Who wrote 'King Lear'?

Author-identification questions in general knowledge test whether a literary work can be matched to its writer by anchoring it to the work's genre, era, and school of writing -- a play is linked to a dramatist active in that period, not to a poet or novelist from a different era.

'King Lear' is one of William Shakespeare's four major tragedies (alongside Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello), first performed around 1606 during the Jacobean era. Its authorship is documented on the 1608 first-edition title page and the 1607 Stationers' Register entry, both of which name Shakespeare. Hence, William Shakespeare is the correct answer.

Contrast with the distractors:

• Tennyson -- a Victorian-era poet ('The Charge of the Light Brigade', 'In Memoriam'); he wrote no plays comparable to 'King Lear'.

• G.B. Shaw -- an Irish playwright of the late 19th-20th century ('Pygmalion'); his style and period belong to modern drama, not Elizabethan/Jacobean tragedy.

• T.S. Eliot -- a 20th-century modernist poet and critic ('The Waste Land'); his work is poetry and criticism, not Renaissance drama.