Fairy tales and honesty in Shakespeare's King Lear, although it was written four centuries ago and is set in a distant mythological past, it still carries with it a moralistic message today. Like traditional fairy tales, to the authors to whom Shakespeare owes much in creating the plot of this play, the entire play is set to illustrate a single flaw in the human condition and teach a lesson about it. This lesson is the importance of honesty. Shakespeare hints at this throughout the play, but the lesson is finally stated explicitly in the last speech of the play, delivered by Edgar: "Speak what we feel, not what we should say" (5.3.393). This type of explicitly moralistic ending is rare in Shakespeare's work, as we see when looking at the endings of some of his other plays. So why, then, in King Lear? The relationships between the characters that we observe in the play are informed largely by the events of the first two scenes of the play. In the first scene, Cordelia is banished because she is unwilling to flatter Lear as her sisters were...