SOURCE: McFarland, Thomas. “The Image of the Family in King Lear.” In On ‘King Lear,’ edited by Lawrence Danson, pp. 91-118. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.

In the following essay, McFarland considers the dramatization of family structure in King Lear.

King Lear develops its action along a pattern supplied simultaneously by poetic fantasy and by historical reality. In the main plot, the relationship between Lear and his daughters is prefigured in the record of a distressed family situation of the late Elizabethan period. Brian Annesley, who for many years had been a gentleman pensioner to Queen Elizabeth, had three daughters. As he grew old, Annesley's mind began to give way, and two of his daughters, Christian, who was the wife of Lord Sandys of the Essex Rebellion, and Lady Grace Wildgoose, petitioned to have the old man declared insane and his estate placed in the care of...