MOST Shakespearean plays follow a normal curve concatenation of events triggered by an initial conflict.
Analysing the plot structure can help you to understand the action as purposeful, connected, and oriented to a logical end rather than seeing it as a haphazard accumulation of seemingly random episodes.  
You will recall what we said before: That conflict is the driving force in any drama.
In analysing King Lear you want to establish the conflict and trace its evolution all the way through complication, crisis point, and denouement to resolution.
The plot of King Lear begins with exposition which introduces characters and setting and provides basic information about relationships between characters and the initial conflict between them.
In King Lear the exposition is in the closest conjunction with the complication or rising action.
In lines 1-28 all the leading characters, except Edgar and the Fool, are introduced; the two plots and their interaction are prepared for, and the keynote of both Gloucester’s character and Lear’s is struck.
With line 29 and the old king’s announcement of his ‘darker purpose’ begins the action of the Lear plot.
‘Darker’ suggests the atmosphere of the drama.
The love test, the division of the kingdom, the disinheritance of Cordelia, and the banishment of Kent, set the tragedy on course.
Conflict in King Lear begins with the king’s decision to partition his kingdom.
The aging king of Britain decides to step down from the throne and divide his kingdom evenly among his three daughters.
First, however, he puts his daughters through a test, asking each to tell him how much she loves him. Goneril and Regan, Lear’s older daughters, give their father flattering answers.
But Cordelia, Lear’s youngest and favourite daughter, remains silent, saying that she has no words to describe how much she loves her father.
Lear flies into a rage and disowns Cordelia.
The king of France, who has courted Cordelia, says that he still wants to marry her even without her land, and she accompanies him to France without her father’s blessing thus revealing the enmeshing of political and personal conflicts.
The conflicts generated by Lear’s self-indulgence complicate as family issues boil over.
Lear’s chosen daughters (Goneril and Regan) aren’t exactly majestic material, and Lear is most definitely disappointed by reversal of expectation, hence there’s some serious domestic drama coming to a head at this point.
Through the Fool’s wit Lear quickly learns that he has made a bad decision.
Goneril and Regan swiftly begin to undermine the little authority that Lear still holds.
Unable to believe that his beloved daughters are betraying him, Lear slowly goes insane.
He flees his daughters’ houses to wander on a heath during a great thunderstorm, accompanied by his Fool and by Kent, a loyal nobleman in disguise.
Meanwhile, an elderly nobleman named Gloucester also experiences family problems in the parallel plot.
His illegitimate son, Edmund, tricks him into believing that his legitimate son, Edgar, is trying to kill him.
Fleeing the manhunt that his father has set for him, Edgar disguises himself as a crazy beggar and calls himself ‘Poor Tom’.
Like Lear, he heads out onto the heath.
When the loyal Gloucester realises that Lear’s daughters have turned against their father, he decides to help Lear in spite of the danger.
Regan and her husband, Cornwall, discover him helping Lear, accuse him of treason, blind him, and turn him out to wander the countryside.
He ends up being led by his disguised son, Edgar, toward the city of Dover, where Lear has also been brought.
In Dover, a French army lands as part of an invasion led by Cordelia in an effort to save her father.
Edmund apparently becomes romantically entangled with both Regan and Goneril, whose husband, Albany, is increasingly sympathetic to Lear’s cause.
Goneril and Edmund conspire to kill Albany.The despairing Gloucester tries to commit suicide, but Edgar saves him by pulling the strange trick of leading him off an imaginary cliff.
Meanwhile, the English troops reach Dover, and the English, led by Edmund, defeat the Cordelia-led French.
Lear and Cordelia are captured.
In the climactic scene, Edgar duels with and kills Edmund; we learn of the death of Gloucester; Goneril poisons Regan out of jealousy over Edmund and then kills herself when her treachery is revealed to Albany; Edmund’s betrayal of Cordelia leads to her needless execution in prison; and Lear finally dies out of grief at Cordelia’s passing.
Albany, Edgar, and the elderly Kent are left to take care of the country under a cloud of sorrow and regret.
The complication of events reaches a crisis point which is heralded by thunder, lightning, and violence.
Furious at the ingratitude of his children, Lear walks out on both of them and wanders screaming into the thunderstorm.
Thunder and lightning are pretty strong indicators of the climax, as is Lear’s searing language and emerging insanity.
Gloucester also gets his eyes plucked out when he tries to help Lear and Edmund rats him out.
At this point our breaths are bated by suspense.
As Cordelia’s French troops march somewhere offstage, tension builds.
Also, with everyone wearing disguises and concealing their true identities, it’s only a matter of time before the truth is revealed.
But until that happens, we can feel the tingly anticipation of waiting for it.
Then follows denouement (anticlimax).Cordelia dies.
Lear and Cordelia lose the battle and are imprisoned.
Lear, wiser now than at the beginning of the play, says he doesn’t mind—he’s learned over the course of the play that power politics don’t matter, while a good relationship with his daughter does.
But then Cordelia is hanged.
The conclusion is a strange one in that it is difficult to pass as resolution of conflict in the usual desired way. It leaves us with yawning vacancy.
Heartbroken, Lear dies while cradling his daughter in his arms.
Somebody obviously has to take over the kingdom now, but nobody really wants the job.
This tragic play centres on a complicated plot and subplot, develops many complex characters, and explores a mass of intense emotions.
In spite of the complexity of the plot, everything in the play is directed towards the battle of good versus evil.
Although Shakespeare seems to indicate in the play that evil is inherent in most human-beings, it becomes a powerfully destructive force in those who allow the evil to dominate their lives, as seen in Regan, Goneril, Edmund; in the end they are destroyed, dying in pain and misery.
Other characters such as Lear and Gloucester make grave errors in life and suffer for them; but they do not allow evil to rule them.
Instead, the play becomes their quest for spiritual redemption (CATHARSIS).
In the end, both of them are allowed to beg forgiveness from the children they have wronged and die a peaceful death.