Regan is the second daughter to King Lear and the wife of the Duke of Cornwall. Different from King Lear, who starts insane and gets slowly more in control of his mind as the play progresses, and Edgar, who only pretends to be mad, Regan is the only character who seems stable enough at the beginning while she appears to be gradually getting more and more twisted and bordering insanity as her passions and volitions take control of her.
Regan suffers from what you might call and overkill of middle child syndrome. She never had the trust and respect of being the eldest daughter, nor the partiality and babying of being the youngest, and feels herself to be the underdog and as such the most deserving of everything and anything. She was always a bit rotten, and the resentment and frustration that has been building inside her for all the long years of watching her father go senile and she and her husband pushed to the back of all favors, turned inward and inflated her hatred, so that when the opportunity came to prove herself the "best daughter", it came out in passionate violence and revenge upon everyone who she believed had ever wronged her, including her father.
Regan is very impulsive. She gives her emotions free reign over herself and lets them drive her wherever they will. Whatever is happening in that moment, at that second, then all else is forgotten and she does whatever she feels without thinking of the consequences. She does not think ahead, plan or prepare, but instead acts before she thinks and lets herself go down paths without ever bothering to look back and see whether she took a wrong turn. She convinces herself that she doesn't care what anyone else thinks of her, though she has the emotional insecurity of a thirteen year old. Her temper is hot and the farther she gets into her sadistic vengeance the less she is able to control it.
Relationships:
King Lear: Regan hates her father. She believes he is a fool for underestimating her and what she believes she can do, and detests him for preferring Cordelia to her and Goneril. Though she thinks she has wanted his affection and trust all her life, when he comes to her for help and security, any love she once had for him is long gone, and she refuses to be saddled with him, insults him, tries to get her sister to take care of him and finally turns him out of her house, hoping he'll die in the wilderness, and prepares to invade his lands and claim them for herself. She relishes playing him like a puppet before casting him out, because she feels that this is how she has been treated.
Goneril: Though seemingly united in many goals with her sister, such as hatred of Cordelia and annoyance turned aggressiveness with their father, most of the play shows a competition between the two not only for the love of Edmund but also for the lands that were taken from the disowned Cordelia and a constant struggle to one-up the other. As the eldest daughter Goneril was depended upon and trusted more than Regan ever was, and the fact that, as little as their father gave them, Goneril still got more, makes Regan's animosity towards her sister only marginally less than most of the other characters. In the first scene the agree that they must do something about Lear's madness - all future scenes show a fake affection and quarrelsome looks that escalate into an obvious sibling rivalry that prompts Goneril to murder Regan.
Cordelia: Though only in two scenes together, one of which where they are both dead, it is clear that both Goneril and Regan dislike their sister because she is the favorite of their father and always gets the best of everything. While there is little doubt that the good Cordelia deserves this, it does nothing to assuage Regan's feelings of uselessness that she gleaned from the rest of her family. Cordelia's shame and banishment brings glee and vindictive pleasure to Regan, only heightened when her lands are taken and offered to her or Goneril. The war leveled between France and Cornwall/Albany proves that all three sisters have little love and much loathing towards each other that only ends when all of them are dead.
Edmund: The attraction of Edmund for Regan lies in the fact that at their core they have a very similar problem. Regan looks at Edmund and what she sees is not so much the handsome boy of the Duke of Gloucester - rather the fact that he, like her, is the child given little respect, he is the child of whom the father and siblings are ashamed, the child who is never given trust or love. He represents everything that she would like to do to Goneril and Lear, and is seduced by the idea that the bastard can do what she has been trying to do her entire life: rise above the given title of his family to make a name for himself and become the glory of the kingdom. Regan wants to be a part of that regime, the two underdogs getting their rightful place and crushing the undeserving beneath them.
Cornwall: If she ever loved him in the first place, since it was most likely an arranged marriage, Regan's love for her husband stretches only the the point where they both hate Lear, Goneril and Albany and they support each other's cruelty. There is a certain amount of affection between them - they have, after all, been married for many years, and they share a nasty side that comes to fruition in 3.7, but not enough to keep Regan from considering leaving Cornwall for Edmund, as Goneril does with her husband. Cornwall's timely death made it so that she did not have to make that decision, but it is in this scene that we see her softer side for the first and only time. Per her attribute of living in the moment, when Cornwall is wounded by a 'traitorous' servant, she is hesitant to help him but for a moment she forgets Edmund in lieu of a certain tenderness and instinct to care. It is short lived, however, like most of her passions, and when he is safely out of the way she continued to pursue Edmund.
Gloucester: One of the "good guys", Gloucester is rewarded for his loyalty to the king and Cordelia by having his eyes brutally removed by Cornwall at Goneril's suggestion and Regan's egging on. There is little conversation between Regan and the Duke besides insults and vehemence, and Regan sees him much as she sees her own father, thinking he has wronged her saintly Edmund in the same way that Lear has wronged her. He is detestable and dirt beneath her shoe, and is not afraid to inform him so when she gets the opportunity.
Kent: Kent is a supporter of King Lear and therefore must automatically be vermin. Regan begins to show her colder side when Kent is put in the stocks by her husband's will and his sentence prolonged from a few hours to through the day and night by Regan's. Kent is the main male beacon of good in the play alongside Cordelia, and he commits the unforgivable sin of standing up for her wronged sister to the point to treason, which to Regan is everything that must be hated and extinguished.
Oswald: As Goneril's servant, he is a source of information to be used, exploited and pumped dry until he is no longer needed and can then be thrown out with the trash. Regan finds him frustratingly disloyal to everyone except Goneril, who is the one person she needs him to betray, and ergo he constitutes someone very low in her esteem.
Edgar: Though they never speak to each other, Regan references Edgar once or twice, and holds him much as she holds Goneril: a usurper of the rightful and deserving ruler. Regan is the one who mentions that Edgar is Lear's godson, and this most likely does little to make her like him more; he is just another person Lear prefers to his own daughter.
Albany: They rarely speak to each other, but when they do it is for Albany to rightly condemn and Regan to stand in horror as the poison Goneril has given her spreads. To Regan, Albany is a lesser version of her sister - less calculating, much less evil, but still greedy for the lands that Regan and Cornwall wants and the other half of the opposition that she hates. He is, however, a reason why Edmund should not have Goneril, and therefore useful to a certain extent, and he is formal to her, allowing her to be escorted away from the judgment the rest face imminently when she becomes sick, and shows respect for his dead sister in law by having her face covered even in light of her wretchedness.
Fool: Though only onstage together once and never speaking to each other, one can only assume that, judging by Regan's character and Fool's behavior, that Regan sees him as a spouter of nonsense and lies that he father listens to more than he does her and a personal insult to the royal house and herself.
Regan is one of 9 dead characters at the end of the play, one of 5 who were murdered and not dead by suicide or heart failure, and one of 5 killed offstage. Thus she ends, without the Shakespearean habit of giving a dramatic speech.
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