Regan (King Lear) Regan (King Lear) Regan is a fictional character in William Shakespeare's tragic play, "King Lear", named after a King of the Britons recorded by the medieval scribe Geoffrey of Monmouth. Shakespeare based the character on "Regan", a personage described by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his pseudohistorical chronicle "Historia regum Britanniae" ("History of the Kings of Britain", ) as one of the British king Lear's three daughters, alongside Goneril and Cordeilla (the source for Cordelia), and the mother of Cunedagius. She is the middle child of King Lear's daughters and is married to the Duke of Cornwall. Similarly to her older
King Lear of a common folk tale, Love Like Salt, Aarne–Thompson type 923, in which a father rejects his youngest daughter for a statement of her love that does not please him. The source of the subplot involving Gloucester, Edgar, and Edmund is a tale in Philip Sidney's "Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia" (1580–90), with a blind Paphlagonian king and his two sons, Leonatus and Plexitrus. Besides the subplot involving the Earl of Gloucester and his sons, the principal innovation Shakespeare made to this story was the death of Cordelia and Lear at the end; in the account by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cordelia