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King Lear

January 26, 2023

This article is about Shakespeare's play. For the legendary figure, see Leir of Britain. For other uses, see King Lear (disambiguation).

King Lear is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare. It is based on the mythological Leir of Britain. King Lear, in preparation for his old age, divides his power and land between two of his daughters. He becomes destitute and insane and a proscribed crux of political machinations. The first known performance of any version of Shakespeare's play was on Saint Stephen's Day in 1606. The three extant publications from which modern editors derive their texts are the 1608 quarto (Q1) and the 1619 quarto (Q2, unofficial and based on Q1) and the 1623 First Folio. The quarto versions differ significantly from the folio version.

The play was often revised after the English Restoration for audiences who disliked its dark and depressing tone, but since the 19th century Shakespeare's original play has been regarded as one of his supreme achievements.

Both the title role and the supporting roles have been coveted by accomplished actors, and the play has been widely adapted. In his A Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley called King Lear "the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world", and the play is regularly cited as one of the greatest works of literature ever written.[1][2][3]

Characters

  • Lear – King of Britain
  • Earl of Gloucester
  • Earl of Kent – later disguised as Caius
  • Fool – Lear's fool
  • Edgar  – Gloucester's first-born son
  • Edmund – Gloucester's illegitimate son
  • Goneril – Lear's eldest daughter
  • Regan – Lear's second daughter
  • Cordelia – Lear's youngest daughter
  • Duke of Albany – Goneril's husband
  • Duke of Cornwall – Regan's husband
  • Gentleman – attends Cordelia
  • Oswald – Goneril's loyal steward
  • King of France – suitor and later husband to Cordelia
  • Duke of Burgundy – suitor to Cordelia
  • Old man – tenant of Gloucester
  • Curan – courtier

Plot

Act I

 
Cordelia in the Court of King Lear (1873) by Sir John Gilbert

King Lear of Britain, elderly and wanting to retire from the duties of the monarchy, decides to divide his realm among his three daughters, and declares he will offer the largest share to the one who loves him most. The eldest, Goneril, speaks first, declaring her love for her father in fulsome terms. Moved by her flattery, Lear proceeds to grant to Goneril her share as soon as she has finished her declaration, before Regan and Cordelia have a chance to speak. He then awards to Regan her share as soon as she has spoken. When it is finally the turn of his youngest and favourite daughter, Cordelia, at first she refuses to say anything ("Nothing, my Lord") and then declares there is nothing to compare her love to, no words to express it properly; she says honestly but bluntly that she loves him according to her bond, no more and no less, and will reserve half of her love for her future husband. Infuriated, Lear disinherits Cordelia and divides her share between her elder sisters.

The Earl of Gloucester and the Earl of Kent observe that, by dividing his realm between Goneril and Regan, Lear has awarded his realm in equal shares to the peerages of the Duke of Albany (Goneril's husband) and the Duke of Cornwall (Regan's husband). Kent objects to Lear's unfair treatment of Cordelia. Enraged by Kent's protests, Lear banishes him from the country. Lear then summons the Duke of Burgundy and the King of France, who have both proposed marriage to Cordelia. Learning that Cordelia has been disinherited, the Duke of Burgundy withdraws his suit, but the King of France is impressed by her honesty and marries her nonetheless. The King of France is shocked by Lear's decision because up until this time Lear has only praised and favoured Cordelia ("... she whom even but now was your best object, / The argument of your praise, balm of your age, ...").[4] Meanwhile, Gloucester has introduced his illegitimate son Edmund to Kent.

 
King Lear: Cordelia's Farewell by Edwin Austin Abbey

Lear announces he will live alternately with Goneril and Regan, and their husbands. He reserves to himself a retinue of 100 knights, to be supported by his daughters. After Cordelia bids farewell to them and leaves with the King of France, Goneril and Regan speak privately, revealing that their declarations of love were false and that they view Lear as a foolish old man.

Gloucester's son Edmund resents his illegitimate status and plots to dispose of his legitimate older half-brother, Edgar. He tricks his father with a forged letter, making him think that Edgar plans to usurp the estate. The Earl of Kent returns from exile in disguise (calling himself Caius), and Lear hires him as a servant. At Albany and Goneril's house, Lear and Kent quarrel with Oswald, Goneril's steward. Lear discovers that now that Goneril has power, she no longer respects him. She orders him to reduce the number of his disorderly retinue. Enraged, Lear departs for Regan's home. The Fool reproaches Lear with his foolishness in giving everything to Regan and Goneril and predicts that Regan will treat him no better.

Act II

Edmund learns from Curan, a courtier, that there is likely to be war between Albany and Cornwall and that Regan and Cornwall are to arrive at Gloucester's house that evening. Taking advantage of the arrival of the duke and Regan, Edmund fakes an attack by Edgar, and Gloucester is completely taken in. He disinherits Edgar and proclaims him an outlaw.

Bearing Lear's message to Regan, Kent meets Oswald again at Gloucester's home, quarrels with him again and is put in the stocks by Regan and her husband Cornwall. When Lear arrives, he objects to the mistreatment of his messenger, but Regan is as dismissive of her father as Goneril was. Lear is enraged but impotent. Goneril arrives and supports Regan's argument against him. Lear yields completely to his rage. He rushes out into a storm to rant against his ungrateful daughters, accompanied by the mocking Fool. Kent later follows to protect him. Gloucester protests against Lear's mistreatment. With Lear's retinue of a hundred knights dissolved, the only companions he has left are his Fool and Kent. Wandering on the heath after the storm, Edgar, in the guise of a madman named Tom o' Bedlam, meets Lear. Edgar babbles madly while Lear denounces his daughters. Kent leads them all to shelter.

Act III

 
King Lear, Benjamin West (1788)

Kent tells a gentleman that a French army has landed in Britain, aiming to reinstate Lear to the throne. He then sends the gentleman to give Cordelia a message while he looks for King Lear on the heath. Meanwhile, Edmund learns that Gloucester is aware of France's impending invasion and betrays his father to Cornwall, Regan, and Goneril. Once Edmund leaves with Goneril to warn Albany about the invasion, Gloucester is arrested, and Regan and Cornwall gouge out Gloucester's eyes. As they do this, a servant is overcome with rage and attacks Cornwall, mortally wounding him. Regan kills the servant and tells Gloucester that Edmund betrayed him. Then, as she did to her father in Act II, she sends Gloucester out to wander the heath.

Act IV

Edgar, in his madman's disguise, meets his blinded father on the heath. Gloucester, sightless and failing to recognise Edgar's voice, begs him to lead him to a cliff at Dover so that he may jump to his death. Goneril discovers that she finds Edmund more attractive than her honest husband Albany, whom she regards as cowardly. Albany has developed a conscience—he is disgusted by the sisters' treatment of Lear and Gloucester—and denounces his wife. Goneril sends Edmund back to Regan. After receiving news of Cornwall's death, she fears her newly widowed sister may steal Edmund and sends him a letter through Oswald. Now alone with Lear, Kent leads him to the French army, which is commanded by Cordelia. But Lear is half-mad and terribly embarrassed by his earlier follies. At Regan's instigation, Albany joins his forces with hers against the French. Goneril's suspicions about Regan's motives are confirmed and returned, as Regan rightly guesses the meaning of her letter and declares to Oswald that she is a more appropriate match for Edmund. Edgar pretends to lead Gloucester to a cliff, then changes his voice and tells Gloucester he has miraculously survived a great fall. Lear appears, by now, completely mad. He rants that the whole world is corrupt and runs off.

Oswald appears, still looking for Edmund. On Regan's orders, he tries to kill Gloucester but is killed by Edgar. In Oswald's pocket, Edgar finds Goneril's letter, in which she encourages Edmund to kill her husband and take her as his wife. Kent and Cordelia take charge of Lear, whose madness quickly passes. Regan, Goneril, Albany, and Edmund meet with their forces. Albany insists that they fight the French invaders but not harm Lear or Cordelia. The two sisters lust for Edmund, who has made promises to both. He considers the dilemma and plots the deaths of Albany, Lear, and Cordelia. Edgar gives Goneril's letter to Albany. The armies meet in battle, the Britons defeat the French, and Lear and Cordelia are captured. Edmund sends Lear and Cordelia off with secret joint orders from him (representing Regan and her forces) and Goneril (representing the forces of her estranged husband, Albany) for the execution of Cordelia.

Act V

 
Lear and Cordelia by Ford Madox Brown

The victorious British leaders meet, and the recently widowed Regan now declares she will marry Edmund. But Albany exposes the intrigues of Edmund and Goneril and proclaims Edmund a traitor. Regan falls ill, having been poisoned by Goneril, and is escorted offstage, where she dies. Edmund defies Albany, who calls for a trial by combat. Edgar appears masked and in armour and challenges Edmund to a duel. No one knows who he is. Edgar wounds Edmund fatally, though Edmund does not die immediately. Albany confronts Goneril with the letter which was intended to be his death warrant; she flees in shame and rage. Edgar reveals himself and reports that Gloucester died offstage from the shock and joy of learning that Edgar is alive, after Edgar revealed himself to his father.

Offstage, Goneril, her plans thwarted, commits suicide. The dying Edmund decides, though he admits it is against his own character, to try to save Lear and Cordelia, but his confession comes too late. Soon after, Albany sends men to countermand Edmund's orders. Lear enters bearing Cordelia's corpse in his arms, having survived by killing the executioner. Kent appears and Lear now recognises him. Albany urges Lear to resume his throne, but as with Gloucester, the trials Lear has been through have finally overwhelmed him, and he dies. Albany then asks Kent and Edgar to take charge of the throne. Kent declines, explaining that his master is calling him on a journey and he must follow. Finally, Albany (in the quarto version) or Edgar (in the folio version) implies that he will now become king.

Sources

 
The first edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, printed in 1577

Shakespeare's play is based on various accounts of the semi-legendary Brythonic figure Leir of Britain, whose name has been linked by some scholars[who?] to the Brythonic god Lir/Llŷr, though in actuality the names are not etymologically related.[5][6][7] Shakespeare's most important source is probably the second edition of The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande by Raphael Holinshed, published in 1587. Holinshed himself found the story in the earlier Historia Regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth, which was written in the 12th century. Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, published 1590, also contains a character named Cordelia, who also dies from hanging, as in King Lear.[8]

Other possible sources are the anonymous play King Leir (published in 1605); The Mirror for Magistrates (1574), by John Higgins; The Malcontent (1604), by John Marston; The London Prodigal (1605); Montaigne's Essays, which were translated into English by John Florio in 1603; An Historical Description of Iland of Britaine (1577), by William Harrison; Remaines Concerning Britaine (1606), by William Camden; Albion's England (1589), by William Warner; and A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures (1603), by Samuel Harsnett, which provided some of the language used by Edgar while he feigns madness.[9] King Lear is also a literary variant of a common folk tale, Love Like Salt, Aarne–Thompson type 923, in which a father rejects his youngest daughter for a statement of her love that does not please him.[10][11][12]

The source of the subplot involving Gloucester, Edgar, and Edmund is a tale in Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1580–90), with a blind Paphlagonian king and his two sons, Leonatus and Plexitrus.[13]

Changes from source material

 
Cordelia, Alexander Johnston (artist) (c.1894)

Besides the subplot involving the Earl of Gloucester and his sons, the principal innovation Shakespeare made to this story was the death of Cordelia and Lear at the end; in the account by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cordelia restores Lear to the throne, and succeeds him as ruler after his death. During the 17th century, Shakespeare's tragic ending was much criticised and alternative versions were written by Nahum Tate, in which the leading characters survived and Edgar and Cordelia were married (despite the fact that Cordelia was previously betrothed to the King of France). As Harold Bloom states: "Tate's version held the stage for almost 150 years, until Edmund Kean reinstated the play's tragic ending in 1823."[14]

Holinshed states that the story is set when Joash was King of Judah (c. 800 BC), while Shakespeare avoids dating the setting, only suggesting that it is sometime in the pre-Christian era.

The characters of Earl "Caius" of Kent and The Fool were created wholly by Shakespeare in order to engage in character-driven conversations with Lear. Oswald the steward, the confidant of Goneril, was created as a similar expository device.

Shakespeare's Lear and other characters makes oaths to Jupiter, Juno, and Apollo. While the presence of Roman religion in Britain is technically an anachronism, nothing was known about any religion that existed in Britain at the time of Lear's alleged life.

Holinshed identifies the personal names of the Duke of Albany (Maglanus), the Duke of Cornwall (Henninus), and the Gallic/French leader (Aganippus). Shakespeare refers to these characters by their titles only, and also changes the nature of Albany from a villain to a hero, by reassigning Albany's wicked deeds to Cornwall. Maglanus and Henninus are killed in the final battle, but are survived by their sons Margan and Cunedag. In Shakespeare's version, Cornwall is killed by a servant who objects to the torture of the Earl of Gloucester, while Albany is one of the few surviving main characters. Isaac Asimov surmised that this alteration was due to the title Duke of Albany being held in 1606 by Prince Charles, the younger son of Shakespeare's benefactor King James.[15] However, this explanation is faulty, because James' older son, Prince Henry, held the title Duke of Cornwall at the same time.

Date and text

 
Title page of the first quarto edition, published in 1608

There is no direct evidence to indicate when King Lear was written or first performed. It is thought to have been composed sometime between 1603 and 1606. A Stationers' Register entry notes a performance before James I on 26 December 1606. The 1603 date originates from words in Edgar's speeches which may derive from Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603).[16] A significant issue in the dating of the play is the relationship of King Lear to the play titled The True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Leir and his Three Daughters, which was published for the first time after its entry in the Stationers' Register of 8 May 1605. This play had a significant effect on Shakespeare, and his close study of it suggests that he was using a printed copy, which suggests a composition date of 1605–06.[17] Conversely, Frank Kermode, in the Riverside Shakespeare, considers the publication of Leir to have been a response to performances of Shakespeare's already-written play; noting a sonnet by William Strachey that may have verbal resemblances with Lear, Kermode concludes that "1604–05 seems the best compromise".[18]

A line in the play that regards "These late eclipses in the sun and moon"[19] appears to refer to a phenomenon of two eclipses that occurred over London within a few days of each other—the lunar eclipse of 27 September 1605 and the solar eclipse of 12 October 1605. This remarkable pair of events stirred up much discussion among astrologers. Edmund's line "A prediction I read this other day…"[20] apparently refers to the published prognostications of the astrologers, which followed after the eclipses. This suggests that those lines in Act I were written sometime after both the eclipses and the published comments.[21]

 
The first page of King Lear, printed in the Second Folio of 1632

The modern text of King Lear derives from three sources: two quartos, one published in 1608 (Q1) and the other in 1619 (Q2),[a] and the version in the First Folio of 1623 (F1). Q1 has "many errors and muddles".[22] Q2 was based on Q1. It introduced corrections and new errors.[22] Q2 also informed the Folio text.[23] Quarto and Folio texts differ significantly. Q1 contains 285 lines not in F1; F1 contains around 100 lines not in Q1. Also, at least a thousand individual words are changed between the two texts, each text has different styles of punctuation, and about half the verse lines in the F1 are either printed as prose or differently divided in the Q1. Early editors, beginning with Alexander Pope, conflated the two texts, creating the modern version that has been commonly used since. The conflated version originated with the assumptions that the differences in the versions do not indicate any re-writing by the author; that Shakespeare wrote only one original manuscript, which is now lost; and that the Quarto and Folio versions contain various distortions of that lost original. In 2021, Duncan Salkeld endorsed this view, suggesting that Q1 was typeset by a reader dictating to the compositor, leading to many slips caused by mishearing.[24] Other editors, such as Nuttall and Bloom, have suggested Shakespeare himself maybe was involved in reworking passages in the play to accommodate performances and other textual requirements of the play.[25]

As early as 1931, Madeleine Doran suggested that the two texts had independent histories, and that these differences between them were critically interesting. This argument, however, was not widely discussed until the late 1970s, when it was revived, principally by Michael Warren and Gary Taylor, who discuss a variety of theories including Doran's idea that the Quarto may have been printed from Shakespeare's foul papers, and that the Folio may have been printed from a promptbook prepared for a production.[26]

The New Cambridge Shakespeare has published separate editions of Q and F; the most recent Pelican Shakespeare edition contains both the 1608 Quarto and the 1623 Folio text as well as a conflated version; the New Arden edition edited by R. A. Foakes offers a conflated text that indicates those passages that are found only in Q or F. Both Anthony Nuttall of Oxford University and Harold Bloom of Yale University have endorsed the view of Shakespeare having revised the tragedy at least once during his lifetime.[25] As Bloom indicates: "At the close of Shakespeare's revised King Lear, a reluctant Edgar becomes King of Britain, accepting his destiny but in the accents of despair. Nuttall speculates that Edgar, like Shakespeare himself, usurps the power of manipulating the audience by deceiving poor Gloucester."[25]

Interpretations and analysis

Analysis and criticism of King Lear over the centuries has been extensive.

