King Leir

[1] The play has attracted critical attention principally for its relationship with King Lear, Shakespeare's version of the same story.

The first edition appeared later that year, printed by Stafford for the bookseller John Wright, with the title The true Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordella.

Other sources and influences include Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, The Mirror for Magistrates, William Warner's Albion's England, and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

[9] Yet "a remarkable historical parallel" provided "a topical reason"[10] for the publication of Leir, and perhaps also for Shakespeare's interest in the story c. 1605.

Brian Annesley (or Anslowe) was an elderly former follower of Queen Elizabeth, a wealthy Kentishman with three daughters: Grace (married to Sir John Wildgose), Christian (the wife of William Sandys, 3rd Baron Sandys), and the youngest, the unmarried Cordell, who had been a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth.

Cordell wrote to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, to protest her older sister's action, and otherwise supported her father against his eldest daughter.