Creative Essay on the ‘Revolutionary’ King Lear Most people are well familiar with William Shakespeare‟s play King Lear, which tells the tragic story of a once-powerful English King who falls victim to old age and decides to subdivide his kingdom among his two eldest daughters Goneril and Regan who profess to love him the most. He exiles his youngest daughter Cordelia, who he believes has not demonstrated sufficient paternal loyalty and respect to him, and Lear‟s daughters waste little time in banishing the monarch from his former realm shortly thereafter. The story, as Shakespeare tells it, is one of anguish and despair, with Lear finally succumbing to the ravages of age and is never again restored to the throne. But what if instead of passively accepting defeat, Lear instead decided to take a page out of the revolutionary book the hippies penned back in the 1960s? That was a time when revolution was everywhere – in American streets young people were protesting in support of the civil rights movement and against an unpopular war in Southeast Asia and also on the shores of Cuba where Fidel Castro‟s revolutionary forces defeated the Batista regime. Lear could have launched a similar revolution against his daughters. While Goneril and Regan retained the power their father entrusted in them, cracks were already beginning to emerge between the two as one began suspecting the other of treachery. A shrewd Lear could have joined forces with another expatriate, Edmund of Gloucester, much like Fidel Castro did with the revolutionary Che Guevara