King Lear

Aging King Lear decides to surrender his throne to his three daughters and solicits comments from them about their devotion and love to him. Goneril and Regan, the elder married daughters, flatter their father with profusely exaggerated declarations of filial devotion, but Goneril, his unmarried youngest, refuses to try to outdo her sisters in insincerity and declares her loyalty to her father in more subdued terms. The egocentric king disinherits her it a fit of pique and banishes her, as well as Kent, one of his most loyal ministers, who had the temerity to criticize the king’s actions. The aging Lear is not happy in retirement as first one and then both of his daughters turn their backs on their now powerless father. Cordelia, now married to the King of France, remains loyal to her father despite his treatment of her and invades England with the French army in hopes of restoring her father to the throne. In the meantime, the Duke of Gloucester’s illegitimate son Edmund plots to have his half-brother Edgar, his father’s legitimate heir, discredited, so that he inherits his father’s estates. The unscrupulous Edmund’s avarice drives him to seduce both Goneril and Regan in his ambitious quest for power.