King Lear is a tragedy by
William Shakespeare, believed to have
been written between 1603 and 1606. It is considered one of his
greatest works. The play is based on the legend of
Leir of Britain, a mythological pre-
Roman Celtic king. It has been widely adapted
for stage and screen, with the part of Lear played by many of the
world's most accomplished actors.
There are two distinct versions of the play:
The True Chronicle
of the History of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three
Daughters, which appeared in
quarto in 1608, and
The
Tragedy of King Lear, a more theatrical version, which
appeared in the
First Folio in 1623. The
two texts are commonly printed in a conflated version, although
many modern editors have argued that each version has its
individual integrity.
After the
Restoration the play
was often modified by theatre practitioners who disliked its dark
and depressing tone, but since the 19th century it has been
regarded as one of Shakespeare's supreme achievements. The tragedy
is particularly noted for its probing observations on the nature of
human suffering and kinship.
Characters
- Lear, King of Britain
- Goneril (sometimes written
Gonerill), eldest daughter of Lear
- Regan, second daughter of Lear
- Cordelia, youngest daughter of Lear
- Duke of Albany, husband to Goneril
- Duke of Cornwall, husband to Regan
- Earl of Gloucester
- Earl of Kent, who appears throughout much of
the play under the guise of Caius
- Edgar, son of Gloucester
- Edmund
(sometimes written Edmond), illegitimate son of
Gloucester
- Oswald, steward to Goneril
- Fool
- King of France, suitor and later husband to
Cordelia
- Duke of Burgundy, suitor to Cordelia
- Curan, a courtier
- Old man, tenant of Gloucester.
- A Doctor, an Officer employed by Edmund, a Gentleman attending
on Cordelia, a Herald, Servants to Cornwall. Knights of Lear's
Train, Officers, Messengers, Soldiers, and Attendants
Synopsis
Lear, who is old, wants to retire from power. He decides to divide
his realm among his three daughters, and offers the largest share
to the one who loves him best. Goneril and Regan both proclaim in
fulsome terms that they love him more than anything in the world,
which pleases him. Cordelia speaks temperately and honestly, which
annoys him. In his anger he disinherits her, and divides the
kingdom between the other two. Kent objects to this unfair
treatment. Lear is further enraged by Kent's contradiction, and
banishes him from the country. Cordelia's two suitors enter.
Learning
that she is disinherited, the Duke of Burgundy withdraws his suit, but the King
of France
is impressed
by her honesty and marries her anyway.
Lear announces he will live alternately with Goneril and Regan, and
their husbands, the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall. He reserves to
himself a retinue of one hundred knights, to be supported by his
daughters. Goneril and Regan speak privately, agreeing that Lear is
old and foolish.
Edmund resents his illegitimate status, and plots to supplant his
legitimate older brother Edgar. He tricks their father Gloucester
with a forged letter, making him think Edgar plans to usurp the
estate. Kent returns from exile in disguise under the name of
Caius, and Lear hires him as a servant. Lear discovers that now
that Goneril has power, she no longer respects him. She orders him
to behave better and reduce his retinue. Enraged, Lear departs for
Regan's home. The Fool mocks Lear's misfortune. Edmund fakes an
attack by Edgar, and Gloucester is completely taken in. He
disinherits Edgar and proclaims him outlaw.
Kent meets Oswald at Gloucester's home, quarrels with him, and is
put in the stocks by Regan and her husband Cornwall. When Lear
arrives, he objects, but Regan takes the same line as Goneril. Lear
is enraged but impotent. Goneril arrives and echoes Regan. 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 Lear's
mistreatment. Wandering on the
heath
after the storm, Lear meets Edgar, in the guise of
Tom o' Bedlam, that is, a madman. Edgar
babbles madly while Lear denounces his daughters. Gloucester leads
them all to shelter.