What we know of Shakespeare's wide reading and powers of assimilation seems to show that he made use of all kinds of material, absorbing contradictory viewpoints, positive and negative, religious and secular, as if to ensure that King Lear would offer no single controlling perspective, but be open to, indeed demand, multiple interpretations.

R. A. Foakes[27]

Historicist interpretations

John F. Danby, in his Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature – A Study of King Lear (1949), argues that Lear dramatizes, among other things, the current meanings of "Nature". The words "nature", "natural", and "unnatural" occur over forty times in the play, reflecting a debate in Shakespeare's time about what nature really was like; this debate pervades the play and finds symbolic expression in Lear's changing attitude to Thunder. There are two strongly contrasting views of human nature in the play: that of the Lear party (Lear, Gloucester, Albany, Kent), exemplifying the philosophy of Bacon and Hooker, and that of the Edmund party (Edmund, Cornwall, Goneril, Regan), akin to the views later formulated by Hobbes, though the latter had not yet begun his philosophy career when Lear was first performed. Along with the two views of Nature, the play contains two views of Reason, brought out in Gloucester and Edmund's speeches on astrology (1.2). The rationality of the Edmund party is one with which a modern audience more readily identifies. But the Edmund party carries bold rationalism to such extremes that it becomes madness: a madness-in-reason, the ironic counterpart of Lear's "reason in madness" (IV.6.190) and the Fool's wisdom-in-folly. This betrayal of reason lies behind the play's later emphasis on feeling.

The two Natures and the two Reasons imply two societies. Edmund is the New Man, a member of an age of competition, suspicion, glory, in contrast with the older society which has come down from the Middle Ages, with its belief in co-operation, reasonable decency, and respect for the whole as greater than the part. King Lear is thus an allegory. The older society, that of the medieval vision, with its doting king, falls into error, and is threatened by the new Machiavellianism; it is regenerated and saved by a vision of a new order, embodied in the king's rejected daughter. Cordelia, in the allegorical scheme, is threefold: a person; an ethical principle (love); and a community. Nevertheless, Shakespeare's understanding of the New Man is so extensive as to amount almost to sympathy. Edmund is the last great expression in Shakespeare of that side of Renaissance individualism—the energy, the emancipation, the courage—which has made a positive contribution to the heritage of the West. "He embodies something vital which a final synthesis must reaffirm. But he makes an absolute claim which Shakespeare will not support. It is right for man to feel, as Edmund does, that society exists for man, not man for society. It is not right to assert the kind of man Edmund would erect to this supremacy."[28]

The play offers an alternative to the feudal-Machiavellian polarity, an alternative foreshadowed in France's speech (I.1.245–256), in Lear and Gloucester's prayers (III.4. 28–36; IV.1.61–66), and in the figure of Cordelia. Until the decent society is achieved, we are meant to take as role-model (though qualified by Shakespearean ironies) Edgar, "the machiavel of goodness",[29] endurance, courage and "ripeness".[28]

 
Three daughters of King Lear by Gustav Pope

The play also contains references to disputes between King James I and Parliament. In the 1604 elections to the House of Commons, Sir John Fortescue, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was defeated by a member of the Buckinghamshire gentry, Sir Francis Goodwin.[30] Displeased with the result, James declared the result of the Buckinghhamshire election invalid, and swore in Fortescue as the MP for Buckinghamshire while the House of Commons insisted on swearing in Goodwin, leading to a clash between King and Parliament over who had the right to decide who sat in the House of Commons.[30] The MP Thomas Wentworth, the son of another MP Peter Wentworth—often imprisoned under Elizabeth for raising the question of the succession in the Commons—was most forceful in protesting James's attempts to reduce the powers of the House of Commons, saying the King could not just declare the results of an election invalid if he disliked who had won the seat as he was insisting that he could.[31] The character of Kent resembles Peter Wentworth in the way which is tactless and blunt in advising Lear, but his point is valid that Lear should be more careful with his friends and advisers.[31]

Just as the House of Commons had argued to James that their loyalty was to the constitution of England, not to the King personally, Kent insists his loyalty is institutional, not personal, as he is loyal to the realm of which the king is head, not to Lear himself, and he tells Lear to behave better for the good of the realm.[31] By contrast, Lear makes an argument similar to James that as king, he holds absolute power and could disregard the views of his subjects if they displease him whenever he liked.[31] In the play, the characters like the Fool, Kent and Cordelia, whose loyalties are institutional, seeing their first loyalty to the realm, are portrayed more favorably than those like Regan and Goneril, who insist they are only loyal to the king, seeing their loyalties as personal.[31] Likewise, James was notorious for his riotous, debauched lifestyle and his preference for sycophantic courtiers who were forever singing his praises out of the hope for advancement, aspects of his court that closely resemble the court of King Lear, who starts out in the play with a riotous, debauched court of sycophantic courtiers.[32] Kent criticises Oswald as a man unworthy of office who has only been promoted because of his sycophancy, telling Lear that he should be loyal to those who are willing to tell him the truth, a statement that many in England wished that James would heed.[32]

Furthermore, James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of England upon the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, thereby uniting the kingdoms of the island of Britain into one, and a major issue of his reign was the attempt to forge a common British identity.[33] James had given his sons Henry and Charles the titles of Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Albany, the same titles borne by the men married to Regan and Goneril.[34] The play begins with Lear ruling all of Britain and ends with him destroying his realm; the critic Andrew Hadfield argued that the division of Britain by Lear was an inversion of the unification of Britain by James, who believed his policies would result in a well governed and prosperous unified realm being passed on to his heir.[34] Hadfield argued that the play was meant as a warning to James as in the play a monarch loses everything by giving in to his sycophantic courtiers who only seek to use him while neglecting those who truly loved him.[34] Hadfield also argued that the world of Lear's court is "childish" with Lear presenting himself as the father of the nation and requiring all of his subjects, not just his children, to address him in paternal terms, which infantises most of the people around him, which pointedly references James's statement in his 1598 book The Trew Law of Free Monarchies that the king is the "father of the nation", for whom all of his subjects are his children.[35]

Psychoanalytic and psychosocial interpretations

King Lear provides a basis for "the primary enactment of psychic breakdown in English literary history".[36] The play begins with Lear's "near-fairytale narcissism".[37]

Given the absence of legitimate mothers in King Lear, Coppélia Kahn[38] provides a psychoanalytic interpretation of the "maternal subtext" found in the play. According to Kahn, Lear's old age forces him to regress into an infantile disposition, and he now seeks a love that is traditionally satisfied by a mothering woman, but in the absence of a real mother, his daughters become the mother figures. Lear's contest of love between Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia serves as the binding agreement; his daughters will get their inheritance provided that they care for him, especially Cordelia, on whose "kind nursery" he will greatly depend.

Cordelia's refusal to dedicate herself to him and love him as more than a father has been interpreted by some as a resistance to incest, but Kahn also inserts the image of a rejecting mother. The situation is now a reversal of parent-child roles, in which Lear's madness is a childlike rage due to his deprivation of filial/maternal care. Even when Lear and Cordelia are captured together, his madness persists as Lear envisions a nursery in prison, where Cordelia's sole existence is for him. It is only with Cordelia's death that his fantasy of a daughter-mother ultimately diminishes, as King Lear concludes with only male characters living.

 
Lear and Cordelia in Prison – William Blake c. 1779

Sigmund Freud asserted that Cordelia symbolises Death. Therefore, when the play begins with Lear rejecting his daughter, it can be interpreted as him rejecting death; Lear is unwilling to face the finitude of his being. The play's poignant ending scene, wherein Lear carries the body of his beloved Cordelia, was of great importance to Freud. In this scene, Cordelia forces the realization of his finitude, or as Freud put it, she causes him to "make friends with the necessity of dying".[39] Shakespeare had particular intentions with Cordelia's death, and was the only writer to have Cordelia killed (in the version by Nahum Tate, she continues to live happily, and in Holinshed's, she restores her father and succeeds him).

Alternatively, an analysis based on Adlerian theory suggests that the King's contest among his daughters in Act I has more to do with his control over the unmarried Cordelia.[40] This theory indicates that the King's "dethronement"[41] might have led him to seek control that he lost after he divided his land.

In his study of the character-portrayal of Edmund, Harold Bloom refers to him as "Shakespeare's most original character".[42] "As Hazlitt pointed out", writes Bloom, "Edmund does not share in the hypocrisy of Goneril and Regan: his Machiavellianism is absolutely pure, and lacks an Oedipal motive. Freud's vision of family romances simply does not apply to Edmund. Iago is free to reinvent himself every minute, yet Iago has strong passions, however negative. Edmund has no passions whatsoever; he has never loved anyone, and he never will. In that respect, he is Shakespeare's most original character."[42]

The tragedy of Lear's lack of understanding of the consequences of his demands and actions is often observed to be like that of a spoiled child, but it has also been noted that his behaviour is equally likely to be seen in parents who have never adjusted to their children having grown up.[43]

Christianity

 
A 1793 painting of King Lear and Cordelia by Benjamin West

Critics are divided on the question of whether King Lear represents an affirmation of a particular Christian doctrine.[44] Those who think it does posit different arguments, which include the significance of Lear's self-divestment.[45] For some critics, this reflects the Christian concepts of the fall of the mighty and the inevitable loss of worldly possessions. By 1569, sermons delivered at court such as those at Windsor declared how "rich men are rich dust, wise men wise dust... From him that weareth purple, and beareth the crown down to him that is clad with meanest apparel, there is nothing but garboil, and ruffle, and hoisting, and lingering wrath, and fear of death and death itself, and hunger, and many a whip of God."[45] Some see this in Cordelia and what she symbolised—that the material body are mere husks that would eventually be discarded so that the fruit can be reached.[44]

Among those who argue that Lear is redeemed in the Christian sense through suffering are A.C. Bradley[46] and John Reibetanz, who has written: "through his sufferings, Lear has won an enlightened soul".[47] Other critics who find no evidence of redemption and emphasise the horrors of the final act include John Holloway[48][page needed] and Marvin Rosenberg.[49][page needed] William R. Elton stresses the pre-Christian setting of the play, writing that, "Lear fulfills the criteria for pagan behavior in life," falling "into total blasphemy at the moment of his irredeemable loss".[50] This is related to the way some sources cite that at the end of the narrative, King Lear raged against heaven before eventually dying in despair with the death of Cordelia.[51]

Harold Bloom argues that King Lear transcends a morality system entirely, and thus is one of the major triumphs of the play. Bloom writes that in the play there is, " . . . no theology, no metaphysics, no ethics".[52]

Performance history

King Lear has been performed by esteemed actors since the 17th century, when men played all the roles. From the 20th century, a number of women have played male roles in the play; most commonly the Fool, who has been played (among others) by Judy Davis, Emma Thompson and Robyn Nevin. Lear himself has been played by Marianne Hoppe in 1990,[53] by Janet Wright in 1995,[54] by Kathryn Hunter in 1996–97,[55] and by Glenda Jackson in 2016 and 2019.[56]

17th century

 
Cover of Tate's The History of King Lear

Shakespeare wrote the role of Lear for his company's chief tragedian, Richard Burbage, for whom Shakespeare was writing incrementally older characters as their careers progressed.[57] It has been speculated either that the role of the Fool was written for the company's clown Robert Armin, or that it was written for performance by one of the company's boys, doubling the role of Cordelia.[58][59] Only one specific performance of the play during Shakespeare's lifetime is known: before the court of King James I at Whitehall on 26 December 1606.[60][61] Its original performances would have been at The Globe, where there were no sets in the modern sense, and characters would have signified their roles visually with props and costumes: Lear's costume, for example, would have changed in the course of the play as his status diminished: commencing in crown and regalia; then as a huntsman; raging bareheaded in the storm scene; and finally crowned with flowers in parody of his original status.[62]

All theatres were closed down by the Puritan government on 6 September 1642. Upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, two patent companies (the King's Company and the Duke's Company) were established, and the existing theatrical repertoire divided between them.[63] And from the restoration until the mid-19th century the performance history of King Lear is not the story of Shakespeare's version, but instead of The History of King Lear, a popular adaptation by Nahum Tate. Its most significant deviations from Shakespeare were to omit the Fool entirely, to introduce a happy ending in which Lear and Cordelia survive, and to develop a love story between Cordelia and Edgar (two characters who never interact in Shakespeare) which ends with their marriage.[64] Like most Restoration adapters of Shakespeare, Tate admired Shakespeare's natural genius but saw fit to augment his work with contemporary standards of art (which were largely guided by the neoclassical unities of time, place, and action).[65] Tate's struggle to strike a balance between raw nature and refined art is apparent in his description of the tragedy: "a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolish't; yet so dazzling in their disorder, that I soon perceiv'd I had seiz'd a treasure."[66][67] Other changes included giving Cordelia a confidante named Arante, bringing the play closer to contemporary notions of poetic justice, and adding titilating material such as amorous encounters between Edmund and both Regan and Goneril, a scene in which Edgar rescues Cordelia from Edmund's attempted kidnapping and rape,[68][69] and a scene in which Cordelia wears men's pants that would reveal the actress's ankles.[70] The play ends with a celebration of "the King's blest Restauration", an obvious reference to Charles II.[b]

18th century

In the early 18th century, some writers began to express objections to this (and other) Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare. For example, in The Spectator on 16 April 1711 Joseph Addison wrote "King Lear is an admirable Tragedy ... as Shakespeare wrote it; but as it is reformed according to the chymerical Notion of poetical Justice in my humble Opinion it hath lost half its Beauty." Yet on the stage, Tate's version prevailed.[c]

David Garrick was the first actor-manager to begin to cut back on elements of Tate's adaptation in favour of Shakespeare's original: he retained Tate's major changes, including the happy ending, but removed many of Tate's lines, including Edgar's closing speech.[72] He also reduced the prominence of the Edgar-Cordelia love story, in order to focus more on the relationship between Lear and his daughters.[73] His version had a powerful emotional impact: Lear driven to madness by his daughters was (in the words of one spectator, Arthur Murphy) "the finest tragic distress ever seen on any stage" and, in contrast, the devotion shown to Lear by Cordelia (a mix of Shakespeare's, Tate's and Garrick's contributions to the part) moved the audience to tears.[d]

The first professional performances of King Lear in North America are likely to have been those of the Hallam Company (later the American Company) which arrived in Virginia in 1752 and who counted the play among their repertoire by the time of their departure for Jamaica in 1774.[74]

19th century

 
King Lear mourns Cordelia's death, James Barry, 1786–1788

Charles Lamb established the Romantics' attitude to King Lear in his 1811 essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their fitness for stage representation" where he says that the play "is essentially impossible to be represented on the stage", preferring to experience it in the study. In the theatre, he argues, "to see Lear acted, to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters on a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting" yet "while we read it, we see not Lear but we are Lear,—we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms."[75][76]

King Lear was politically controversial during the period of George III's madness, and as a result was not performed at all in the two professional theatres of London from 1811 to 1820: but was then the subject of major productions in both, within three months of his death.[77] The 19th century saw the gradual reintroduction of Shakespeare's text to displace Tate's version. Like Garrick before him, John Philip Kemble had introduced more of Shakespeare's text, while still preserving the three main elements of Tate's version: the love story, the omission of the Fool, and the happy ending. Edmund Kean played King Lear with its tragic ending in 1823, but failed and reverted to Tate's crowd-pleaser after only three performances.[78][79] At last in 1838, William Macready at Covent Garden performed Shakespeare's version, freed from Tate's adaptions.[78] The restored character of the Fool was played by an actress, Priscilla Horton, as, in the words of one spectator, "a fragile, hectic, beautiful-faced, half-idiot-looking boy".[80] And Helen Faucit's final appearance as Cordelia, dead in her father's arms, became one of the most iconic of Victorian images.[81] John Forster, writing in the Examiner on 14 February 1838, expressed the hope that "Mr Macready's success has banished that disgrace [Tate's version] from the stage for ever."[82] But even this version was not close to Shakespeare's: the 19th-century actor-managers heavily cut Shakespeare's scripts: ending scenes on big "curtain effects" and reducing or eliminating supporting roles to give greater prominence to the star.[83] One of Macready's innovations—the use of Stonehenge-like structures on stage to indicate an ancient setting—proved enduring on stage into the 20th century, and can be seen in the 1983 television version starring Laurence Olivier.[84]

