MY TITLE MAY SEEM IRONIC. Clearly, death is not an unusual occurrence in King Lear. A list of characters who are dead by the end of the play would have to include Lear himself, all three of his daughters, one son-in-law, Oswald, Edmund, Gloucester, the "slave that was a-hanging" Cordelia (5.3.272), and the unnamed servant who mortally wounds Cornwall immediately before being himself killed by Regan. By the end of the play, almost all of the characters who matter are dead, dying, or, in the Fool's case, have simply gone. The exceptions are Albany and Edgar, who take turns delivering the final lines in the Quarto and Folio texts, respectively. Surprisingly, however, among the characters who seek death, Goneril alone succeeds. Gloucester is not executed by Regan and Cornwall, who instead blind him, nor does he manage to dash himself against the rocks at the bottom of Dover Cliff. Lear is not destroyed during the storm, despite his cries for apocalypse, and later finds himself awoken from a sleep which he took to be death. Even Cordelia's suicide, present in most if not all of the sources to which Shakespeare had access, is replaced by an extra-legal execution. The only character who does succeed in committing suicide, Goneril, is perhaps the most despicable. For every other character, death seems strangely unattainable. Most die, but not if they're trying. While Lear, like "all tragedies" according to Lord Byron, ends "in death," most deaths are strangely deferred. This unusual situation must be accounted for by any attempt to understand King Lear as a tragedy. Leo Tolstoy, in his famously perverse declaration of the superiority of the earlier, anonymous, and now mostly forgotten play King Leir, claims that Shakespeare's adaptation violates all the conventions of tragedy accepted by his nineteenth-century admirers:
