Kent and Primogeniture in King Lear

This essay explores how, through the figure of Kent in King Lear, Shakespeare evokes the stereotype of the proud and rugged “Men of Kent,” even as he repudiates the customs of partible inheritance held by contemporary authors such as William Lambarde to be the source of that Kentish character. Kent’s name and dramatic function, along with the play’s treatment of inheritance and succession, mark King Lear as an intervention into contemporary debates about inheritance practices, a defense of early modern England’s particularly strict system of primogeniture.