Books like King Lear
An old king divides his kingdom between two of his three daughters by asking them to say how much they love him, and walks out into a storm and his own disintegrating mind when they take him at his word.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of King Lear
Hamlet
A Danish prince's dead father tells him from a battlement that his uncle poisoned him and married the queen, and the prince takes the entire play to decide whether the ghost is telling the truth.
Othello
A Moorish general in the service of Venice marries a senator's daughter and is talked, by a man who tells him he is his friend, into murdering her on their wedding sheets.
Henry IV
A play: twenty years after a fall from his horse at a costume pageant, a wealthy Italian still believes he is the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, and his old circle arrives with a doctor to try to cure him.
The Iceman Cometh
A play: in Harry Hope's dive saloon in 1912, a roomful of drunks living on pipe dreams wait for Hickey, the salesman whose yearly binge they love, and this time he arrives sober.
Mourning Becomes Electra
A play in three parts setting the Oresteia in New England just after the Civil War: General Ezra Mannon comes home to a wife who hates him and a daughter who adores him.
Medea
A woman scorned by her husband murders their children in an act of revenge that has haunted literature for two and a half millennia.
Death and the King's Horseman
In a Yoruba town in colonial Nigeria during the Second World War, Elesin, the king's horseman, must follow the dead king into the afterlife by ritual suicide, and the British district officer decides to stop him.
Caligula
A play: after the death of his sister Drusilla, the young emperor Caligula decides that men die and are not happy, and sets out to use his absolute power to live by that truth.
Jude the Obscure
Jude Fawley, a stonemason who dreams of studying at Christminster, is thwarted by class, by marriage and by his love for his free-thinking cousin Sue, in Hardy's bleakest novel.
Faust
A scholar who has mastered every discipline and found none of them enough makes a wager with the devil Mephistopheles, and the bargain leads him to the young Gretchen.
The Homecoming
Teddy, a philosophy professor in America, brings his wife Ruth home to meet his father and brothers in their all-male house in North London.
The Cherry Orchard
An aristocratic family's estate is sold to a merchant, and the cherry orchard they can't save becomes a symbol of everything that changes when a social order dies.