An aging king divides his realm among his daughters based on their professions of love, and the one who loves him most truly says nothing he can bear to hear. Shakespeare's 1606 tragedy strips sovereignty, sanity, and shelter from its protagonist with unmatched ruthlessness, driving Lear onto a storm-lashed heath where he discovers, too late, what it means to be merely human. Parallel to his fall runs Gloucester's, another father destroyed by the child he trusted. The play is pitiless in its exposure of power's blindness. Yet on that same heath, amid madness and rain, Lear learns compassion for the poor naked wretches he never noticed from his throne. The cost of wisdom, Shakespeare insists, is everything.