In 1843, the Act for Regulating the Theatres came into force, bringing an end to the monopolies of the two existing companies and, by doing so, increased the number of theatres in London.[80] At the same time, the fashion in theatre was "pictorial": valuing visual spectacle above plot or characterisation and often required lengthy (and time-consuming) scene changes.[85] For example, Henry Irving's 1892 King Lear offered spectacles such as Lear's death beneath a cliff at Dover, his face lit by the red glow of a setting sun; at the expense of cutting 46% of the text, including the blinding of Gloucester.[86] But Irving's production clearly evoked strong emotions: one spectator, Gordon Crosse, wrote of the first entrance of Lear, "a striking figure with masses of white hair. He is leaning on a huge scabbarded sword which he raises with a wild cry in answer to the shouted greeting of his guards. His gait, his looks, his gestures, all reveal the noble, imperious mind already degenerating into senile irritability under the coming shocks of grief and age."[87]

The importance of pictorialism to Irving, and to other theatre professionals of the Victorian era, is exemplified by the fact that Irving had used Ford Madox Brown's painting Cordelia's Portion as the inspiration for the look of his production, and that the artist himself was brought in to provide sketches for the settings of other scenes.[88] A reaction against pictorialism came with the rise of the reconstructive movement, believers in a simple style of staging more similar to that which would have pertained in renaissance theatres, whose chief early exponent was the actor-manager William Poel. Poel was influenced by a performance of King Lear directed by Jocza Savits at the Hoftheater in Munich in 1890, set on an apron stage with a three-tier Globe—like reconstruction theatre as its backdrop. Poel would use this same configuration for his own Shakespearean performances in 1893.[89]

20th century

 
Cordelia's Portion by Ford Madox Brown

By mid-century, the actor–manager tradition had declined, to be replaced by a structure in which the major theatre companies employed professional directors as auteurs. The last of the great actor–managers, Donald Wolfit, played Lear in 1944 on a Stonehenge-like set and was praised by James Agate as "the greatest piece of Shakespearean acting since I have been privileged to write for the Sunday Times".[e][91] Wolfit supposedly drank eight bottles of Guinness in the course of each performance.[f]

The character of Lear in the 19th century was often that of a frail old man from the opening scene, but Lears of the 20th century often began the play as strong men displaying regal authority, including John Gielgud, Donald Wolfit and Donald Sinden.[93] Cordelia, also, evolved in the 20th century: earlier Cordelias had often been praised for being sweet, innocent and modest, but 20th-century Cordelias were often portrayed as war leaders. For example, Peggy Ashcroft, at the RST in 1950, played the role in a breastplate and carrying a sword.[94] Similarly, the Fool evolved through the course of the century, with portrayals often deriving from the music hall or circus tradition.[95]

At Stratford-upon-Avon in 1962 Peter Brook (who would later film the play with the same actor, Paul Scofield, in the role of Lear) set the action simply, against a huge, empty white stage. The effect of the scene when Lear and Gloucester meet, two tiny figures in rags in the midst of this emptiness, was said (by the scholar Roger Warren) to catch "both the human pathos ... and the universal scale ... of the scene".[96] Some of the lines from the radio broadcast were used by The Beatles to add into the recorded mix of the song "I Am the Walrus". John Lennon happened upon the play on the BBC Third Programme while fiddling with the radio while working on the song. The voices of actors Mark Dignam, Philip Guard, and John Bryning from the play are all heard in the song.[97][98]

Like other Shakespearean tragedies, King Lear has proved amenable to conversion into other theatrical traditions. In 1989, David McRuvie and Iyyamkode Sreedharan adapted the play then translated it to Malayalam, for performance in Kerala in the Kathakali tradition—which itself developed around 1600, contemporary with Shakespeare's writing. The show later went on tour, and in 2000 played at Shakespeare's Globe, completing, according to Anthony Dawson, "a kind of symbolic circle".[99] Perhaps even more radical was Ong Keng Sen's 1997 adaptation of King Lear, which featured six actors each performing in a separate Asian acting tradition and in their own separate languages. A pivotal moment occurred when the Jingju performer playing Older Daughter (a conflation of Goneril and Regan) stabbed the Noh-performed Lear whose "falling pine" deadfall, straight face-forward into the stage, astonished the audience, in what Yong Li Lan describes as a "triumph through the moving power of noh performance at the very moment of his character's defeat".[100][101]

In 1974, Buzz Goodbody directed Lear, a deliberately abbreviated title for Shakespeare's text, as the inaugural production of the RSC's studio theatre The Other Place. The performance was conceived as a chamber piece, the small intimate space and proximity to the audience enabled detailed psychological acting, which was performed with simple sets and in modern dress.[102] Peter Holland has speculated that this company/directoral decision—namely choosing to present Shakespeare in a small venue for artistic reasons when a larger venue was available—may at the time have been unprecedented.[102]

Brook's earlier vision of the play proved influential, and directors have gone further in presenting Lear as (in the words of R. A. Foakes) "a pathetic senior citizen trapped in a violent and hostile environment". When John Wood took the role in 1990, he played the later scenes in clothes that looked like cast-offs, inviting deliberate parallels with the uncared-for in modern Western societies.[103] Indeed, modern productions of Shakespeare's plays often reflect the world in which they are performed as much as the world for which they were written: and the Moscow theatre scene in 1994 provided an example, when two very different productions of the play (those by Sergei Zhonovach and Alexei Borodin), very different from one another in their style and outlook, were both reflections on the break-up of the Soviet Union.[104]

21st century

In 2002 and 2010, the Hudson Shakespeare Company of New Jersey staged separate productions as part of their respective Shakespeare in the Parks seasons. The 2002 version was directed by Michael Collins and transposed the action to a West Indies, nautical setting. Actors were featured in outfits indicative of looks of various Caribbean islands. The 2010 production directed by Jon Ciccarelli was fashioned after the atmosphere of the film The Dark Knight with a palette of reds and blacks and set the action in an urban setting. Lear (Tom Cox) appeared as a head of multi-national conglomerate who divided up his fortune among his socialite daughter Goneril (Brenda Scott), his officious middle daughter Regan (Noelle Fair) and university daughter Cordelia (Emily Best).[105]

In 2012, renowned Canadian director Peter Hinton directed an all-First Nations production of King Lear at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Ontario, with the setting changed to an Algonquin nation in the 17th century.[106] The cast included August Schellenberg as Lear, Billy Merasty as Gloucester, Tantoo Cardinal as Regan, Kevin Loring as Edmund, Jani Lauzon in a dual role as Cordelia and the Fool, and Craig Lauzon as Kent.[106] This setting would later be reproduced as part of the Manga Shakespeare graphic novel series published by Self-Made Hero, adapted by Richard Appignanesi and featuring the illustrations of Ilya.

In 2015, Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille staged a production set in Upper Canada against the backdrop of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837. This production starred David Fox as Lear.[107]

In the summer of 2015–2016, The Sydney Theatre Company staged King Lear, directed by Neil Armfield with Geoffrey Rush in the lead role and Robyn Nevin as the Fool. About the madness at the heart of the play, Rush said that for him "it's about finding the dramatic impact in the moments of his mania. What seems to work best is finding a vulnerability or a point of empathy, where an audience can look at Lear and think how shocking it must be to be that old and to be banished from your family into the open air in a storm. That's a level of impoverishment you would never want to see in any other human being, ever."[108]

In 2016, Talawa Theatre Company and Royal Exchange Manchester co-produced a production of King Lear with Don Warrington in the title role.[109] The production, featuring a largely black cast, was described in The Guardian as being "as close to definitive as can be".[110] The Daily Telegraph wrote that "Don Warrington's King Lear is a heartbreaking tour de force".[111] King Lear was staged by Royal Shakespeare Company, with Antony Sher in the lead role. The performance was directed by Gregory Doran and was described as having "strength and depth".[112]

In 2017, the Guthrie Theatre produced a production of King Lear with Stephen Yoakam in the title role. Armin Shimerman appeared as the fool, portraying it with "an unusual grimness, but it works",[113] in a production that was hailed as "a devastating piece of theater, and a production that does it justice".[113]

Lear was played on Broadway by Christopher Plummer in 2004 and Glenda Jackson in 2019, with Jackson reprising her portrayal from a 2016 production at The Old Vic in London.

Adaptations

Film and video

The first film adaptation of King Lear was a five-minute German version made around 1905, which has not survived.[114] The oldest extant version is a ten-minute studio-based version from 1909 by Vitagraph, which, according to Luke McKernan, made the "ill-advised" decision to attempt to cram in as much of the plot as possible.[115] Two silent versions, both titled Re Lear, were made in Italy in 1910. Of these, the version by director Gerolamo Lo Savio was filmed on location, and it dropped the Edgar sub-plot and used frequent intertitling to make the plot easier to follow than its Vitagraph predecessor.[g] A contemporary setting was used for Louis Feuillade's 1911 French adaptation Le Roi Lear Au Village, and in 1914 in America, Ernest Warde expanded the story to an hour, including spectacles such as a final battle scene.[117]

The Joseph Mankiewicz (1949) House of Strangers is often considered a Lear adaptation, but the parallels are more striking in Broken Lance (1954) in which a cattle baron played by Spencer Tracy tyrannizes his three sons, and only the youngest, Joe, played by Robert Wagner, remains loyal.[118]

The TV anthology series Omnibus (1952–1961) staged a 73-minute version of King Lear on 18 October 1953. It was adapted by Peter Brook and starred Orson Welles in his American television debut.[119]

Two screen versions of King Lear date from the early 1970s: Grigori Kozintsev's Korol Lir,[h] and Peter Brook's film of King Lear, which stars Paul Scofield.[122] Brook's film starkly divided the critics: Pauline Kael said "I didn't just dislike this production, I hated it!" and suggested the alternative title Night of the Living Dead.[i] Yet Robert Hatch in The Nation thought it as "excellent a filming of the play as one can expect" and Vincent Canby in The New York Times called it "an exalting Lear, full of exquisite terror".[j] The film drew on the ideas of Jan Kott, in particular his observation that King Lear was the precursor of absurdist theatre, and that it has parallels with Beckett's Endgame.[124] Critics who dislike the film particularly draw attention to its bleak nature from its opening: complaining that the world of the play does not deteriorate with Lear's suffering, but commences dark, colourless and wintry, leaving, according to Douglas Brode, "Lear, the land, and us with nowhere to go".[125] Cruelty pervades the film, which does not distinguish between the violence of ostensibly good and evil characters, presenting both savagely.[126] Paul Scofield, as Lear, eschews sentimentality: This demanding old man with a coterie of unruly knights provokes audience sympathy for the daughters in the early scenes, and his presentation explicitly rejects the tradition of playing Lear as "poor old white-haired patriarch".[127]

Korol Lir has been praised by critic Alexander Anikst for the "serious, deeply thoughtful" even "philosophical approach" of director Grigori Kozintsev and writer Boris Pasternak. Making a thinly veiled criticism of Brook in the process, Anikst praised the fact that there were "no attempts at sensationalism, no efforts to 'modernise' Shakespeare by introducing Freudian themes, Existentialist ideas, eroticism, or sexual perversion. [Kozintsev] ... has simply made a film of Shakespeare's tragedy."[k] Dmitri Shostakovich provided an epic score, its motifs including an (increasingly ironic) trumpet fanfare for Lear, and a five-bar "Call to Death" marking each character's demise.[129] Kozintzev described his vision of the film as an ensemble piece: with Lear, played by a dynamic Jüri Järvet, as first among equals in a cast of fully developed characters.[130] The film highlights Lear's role as king by including his people throughout the film on a scale no stage production could emulate, charting the central character's decline from their god to their helpless equal; his final descent into madness marked by his realisation that he has neglected the "poor naked wretches".[131][132] As the film progresses, ruthless characters—Goneril, Regan, Edmund—increasingly appear isolated in shots, in contrast to the director's focus, throughout the film, on masses of human beings.[133]

Jonathan Miller twice directed Michael Hordern in the title role for English television, the first for the BBC's Play of the Month in 1975 and the second for the BBC Television Shakespeare in 1982. Hordern received mixed reviews, and was considered a bold choice due to his history of taking much lighter roles.[134] Also for English television, Laurence Olivier took the role in a 1983 TV production for Granada Television. It was his last screen appearance in a Shakespearean role.[135]

In 1985, a major screen adaptation of the play appeared: Ran, directed by Akira Kurosawa. At the time the most expensive Japanese film ever made, it tells the story of Hidetora, a fictional 16th-century Japanese warlord, whose attempt to divide his kingdom among his three sons leads to an estrangement with the youngest, and ultimately most loyal, of them, and eventually to civil war.[136] In contrast to the cold drab greys of Brook and Kozintsev, Kurosawa's film is full of vibrant colour: external scenes in yellows, blues and greens, interiors in browns and ambers, and Emi Wada's Oscar-winning colour-coded costumes for each family member's soldiers.[137][136] Hidetora has a back-story: a violent and ruthless rise to power, and the film portrays contrasting victims: the virtuous characters Sue and Tsurumaru who are able to forgive, and the vengeful Kaede (Mieko Harada), Hidetora's daughter-in-law and the film's Lady Macbeth-like villain.[138][139]

 
Screenshot from trailer for House of Strangers (1949).
"The film has two antecedents—biblical references to Joseph and his brothers and King Lear".[140]

A scene in which a character is threatened with blinding in the manner of Gloucester forms the climax of the 1973 parody horror Theatre of Blood.[141] Comic use is made of Sir's inability to physically carry any actress cast as Cordelia opposite his Lear in the 1983 film of the stage play The Dresser.[142] John Boorman's 1990 Where the Heart Is features a father who disinherits his three spoiled children.[143] Francis Ford Coppola deliberately incorporated elements of Lear in his 1990 sequel The Godfather Part III, including Michael Corleone's attempt to retire from crime throwing his domain into anarchy, and most obviously the death of his daughter in his arms. Parallels have also been drawn between Andy García's character Vincent and both Edgar and Edmund, and between Talia Shire's character Connie and Kaede in Ran.[144]

In 1997, Jocelyn Moorhouse directed A Thousand Acres, based on Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, set in 1990s Iowa.[145] The film is described, by scholar Tony Howard, as the first adaptation to confront the play's disturbing sexual dimensions.[144] The story is told from the viewpoint of the elder two daughters, Ginny played by Jessica Lange and Rose played by Michelle Pfeiffer, who were sexually abused by their father as teenagers. Their younger sister Caroline, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh had escaped this fate and is ultimately the only one to remain loyal.[146][147]

In 1998, the BBC produced a televised version,[148] directed by Richard Eyre, of his award-winning 1997 Royal National Theatre production, starring Ian Holm as Lear. In March 2001, in a review originally posted to culturevulture.net, critic Bob Wake observed that the production was "of particular note for preserving Ian Holm’s celebrated stage performance in the title role. Stellar interpreters of Lear haven't always been so fortunate."[149] Wake added that other performances had been poorly documented because they suffered from technological problems (Orson Welles), eccentric televised productions (Paul Scofield), or were filmed when the actor playing Lear was unwell (Laurence Olivier).[150]

The play was adapted to the world of gangsters in Don Boyd's 2001 My Kingdom, a version which differs from all others in commencing with the Lear character, Sandeman, played by Richard Harris, in a loving relationship with his wife. But her violent death marks the start of an increasingly bleak and violent chain of events (influenced by co-writer Nick Davies' documentary book Dark Heart) which in spite of the director's denial that the film had "serious parallels" to Shakespeare's play, actually mirror aspects of its plot closely.[151][152]

Unlike Shakespeare's Lear, but like Hidetora and Sandeman, the central character of Uli Edel's 2002 American TV adaptation King of Texas, John Lear played by Patrick Stewart, has a back-story centred on his violent rise to power as the richest landowner (metaphorically a "king") in General Sam Houston's independent Texas in the early 1840s. Daniel Rosenthal comments that the film was able, by reason of having been commissioned by the cable channel TNT, to include a bleaker and more violent ending than would have been possible on the national networks.[153] 2003's Channel 4-commissioned two-parter Second Generation set the story in the world of Asian manufacturing and music in England.[154]

The Canadian comedy-drama TV series Slings & Arrows (2003–2006), which follows a fictional Shakespearean theatre festival inspired by the real-life Stratford Festival in Ontario, devotes its third season to a troubled production of King Lear. The fictional actor starring as Lear (played by William Hutt, who in real life played Lear onstage at Stratford three times to great acclaim[155]) is given the role despite concerns over his advanced age and ill health, plus a secret addiction to heroin discovered by the theatre's director. Eventually the actor's mental state deteriorates until he seems to believe he is Lear himself, wandering into a storm and later reciting his lines uncontrollably. William Hutt himself was in failing health when he filmed the TV role and died less than a year after the third season premiered.[156]

In 2008, a version of King Lear produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company premiered with Ian McKellen in the role of King Lear.[157]

In the 2012 romantic comedy If I Were You, there is a reference to the play when the lead characters are cast in a female version of King Lear set in modern times, with Marcia Gay Harden cast in the Lear role and Lenore Watling as "the fool". Lear is an executive in a corporate empire instead of a literal one, being phased out of her position. The off-beat play (and its cast) is a major plot element of the movie.[citation needed] The American musical drama television series Empire is partially inspired from King Lear.[158][159][160]

Carl Bessai wrote and directed a modern adaptation of King Lear titled The Lears. Released in 2017, the film starred Bruce Dern, Anthony Michael Hall and Sean Astin.[161]

On 28 May 2018, BBC Two broadcast King Lear starring Anthony Hopkins in the title role and Emma Thompson as Goneril. Directed by Richard Eyre, the play featured a 21st-century setting. Hopkins, at the age of 80, was deemed ideal for the role and "at home with Lear's skin" by critic Sam Wollaston.[162]

Radio and audio

The first recording of the Argo Shakespeare for Argo Records was King Lear in 1957, directed and produced by George Rylands with William Devlin in the title role, Jill Balcon as Goneril and Prunella Scales as Cordelia.[163]

The Shakespeare Recording Society recorded a full-length unabridged audio productions on LP in 1965 (SRS-M-232) directed by Howard Sackler, with Paul Scofield as Lear, Cyril Cusack as Gloucester. Robert Stephens as Edmund, Rachel Roberts, Pamela Brown and John Stride.

