King Lear

Why it’s on the list: A king divides his kingdom by asking his three daughters to say how much they love him, disinherits the one who refuses to perform it, and is turned out into a storm by the two who did. The play that offers the least consolation of anything Shakespeare wrote.

Where I heard about it

• Founders Classical Academy — the last Shakespeare on the twelfth-grade list at this classical school in Lewisville, Texas, so a student who met him at ten in A Midsummer Night’s Dream leaves on this one; posted by the Classic Learning Test in September 2026. The full eight-year sequence is on Founders Classical Academy Reading List.

About this edition

Written around 1605. Shakespeare took a source play with a happy ending and removed it; Nahum Tate put the happy ending back in 1681, and the English stage used his version for a hundred and fifty years.

Connections

• Founders Classical Academy Reading List — the curriculum this came from; 56 unique titles across 5th through 12th grade.
• Classical Education — the movement whose canon this list is.
• William Shakespeare
• Hamlet
• Literature