Information flow

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the story of King Lear and his daughters was popular. By the time Elizabeth died, at least a dozen available books offered the story to anyone wishing to read it. Making the story a simple narrative that stated an obvious moral, however in most of these stories the characters were undeveloped. When he began work on Lear, perhaps his greatest tragedy, Shakespeare must have had several version of this story available to him. Even though the characters were based on the stock figures of legend, he turned them into credible human beings with complex motives.