King Lear was broadcast live on the BBC Third Programme on 29 September 1967, starring John Gielgud, Barbara Jefford, Barbara Bolton and Virginia McKenna as Lear and his daughters.[164] At Abbey Road Studios, John Lennon used a microphone held to a radio to overdub fragments of the play (Act IV, Scene 6)[165] onto the song "I Am the Walrus", which The Beatles were recording that evening. The voices recorded were those of Mark Dignam (Gloucester), Philip Guard (Edgar) and John Bryning (Oswald).[97][98]

On 10 April 1994, Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company performed a radio adaptation directed by Glyn Dearman starring Gielgud as Lear, with Keith Michell as Kent, Richard Briers as Gloucester, Dame Judi Dench as Goneril, Emma Thompson as Cordelia, Eileen Atkins as Regan, Kenneth Branagh as Edmund, John Shrapnel as Albany, Robert Stephens as Cornwall, Denis Quilley as Burgundy, Sir Derek Jacobi as France, Iain Glen as Edgar and Michael Williams as The Fool.[166]

Naxos AudioBooks released an audio production in 2002 with Paul Scofield as Lear, Alec McCowen as Gloucester, Kenneth Branagh as The Fool, and a full cast.[167] It was nominated for an Audie Award for Audio Drama in 2003.

In October 2017, Big Finish Productions released an audio adaptation full cast drama. Adapted by Nicholas Pegg. The full cast starred David Warner as the titular King Lear, Lisa Bowerman as Regan, Louise Jameson as Goneril, Trevor Cooper as Oswald / Lear's Gentleman / Third Messenger, Raymond Coulthard (Edmund / Cornwall's Servant / Second Messenger / Second Gentleman), Barnaby Edwards (The King of France / Old Man / Herald), Ray Fearon (The Duke of Cornwall), Mike Grady (The Fool), Gwilym Lee (Edgar / the Duke of Burgundy), Tony Millan (The Earl of Gloucester / First Messenger), Nicholas Pegg (The Duke of Albany / Gloucester's Servant / Curan) and Paul Shelley (The Earl of Kent)[168]

Opera

German composer Aribert Reimann's opera Lear premiered on 9 July 1978.

Japanese composer's Toshio Hosokawa's opera Vision of Lear premiered on 19 April 1998 at the Munich Biennale.

Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen's opera Kuningas Lear premiered on 15 September 2000.[169]

Novels

Jane Smiley's 1991 novel A Thousand Acres, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is based on King Lear, but set in a farm in Iowa in 1979 and told from the perspective of the oldest daughter.[170]

The 2009 novel Fool by Christopher Moore is a comedic retelling of King Lear from the perspective of the court jester.[171]

Edward St Aubyn's 2017 novel Dunbar is a modern retelling of King Lear, commissioned as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series.[172]

On 27 March 2018, Tessa Gratton published a high fantasy adaptation of King Lear titled The Queens of Innis Lear with Tor Books.[173]

Preti Taneja’s 2018 novel We That Are Young is based on King Lear and set in India.[174]

The 2021 novel Learwife by J. R. Thorpe imagines the story of Lear's wife and the mother of his children, who is not present in the play.[175]

See also

Notes and references

Notes

  1. ^ The 1619 quarto is part of William Jaggard's so-called False Folio.
  2. ^ Jean I. Marsden cites Tate's Lear line 5.6.119.[69]
  3. ^ Quoted by Jean I. Marsden.[71]
  4. ^ Jean I. Marsden cites Gray's Inn Journal 12 January 1754.[73]
  5. ^ Quoted by Stanley Wells.[90]
  6. ^ According to Ronald Harwood, quoted by Stanley Wells.[92]
  7. ^ This version appears on the British Film Institute video compilation Silent Shakespeare (1999).[116]
  8. ^ The original title of this film in Cyrillic script is Король Лир and the sources anglicise it with different spellings. Daniel Rosenthal gives it as Korol Lir,[120] while Douglas Brode gives it as Karol Lear.[121]
  9. ^ Pauline Kael's New Yorker review is quoted by Douglas Brode.[123]
  10. ^ Both quoted by Douglas Brode.[122]
  11. ^ Quoted by Douglas Brode.[128]

References

All references to King Lear, unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Folger Shakespeare Library's Folger Digital Editions texts edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Under their referencing system, 1.1.246–248 means act 1, scene 1, lines 246 through 248.

  1. ^ "A Defence of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley". 17 December 2022.
  2. ^ Burt 2008, p. 1.
  3. ^ "Top 100 Works in World Literature by Norwegian Book Clubs, with the Norwegian Nobel Institute - the Greatest Books".
  4. ^ King Lear, 1.1.246–248.
  5. ^ Jackson 1953, p. 459.
  6. ^ Ekwall 1928, p. xlii.
  7. ^ Stevenson 1918.
  8. ^ Foakes 1997, pp. 94–96.
  9. ^ Hadfield 2007, p. 208.
  10. ^ "In other literary forms of the Middle Ages there occasionally appear oral tales. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in telling the story of King Lear, includes the incident of Love Like Salt (Type 923) ...". Thompson, Stith (1977). The Folktale. University of California Press. p. 181. ISBN 0-520-03537-2.
  11. ^ Mitakidou & Manna 2002, p. 100.
  12. ^ Ashliman 2013.
  13. ^ McNeir 1968.
  14. ^ Bloom 2008, p. 53.
  15. ^ Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, Volume II, section "King Lear".
  16. ^ Kermode 1974, p. 1249.
  17. ^ Foakes 1997, pp. 89–90.
  18. ^ Kermode 1974, p. 1250.
  19. ^ King Lear, 1.2.103
  20. ^ King Lear, 1.2.139
  21. ^ Shaheen 1999, p. 606.
  22. ^ a b Foakes Ard3, p. 111
  23. ^ Foakes Ard3, p. 113
  24. ^ Salkeld, Duncan (16 March 2021). "Q/F: The Texts of King Lear". The Library. 22 (1): 3–32. doi:10.1093/library/22.1.3.
  25. ^ a b c Bloom 2008, p. xii.
  26. ^ Taylor & Warren 1983, p. 429.
  27. ^ Foakes 1997, p. 107.
  28. ^ a b Danby 1949, p. 50.
  29. ^ Danby 1949, p. 151.
  30. ^ a b Hadfield 2004, p. 103.
  31. ^ a b c d e Hadfield 2004, p. 105.
  32. ^ a b Hadfield 2004, pp. 105–106.
  33. ^ Hadfield 2004, pp. 98–99.
  34. ^ a b c Hadfield 2004, p. 99.
  35. ^ Hadfield 2004, pp. 100–101.
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External links

