Seems odd now this has never occurred to me (randomly stumbled on) that the mother-wife should be such a non-presence in King Lear: “What happened to Queen Lear? Where is she? How might things h bn, had she not been absent? If I recall aright, Shakespeare never even addresses this q. But isn’t this a deafening silence?”
Seems fair to mention that Shakespeare took this story pretty much as is from other sources,… but even so, the three adult-seeming daughters with a father and no mother undeniably creates the underlying familial atmospherics of that main plot, while a single father with two adult sons and no apparent mom –and with not the same mom– composes the familial atmospherics of the subplot. (Can we project from this what I think is no where explicitly stated that Lear’s two unfaithful daughters were illegitimate?)
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 