What is "goneril"

Goneril is a character in Shakespeare's tragic play King Lear (1605). She is the eldest of King Lear's three daughters. Along with her sister Regan, Goneril is considered a villain, obsessed with power and overthrowing her elderly father as ruler of the kingdom of Britain. Her aggressiveness is a rare trait for a female character in Elizabethan literature.

Shakespeare based the character on Gonorilla, a personage described by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his pseudohistorical chronicle Historia regum Britanniae ("History of the Kings of Britain", ) as the eldest of the British king Lear's three daughters, alongside Regan and Cordeilla (the source for Cordelia), and the mother of Marganus.