William Shakespeare’s King Lear has long received considerable attention for textual, philological and theatrical reasons. This monograph combines the most recent academic research and the close reading of the 1608 Quarto text to find answers to the question what makes this play an outstanding and exceptional work of art. Written to be performed to a courtly audience, the text bears traces of the dramaturgical heritage of Tudor interludes as well as the tropes of early Jacobean public discourses on royal power. Relying on The Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham’s Early Modern handbook of rhetorical and poetic conventions, the monograph offers a historically plausible understanding of the play and argues that the corporeal image cluster of the text corresponds to the rhetoric of the royal discourse based on the tropes of the body politic. The research findings eventually lead to the conclusion that the 1608 King Lear Quarto stands as a dramatic response to royal propaganda and it is meant to hold a mirror of governance to the royal court and to King James in particular, who supposedly was present at the first performance of the play in Whitehall.