Edmund betrays Gloucester to Cornwall, Regan, and Goneril. He shows
a letter from his father to the King of France asking for help
against them; and in fact a French army has landed in Britain.
Gloucester is arrested, and Cornwall gouges out his eyes. But one
of Cornwall's servants is so outraged by this that he attacks and
fatally wounds Cornwall. Regan kills the mutinous servant, and
tells Gloucester that Edmund tricked him; then she turns him out to
wander the heath too. Edgar, in his madman's guise as Tom, meets
blinded Gloucester on the heath. Gloucester begs Tom to lead him to
a cliff, so that he may jump to his death.
Edmund meets Goneril, and she finds him more attractive than her
honest husband Albany, whom she regards as milk-livered. Albany is
disgusted by the sisters' treatment of Lear, and the mutilation of
Gloucester, and denounces Goneril. Kent leads Lear to the French
army, which is accompanied by Cordelia. But Lear is half-mad and
terribly embarrassed by his earlier follies. Albany leads the
British army to meet the French. Regan too is attracted to Edmund,
and the two sisters become jealous. Goneril sends Oswald with
letters to Edmund, and also tells Oswald to kill Gloucester if he
sees him. Edgar pretends to lead Gloucester to a cliff, then
changes his voice and tells Gloucester he has miraculously survived
a great fall. They meet Lear, who is now completely mad. Lear rants
that the whole world is corrupt and runs off.
Oswald tries to kill Gloucester, but is slain by Edgar. In Oswald's
pocket, Edgar finds a letter from Goneril to Edmund suggesting the
murder of Albany. Kent and Cordelia take charge of Lear, whose
madness largely 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 British
defeat the French, and Lear and Cordelia are captured. Edmund sends
them off with secret orders for execution.
The victorious British leaders meet, and Regan now declares she
will marry Edmund. But Albany exposes the intrigues of Edmund and
Goneril, and proclaims Edmund a traitor. Regan collapses; Goneril
has poisoned her. Edmund defies Albany, who calls for a trial by
combat. Edgar appears to fight Edmund, and fatally stabs him in a
duel. Albany shows Goneril's letter to her; she flees in shame and
rage. Edgar reveals himself.
Offstage, Goneril stabs herself, and confesses to poisoning Regan.
Edmund, dying, reveals his order to kill Lear and Cordelia. But it
is too late: Cordelia is dead, though Lear slew the killer. Lear
recognizes Kent. Albany urges Lear to resume his throne, but Lear
is too far gone in grief and hardship. He collapses and dies.
Albany offers to share power between Kent and Edgar but Kent,
overwhelmed with sadness, refuses. At the end, either Albany or
Edgar (depending on whether one reads the Quarto or the Folio
version) is crowned King.
Sources
Shakespeare's play is based on various accounts of the
semi-legendary Celtic figure Lear/
Lir/
Llŷr. 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.
Other possible sources are
A Mirror for Magistrates
(1574), by
John Higgins;
The
Malcontent (1604), by
John
Marston;
The London Prodigal (1605);
Arcadia
(1580–1590), by
Sir Philip Sidney,
from which Shakespeare took the main outline of the Gloucester
subplot;
Montaigne's
Essays,
which were translated into English by
John
Florio in 1603;
An Historical Description of Iland of
Britaine, by
William
Harrison;
Remaines Concerning Britaine, by
William Camden (1606);
Albion's England, by
William Warner, (1589); and
A
Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, by
Samuel Harsnett (1603), which provided some
of the language used by Edgar while he feigns madness.
King
Lear is also a literary variant of a common
fairy tale, in which a father rejects his
youngest daughter for a statement of her love that does not please
him.
The source of the subplot involving Gloucester, Edgar, and Edmund
is a tale in
Philip Sidney's
Countess of
Pembroke's Arcadia, with a blind
Paphlagonian king and his two sons, Leonatus and
Plexitrus.
