Comic Books
- Preacher: Protagonist Jesse Custer greets a storm with a cry of "blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes!" and a sheepish admission of "always wanted to do that".
- The Simpsons story "Bard Boiled" revolves around parodies of Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, and King Lear.
Film
- In The Lost World, the T-rex attacks a San Diego video store, in which a poster for a King Lear movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger can be briefly glimpsed.
Literature
- In The Wheel of Time, one character is described as "a king in every inch of him."
Live Action TV
- Blackadder: The first episode was basically the last act of Richard III crossed with Macbeth, complete with three witches whose names in the shooting script are those of the princesses from King Lear. Some of the more grandiose characters quote directly from Henry V and Julius Caesar.
- In the first episode of Garth Marenghis Darkplace, a title card appears (in the middle of a scene), reading "This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen." It's actually somewhat appropriate, which is immediately ruined by the fact it cites King Lear, p46 rather than an act and scene, demonstrating just how much of a hack writer Garth Marenghi is.
- The Just Shoot Me! episode "King Lear Jet" is a Whole Plot Reference to Lear. Jack wins tickets to the play and has Nina and Eliot fighting over them, while neglecting Maya, who is a Shakespeare fan. A scene where Maya explains the plot to Dennis intercuts with Nina and Eliot plotting against each other and Jack going mad due to an out-of-control automatic door. The tickets finally go to Dennis, who is seen crying at the theater.
- President Bartlet on The West Wing has three daughters, but it's the middle one, Ellie, with whom he has the difficult relationship. In the episode named after her, the Surgeon General says in an Internet chat that generally speaking marijuana isn't worse for you than cigarettes, and the White House is planning to fire her when Ellie (a medical student herself) sticks her oar in by telling the press her father would never fire a doctor for giving accurate if impolitic medical information to the public. Bartlet has a fight with her, assuming she did it just to give him a hard time and demanding to know why she isn't always on his side like her sisters. Later, reflecting, he mentions King Lear and says that, after all, it was actually a nice thing she said about him.
- The West Wing borrows a lot from King Lear, especially in the earlier seasons. Leo takes the Earl of Kent's role (Bartlet's oldest friend, more pragmatic where Bartlet is idealistic), Charlie is the Fool (younger and less educated than other characters but wise, father-son relationship with Bartlet), the Vice President is Edmund (hungry for power that he feels he is owed, something of a schemer).
Music
- As if "I Am The Walrus" wasn't bizarre enough, at the end part of a BBC radio production of King Lear was mixed in live. The part they got was Act 4, Scene 6, from Oswald's Final Speech to Edgar saying, "Sit you down, father; rest you."
Web Comics
- Hark! A Vagrant: "The Madness of King Lear"
gets most of its comedy from various characters seriously under reacting to Lears' increasing insanity while his daughter get more and more annoyed.
Wrestling
- Scott Keith titled his rant about WWE's decline in the early 1990s "The King Lear Rant".
Real Life
- In real life, the moons of Uranus include Miranda, Caliban, Sycorax, Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Trinculo, Francisco, Ferdinand, Titania, Oberon, Puck, Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Mab, Portia, Rosalind, Margaret Perdita, and Cupid. In fact, according to Wikipedia, Ariel was one of the few moons of Uranus that wasn't initially named after a Shakespeare character—the first four were Titania and Oberon (after A Midsummer Night's Dream) and Ariel and Umbriel (after Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock). It just so happened that when they started finding more moons, Pope only got one more shout-out (Belinda) and Shakespeare got a couple dozen or so, with The Tempest alone receiving nine, ten if you include Ariel as a Tempest shout-out as well.
