Regan
Regan is Goneril's darker mirror - matching her sister's early flattery and later cruelty, but exceeding her in the one scene where the play's violence becomes most direct and personal, at Gloucester's blinding. Her rivalry with Goneril over Edmund provides the mechanism of her own death.
Appears In
Who is Regan?
Regan's declaration of love in the opening scene goes further than Goneril's, insisting she is made of the self-same metal as her sister but prizes herself higher still - an escalation that should tell Lear something about the nature of the contest he has designed, but does not. Once her third of the kingdom is secured, she moves in lockstep with Goneril against their father's remaining authority, matching her sister's complaints about his knights and adding her own refusals, until between them they have reduced Lear's retinue to nothing at all - an arithmetic of cruelty performed with an almost bureaucratic calm.
Regan's capacity for violence exceeds her sister's in the one moment the play makes unbearably explicit: when Gloucester is discovered to have aided Lear, it is Regan who eggs her husband Cornwall on as he gouges out the old earl's eyes, and Regan herself who, informed that Gloucester's other eye remains, urges Cornwall to finish the job. It is one of the few moments in the play where cruelty is not calculated for advantage but seems to be its own satisfaction.
Widowed when a servant, appalled at what he is witnessing, mortally wounds Cornwall in the same scene, Regan turns her attention to Edmund with an urgency that borders on desperation, competing openly with Goneril for a man neither can safely trust. She dies poisoned by her own sister before the final battle is even decided, a death the play notes almost in passing - one more casualty of an appetite that consumed everyone who indulged it, including, at the last, each other.
Motivation
Regan is motivated by the same appetite for power and control that drives Goneril, sharpened by a competitive need to match or exceed her sister at every turn - in professed love, in cruelty, and finally in desire for the same man.
Personality
Regan's cruelty has a directness that Goneril's more managerial ruthlessness lacks - she does not merely permit violence, she urges it forward, as at Gloucester's blinding, where her insistence that Cornwall finish what he has started reveals an appetite for suffering that outstrips any political necessity. Her rivalry with Goneril for Edmund reveals the same competitive instinct that shaped her opening declaration of love: whatever her sister claims, Regan must claim more, a pattern that finally destroys her when Goneril decides the contest by poison rather than persuasion.