At the end of the play, Cordelia and her French army are defeated by the British. Cordelia is taken to prison, where she stays, along with Lear. Lear is happy to be with her.
Goneril and Regan are in competition for Edmund. Goneril poisons Regan. Albany wants Cordelia and Lear to come before him to see if they can be freed without posing a threat to England. Edmund wants to kill Cordelia, so he puts that meeting off to the next day. He promises the prison captain a reward if he hangs Cordelia and makes it look like a suicide.
Albany begins to treat Edmund like an underling and then declares him a traitor, asking any who can testify to his treachery to come forward. Edgar, disguised by being fully armored with his visor down, makes the accusation and mortally wounds Edmund in a sword battle. Gloucester dies from a...
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weak heart overstrained by all the stress he has recently been through.
Edgar reveals himself and explains how Kent helped Lear. Goneril commits suicide, and Regan dies from her poisoning. Edmund, wanting to do a last good deed, tries to save Cordelia, but it is too late. Lear comes in carrying her dead body. Lear dies too, as does Edmund. Albany declares Edgar and Kent joint rulers of England because of their support of Lear.
How did King Lear die?
Lear dies as he contemplates the body of Cordelia, who has just been brought into the room. He says:
Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips.
Look there, look there. O, O, O, O.
He doesn't want to accept that Cordelia is dead. In one version of the play, he dies thinking she is still alive; in another, he recognizes that she is dead. In either case, he dies very soon after she is brought in.
Lear is an old man, near the end of his life cycle. Lately, he has been under severe emotional strain, as well as severe physical strain. For instance, he had recently been wandering outside in a violent storm. All of this has taken a toll on him. While we are not told exactly why he dies, we can plausibly imagine he has been weakened by his recent stresses. When he undergoes the emotional turmoil of first thinking he will be reunited with his beloved Cordelia and then is confronted with her dead body, that is the final straw. Aged and strained, he dies. Probably today, his death would be understood as from a sudden heart attack.
King Lear essentially dies of a broken heart. In the final scene of the drama, King Lear is peering over his daughter's dead body. He brings it in and stares at Cordelia's face. He wishes some aspect of life to be brought back to it. There is a vast level of guilt that Lear demonstrates in this scene. He wishes to bring back life to "nothing," the essence of Cordelia's statement to him in the first scene. For Lear, a massive transformation in his own character and his realization has been undertaken throughout the drama. His words that indicate he "might have saved her" is reflective of this. In a setting in which so much has been twisted and deformed, something which Lear himself has been an active agent in perpetrating, Shakespeare devises it so that Lear dies of what amounts to be a broken heart. It is this element that Lear lacked in the opening of the drama and its presence is what causes his death. It is in this where death is seen as a step towards restoration. Shakespeare uses Lear's death and his own understanding about his own folly as a reason why there is some level of hope in restoration in following Lear's death. His death through a broken heart and a recognition of his own failures is where there can be hope for a future that avoids the mistakes that he, himself, has made. Being a "foolish old man" is where his death through the breaking of his own heart becomes a fitting conclusion to the narrative.