Changes from source material
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. During the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, this tragic ending was much criticised, and
alternative versions were written and performed, in which the
leading characters survived and Edgar and Cordelia were married
(despite the fact that Cordelia was already married to the King of
France.)
Date and text
Although a date of composition cannot be given, many editions of
the play date
King Lear between 1603 and 1606. The latest
it could have been written is 1606, because the
Stationers' Register notes a
performance on December 26, 1606. The 1603 date originates from
words in Edgar's speeches which may derive from
Samuel Harsnett's
Declaration of
Egregious Popish Impostures (1603). In his Arden edition, R.A.
Foakes argues for a date of 1605–6, because one of Shakespeare's
sources,
The True Chronicle History of King Leir, was not
published until 1605; close correspondences between that play and
Shakespeare's suggest that he may have been working from a text
(rather than from recollections of a performance). On the contrary,
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
"1604-5 seems the best compromise".
However, before
Kenneth Muir
set out the case for the play's indebtedness to Harsnett's 1603
text, a minority of scholars believed the play to be much older. In
1936, A. S. Cairncross argued that "the relationship of the two
plays [
Leir and
Lear] has been inverted":
Shakespeare's
Lear came first and that the anonymous
Leir is an imitation of it.
One piece of evidence
for this view is that in 1594, King Leir was entered into
the Stationers' Register (but never published), while in the same
year a play called King Leare was recorded by Philip Henslowe as being performed at the
Rose
theatre
. However, the majority view is that these
two references are simply variant spellings of the same play,
King Leir. In addition,
Shakespeare authorship
researcher
Eva Turner Clark, who
believed the plays were written by the
Earl of Oxford, saw numerous parallels
between the play and the events of 1589–90, including the Kent
banishment subplot, which she believed to parallel the 1589
banishment of
Sir Francis Drake by
Queen Elizabeth. The
question of dating is further complicated by the question of
revision (see below).
The modern text of King Lear derives from three sources: two
quartos, published in 1608 (Q
1) and 1619 (Q
2)
respectively, and the version in the First Folio of 1623
(F
1). The differences between these versions are
significant. Q
1 contains 285 lines not in F
1;
F
1 contains around 100 lines not in Q
1. Also,
at least a thousand individual words are changed between the two
texts, each text has a completely different style of punctuation,
and about half the verse lines in the F
1 are either
printed as prose or differently divided in the Q
1. The
early editors, beginning with
Alexander
Pope, simply conflated the two texts, creating the modern
version that has remained nearly universal for centuries. The
conflated version is born from the presumption that Shakespeare
wrote only one original manuscript, now unfortunately lost, and
that the Quarto and Folio versions are distortions of that
original.
As early as 1931,
Madeleine Doran
suggested that the two texts had basically different provenances,
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. Their thesis, while controversial, has gained
significant acceptance. It posits, essentially, that the Quarto
derives from something close to Shakespeare's
foul papers, and the Folio is drawn in some way
from a promptbook, prepared for production by Shakespeare's company
or someone else. In short, Q
1 is "authorial";
F
1 is "theatrical." In criticism, the rise of "revision
criticism" has been part of the pronounced trend away from
mid-century formalism. 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
is not the only recent edition to offer the traditional conflated
text.
Performance history
The first recorded performance on December 26, 1606 is the only one
known with certainty from Shakespeare's era. The play was revived
soon after the theatres re-opened after the 1660 Restoration, and
was played in its original form as late as 1675. But the urge to
adapt and change that was so liberally applied to Shakespeare's
plays in that period eventually settled on
Lear as on
other works.
Nahum Tate produced an
adaptation in 1681: he gave the play a happy ending, with Edgar and
Cordelia marrying, and Lear restored to kingship. The Fool was
eliminated altogether, and Arante, a confidant for Cordelia, was
added. This was the version acted by
Thomas Betterton,
David Garrick, and
Edmund Kean, and praised by
Samuel Johnson. The play was suppressed in
the late 18th and early 19th century by the British government,
which disliked the dramatization of a mad monarch at a time when
George III was
suffering mental impairment. The original text did not return to
the London stage until
William
Charles Macready's production of 1838. Other actors who were
famous as King Lear in the nineteenth century were
Samuel Phelps and
Edwin
Booth.