 
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
The Tragedy of King Lear
 
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January 26, 2023
king, lear, this, article, about, shakespeare, play, legendary, figure, leir, britain, other, uses, disambiguation, tragedy, written, william, shakespeare, based, mythological, leir, britain, preparation, divides, power, land, between, daughters, becomes, dest. This article is about Shakespeare s play For the legendary figure see Leir of Britain For other uses see King Lear disambiguation King Lear is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare It is based on the mythological Leir of Britain King Lear in preparation for his old age divides his power and land between two of his daughters He becomes destitute and insane and a proscribed crux of political machinations The first known performance of any version of Shakespeare s play was on Saint Stephen s Day in 1606 The three extant publications from which modern editors derive their texts are the 1608 quarto Q1 and the 1619 quarto Q2 unofficial and based on Q1 and the 1623 First Folio The quarto versions differ significantly from the folio version King Lear George Frederick Bensell The play was often revised after the English Restoration for audiences who disliked its dark and depressing tone but since the 19th century Shakespeare s original play has been regarded as one of his supreme achievements Both the title role and the supporting roles have been coveted by accomplished actors and the play has been widely adapted In his A Defence of Poetry Percy Bysshe Shelley called King Lear the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world and the play is regularly cited as one of the greatest works of literature ever written 1 2 3 Contents 1 Characters 2 Plot 2 1 Act I 2 2 Act II 2 3 Act III 2 4 Act IV 2 5 Act V 3 Sources 3 1 Changes from source material 4 Date and text 5 Interpretations and analysis 5 1 Historicist interpretations 5 2 Psychoanalytic and psychosocial interpretations 5 3 Christianity 6 Performance history 6 1 17th century 6 2 18th century 6 3 19th century 6 4 20th century 6 5 21st century 7 Adaptations 7 1 Film and video 7 2 Radio and audio 7 3 Opera 7 4 Novels 8 See also 9 Notes and references 9 1 Notes 9 2 References 10 Bibliography 10 1 Editions of King Lear 10 2 Secondary sources 11 External linksCharacters EditLear King of Britain Earl of Gloucester Earl of Kent later disguised as Caius Fool Lear s fool Edgar Gloucester s first born son Edmund Gloucester s illegitimate son Goneril Lear s eldest daughter Regan Lear s second daughter Cordelia Lear s youngest daughter Duke of Albany Goneril s husband Duke of Cornwall Regan s husband Gentleman attends Cordelia Oswald Goneril s loyal steward King of France suitor and later husband to Cordelia Duke of Burgundy suitor to Cordelia Old man tenant of Gloucester Curan courtierPlot EditAct I Edit Cordelia in the Court of King Lear 1873 by Sir John Gilbert King Lear of Britain elderly and wanting to retire from the duties of the monarchy decides to divide his realm among his three daughters and declares he will offer the largest share to the one who loves him most The eldest Goneril speaks first declaring her love for her father in fulsome terms Moved by her flattery Lear proceeds to grant to Goneril her share as soon as she has finished her declaration before Regan and Cordelia have a chance to speak He then awards to Regan her share as soon as she has spoken When it is finally the turn of his youngest and favourite daughter Cordelia at first she refuses to say anything Nothing my Lord and then declares there is nothing to compare her love to no words to express it properly she says honestly but bluntly that she loves him according to her bond no more and no less and will reserve half of her love for her future husband Infuriated Lear disinherits Cordelia and divides her share between her elder sisters The Earl of Gloucester and the Earl of Kent observe that by dividing his realm between Goneril and Regan Lear has awarded his realm in equal shares to the peerages of the Duke of Albany Goneril s husband and the Duke of Cornwall Regan s husband Kent objects to Lear s unfair treatment of Cordelia Enraged by Kent s protests Lear banishes him from the country Lear then summons the Duke of Burgundy and the King of France who have both proposed marriage to Cordelia Learning that Cordelia has been disinherited the Duke of Burgundy withdraws his suit but the King of France is impressed by her honesty and marries her nonetheless The King of France is shocked by Lear s decision because up until this time Lear has only praised and favoured Cordelia she whom even but now was your best object The argument of your praise balm of your age 4 Meanwhile Gloucester has introduced his illegitimate son Edmund to Kent King Lear Cordelia s Farewell by Edwin Austin Abbey Lear announces he will live alternately with Goneril and Regan and their husbands He reserves to himself a retinue of 100 knights to be supported by his daughters After Cordelia bids farewell to them and leaves with the King of France Goneril and Regan speak privately revealing that their declarations of love were false and that they view Lear as a foolish old man Gloucester s son Edmund resents his illegitimate status and plots to dispose of his legitimate older half brother Edgar He tricks his father with a forged letter making him think that Edgar plans to usurp the estate The Earl of Kent returns from exile in disguise calling himself Caius and Lear hires him as a servant At Albany and Goneril s house Lear and Kent quarrel with Oswald Goneril s steward Lear discovers that now that Goneril has power she no longer respects him She orders him to reduce the number of his disorderly retinue Enraged Lear departs for Regan s home The Fool reproaches Lear with his foolishness in giving everything to Regan and Goneril and predicts that Regan will treat him no better Act II Edit Edmund learns from Curan a courtier that there is likely to be war between Albany and Cornwall and that Regan and Cornwall are to arrive at Gloucester s house that evening Taking advantage of the arrival of the duke and Regan Edmund fakes an attack by Edgar and Gloucester is completely taken in He disinherits Edgar and proclaims him an outlaw Bearing Lear s message to Regan Kent meets Oswald again at Gloucester s home quarrels with him again and is put in the stocks by Regan and her husband Cornwall When Lear arrives he objects to the mistreatment of his messenger but Regan is as dismissive of her father as Goneril was Lear is enraged but impotent Goneril arrives and supports Regan s argument against him Lear yields completely to his rage He rushes out into a storm to rant against his ungrateful daughters accompanied by the mocking Fool Kent later follows to protect him Gloucester protests against Lear s mistreatment With Lear s retinue of a hundred knights dissolved the only companions he has left are his Fool and Kent Wandering on the heath after the storm Edgar in the guise of a madman named Tom o Bedlam meets Lear Edgar babbles madly while Lear denounces his daughters Kent leads them all to shelter Act III Edit King Lear Benjamin West 1788 Kent tells a gentleman that a French army has landed in Britain aiming to reinstate Lear to the throne He then sends the gentleman to give Cordelia a message while he looks for King Lear on the heath Meanwhile Edmund learns that Gloucester is aware of France s impending invasion and betrays his father to Cornwall Regan and Goneril Once Edmund leaves with Goneril to warn Albany about the invasion Gloucester is arrested and Regan and Cornwall gouge out Gloucester s eyes As they do this a servant is overcome with rage and attacks Cornwall mortally wounding him Regan kills the servant and tells Gloucester that Edmund betrayed him Then as she did to her father in Act II she sends Gloucester out to wander the heath Act IV Edit Edgar in his madman s disguise meets his blinded father on the heath Gloucester sightless and failing to recognise Edgar s voice begs him to lead him to a cliff at Dover so that he may jump to his death Goneril discovers that she finds Edmund more attractive than her honest husband Albany whom she regards as cowardly Albany has developed a conscience he is disgusted by the sisters treatment of Lear and Gloucester and denounces his wife Goneril sends Edmund back to Regan After receiving news of Cornwall s death she fears her newly widowed sister may steal Edmund and sends him a letter through Oswald Now alone with Lear Kent leads him to the French army which is commanded by Cordelia But Lear is half mad and terribly embarrassed by his earlier follies At Regan s instigation Albany joins his forces with hers against the French Goneril s suspicions about Regan s motives are confirmed and returned as Regan rightly guesses the meaning of her letter and declares to Oswald that she is a more appropriate match for Edmund Edgar pretends to lead Gloucester to a cliff then changes his voice and tells Gloucester he has miraculously survived a great fall Lear appears by now completely mad He rants that the whole world is corrupt and runs off Oswald appears still looking for Edmund On Regan s orders he tries to kill Gloucester but is killed by Edgar In Oswald s pocket Edgar finds Goneril s letter in which she encourages Edmund to kill her husband and take her as his wife Kent and Cordelia take charge of Lear whose madness quickly passes Regan Goneril Albany and Edmund meet with their forces Albany insists that they fight the French invaders but not harm Lear or Cordelia The two sisters lust for Edmund who has made promises to both He considers the dilemma and plots the deaths of Albany Lear and Cordelia Edgar gives Goneril s letter to Albany The armies meet in battle the Britons defeat the French and Lear and Cordelia are captured Edmund sends Lear and Cordelia off with secret joint orders from him representing Regan and her forces and Goneril representing the forces of her estranged husband Albany for the execution of Cordelia Act V Edit Lear and Cordelia by Ford Madox Brown The victorious British leaders meet and the recently widowed Regan now declares she will marry Edmund But Albany exposes the intrigues of Edmund and Goneril and proclaims Edmund a traitor Regan falls ill having been poisoned by Goneril and is escorted offstage where she dies Edmund defies Albany who calls for a trial by combat Edgar appears masked and in armour and challenges Edmund to a duel No one knows who he is Edgar wounds Edmund fatally though Edmund does not die immediately Albany confronts Goneril with the letter which was intended to be his death warrant she flees in shame and rage Edgar reveals himself and reports that Gloucester died offstage from the shock and joy of learning that Edgar is alive after Edgar revealed himself to his father Offstage Goneril her plans thwarted commits suicide The dying Edmund decides though he admits it is against his own character to try to save Lear and Cordelia but his confession comes too late Soon after Albany sends men to countermand Edmund s orders Lear enters bearing Cordelia s corpse in his arms having survived by killing the executioner Kent appears and Lear now recognises him Albany urges Lear to resume his throne but as with Gloucester the trials Lear has been through have finally overwhelmed him and he dies Albany then asks Kent and Edgar to take charge of the throne Kent declines explaining that his master is calling him on a journey and he must follow Finally Albany in the quarto version or Edgar in the folio version implies that he will now become king Sources Edit The first edition of Raphael Holinshed s Chronicles of England Scotlande and Irelande printed in 1577 Shakespeare s play is based on various accounts of the semi legendary Brythonic figure Leir of Britain whose name has been linked by some scholars who to the Brythonic god Lir Llŷr though in actuality the names are not etymologically related 5 6 7 Shakespeare s most important source is probably the second edition of The Chronicles of England Scotlande and Irelande by Raphael Holinshed published in 1587 Holinshed himself found the story in the earlier Historia Regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth which was written in the 12th century Edmund Spenser s The Faerie Queene published 1590 also contains a character named Cordelia who also dies from hanging as in King Lear 8 Other possible sources are the anonymous play King Leir published in 1605 The Mirror for Magistrates 1574 by John Higgins The Malcontent 1604 by John Marston The London Prodigal 1605 Montaigne s Essays which were translated into English by John Florio in 1603 An Historical Description of Iland of Britaine 1577 by William Harrison Remaines Concerning Britaine 1606 by William Camden Albion s England 1589 by William Warner and A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures 1603 by Samuel Harsnett which provided some of the language used by Edgar while he feigns madness 9 King Lear is also a literary variant of a common folk tale Love Like Salt Aarne Thompson type 923 in which a father rejects his youngest daughter for a statement of her love that does not please him 10 11 12 The source of the subplot involving Gloucester Edgar and Edmund is a tale in Philip Sidney s Countess of Pembroke s Arcadia 1580 90 with a blind Paphlagonian king and his two sons Leonatus and Plexitrus 13 Changes from source material Edit Cordelia Alexander Johnston artist c 1894 Besides the subplot involving the Earl of Gloucester and his sons the principal innovation Shakespeare made to this story was the death of Cordelia and Lear at the end in the account by Geoffrey of Monmouth Cordelia restores Lear to the throne and succeeds him as ruler after his death During the 17th century Shakespeare s tragic ending was much criticised and alternative versions were written by Nahum Tate in which the leading characters survived and Edgar and Cordelia were married despite the fact that Cordelia was previously betrothed to the King of France As Harold Bloom states Tate s version held the stage for almost 150 years until Edmund Kean reinstated the play s tragic ending in 1823 14 Holinshed states that the story is set when Joash was King of Judah c 800 BC while Shakespeare avoids dating the setting only suggesting that it is sometime in the pre Christian era The characters of Earl Caius of Kent and The Fool were created wholly by Shakespeare in order to engage in character driven conversations with Lear Oswald the steward the confidant of Goneril was created as a similar expository device Shakespeare s Lear and other characters makes oaths to Jupiter Juno and Apollo While the presence of Roman religion in Britain is technically an anachronism nothing was known about any religion that existed in Britain at the time of Lear s alleged life Holinshed identifies the personal names of the Duke of Albany Maglanus the Duke of Cornwall Henninus and the Gallic French leader Aganippus Shakespeare refers to these characters by their titles only and also changes the nature of Albany from a villain to a hero by reassigning Albany s wicked deeds to Cornwall Maglanus and Henninus are killed in the final battle but are survived by their sons Margan and Cunedag In Shakespeare s version Cornwall is killed by a servant who objects to the torture of the Earl of Gloucester while Albany is one of the few surviving main characters Isaac Asimov surmised that this alteration was due to the title Duke of Albany being held in 1606 by Prince Charles the younger son of Shakespeare s benefactor King James 15 However this explanation is faulty because James older son Prince Henry held the title Duke of Cornwall at the same time Date and text Edit Title page of the first quarto edition published in 1608 There is no direct evidence to indicate when King Lear was written or first performed It is thought to have been composed sometime between 1603 and 1606 A Stationers Register entry notes a performance before James I on 26 December 1606 The 1603 date originates from words in Edgar s speeches which may derive from Samuel Harsnett s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures 1603 16 A significant issue in the dating of the play is the relationship of King Lear to the play titled The True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Leir and his Three Daughters which was published for the first time after its entry in the Stationers Register of 8 May 1605 This play had a significant effect on Shakespeare and his close study of it suggests that he was using a printed copy which suggests a composition date of 1605 06 17 Conversely Frank Kermode in the Riverside Shakespeare considers the publication of Leir to have been a response to performances of Shakespeare s already written play noting a sonnet by William Strachey that may have verbal resemblances with Lear Kermode concludes that 1604 05 seems the best compromise 18 A line in the play that regards These late eclipses in the sun and moon 19 appears to refer to a phenomenon of two eclipses that occurred over London within a few days of each other the lunar eclipse of 27 September 1605 and the solar eclipse of 12 October 1605 This remarkable pair of events stirred up much discussion among astrologers Edmund s line A prediction I read this other day 20 apparently refers to the published prognostications of the astrologers which followed after the eclipses This suggests that those lines in Act I were written sometime after both the eclipses and the published comments 21 The first page of King Lear printed in the Second Folio of 1632The modern text of King Lear derives from three sources two quartos one published in 1608 Q1 and the other in 1619 Q2 a and the version in the First Folio of 1623 F1 Q1 has many errors and muddles 22 Q2 was based on Q1 It introduced corrections and new errors 22 Q2 also informed the Folio text 23 Quarto and Folio texts differ significantly Q1 contains 285 lines not in F1 F1 contains around 100 lines not in Q1 Also at least a thousand individual words are changed between the two texts each text has different styles of punctuation and about half the verse lines in the F1 are either printed as prose or differently divided in the Q1 Early editors beginning with Alexander Pope conflated the two texts creating the modern version that has been commonly used since The conflated version originated with the assumptions that the differences in the versions do not indicate any re writing by the author that Shakespeare wrote only one original manuscript which is now lost and that the Quarto and Folio versions contain various distortions of that lost original In 2021 Duncan Salkeld endorsed this view suggesting that Q1 was typeset by a reader dictating to the compositor leading to many slips caused by mishearing 24 Other editors such as Nuttall and Bloom have suggested Shakespeare himself maybe was involved in reworking passages in the play to accommodate performances and other textual requirements of the play 25 As early as 1931 Madeleine Doran suggested that the two texts had independent histories and that these differences between them were critically interesting This argument however was not widely discussed until the late 1970s when it was revived principally by Michael Warren and Gary Taylor who discuss a variety of theories including Doran s idea that the Quarto may have been printed from Shakespeare s foul papers and that the Folio may have been printed from a promptbook prepared for a production 26 The New Cambridge Shakespeare has published separate editions of Q and F the most recent Pelican Shakespeare edition contains both the 1608 Quarto and the 1623 Folio text as well as a conflated version the New Arden edition edited by R A Foakes offers a conflated text that indicates those passages that are found only in Q or F Both Anthony Nuttall of Oxford University and Harold Bloom of Yale University have endorsed the view of Shakespeare having revised the tragedy at least once during his lifetime 25 As Bloom indicates At the close of Shakespeare s revised King Lear a reluctant Edgar becomes King of Britain accepting his destiny but in the accents of despair Nuttall speculates that Edgar like Shakespeare himself usurps the power of manipulating the audience by deceiving poor Gloucester 25 Interpretations and analysis EditAnalysis and criticism of King Lear over the centuries has been extensive What we know of Shakespeare s wide reading and powers of assimilation seems to show that he made use of all kinds of material absorbing contradictory viewpoints positive and negative religious and secular as if to ensure that King Lear would offer no single controlling perspective but be open to indeed demand multiple interpretations R A Foakes 27 Historicist interpretations Edit John F Danby in his Shakespeare s Doctrine of Nature A Study of King Lear 1949 argues that Lear dramatizes among other things the current meanings of Nature The words nature natural and unnatural occur over forty times in the play reflecting a debate in Shakespeare s time about what nature really was like this debate pervades the play and finds symbolic expression in Lear s changing attitude to Thunder There are two strongly contrasting views of human nature in the play that of the Lear party Lear Gloucester Albany Kent exemplifying the philosophy of Bacon and Hooker and that of the Edmund party Edmund Cornwall Goneril Regan akin to the views later formulated by Hobbes though the latter had not yet begun his philosophy career when Lear was first performed Along with the two views