King Lear

William Shakespeare

AudiobooksEnglish3 h 23 min

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Old King Lear decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters according to how much each says she loves him. Goneril and Regan flatter him and…

About the recording

Author: William Shakespeare
Read by: John Gonzalez, Denny Sayers, JemmaBlythe and 21 other readers
Length: 3:23:02
Parts: 5
Language: English
Source: LibriVox · Internet Archive

Now playingAct 1

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Chapters (5)

About this book

Old King Lear decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters according to how much each says she loves him. Goneril and Regan flatter him and receive everything; Cordelia, who loves him most, will not perform her love and is banished. Stripped of his power by the two elder daughters, Lear rages on a heath in a storm with his Fool and descends into madness, while in a parallel story the Earl of Gloucester is betrayed by one son and blinded, and saved by the other.

Context and significance

Shakespeare wrote King Lear around 1606, and it is often counted the greatest and the most painful of his tragedies. This is a dramatic reading by a cast of LibriVox volunteers, each taking a part, in about three and a half hours.

This is a LibriVox recording, read by volunteers and dedicated to the public domain; its audio files are kept by the Internet Archive, which plays and serves them here. Public-domain status differs from country to country, so check the law where you live before republishing it. Do you hold rights in this work? Request its removal