King Lear

Mack, Maynard, King Lear in Our Time (1966). Remains valuable in our time.

Taylor, Gary, and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear (1983). Groundbreaking collection of essays on Quarto and Folio variants.

THE PLAY IN PERFORMANCE

Brooke, Michael, “King Lear on Screen,” www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/566346/index.html. Overview of film versions.

Chambers, Colin, Other Spaces: New Theatre and the RSC (1980). Includes fine account of the powerfully intimate Buzz Goodbody production.

Jackson, Russell, and Robert Smallwood, eds, Players of Shakespeare 2 (1988). Interviews with actors, including Antony Sher on playing the Fool in Adrian Noble’s production.

Leggatt, Alexander, King Lear, Shakespeare in Performance (1991). Good survey.

Ogden, James, and Arthur H. Scouten, eds, Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism (1997). Contains several illuminating essays.

Rosenberg, Marvin, The Masks of King Lear (1972). Many fascinating details of performances down the ages.

AVAILABLE ON DVD

King Lear, directed by Peter Brook (1970, DVD 2005). Bleak interpretation with magisterial performance by Paul Scofield.

King Lear (Korol Lir), directed by Grigori Kosintsev (1970, DVD 2007). Powerful Russian version.

King Lear, directed by Jonathan Miller (BBC Television Shakespeare, 1982, DVD 2004). Michael Hordern as Lear in a reworking (with fuller, perhaps overlong text) of an earlier television version by Miller, based ultimately on a stage production at Nottingham.

King Lear, directed by Michael Elliott (Channel 4 Television, 1983, DVD 2007). Laurence Olivier’s last Shakespearean performance.

Ran, directed by Akira Kurosawa (1985, DVD 2006). Epic Japanese adaptation in Samurai setting.

A Thousand Acres, directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse (1997, DVD 2006). Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in a film version of a novel by Jane Smiley that transposes the story to the American Midwest and tells it from the point of view of the three daughters.

King Lear, directed by Richard Eyre (BBC2 Television 1998, DVD 2006). Filming of Eyre’s exemplary small-scale National Theatre production.

My Kingdom, directed by Don Boyd (2001, DVD 2005). Richard Harris’ last role: the Lear plot transposed to the world of a twenty-first-century Liverpool drug baron.

REFERENCES

  1. Gamini Salgado, Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances 1590–1890 (1975), p. 38.

  2. James Boswell, in a diary entry on 12 May 1763, in Boswell’s London Journals: 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (1950), pp. 256–7.

  3. George Steevens, review dated 16–18 February 1773, quoted in Shakespeare, The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers, vol. 5, 1765–1774(1979), pp. 501–2.

  4. Leigh Hunt in an originally unsigned review of King Lear in The Examiner, No. 21, 22 May 1808, pp. 331–3.

  5. The Times, review of King Lear, 25 April 1820.

  6. William Hazlitt, in a London Magazine review of June 1820.

  7. William Hazlitt, in a London Magazine review of May 1820.

  8. John Forster, “The Restoration of Shakespeare’s Lear to the Stage,” The Examiner, No. 1566, 4 February 1838, pp. 69–70.

  9. “Review of King Lear,” The Athenaeum, No. 1066, 1 April 1848, p. 346.

10. William Winter, “The Art of Edwin Booth: King Lear,” in his Life and Art of Edwin Booth (1893), pp. 177–85.

11. Henry James, “Tommaso Salvini,” The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. LI, No. CCCV, March 1883, pp. 377–86.

12. John Gielgud, “Granville Barker Rehearses King Lear,” in his Stage Directions (1963, repr. 1979), pp. 51–5.

13. James Agate, review of King Lear in Brief Chronicles: A Survey of the Plays of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans in Actual Performance (1943, repr. 1971), pp. 201–3.

14. The Times, review of King Lear, 21 April 1936.

15. W. A. Darlington, “Old Vic at Home,” New York Times, 13 October 1946.

16. Alan Brien, “Simulation in the Fields,” The Spectator, Vol. 203, No. 6843, 21 August 1959, pp. 223–4.

17. Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (1966).

18. James Ogden, “Introduction,” in Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism, ed. James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten (1997).