of Nature the play contains two views of Reason brought out in Gloucester and Edmund s speeches on astrology 1 2 The rationality of the Edmund party is one with which a modern audience more readily identifies But the Edmund party carries bold rationalism to such extremes that it becomes madness a madness in reason the ironic counterpart of Lear s reason in madness IV 6 190 and the Fool s wisdom in folly This betrayal of reason lies behind the play s later emphasis on feeling The two Natures and the two Reasons imply two societies Edmund is the New Man a member of an age of competition suspicion glory in contrast with the older society which has come down from the Middle Ages with its belief in co operation reasonable decency and respect for the whole as greater than the part King Lear is thus an allegory The older society that of the medieval vision with its doting king falls into error and is threatened by the new Machiavellianism it is regenerated and saved by a vision of a new order embodied in the king s rejected daughter Cordelia in the allegorical scheme is threefold a person an ethical principle love and a community Nevertheless Shakespeare s understanding of the New Man is so extensive as to amount almost to sympathy Edmund is the last great expression in Shakespeare of that side of Renaissance individualism the energy the emancipation the courage which has made a positive contribution to the heritage of the West He embodies something vital which a final synthesis must reaffirm But he makes an absolute claim which Shakespeare will not support It is right for man to feel as Edmund does that society exists for man not man for society It is not right to assert the kind of man Edmund would erect to this supremacy 28 The play offers an alternative to the feudal Machiavellian polarity an alternative foreshadowed in France s speech I 1 245 256 in Lear and Gloucester s prayers III 4 28 36 IV 1 61 66 and in the figure of Cordelia Until the decent society is achieved we are meant to take as role model though qualified by Shakespearean ironies Edgar the machiavel of goodness 29 endurance courage and ripeness 28 Three daughters of King Lear by Gustav Pope The play also contains references to disputes between King James I and Parliament In the 1604 elections to the House of Commons Sir John Fortescue the Chancellor of the Exchequer was defeated by a member of the Buckinghamshire gentry Sir Francis Goodwin 30 Displeased with the result James declared the result of the Buckinghhamshire election invalid and swore in Fortescue as the MP for Buckinghamshire while the House of Commons insisted on swearing in Goodwin leading to a clash between King and Parliament over who had the right to decide who sat in the House of Commons 30 The MP Thomas Wentworth the son of another MP Peter Wentworth often imprisoned under Elizabeth for raising the question of the succession in the Commons was most forceful in protesting James s attempts to reduce the powers of the House of Commons saying the King could not just declare the results of an election invalid if he disliked who had won the seat as he was insisting that he could 31 The character of Kent resembles Peter Wentworth in the way which is tactless and blunt in advising Lear but his point is valid that Lear should be more careful with his friends and advisers 31 Just as the House of Commons had argued to James that their loyalty was to the constitution of England not to the King personally Kent insists his loyalty is institutional not personal as he is loyal to the realm of which the king is head not to Lear himself and he tells Lear to behave better for the good of the realm 31 By contrast Lear makes an argument similar to James that as king he holds absolute power and could disregard the views of his subjects if they displease him whenever he liked 31 In the play the characters like the Fool Kent and Cordelia whose loyalties are institutional seeing their first loyalty to the realm are portrayed more favorably than those like Regan and Goneril who insist they are only loyal to the king seeing their loyalties as personal 31 Likewise James was notorious for his riotous debauched lifestyle and his preference for sycophantic courtiers who were forever singing his praises out of the hope for advancement aspects of his court that closely resemble the court of King Lear who starts out in the play with a riotous debauched court of sycophantic courtiers 32 Kent criticises Oswald as a man unworthy of office who has only been promoted because of his sycophancy telling Lear that he should be loyal to those who are willing to tell him the truth a statement that many in England wished that James would heed 32 Furthermore James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of England upon the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 thereby uniting the kingdoms of the island of Britain into one and a major issue of his reign was the attempt to forge a common British identity 33 James had given his sons Henry and Charles the titles of Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Albany the same titles borne by the men married to Regan and Goneril 34 The play begins with Lear ruling all of Britain and ends with him destroying his realm the critic Andrew Hadfield argued that the division of Britain by Lear was an inversion of the unification of Britain by James who believed his policies would result in a well governed and prosperous unified realm being passed on to his heir 34 Hadfield argued that the play was meant as a warning to James as in the play a monarch loses everything by giving in to his sycophantic courtiers who only seek to use him while neglecting those who truly loved him 34 Hadfield also argued that the world of Lear s court is childish with Lear presenting himself as the father of the nation and requiring all of his subjects not just his children to address him in paternal terms which infantises most of the people around him which pointedly references James s statement in his 1598 book The Trew Law of Free Monarchies that the king is the father of the nation for whom all of his subjects are his children 35 Psychoanalytic and psychosocial interpretations Edit King Lear provides a basis for the primary enactment of psychic breakdown in English literary history 36 The play begins with Lear s near fairytale narcissism 37 Given the absence of legitimate mothers in King Lear Coppelia Kahn 38 provides a psychoanalytic interpretation of the maternal subtext found in the play According to Kahn Lear s old age forces him to regress into an infantile disposition and he now seeks a love that is traditionally satisfied by a mothering woman but in the absence of a real mother his daughters become the mother figures Lear s contest of love between Goneril Regan and Cordelia serves as the binding agreement his daughters will get their inheritance provided that they care for him especially Cordelia on whose kind nursery he will greatly depend Cordelia s refusal to dedicate herself to him and love him as more than a father has been interpreted by some as a resistance to incest but Kahn also inserts the image of a rejecting mother The situation is now a reversal of parent child roles in which Lear s madness is a childlike rage due to his deprivation of filial maternal care Even when Lear and Cordelia are captured together his madness persists as Lear envisions a nursery in prison where Cordelia s sole existence is for him It is only with Cordelia s death that his fantasy of a daughter mother ultimately diminishes as King Lear concludes with only male characters living Lear and Cordelia in Prison William Blake c 1779 Sigmund Freud asserted that Cordelia symbolises Death Therefore when the play begins with Lear rejecting his daughter it can be interpreted as him rejecting death Lear is unwilling to face the finitude of his being The play s poignant ending scene wherein Lear carries the body of his beloved Cordelia was of great importance to Freud In this scene Cordelia forces the realization of his finitude or as Freud put it she causes him to make friends with the necessity of dying 39 Shakespeare had particular intentions with Cordelia s death and was the only writer to have Cordelia killed in the version by Nahum Tate she continues to live happily and in Holinshed s she restores her father and succeeds him Alternatively an analysis based on Adlerian theory suggests that the King s contest among his daughters in Act I has more to do with his control over the unmarried Cordelia 40 This theory indicates that the King s dethronement 41 might have led him to seek control that he lost after he divided his land In his study of the character portrayal of Edmund Harold Bloom refers to him as Shakespeare s most original character 42 As Hazlitt pointed out writes Bloom Edmund does not share in the hypocrisy of Goneril and Regan his Machiavellianism is absolutely pure and lacks an Oedipal motive Freud s vision of family romances simply does not apply to Edmund Iago is free to reinvent himself every minute yet Iago has strong passions however negative Edmund has no passions whatsoever he has never loved anyone and he never will In that respect he is Shakespeare s most original character 42 The tragedy of Lear s lack of understanding of the consequences of his demands and actions is often observed to be like that of a spoiled child but it has also been noted that his behaviour is equally likely to be seen in parents who have never adjusted to their children having grown up 43 Christianity Edit A 1793 painting of King Lear and Cordelia by Benjamin West Critics are divided on the question of whether King Lear represents an affirmation of a particular Christian doctrine 44 Those who think it does posit different arguments which include the significance of Lear s self divestment 45 For some critics this reflects the Christian concepts of the fall of the mighty and the inevitable loss of worldly possessions By 1569 sermons delivered at court such as those at Windsor declared how rich men are rich dust wise men wise dust From him that weareth purple and beareth the crown down to him that is clad with meanest apparel there is nothing but garboil and ruffle and hoisting and lingering wrath and fear of death and death itself and hunger and many a whip of God 45 Some see this in Cordelia and what she symbolised that the material body are mere husks that would eventually be discarded so that the fruit can be reached 44 Among those who argue that Lear is redeemed in the Christian sense through suffering are A C Bradley 46 and John Reibetanz who has written through his sufferings Lear has won an enlightened soul 47 Other critics who find no evidence of redemption and emphasise the horrors of the final act include John Holloway 48 page needed and Marvin Rosenberg 49 page needed William R Elton stresses the pre Christian setting of the play writing that Lear fulfills the criteria for pagan behavior in life falling into total blasphemy at the moment of his irredeemable loss 50 This is related to the way some sources cite that at the end of the narrative King Lear raged against heaven before eventually dying in despair with the death of Cordelia 51 Harold Bloom argues that King Lear transcends a morality system entirely and thus is one of the major triumphs of the play Bloom writes that in the play there is no theology no metaphysics no ethics 52 Performance history EditKing Lear has been performed by esteemed actors since the 17th century when men played all the roles From the 20th century a number of women have played male roles in the play most commonly the Fool who has been played among others by Judy Davis Emma Thompson and Robyn Nevin Lear himself has been played by Marianne Hoppe in 1990 53 by Janet Wright in 1995 54 by Kathryn Hunter in 1996 97 55 and by Glenda Jackson in 2016 and 2019 56 17th century Edit Cover of Tate s The History of King Lear Shakespeare wrote the role of Lear for his company s chief tragedian Richard Burbage for whom Shakespeare was writing incrementally older characters as their careers progressed 57 It has been speculated either that the role of the Fool was written for the company s clown Robert Armin or that it was written for performance by one of the company s boys doubling the role of Cordelia 58 59 Only one specific performance of the play during Shakespeare s lifetime is known before the court of King James I at Whitehall on 26 December 1606 60 61 Its original performances would have been at The Globe where there were no sets in the modern sense and characters would have signified their roles visually with props and costumes Lear s costume for example would have changed in the course of the play as his status diminished commencing in crown and regalia then as a huntsman raging bareheaded in the storm scene and finally crowned with flowers in parody of his original status 62 All theatres were closed down by the Puritan government on 6 September 1642 Upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 two patent companies the King s Company and the Duke s Company were established and the existing theatrical repertoire divided between them 63 And from the restoration until the mid 19th century the performance history of King Lear is not the story of Shakespeare s version but instead of The History of King Lear a popular adaptation by Nahum Tate Its most significant deviations from Shakespeare were to omit the Fool entirely to introduce a happy ending in which Lear and Cordelia survive and to develop a love story between Cordelia and Edgar two characters who never interact in Shakespeare which ends with their marriage 64 Like most Restoration adapters of Shakespeare Tate admired Shakespeare s natural genius but saw fit to augment his work with contemporary standards of art which were largely guided by the neoclassical unities of time place and action 65 Tate s struggle to strike a balance between raw nature and refined art is apparent in his description of the tragedy a heap of jewels unstrung and unpolish t yet so dazzling in their disorder that I soon perceiv d I had seiz d a treasure 66 67 Other changes included giving Cordelia a confidante named Arante bringing the play closer to contemporary notions of poetic justice and adding titilating material such as amorous encounters between Edmund and both Regan and Goneril a scene in which Edgar rescues Cordelia from Edmund s attempted kidnapping and rape 68 69 and a scene in which Cordelia wears men s pants that would reveal the actress s ankles 70 The play ends with a celebration of the King s blest Restauration an obvious reference to Charles II b 18th century Edit In the early 18th century some writers began to express objections to this and other Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare For example in The Spectator on 16 April 1711 Joseph Addison wrote King Lear is an admirable Tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it but as it is reformed according to the chymerical Notion of poetical Justice in my humble Opinion it hath lost half its Beauty Yet on the stage Tate s version prevailed c David Garrick was the first actor manager to begin to cut back on elements of Tate s adaptation in favour of Shakespeare s original he retained Tate s major changes including the happy ending but removed many of Tate s lines including Edgar s closing speech 72 He also reduced the prominence of the Edgar Cordelia love story in order to focus more on the relationship between Lear and his daughters 73 His version had a powerful emotional impact Lear driven to madness by his daughters was in the words of one spectator Arthur Murphy the finest tragic distress ever seen on any stage and in contrast the devotion shown to Lear by Cordelia a mix of Shakespeare s Tate s and Garrick s contributions to the part moved the audience to tears d The first professional performances of King Lear in North America are likely to have been those of the Hallam Company later the American Company which arrived in Virginia in 1752 and who counted the play among their repertoire by the time of their departure for Jamaica in 1774 74 19th century Edit King Lear mourns Cordelia s death James Barry 1786 1788 Charles Lamb established the Romantics attitude to King Lear in his 1811 essay On the Tragedies of Shakespeare considered with reference to their fitness for stage representation where he says that the play is essentially impossible to be represented on the stage preferring to experience it in the study In the theatre he argues to see Lear acted to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking stick turned out of doors by his daughters on a rainy night has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting yet while we read it we see not Lear but we are Lear we are in his mind we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms 75 76 King Lear was politically controversial during the period of George III s madness and as a result was not performed at all in the two professional theatres of London from 1811 to 1820 but was then the subject of major productions in both within three months of his death 77 The 19th century saw the gradual reintroduction of Shakespeare s text to displace Tate s version Like Garrick before him John Philip Kemble had introduced more of Shakespeare s text while still preserving the three main elements of Tate s version the love story the omission of the Fool and the happy ending Edmund Kean played King Lear with its tragic ending in 1823 but failed and reverted to Tate s crowd pleaser after only three performances 78 79 At last in 1838 William Macready at Covent Garden performed Shakespeare s version freed from Tate s adaptions 78 The restored character of the Fool was played by an actress Priscilla Horton as in the words of one spectator a fragile hectic beautiful faced half idiot looking boy 80 And Helen Faucit s final appearance as Cordelia dead in her father s arms became one of the most iconic of Victorian images 81 John Forster writing in the Examiner on 14 February 1838 expressed the hope that Mr Macready s success has banished that disgrace Tate s version from the stage for ever 82 But even this version was not close to Shakespeare s the 19th century actor managers heavily cut Shakespeare s scripts ending scenes on big curtain effects and reducing or eliminating supporting roles to give greater prominence to the star 83 One of Macready s innovations the use of Stonehenge like structures on stage to indicate an ancient setting proved enduring on stage into the 20th century and can be seen in the 1983 television version starring Laurence Olivier 84 In 1843 the Act for Regulating the Theatres came into force bringing an end to the monopolies of the two existing companies and by doing so increased the number of theatres in London 80 At the same time the fashion in theatre was pictorial valuing visual spectacle above plot or characterisation and often required lengthy and time consuming scene changes 85 For example Henry Irving s 1892 King Lear offered spectacles such as Lear s death beneath a cliff at Dover his face lit by the red glow of a setting sun at the expense of cutting 46 of the text including the blinding of Gloucester 86 But Irving s production clearly evoked strong emotions one spectator Gordon Crosse wrote of the first entrance of Lear a striking figure with masses of white hair He is leaning on a huge scabbarded sword which he raises with a wild cry in answer to the shouted greeting of his guards His gait his looks his gestures all reveal the noble imperious mind already degenerating into senile irritability under the coming shocks of grief and age 87 The importance of pictorialism to Irving and to other theatre professionals of the Victorian era is exemplified by the fact that Irving had used Ford Madox Brown s painting Cordelia s Portion as the inspiration for the look of his production and that the artist himself was brought in to provide sketches for the settings of other scenes 88 A reaction against pictorialism came with the rise of the reconstructive movement believers in a simple style of staging more similar to that which would have pertained in renaissance theatres whose chief early exponent was the actor manager William Poel Poel was influenced by a performance of King Lear directed by Jocza Savits at the Hoftheater in Munich in 1890 set on an apron stage with a three tier Globe like reconstruction theatre as its backdrop Poel would use this same configuration for his own Shakespearean performances in 1893 89 20th century Edit Cordelia s Portion by Ford Madox Brown By mid century the actor manager tradition had declined to be replaced by a structure in which the major theatre companies employed professional directors as auteurs The last of the great actor managers Donald Wolfit played Lear in 1944 on a Stonehenge like set and was praised by James Agate as the greatest piece of Shakespearean acting since I have been privileged to write for the Sunday Times e 91 Wolfit supposedly drank eight bottles of Guinness in the course of each performance f The character of Lear in the 19th century was often that of a frail old man from the opening scene but Lears of the 20th century often began the play as strong men displaying regal authority including John Gielgud Donald Wolfit and Donald Sinden 93 Cordelia also evolved in the 20th century earlier Cordelias had often been praised for being sweet innocent and modest but 20th century Cordelias were often portrayed as war leaders For example Peggy Ashcroft at the RST in 1950 played the role in a breastplate and carrying a sword 94 Similarly the Fool evolved through