20th Century
The play is among the most popular of Shakespeare’s works to be
staged in the 20th century. The most famous staging may be the 1962
production directed by
Peter Brook, with
Paul Scofield as Lear'
Alec McCowen as The Fool. In a 2004 opinion
poll of members of the
Royal
Shakespeare Company, Scofield's Lear was voted as the greatest
performance in a Shakespearean play in the history of the RSC . and
immortalized on film in 1971.
The longest Broadway
run of
King Lear was the 1968 production with Lee J. Cobb as
Lear,
Stacy Keach as Edmund,
Philip Bosco as Kent, and
Rene Auberjonois as the Fool. It ran for 72
performances: no other Broadway production of the play has run for
as many as 50 performances. A Soviet film adaptation was done by
Mosfilm in 1971, directed by
Grigori
Kozintsev, with black-and-white photography and a score by
Shostakovich.
The script was based
on a translation by Boris Pasternak,
and Estonian
actor
Jüri Järvet played the mad
king.
Other famous actors played Lear in the twentieth century.
- Laurence Olivier decided to
tackle the role for the second time at the age of 75 in a television production in 1983 with an all-star
cast that included Diana Rigg, John Hurt, and Colin
Blakely. Olivier had played Lear previously in 1946,
at the age of 39, at the Old
Vic
, but his performance was generally considered a
disappointment and overshadowed in the production by Alec Guinness' depiction of The Fool .
His 1983
Lear was telecast in the United States
in 1984 as a two hour and forty minute production,
which was widely acclaimed; Olivier received the last of his
several Emmy Awards as Best Actor for his
performance.
- John Gielgud was 26 when he first
played Lear at the Old Vic in 1931, and played the part in three
additional stage productions including a controversial 1955
Stratford Memorial Theatre
production designed by sculptor Isamu
Noguchi. He was 90 when he took on the part for the final time
in a 1994 radio production with a cast that included Judi Dench, Kenneth
Branagh, and Derek Jacobi.
- Orson Welles starred in a live
television version (now preserved on kinescope) in 1953 for CBS,
directed by Peter Brook. This production
condensed the play to ninety minutes and eliminated the
Edgar-Edmund subplot. Welles played Lear again at the New York
Civic Center in 1958, breaking his ankle during previews and playing most of the
performances in a wheelchair.
- Donald Wolfit was considered one
of the great Lears, keeping the role in his repertory for over ten
years and playing it on Broadway and for the Royal Shakespeare
Company.
- Ian Holm won a
Laurence Olivier Award for
his performance of Lear at the Royal National Theatre
and an Emmy nomination for the
1997 television version. Minimalist sets put the focus on
the acting.
- James Earl Jones played Lear in
the New York Shakespeare
Festival, with Raúl Juliá
as Edmund, Paul Sorvino as Gloucester,
and Rene Auberjonois as Edgar. This
production was videotaped and telecast in 1974 by PBS.
- Michael Hordern played Lear in
the BBC Television
Shakespeare series.
- William Devlin starred in a
drastically shortened live television version in 1948, directed by
Royston Morley.
21st Century
The first
great 21st century Lear may be Christopher Plummer, who became the
first actor to receive a Tony Award
nomination for playing Lear in the 2004 Broadway production at the
Vivian Beaumont
Theatre
.
Ian McKellen (who had previously appeared as
Edgar and Kent, winning a Drama Desk
Award for the former) was triumphant as Lear in April 2007,
with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Courtyard Theatre in
Stratford-Upon-Avon
. This production was taken on a world tour
with a cast that included
Romola Garai
as Cordelia,
Sylvester McCoy as the
Fool,
Frances Barber as Goneril,
Monica Dolan as Regan,
William Gaunt as Gloucester, and
Jonathan Hyde as Kent.
