SOURCE: Schlueter, June. “The Promised End.” In Dramatic Closure: Reading the End, pp. 13-18. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1995.

In the following essay, Schlueter discusses the conclusion of King Lear, noting that the play “both embodies and disrupts” literary conventions.

All friends shall taste 

The wages of their virtue, and all foes 

The cup of their deservings. … 

In Shakespeare's King Lear, the final sequence, beginning with Lear's howls and culminating in his death, may well compose the most powerful image of the play. The death of Cordelia, who earlier exchanged love and forgiveness with her father, astonishes even a reader expecting a tragic ending, for she, like Lear, has become “Great thing of us forgot!” (5.3.240).¹ Diverted and preoccupied by the unfolding events, the reader gives little thought to the Captain sent off to do “man's work” (5.3.40) or to Edmund's pending hope to do some good. When father...