the course of the century with portrayals often deriving from the music hall or circus tradition 95 At Stratford upon Avon in 1962 Peter Brook who would later film the play with the same actor Paul Scofield in the role of Lear set the action simply against a huge empty white stage The effect of the scene when Lear and Gloucester meet two tiny figures in rags in the midst of this emptiness was said by the scholar Roger Warren to catch both the human pathos and the universal scale of the scene 96 Some of the lines from the radio broadcast were used by The Beatles to add into the recorded mix of the song I Am the Walrus John Lennon happened upon the play on the BBC Third Programme while fiddling with the radio while working on the song The voices of actors Mark Dignam Philip Guard and John Bryning from the play are all heard in the song 97 98 Like other Shakespearean tragedies King Lear has proved amenable to conversion into other theatrical traditions In 1989 David McRuvie and Iyyamkode Sreedharan adapted the play then translated it to Malayalam for performance in Kerala in the Kathakali tradition which itself developed around 1600 contemporary with Shakespeare s writing The show later went on tour and in 2000 played at Shakespeare s Globe completing according to Anthony Dawson a kind of symbolic circle 99 Perhaps even more radical was Ong Keng Sen s 1997 adaptation of King Lear which featured six actors each performing in a separate Asian acting tradition and in their own separate languages A pivotal moment occurred when the Jingju performer playing Older Daughter a conflation of Goneril and Regan stabbed the Noh performed Lear whose falling pine deadfall straight face forward into the stage astonished the audience in what Yong Li Lan describes as a triumph through the moving power of noh performance at the very moment of his character s defeat 100 101 In 1974 Buzz Goodbody directed Lear a deliberately abbreviated title for Shakespeare s text as the inaugural production of the RSC s studio theatre The Other Place The performance was conceived as a chamber piece the small intimate space and proximity to the audience enabled detailed psychological acting which was performed with simple sets and in modern dress 102 Peter Holland has speculated that this company directoral decision namely choosing to present Shakespeare in a small venue for artistic reasons when a larger venue was available may at the time have been unprecedented 102 Brook s earlier vision of the play proved influential and directors have gone further in presenting Lear as in the words of R A Foakes a pathetic senior citizen trapped in a violent and hostile environment When John Wood took the role in 1990 he played the later scenes in clothes that looked like cast offs inviting deliberate parallels with the uncared for in modern Western societies 103 Indeed modern productions of Shakespeare s plays often reflect the world in which they are performed as much as the world for which they were written and the Moscow theatre scene in 1994 provided an example when two very different productions of the play those by Sergei Zhonovach and Alexei Borodin very different from one another in their style and outlook were both reflections on the break up of the Soviet Union 104 21st century Edit In 2002 and 2010 the Hudson Shakespeare Company of New Jersey staged separate productions as part of their respective Shakespeare in the Parks seasons The 2002 version was directed by Michael Collins and transposed the action to a West Indies nautical setting Actors were featured in outfits indicative of looks of various Caribbean islands The 2010 production directed by Jon Ciccarelli was fashioned after the atmosphere of the film The Dark Knight with a palette of reds and blacks and set the action in an urban setting Lear Tom Cox appeared as a head of multi national conglomerate who divided up his fortune among his socialite daughter Goneril Brenda Scott his officious middle daughter Regan Noelle Fair and university daughter Cordelia Emily Best 105 In 2012 renowned Canadian director Peter Hinton directed an all First Nations production of King Lear at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa Ontario with the setting changed to an Algonquin nation in the 17th century 106 The cast included August Schellenberg as Lear Billy Merasty as Gloucester Tantoo Cardinal as Regan Kevin Loring as Edmund Jani Lauzon in a dual role as Cordelia and the Fool and Craig Lauzon as Kent 106 This setting would later be reproduced as part of the Manga Shakespeare graphic novel series published by Self Made Hero adapted by Richard Appignanesi and featuring the illustrations of Ilya In 2015 Toronto s Theatre Passe Muraille staged a production set in Upper Canada against the backdrop of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 This production starred David Fox as Lear 107 In the summer of 2015 2016 The Sydney Theatre Company staged King Lear directed by Neil Armfield with Geoffrey Rush in the lead role and Robyn Nevin as the Fool About the madness at the heart of the play Rush said that for him it s about finding the dramatic impact in the moments of his mania What seems to work best is finding a vulnerability or a point of empathy where an audience can look at Lear and think how shocking it must be to be that old and to be banished from your family into the open air in a storm That s a level of impoverishment you would never want to see in any other human being ever 108 In 2016 Talawa Theatre Company and Royal Exchange Manchester co produced a production of King Lear with Don Warrington in the title role 109 The production featuring a largely black cast was described in The Guardian as being as close to definitive as can be 110 The Daily Telegraph wrote that Don Warrington s King Lear is a heartbreaking tour de force 111 King Lear was staged by Royal Shakespeare Company with Antony Sher in the lead role The performance was directed by Gregory Doran and was described as having strength and depth 112 In 2017 the Guthrie Theatre produced a production of King Lear with Stephen Yoakam in the title role Armin Shimerman appeared as the fool portraying it with an unusual grimness but it works 113 in a production that was hailed as a devastating piece of theater and a production that does it justice 113 Lear was played on Broadway by Christopher Plummer in 2004 and Glenda Jackson in 2019 with Jackson reprising her portrayal from a 2016 production at The Old Vic in London Adaptations EditFilm and video Edit The first film adaptation of King Lear was a five minute German version made around 1905 which has not survived 114 The oldest extant version is a ten minute studio based version from 1909 by Vitagraph which according to Luke McKernan made the ill advised decision to attempt to cram in as much of the plot as possible 115 Two silent versions both titled Re Lear were made in Italy in 1910 Of these the version by director Gerolamo Lo Savio was filmed on location and it dropped the Edgar sub plot and used frequent intertitling to make the plot easier to follow than its Vitagraph predecessor g A contemporary setting was used for Louis Feuillade s 1911 French adaptation Le Roi Lear Au Village and in 1914 in America Ernest Warde expanded the story to an hour including spectacles such as a final battle scene 117 The Joseph Mankiewicz 1949 House of Strangers is often considered a Lear adaptation but the parallels are more striking in Broken Lance 1954 in which a cattle baron played by Spencer Tracy tyrannizes his three sons and only the youngest Joe played by Robert Wagner remains loyal 118 The TV anthology series Omnibus 1952 1961 staged a 73 minute version of King Lear on 18 October 1953 It was adapted by Peter Brook and starred Orson Welles in his American television debut 119 Two screen versions of King Lear date from the early 1970s Grigori Kozintsev s Korol Lir h and Peter Brook s film of King Lear which stars Paul Scofield 122 Brook s film starkly divided the critics Pauline Kael said I didn t just dislike this production I hated it and suggested the alternative title Night of the Living Dead i Yet Robert Hatch in The Nation thought it as excellent a filming of the play as one can expect and Vincent Canby in The New York Times called it an exalting Lear full of exquisite terror j The film drew on the ideas of Jan Kott in particular his observation that King Lear was the precursor of absurdist theatre and that it has parallels with Beckett s Endgame 124 Critics who dislike the film particularly draw attention to its bleak nature from its opening complaining that the world of the play does not deteriorate with Lear s suffering but commences dark colourless and wintry leaving according to Douglas Brode Lear the land and us with nowhere to go 125 Cruelty pervades the film which does not distinguish between the violence of ostensibly good and evil characters presenting both savagely 126 Paul Scofield as Lear eschews sentimentality This demanding old man with a coterie of unruly knights provokes audience sympathy for the daughters in the early scenes and his presentation explicitly rejects the tradition of playing Lear as poor old white haired patriarch 127 Korol Lir has been praised by critic Alexander Anikst for the serious deeply thoughtful even philosophical approach of director Grigori Kozintsev and writer Boris Pasternak Making a thinly veiled criticism of Brook in the process Anikst praised the fact that there were no attempts at sensationalism no efforts to modernise Shakespeare by introducing Freudian themes Existentialist ideas eroticism or sexual perversion Kozintsev has simply made a film of Shakespeare s tragedy k Dmitri Shostakovich provided an epic score its motifs including an increasingly ironic trumpet fanfare for Lear and a five bar Call to Death marking each character s demise 129 Kozintzev described his vision of the film as an ensemble piece with Lear played by a dynamic Juri Jarvet as first among equals in a cast of fully developed characters 130 The film highlights Lear s role as king by including his people throughout the film on a scale no stage production could emulate charting the central character s decline from their god to their helpless equal his final descent into madness marked by his realisation that he has neglected the poor naked wretches 131 132 As the film progresses ruthless characters Goneril Regan Edmund increasingly appear isolated in shots in contrast to the director s focus throughout the film on masses of human beings 133 Jonathan Miller twice directed Michael Hordern in the title role for English television the first for the BBC s Play of the Month in 1975 and the second for the BBC Television Shakespeare in 1982 Hordern received mixed reviews and was considered a bold choice due to his history of taking much lighter roles 134 Also for English television Laurence Olivier took the role in a 1983 TV production for Granada Television It was his last screen appearance in a Shakespearean role 135 In 1985 a major screen adaptation of the play appeared Ran directed by Akira Kurosawa At the time the most expensive Japanese film ever made it tells the story of Hidetora a fictional 16th century Japanese warlord whose attempt to divide his kingdom among his three sons leads to an estrangement with the youngest and ultimately most loyal of them and eventually to civil war 136 In contrast to the cold drab greys of Brook and Kozintsev Kurosawa s film is full of vibrant colour external scenes in yellows blues and greens interiors in browns and ambers and Emi Wada s Oscar winning colour coded costumes for each family member s soldiers 137 136 Hidetora has a back story a violent and ruthless rise to power and the film portrays contrasting victims the virtuous characters Sue and Tsurumaru who are able to forgive and the vengeful Kaede Mieko Harada Hidetora s daughter in law and the film s Lady Macbeth like villain 138 139 Screenshot from trailer for House of Strangers 1949 The film has two antecedents biblical references to Joseph and his brothers and King Lear 140 A scene in which a character is threatened with blinding in the manner of Gloucester forms the climax of the 1973 parody horror Theatre of Blood 141 Comic use is made of Sir s inability to physically carry any actress cast as Cordelia opposite his Lear in the 1983 film of the stage play The Dresser 142 John Boorman s 1990 Where the Heart Is features a father who disinherits his three spoiled children 143 Francis Ford Coppola deliberately incorporated elements of Lear in his 1990 sequel The Godfather Part III including Michael Corleone s attempt to retire from crime throwing his domain into anarchy and most obviously the death of his daughter in his arms Parallels have also been drawn between Andy Garcia s character Vincent and both Edgar and Edmund and between Talia Shire s character Connie and Kaede in Ran 144 In 1997 Jocelyn Moorhouse directed A Thousand Acres based on Jane Smiley s Pulitzer Prize winning novel set in 1990s Iowa 145 The film is described by scholar Tony Howard as the first adaptation to confront the play s disturbing sexual dimensions 144 The story is told from the viewpoint of the elder two daughters Ginny played by Jessica Lange and Rose played by Michelle Pfeiffer who were sexually abused by their father as teenagers Their younger sister Caroline played by Jennifer Jason Leigh had escaped this fate and is ultimately the only one to remain loyal 146 147 In 1998 the BBC produced a televised version 148 directed by Richard Eyre of his award winning 1997 Royal National Theatre production starring Ian Holm as Lear In March 2001 in a review originally posted to culturevulture net critic Bob Wake observed that the production was of particular note for preserving Ian Holm s celebrated stage performance in the title role Stellar interpreters of Lear haven t always been so fortunate 149 Wake added that other performances had been poorly documented because they suffered from technological problems Orson Welles eccentric televised productions Paul Scofield or were filmed when the actor playing Lear was unwell Laurence Olivier 150 The play was adapted to the world of gangsters in Don Boyd s 2001 My Kingdom a version which differs from all others in commencing with the Lear character Sandeman played by Richard Harris in a loving relationship with his wife But her violent death marks the start of an increasingly bleak and violent chain of events influenced by co writer Nick Davies documentary book Dark Heart which in spite of the director s denial that the film had serious parallels to Shakespeare s play actually mirror aspects of its plot closely 151 152 Unlike Shakespeare s Lear but like Hidetora and Sandeman the central character of Uli Edel s 2002 American TV adaptation King of Texas John Lear played by Patrick Stewart has a back story centred on his violent rise to power as the richest landowner metaphorically a king in General Sam Houston s independent Texas in the early 1840s Daniel Rosenthal comments that the film was able by reason of having been commissioned by the cable channel TNT to include a bleaker and more violent ending than would have been possible on the national networks 153 2003 s Channel 4 commissioned two parter Second Generation set the story in the world of Asian manufacturing and music in England 154 The Canadian comedy drama TV series Slings amp Arrows 2003 2006 which follows a fictional Shakespearean theatre festival inspired by the real life Stratford Festival in Ontario devotes its third season to a troubled production of King Lear The fictional actor starring as Lear played by William Hutt who in real life played Lear onstage at Stratford three times to great acclaim 155 is given the role despite concerns over his advanced age and ill health plus a secret addiction to heroin discovered by the theatre s director Eventually the actor s mental state deteriorates until he seems to believe he is Lear himself wandering into a storm and later reciting his lines uncontrollably William Hutt himself was in failing health when he filmed the TV role and died less than a year after the third season premiered 156 In 2008 a version of King Lear produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company premiered with Ian McKellen in the role of King Lear 157 In the 2012 romantic comedy If I Were You there is a reference to the play when the lead characters are cast in a female version of King Lear set in modern times with Marcia Gay Harden cast in the Lear role and Lenore Watling as the fool Lear is an executive in a corporate empire instead of a literal one being phased out of her position The off beat play and its cast is a major plot element of the movie citation needed The American musical drama television series Empire is partially inspired from King Lear 158 159 160 Carl Bessai wrote and directed a modern adaptation of King Lear titled The Lears Released in 2017 the film starred Bruce Dern Anthony Michael Hall and Sean Astin 161 On 28 May 2018 BBC Two broadcast King Lear starring Anthony Hopkins in the title role and Emma Thompson as Goneril Directed by Richard Eyre the play featured a 21st century setting Hopkins at the age of 80 was deemed ideal for the role and at home with Lear s skin by critic Sam Wollaston 162 Radio and audio Edit The first recording of the Argo Shakespeare for Argo Records was King Lear in 1957 directed and produced by George Rylands with William Devlin in the title role Jill Balcon as Goneril and Prunella Scales as Cordelia 163 The Shakespeare Recording Society recorded a full length unabridged audio productions on LP in 1965 SRS M 232 directed by Howard Sackler with Paul Scofield as Lear Cyril Cusack as Gloucester Robert Stephens as Edmund Rachel Roberts Pamela Brown and John Stride King Lear was broadcast live on the BBC Third Programme on 29 September 1967 starring John Gielgud Barbara Jefford Barbara Bolton and Virginia McKenna as Lear and his daughters 164 At Abbey Road Studios John Lennon used a microphone held to a radio to overdub fragments of the play Act IV Scene 6 165 onto the song I Am the Walrus which The Beatles were recording that evening The voices recorded were those of Mark Dignam Gloucester Philip Guard Edgar and John Bryning Oswald 97 98 On 10 April 1994 Kenneth Branagh s Renaissance Theatre Company performed a radio adaptation directed by Glyn Dearman starring Gielgud as Lear with Keith Michell as Kent Richard Briers as Gloucester Dame Judi Dench as Goneril Emma Thompson as Cordelia Eileen Atkins as Regan Kenneth Branagh as Edmund John Shrapnel as Albany Robert Stephens as Cornwall Denis Quilley as Burgundy Sir Derek Jacobi as France Iain Glen as Edgar and Michael Williams as The Fool 166 Naxos AudioBooks released an audio production in 2002 with Paul Scofield as Lear Alec McCowen as Gloucester Kenneth Branagh as The Fool and a full cast 167 It was nominated for an Audie Award for Audio Drama in 2003 In October 2017 Big Finish Productions released an audio adaptation full cast drama Adapted by Nicholas Pegg The full cast starred David Warner as the titular King Lear Lisa Bowerman as Regan Louise Jameson as Goneril Trevor Cooper as Oswald Lear s Gentleman Third Messenger Raymond Coulthard Edmund Cornwall s Servant Second Messenger Second Gentleman Barnaby Edwards The King of France Old Man Herald Ray Fearon The Duke of Cornwall Mike Grady The Fool Gwilym Lee Edgar the Duke of Burgundy Tony Millan The Earl of Gloucester First Messenger Nicholas Pegg The Duke of Albany Gloucester s Servant Curan and Paul Shelley The Earl of Kent 168 Opera Edit German composer Aribert Reimann s opera Lear premiered on 9 July 1978 Japanese composer s Toshio Hosokawa s opera Vision of Lear premiered on 19 April 1998 at the Munich Biennale Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen s opera Kuningas Lear premiered on 15 September 2000 169 Novels Edit Jane Smiley s 1991 novel A Thousand Acres winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is based on King Lear but set in a farm in Iowa in 1979 and told from the perspective of the oldest daughter 170 The 2009 novel Fool by Christopher Moore is a comedic retelling of King Lear from the perspective of the court jester 171 Edward St Aubyn s 2017 novel Dunbar is a modern retelling of King Lear commissioned as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series 172 On 27 March 2018 Tessa Gratton published a high fantasy adaptation of King Lear titled The Queens of Innis Lear with Tor Books 173 Preti Taneja s 2018 novel We That Are Young is based on King Lear and set in India 174 The 2021 novel Learwife by J R Thorpe imagines the story of Lear s wife and the mother of his children who is not present in the play 175 See also EditIllegitimacy in fiction Nothing comes from nothing Shakespearean fool Fool novel Water and Salt Cap o Rushes The Goose Girl at the Well The Dirty Shepherdess The Yiddish King LearNotes and references EditNotes Edit The 1619 quarto is part of William Jaggard s so called False Folio Jean I Marsden cites Tate s Lear line 5 6 119 69 Quoted by Jean I Marsden 71 Jean I Marsden cites Gray s Inn Journal 12 January 1754 73 Quoted by Stanley Wells 90 According to Ronald Harwood quoted by Stanley Wells 92 This version appears on the British Film Institute video compilation Silent Shakespeare 1999 116 The original title of this film in Cyrillic script is Korol Lir and the sources anglicise it with different spellings Daniel Rosenthal gives it as Korol Lir 120 while Douglas Brode gives it as Karol Lear 121 Pauline Kael s New Yorker review is quoted by Douglas Brode 123 Both quoted by Douglas Brode 122 Quoted by