It continued at the
New London
Theatre
, Drury
Lane
, where it ended its run on 12 January 2008 and
netted McKellen a Laurence
Olivier Award nomination. The production, which was
directed by
Trevor Nunn and was
alternated with
The Seagull,
was later videotaped and broadcast on
Great Performances on
PBS, garnering McKellen an
Emmy
Award nomination.
Other recent Lears were:
Points of debate
Opening
I, Scene I features a ceremony in which King Lear divides his
kingdom among his daughters. Lear seemingly partitions his kingdom
according to the verbal expressions of his daughters' love for him.
If this were a test, it would make most sense for Lear to hear out
all three daughters before starting to divide the kingdom.
David Ball posits an alternate
interpretation. He bases this analysis on the conversation between
Kent and Gloucester which are the first seven lines of the play and
serve to help the audience understand the context of the drama
about to unfold.
Ball interprets this statement to mean that the court already knows
how the King is going to divide his kingdom; that the outcome of
the ceremony is already decided and publicly known.
Alternatively, it has been suggested that the King's "contest" has
more to do with his control over the unmarried Cordelia.
Tragic ending
The
adaptations that Shakespeare made to
the legend of King Lear to produce his tragic version are quite
telling of the effect they would have had on his contemporary
audience. The story of King Lear was familiar to the average
English Renaissance
theatre goer (as were many of Shakespeare's sources) and any
discrepancies between versions would have been immediately
apparent.
Shakespeare's tragic conclusion gains its sting from such a
discrepancy. The traditional legend and all adaptations preceding
Shakespeare's have it that after Lear is restored to the throne, he
remains there until "made ripe for death" (
Edmund Spenser). Cordelia, her sisters also
dead, takes the throne as rightful heir, but after a few years is
overthrown and imprisoned by nephews, leading to her suicide.
Shakespeare shocks his audience by bringing the worn and haggard
Lear onto the stage, carrying his dead youngest daughter. He taunts
them with the possibility that she may live yet with Lear saying,
"This feather stirs; she lives!" But Cordelia's death is soon
confirmed.
This was indeed too bleak for some to take, even many years later.
King Lear was at first unsuccessful on the Restoration
stage, and it was only with
Nahum Tate's
happy-ending version of 1681 that it became part of the repertory.
Tate's
Lear, where Lear survives and triumphs, and Edgar
and Cordelia get married, held the stage until 1838.
Samuel Johnson endorsed the use of Tate's
version in his edition of Shakespeare's plays (1765): "Cordelia,
from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and
felicity. And, if my sensations could add anything to the general
suffrage, I might relate that I was many years ago so shocked by
Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read
again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them
as an editor."
Cordelia and the Fool
The Fool, important in the first act, disappears without
explanation in the third act. He appears in Act I, scene four, and
disappears in Act III, scene six. His final line is "And I'll to
bed at noon", a line that many think might mean that he is to die
at the highest point of his life, when he lies in prison separated
from his friends.
A popular explanation for the Fool's disappearance is that the
actor playing the Fool also played Cordelia. The two characters are
never on stage simultaneously, and
dual-roling was common in
Shakespeare's time. However, the Fool would have been played by
Robert Armin, the regular clown actor
of Shakespeare's company, who is unlikely to have been cast as a
tragic heroine. Even so, the play does ask us to at least compare
the two; Lear chides Cordelia for foolishness in Act I; chides
himself as equal in folly in Act V; and as he holds the dead
Cordelia in the final scene, says "And my poor fool is hanged"
("fool" could be taken as either a direct reference to the Fool, or
an affectionate reference to Cordelia herself, or it could refer to
both the fool and Cordelia).
