Shakespeare's King Lear

Lear is too much. There’s too much to stomach, an overdoing of massive wickednesses which rightly provoked perhaps the most famous reaction to King Lear ever, Dr Samuel Johnson’s horror in his Prefaces to his Shakespeare (1765) over the blinding of Gloucester –“an act too horrid to be endured in dramatick exhibition” – and the death of Cordelia: “contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of the chronicles”. There are ind...