Douglas Brode 128 References Edit All references to King Lear unless otherwise specified are taken from the Folger Shakespeare Library s Folger Digital Editions texts edited by Barbara Mowat Paul Werstine Michael Poston and Rebecca Niles Under their referencing system 1 1 246 248 means act 1 scene 1 lines 246 through 248 A Defence of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley 17 December 2022 Burt 2008 p 1 Top 100 Works in World Literature by Norwegian Book Clubs with the Norwegian Nobel Institute the Greatest Books King Lear 1 1 246 248 Jackson 1953 p 459 Ekwall 1928 p xlii Stevenson 1918 Foakes 1997 pp 94 96 Hadfield 2007 p 208 In other literary forms of the Middle Ages there occasionally appear oral tales Geoffrey of Monmouth in telling the story of King Lear includes the incident of Love Like Salt Type 923 Thompson Stith 1977 The Folktale University of California Press p 181 ISBN 0 520 03537 2 Mitakidou amp Manna 2002 p 100 Ashliman 2013 McNeir 1968 Bloom 2008 p 53 Asimov s Guide to Shakespeare Volume II section King Lear Kermode 1974 p 1249 Foakes 1997 pp 89 90 Kermode 1974 p 1250 King Lear 1 2 103 King Lear 1 2 139 Shaheen 1999 p 606 a b Foakes Ard3 p 111 Foakes Ard3 p 113 Salkeld Duncan 16 March 2021 Q F The Texts of King Lear The Library 22 1 3 32 doi 10 1093 library 22 1 3 a b c Bloom 2008 p xii Taylor amp Warren 1983 p 429 Foakes 1997 p 107 a b Danby 1949 p 50 Danby 1949 p 151 a b Hadfield 2004 p 103 a b c d e Hadfield 2004 p 105 a b Hadfield 2004 pp 105 106 Hadfield 2004 pp 98 99 a b c Hadfield 2004 p 99 Hadfield 2004 pp 100 101 Brown 2001 p 19 Brown 2001 p 20 Kahn 1986 Freud 1997 p 120 McLaughlin 1978 p 39 Croake 1983 p 247 a b Bloom 2008 p 317 Kamaralli 2015 a b Peat 1982 p 43 a b Kronenfeld 1998 p 181 Bradley 1905 p 285 Reibetanz 1977 p 108 Holloway 1961 Rosenberg 1992 Elton 1988 p 260 Pierce 2008 p xx Iannone Carol 1997 Harold Bloom and King Lear Tragic Misreading The Hudson Review 50 1 83 94 doi 10 2307 3852392 JSTOR 3852392 Croall 2015 p 70 Nestruck 2016 Gay 2002 p 171 Cavendish 2016 Taylor 2002 p 5 Thomson 2002 p 143 Taylor 2002 p 6 Hunter 1972 p 45 Taylor 2002 pp 18 19 Gurr amp Ichikawa 2000 pp 53 54 Marsden 2002 p 21 Taylor 2003 pp 324 325 Bradley 2010 p 43 Armstrong 2003 p 312 Jackson 1986 p 190 Potter 2001 p 186 a b Marsden 2002 p 28 Bradley 2010 p 47 Marsden 2002 p 30 Tatspaugh 2003 p 528 a b Marsden 2002 p 33 Morrison 2002 p 232 Moody 2002 p 40 Hunter 1972 p 50 Potter 2001 p 189 a b Potter 2001 pp 190 191 Wells 1997 p 62 a b Potter 2001 p 191 Gay 2002 p 161 Wells 1997 p 73 Hunter 1972 p 51 Foakes 1997 pp 30 31 Schoch 2002 pp 58 75 Potter 2001 p 193 Jackson 1986 p 206 Schoch 2002 p 63 O Connor 2002 p 78 Wells 1997 p 224 Foakes 1997 p 89 Wells 1997 p 229 Foakes 1997 p 24 Foakes 1997 pp 36 37 Foakes 1997 p 52 Warren 1986 p 266 a b Everett 1999 pp 134 136 a b Lewisohn 1988 p 128 Dawson 2002 p 178 Lan 2005 p 532 Gillies et al 2002 p 265 a b Holland 2001 p 211 Foakes 1997 pp 27 28 Holland 2001 p 213 Beckerman 2010 a b Nestruck 2012 Ouzounian 2015 Blake 2015 Hutchison 2015 Hickling 2016 Allfree 2016 Billington 2016 a b Ringham 2017 Brode 2001 p 205 McKernan amp Terris 1994 p 83 McKernan amp Terris 1994 p 84 Brode 2001 pp 205 206 McKernan amp Terris 1994 pp 84 85 Crosby 1953 Rosenthal 2007 p 79 Brode 2001 p 210 a b Brode 2001 p 206 Brode 2001 pp 206 209 Brode 2001 pp 206 207 Brode 2001 pp 206 210 Rosenthal 2007 p 82 Rosenthal 2007 p 83 Brode 2001 p 211 Rosenthal 2007 p 81 Brode 2001 pp 211 212 Rosenthal 2007 pp 79 80 King Lear 3 4 32 Guntner 2007 pp 134 135 McKernan amp Terris 1994 pp 85 87 McKernan amp Terris 1994 pp 87 88 a b Rosenthal 2007 p 84 Guntner 2007 p 136 Rosenthal 2007 pp 84 87 Jackson 2001 p 225 Griggs 2009 p 122 McKernan amp Terris 1994 p 85 McKernan amp Terris 1994 p 87 Howard 2007 p 308 a b Howard 2007 p 299 Rosenthal 2007 p 88 Rosenthal 2007 pp 88 89 Brode 2001 p 217 King Lear 1998 BFI Retrieved 28 September 2022 Wake Bob 1 January 1998 King Lear CultureVulture Retrieved 28 September 2022 Royal National Theatre Selected Reviews 1999 2006 Retrieved 24 September 2021 Rosenthal 2007 pp 90 91 Lehmann 2006 pp 72 89 Rosenthal 2007 pp 92 93 Greenhalgh amp Shaughnessy 2006 p 99 Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia Hutt William Athabasca University Retrieved on May 14 2008 McKinney Mark November 5 2010 Mark McKinney Comedic Slings And Arrows Fresh Air Interview Interviewed by Terry Gross Philadelphia National Public Radio Retrieved 2022 10 11 King Lear DVD 2008 Amazon co uk Retrieved 5 February 2021 Logan Michael 31 December 2014 Lee Daniels Builds a Soapy New Hip Hop Empire for Fox TV Guide CBS Interactive Retrieved 3 January 2015 Stack Tim 7 January 2015 Empire Inside Fox s ambitious groundbreaking musical soap Entertainment Weekly Retrieved 7 January 2015 Wilson Stacey 6 May 2014 Lee Daniels on Fox s Empire I Wanted to Make a Black Dynasty Q amp A The Hollywood Reporter Prometheus Global Media Retrieved 14 December 2014 McNary 2016 Wollaston 2018 Quinn 2017 Radio Times 1967 King Lear 4 6 245 246 and King Lear 4 6 275 284 Folger Shakespeare Library Radio Times 1994 King Lear June 2016 Hughes Media Internet Limited 16 King Lear Big Finish Classics Big Finish Retrieved 1 August 2022 Anderson Martin 1999 Aulis Sallinen strong and simple Finnish Music Quarterly Retrieved 1 March 2022 King Lear in Zebulon County archive nytimes com Retrieved 17 March 2021 Dirda Michael 8 February 2009 Michael Dirda on Fool By Christopher Moore The Washington Post ISSN 0190 8286 Retrieved 3 June 2022 Gilbert Sophie 10 October 2017 King Lear Is a Media Mogul in Dunbar The Atlantic Retrieved 3 June 2022 Novels tessagratton com Archived from the original on 7 March 2019 Retrieved 20 March 2019 Los Angeles Review of Books Los Angeles Review of Books 27 December 2018 Retrieved 3 June 2022 Lashbrook Angela 7 December 2021 You Know About King Lear A New Novel Tells His Banished Queen s Tale The New York Times ISSN 0362 4331 Retrieved 3 June 2022 Bibliography EditEditions of King Lear Edit Foakes R A ed 1997 King Lear The Arden Shakespeare third series Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN 978 1 903436 59 2 Hadfield Andrew ed 2007 King Lear The Barnes amp Noble Shakespeare New York Barnes amp Noble ISBN 978 1 4114 0079 5 Hunter G K ed 1972 King Lear The New Penguin Shakespeare Penguin Books Kermode Frank 1974 Introduction to King Lear In Evans G Blakemore ed The Riverside Shakespeare Houghton Mifflin ISBN 978 0 395 04402 5 Pierce Joseph ed 2008 King Lear Ignatius Critical Editions San Francisco Ignatius Press ISBN 978 1 58617 137 7 Secondary sources Edit Allfree Claire 7 April 2016 Don Warrington s King Lear is a heartbreaking tour de force The Telegraph Retrieved 6 November 2018 Armstrong Alan 2003 Unfamiliar Shakespeare In Wells Stanley Orlin Lena Cowen eds Shakespeare An Oxford Guide Oxford Oxford University Press pp 308 319 ISBN 978 0 19 924522 2 Ashliman D L ed 9 February 2013 Love Like Salt Folktales of Types 923 and 510 Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts Retrieved 2 November 2018 Beckerman Jim 21 June 2010 Hudson Shakespeare Company takes King Lear outdoors The Record Archived from the original on 3 March 2016 Retrieved 6 November 2018 Billington Michael 2 September 2016 King Lear review Sher shores up his place in Shakespeare royalty The Guardian Retrieved 25 December 2017 Blake Elissa 19 November 2015 Three girls lucky me says Geoffrey Rush as he plays in King Lear The Sydney Morning Herald Retrieved 6 November 2018 Bloom Harold ed 2008 King Lear Bloom s Shakespeare Through the Ages Infobase Publishing ISBN 978 0 7910 9574 4 Burt Daniel S 2008 The Drama 100 A Ranking of the Greatest Plays of All Time PDF Facts On File ISBN 978 0 8160 6073 3 Archived from the original PDF on 20 November 2022 Bradley A C 1905 first published 1904 Shakespearean Tragedy Lectures on Hamlet Othello King Lear and Macbeth 20th impression 2nd ed London Macmillan Bradley Lynne 2010 AdaptingKing Learfor the Stage Routledge ISBN 978 1 4094 0597 9 Brode Douglas 2001 Shakespeare in the Movies From the Silent Era to Today Berkley Books ISBN 978 0 425 18176 8 Brown Dennis 2001 King Lear The Lost Leader Group Disintegration Transformation and Suspended Reconsolidation Critical Survey Berghahn Books 13 3 19 39 doi 10 3167 001115701782483408 eISSN 1752 2293 ISSN 0011 1570 JSTOR 41557126 Burnett Mark Thornton Wray Ramona eds 2006 Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty First Century Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press ISBN 978 0 7486 2351 8 Greenhalgh Susan Shaughnessy Robert Our Shakespeares British Television and the Strains of Multiculturalism In Burnett amp Wray 2006 pp 90 112 Lehmann Courtney The Postnostalgic Renaissance The Place of Liverpool in Don Boyd s My Kingdom In Burnett amp Wray 2006 pp 72 89 Cavendish Dominic 5 November 2016 King Lear Old Vic review Glenda Jackson s performance will be talked about for years The Telegraph Retrieved 5 November 2018 Croake James W 1983 Alderian Family Counseling Education Individual Psychology 39 Croall Jonathan 2015 Performing King Lear Gielgud to Russell Beale Bloomsbury Publishing doi 10 5040 9781474223898 ISBN 978 1 4742 2385 0 Crosby John 22 October 1953 Orson Welles as King Lear on TV is Impressive New York Herald Tribune Retrieved 18 November 2018 via wellesnet com Danby John F 1949 Shakespeare s Doctrine of Nature A Study of King Lear London Faber and Faber OL 17770097M Ekwall Eilert 1928 English River names Oxford Clarendon Press hdl 2027 uc1 b4598439 LCCN 29010319 OCLC 2793798 OL 6727840M Elton William R 1988 King Learand the Gods Lexington University Press of Kentucky ISBN 978 0 8131 0178 1 Everett Walter 1999 The Beatles as Musicians Revolver Through the Anthology Oxford Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 512941 0 Freud Sigmund 1997 Writings on Art and Literature Meridian Crossing Aesthetics Stanford CA Stanford University Press ISBN 978 0 8047 2973 4 de Grazia Margreta Wells Stanley eds 2001 The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press doi 10 1017 CCOL0521650941 ISBN 978 1 139 00010 9 via Cambridge Core Holland Peter 2001 Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century Theatre In de Grazia Margreta Wells Stanley eds The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 199 215 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521650941 ISBN 978 1 139 00010 9 via Cambridge Core Jackson Russell 2001 Shakespeare and the Cinema In de Grazia Margreta Wells Stanley eds The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 217 234 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521650941 014 ISBN 978 1 139 00010 9 via Cambridge Core Potter Lois 2001 Shakespeare in the Theatre 1660 1900 In de Grazia Margreta Wells Stanley eds The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 183 198 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521650941 012 ISBN 978 1 139 00010 9 via Cambridge Core Griggs Yvonne 2009 Shakespeare s King Lear Screen Adaptations Bloomsbury Publishing doi 10 5040 9781408167168 ISBN 978 1 4081 0592 4 permanent dead link Gurr Andrew Ichikawa Mariko 2000 Staging in Shakespeare s Theatres Oxford Shakespeare Topics Oxford Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 871158 2 Hadfield Andrew 2004 Hadfield Andrew ed Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics Arden Critical Companions London Bloomsbury Publishing doi 10 5040 9781472555212 ISBN 978 1 903436 17 2 Hickling Alfred 7 April 2016 King Lear review as close to definitive as can be The Guardian Retrieved 6 November 2018 Hodgdon Barbara Worthen W B 2005 A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance Blackwell Publishing ISBN 978 1 4051 8821 0 Lan Yong Li 2005 Shakespeare and the Fiction of the Intercultural In Hodgdon Barbara Worthen W B eds A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance Blackwell Publishing pp 527 549 ISBN 978 1 4051 8821 0 Holloway John 2014 first published 1961 The Story of the Night Studies in Shakespeare s Major Tragedies New York Routledge ISBN 978 1 138 01033 8 Hutchison David 12 October 2015 Don Warrington cast as King Lear at the Royal Exchange The Stage Retrieved 6 November 2018 Jackson Kenneth Hurlstone 1995 first published 1953 Language and History in Early Britain A chronological survey of the Brittonic languages first to twelfth century A D Edinburgh University of Edinburgh Press ISBN 978 1 85182 140 2 Jackson Russell ed 2007 The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film Cambridge Companions to Literature 2nd ed Cambridge Cambridge University Press doi 10 1017 CCOL0521866006 ISBN 978 1 139 00143 4 via Cambridge Core Guntner J Lawrence 2007 Hamlet Macbeth and King Lear on Film In Jackson Russell ed The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film Cambridge Companions to Literature 2nd ed Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 120 140 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521866006 008 ISBN 978 1 139 00143 4 via Cambridge Core Howard Tony 2007 Shakespeare s Cinematic Offshoots In Jackson Russell ed The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film Cambridge Companions to Literature 2nd ed Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 303 323 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521866006 018 ISBN 978 1 139 00143 4 via Cambridge Core Kahn Coppelia 1986 The Absent Mother in King Lear In Ferguson Margaret W Quilligan Maureen Vickers Nancy J eds Rewriting the Renaissance The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe Women in Culture and Society Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press pp 33 49 ISBN 978 0 226 24314 6 Kamaralli Anna 21 December 2015 Thou hadst better avoid getting teary and King Leary this Christmas The Conversation Retrieved 4 January 2016 Kronenfeld Judy 1998 King Learand the Naked Truth Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance London Duke University Press ISBN 978 0 8223 2038 8 Lewisohn Mark 1988 Complete Beatles Recording Sessions The Official Story of the Abbey Road Years 1962 1970 Hamlyn ISBN 978 0 600 55798 2 McKernan Luke Terris Olwen 1994 Walking Shadows Shakespeare in the National Film and Television Archive British Film Institute ISBN 0 85170 486 7 McLaughlin John J 1978 The Dynamics of Power in King Lear An Adlerian Interpretation Shakespeare Quarterly Folger Shakespeare Library 29 1 37 43 doi 10 2307 2869167 eISSN 1538 3555 ISSN 0037 3222 JSTOR 2869167 McNary Dave 19 April 2016 Bruce Dern Anthony Michael Hall to Star in King Lear Adaptation Variety Retrieved 26 December 2017 McNeir Waldo F 1968 The Role of Edmund in King Lear SEL Studies in English Literature 1500 1900 Rice University 8 2 Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama 187 216 doi 10 2307 449655 eISSN 1522 9270 ISSN 0039 3657 JSTOR 449655 Mitakidou Soula Manna Anthony L 2002 Folktales from Greece A Treasury of Delights Libraries Unlimited ISBN 978 1 56308 908 4 Muir Kenneth Wells Stanley eds 1982 Aspects of King Lear Aspects of Shakespeare Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 28813 2 Peat Derek 1982 And That s True Too King Lear and the Tension of Uncertainty In Muir Kenneth Wells Stanley eds Aspects of King Lear Aspects of Shakespeare Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 43 55 ISBN 978 0 521 28813 2 Nestruck J Kelly 13 May 2012 A King Lear in need of a king The Globe and Mail Retrieved 6 November 2018 Nestruck J Kelly 14 November 2016 Janet Wright played wise cracking matriarch on Corner Gas The Globe and Mail Retrieved 5 November 2018 Ouzounian Richard 26 November 2015 David Fox stars in Upper Canada King Lear Toronto Star Retrieved 6 November 2018 Quinn Michael 27 January 2017 Remastered the legendary Argo Shakespeare recordings The Stage Retrieved 7 November 2018 Network Three 29 September 1967 Radio Times Vol 176 no 2289 London South East ed 21 September 1967 Retrieved 7 November 2018 via BBC Genome Project Sunday Play The Tragedy of King Lear BBC Radio 3 10 April 1994 Radio Times Vol 281 no 3665 London ed 7 April 1994 Retrieved 7 November 2018 via BBC Genome Project Reibetanz John 1977 The Lear World A Study ofKing Learin Its Dramatic Context Toronto University of Toronto Press ISBN 978 0 8020 5375 6 Ringham Eric 23 February 2017 Guthrie stages a heartbreaking powerful Lear MPRNews Minnesota Public Radio Retrieved 7 November 2018 Rosenberg Marvin 1992 The Masks ofKing Lear Newark University of Delaware Press ISBN 978 0 87413 485 8 Rosenthal Daniel 2007 100 Shakespeare Films British Film Institute ISBN 978 1 84457 170 3 Shaheen Naseeb 1999 Biblical References in Shakespeare s Plays University of Delaware Press ISBN 978 0 87413 677 7 Stevenson W H 1918 A note on the derivation of the name Leicester PDF The Archaeological Journal Royal Archaeological Institute 75 30 31 ISSN 0066 5983 via Archaeology Data Service Taylor Gary Warren Michael eds 1983 The Division of the Kingdoms Shakespeare s Two Versions ofKing Lear Oxford Clarendon Press ISBN 978 0 19 812950 9 Wells Stanley ed 1986 The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 31841 9 Jackson Russell 1986 Shakespeare on the Stage from 1660 to 1900 In Wells Stanley ed The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 187 212 ISBN 978 0 521 31841 9 Warren Roger 1986 Shakespeare on the Twentieth Century Stage In Wells Stanley ed The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 257 272 ISBN 978 0 521 31841 9 Wells Stanley ed 1997 Shakespeare in the Theatre An Anthology of Criticism Oxford Shakespeare Topics Oxford Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 871176 6 Wells Stanley Orlin Lena Cowen eds 2003 Shakespeare An Oxford Guide Oxford Oxford University Press ISBN 0 19 924522 3 Tatspaugh Patricia 2003 Performance History Shakespeare on the Stage 1660 2001 In Wells Stanley Orlin Lena Cowen eds Shakespeare An Oxford Guide Oxford Oxford University Press pp 525 549 ISBN 0 19 924522 3 Taylor Michael 2003 The Critical Tradition In Wells Stanley Orlin Lena Cowen eds Shakespeare An Oxford Guide Oxford Oxford University Press pp 323 332 ISBN 0 19 924522 3 Wells Stanley Stanton Sarah eds 2002 The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press doi 10 1017 CCOL0521792959 ISBN 978 0 511 99957 4 S2CID 152980428 via Cambridge Core Dawson Anthony B 2002 International Shakespeare In Wells Stanley Stanton Sarah eds The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 174 193 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521792959 010 ISBN 978 0 511 99957 4 via Cambridge Core Gay Penny 2002 Women and Shakespearean Performance In Wells Stanley Stanton Sarah eds The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 155 173 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521792959 009 ISBN 978 0 511 99957 4 via Cambridge Core Gillies John Minami Ryuta Li Ruri Trivedi Poonam 2002 Shakespeare on the Stages of Asia In Wells Stanley Stanton Sarah eds The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 259 283 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521792959 014 ISBN 978 0 511 99957 4 via Cambridge Core Marsden Jean I 2002 Improving Shakespeare from the Restoration to Garrick In Wells Stanley Stanton Sarah eds The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 21 36 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521792959 014 ISBN 978 0 511 99957 4 via Cambridge Core Moody Jane 2002 Romantic Shakespeare In Wells Stanley Stanton Sarah eds The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 37 57 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521792959 003 ISBN 978 0 511 99957 4 via Cambridge Core Morrison Michael A 2002 Shakespeare in North America In Wells Stanley Stanton Sarah eds The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 230 258 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521792959 013 ISBN 978 0 511 99957 4 via Cambridge Core O Connor Marion 2002 Reconstructive Shakespeare reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean stages In Wells Stanley Stanton Sarah eds The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 76 97 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521792959 005 ISBN 978 0 511 99957 4 via Cambridge Core Schoch Richard W 2002 Pictorial Shakespeare In Wells Stanley Stanton Sarah eds The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 58 75 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521792959 004 ISBN 978 0 511 99957 4 via Cambridge Core Taylor Gary 2002 Shakespeare Plays on Renaissance Stages In Wells Stanley Stanton Sarah eds The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 1 20 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521792959 001 ISBN 978 0 511 99957 4 via Cambridge Core Thomson Peter 2002 The Comic Actor and Shakespeare In Wells Stanley Stanton Sarah eds The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage Cambridge Companions to Literature Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 137 154 doi 10 1017 CCOL0521792959 008 ISBN 978 0 511 99957 4 via Cambridge Core Wollaston Sam 28 May 2018 King Lear review Anthony Hopkins is shouty vulnerable and absolutely mesmerising The Guardian Retrieved 7 November 2018 External links Edit Wikisource has original text related to this article The Tragedy of King Lear Wikiquote has quotations related to King Lear Media related to King Lear at Wikimedia Commons King Lear at Standard Ebooks King Lear at Project Gutenberg King Lear at the British Library King Lear public domain audiobook at LibriVox Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title King Lear amp oldid 1135098945, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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