In the
Trevor Nunn production of
King Lear, which was shown on
PBS and
stars
Ian McKellen, the play is
slightly revised so that the Fool (portrayed by
Sylvester McCoy) is hanged on stage, just
after Gloucester is captured by Cornwall's men.
In Elizabethan English, "fool" was a term used to mean "child" (cf.
foal). For example, in
Hamlet,
Polonius warns Ophelia that if she does not keep her distance from
Hamlet, she'll "tender me a fool," i.e. present him with a child.
As Lear holds the dead body of Cordelia, he remembers holding her
in his arms as a baby.
Adaptations and cultural references
- Portions of a radio performance of the play on BBC Radio 3 in the UK were used by John Lennon in The
Beatles' song "I Am the Walrus",
starting at about the halfway point, but most audible towards the
end and during the long fadeout. Lennon added the BBC audio (live
as it was being broadcast) during mixing of the track. The
character Oswald's exhortation, "bury my body", as well as his
lament, "O, untimely death!" (Act IV, Scene VI) were interpreted by
fans as further pieces of evidence that band member Paul McCartney was dead.
- A
lake in Watermead
Country Park
, Leicestershire
is named King Lear's Lake, owing to its proximity
of the legendary burial tomb of King Leir. A statue in the
lake depicts the final scene of Shakespeare's play.
- The Liverpool based band The Wombats make reference to the play
in their song "Lost in the Post."
- At the beginning of the video game Final Fantasy IX, the play 'I Want To Be
Your Canary' played in front of Queen Brahne is heavily inspired
from King Lear (the two plays share both the characters' names and
the plot) .
- Canadian band The Tragically
Hip have a song called "Cordelia" inspired by King Lear on
their album Road Apples
Adaptations
A number of significant and diverse readings have emerged from eras and societies since the play was first written; evidence of the ability of Shakespeare to encompass many human experiences. The play was poorly received in the 17th century because the theme of fallen royalty was too close to the events of the period; the exile of the court to France. In 1681 Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear to suit a 17th century audience: Tate's The History of King Lear changed Shakespeare's tragedy into a love story with a happy ending. The King of France and the Fool are omitted; Edgar saves Cordelia from ruffians on the heath; Lear defeats the assassins sent to kill him and Cordelia, and Edgar and Regan are betrothed in a final scene, where Edgar declares that "Truth and Virtue shall at last succeed."
As society and time changed, especially in the nineteenth century,
Shakespeare's tragic ending was reinstalled, first, briefly, by
Edmund Kean in 1823, then by
William Charles Macready in 1834.
Macready removed all traces of Tate in an abridged version of
Shakespeare's text in 1838, and
Samuel
Phelps restored the complete Shakespearean version in
1845.
The only recent production of Tate's version was staged by the
Riverside Shakespeare
Company in 1985, directed by W. Stuart McDowell, at
The Shakespeare Center in New York
City.
Critical analysis
The twentieth century saw a number of diverse and rich readings of
the play emerge as a result of the turbulent social changes of the
century. A. C. Bradley saw this play as an individual coming to
terms with his personality; that Lear was a great man and therefore
the play is almost unfathomable.
The Family Drama reading has also become prevalent in the 20th
century.
King Lear can be read as being about the dynamics
in the relationship between parent and children. Key issues include
the relationship between Lear and Goneril/Regan, between Lear and
Cordelia and the relationship between Gloucester and his
sons.
The play has been interpreted by many societies. Communist Russia
emphasised the suffering of the common people and the oppressive
nature of the monarch in the film
Korol Lear (Король Лир 1970).
Lear's suffering as a form of
purgatory,
within a shifting religious landscape in contemporary England, has
also been put forward and has been extended onto other Shakespeare
dramas like
Hamlet.
Reworkings
Since the 1950s, there have been various "reworkings" of King Lear.
