judgement is limited to an inclination toward their own advantage: characters such as Oswald or the anonymous Officer in Act V, scene ii who, when asked by Edmund to carry out the orders contained in the note he has just given him without being told what the orders are, replies simply and terribly, “I’ll do’t, my Lord.”

This is why I believe the fundamental moral question in King Lear is not simply “What is the right thing to do?” Even corrupt characters seem able to distinguish good and evil accurately. (Consider Edmund’s last words: “I pant for life; some good I mean to do / Despite of my own nature.”) Rather, in this play the essential moral issue is whether we have the courage to do what we judge intuitively to be right, despite all the temptations we face to ignore the promptings of our moral reason and pursue our own advantage. Some characters come through that moment of moral trial, while others fail.

What Shakespeare insists is that it is a free choice.

This essay is adapted from Thinking Through Shakespeare (Princeton University Press, 2026).