These include:
Novels
Graphic Novels
ILYA
link
Plays
- The play Lear by Edward Bond
- The play Lear's Daughters by W. T. G. and Elaine
Feinstein
- The play Seven Lears by Howard Barker
- The play Lear Reloaded by Scot Lahaie
- The play Aspects of Lear directed by Joseph Timko
- The Play The Fool, by Christopher Moore, retells the
story of King Lear from the perspective of The Black Fool.
Films
Film adaptations
- 1909 – A silent, black and white film directed by J. Stuart
Blackton and William V. Ranous, with William V. Ranous as
Lear.
- 1916 – Directed by Ernest C.
Warde, with Frederick Warde as Lear.
- 1934
– Der Yidisher Kenig Lear (The Yiddish King Lear) is an
adaptation of Jacob Gordin's play set
in Vilna
, Lithuania
, directed by Harry Thomashefsky.
- 1971 – Directed by
Grigori Kozintsev, with Jüri Järvet as Lear. Russian version;
original title Korol Lir.
- 1971 – Directed by
Peter Brook, with Paul Scofield as Lear, Alan Webb as Duke of Gloucester, Irene Worth as Goneril, Susan Engel as Regan, Anne-Lise Gabold as Cordelia, Jack MacGowran as Fool. The text has been
severely cut and the remainder has been reassembled. All is bleak
in this black-and-white, existential experience.
- 1949 – Gunasundari Katha, a
Telugu film directed by Kadiri Venkata Reddy. The pivotal role
of Cordelia was played by Sriranjani.
- 1954 – Broken Lance, a
western adaptation by Richard Murphy
(screenplay) and Philip Yordan (story).
- 1974 – A Thames Television
production, directed by Tony Davenall, with Patrick Magee as Lear.
- 1975 – Directed by Jonathan
Miller for BBC television, as part of the
"Play for the Month" series, with Michael Hordern as Lear.
- 1982 – Directed by Jonathan
Miller for BBC television, with Michael Hordern once again cast as Lear.
Part of the Shakespeare
Plays series, this version follows the text closely.
- 1984 – Directed by Michael
Elliott, with Laurence Olivier as
Lear. The film begins and ends at Stonehenge, and features Dorothy Tutin as Goneril, Diana Rigg as Regan, Anna Calder-Marshall as Cordelia,
John Hurt as the Fool, Colin Blakely as Kent, Leo McKern as Gloucester, and Robert Lindsay as Edmund. [8876]. Olivier won the Emmy
Award for his performance.
- 1985 – The film Ran by
Akira Kurosawa is loosely based on
King Lear, setting the story in Sengoku-period Japan and
replacing the three daughters with three sons.
- 1987 – Jean-Luc Godard directed his own heavily
altered and re-imagined adaptation of King Lear.
- 1997 – A Thousand Acres, a film version of Jane
Smiley's novel, directed by Jocelyn
Moorhouse and starring Jason
Robards, Jennifer Jason
Leigh, Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Colin Firth.
- 1998 – Directed by Richard Eyre and
starring Ian Holm as Lear. Aired on
BBC television and later on PBS as a part of the Masterpiece Theatre series.
- 1999 – Directed by and starring Brian
Blessed as Lear.
- 2001 – My Kingdom stars Richard Harris and Lynn Redgrave. A modern, gangland version of
King Lear.
- 2002 – King of Texas, a
television adaptation set in frontier Texas, directed by Uli Edel, with Patrick
Stewart as John Lear.
- 2007 – Baby Cakes Sees a Play, Brad Neely's retelling of King Lear
through the eyes of Baby Cakes.
- 2009 – A videotaped
version of the 2007 Royal
Shakespeare Company production was shown on PBS, featuring
Ian McKellen as Lear.
- 2010 – King Lear – To be directed by Michael Radford,
with Al Pacino as Lear.
Notable performers as King Lear
Cameron as King Lear (1872) / print by A.L.
See also
References
External links
in Chicago
and the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington,
DC
in 2009
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