Skip to main content
12 results from Shakespeare & Beyond on

King Lear

View 25 results across all blogs
Making BEDLAM: Creating a Shakespeare mash-up series
Production crew of BEDLAM: The Series
Shakespeare & Beyond

Making BEDLAM: Creating a Shakespeare mash-up series

Posted
Author
Eric Tucker Musa Gurnis

Production crew of BEDLAM: The Series. Photo by Ashley Garrett. Eric Tucker is an off-Broadway director and Artistic Director of Bedlam Theatre. Musa Gurnis is an early modern theater scholar and actor. When we pitched our Shakespeare mash-up series BEDLAM…

Excerpt: Learwife by J. R. Thorp
Shakespeare & Beyond

Excerpt: Learwife by J. R. Thorp

Posted
Author
Shakespeare & Beyond

Picking up where Shakespeare’s King Lear ends, a new novel imagines the life of Lear’s wife, who in this telling has been banished for 15 years when she receives word of her family members’ deaths. Learwife by J.R. Thorp gives…

Of Roys and kings: “The shadow of Succession”
Shakespeare & Beyond

Of Roys and kings: “The shadow of Succession”

Posted
Author
Austin Tichenor
Austin Tichenor explores the copious Shakespearean echoes in HBO's Succession series, in which the Shakespearean actor Brian Cox plays a key role.
Speaking what we feel: Shakespeare’s plague plays
Shakespeare & Beyond

Speaking what we feel: Shakespeare’s plague plays

Posted
Author
Austin Tichenor
How do Shakespeare's plays reflect a life filled with plague outbreaks, asks Austin Tichenor -- and do we see his plays in new ways now?
And so they play their parts: Double-casting Shakespeare’s plays
Shakespeare & Beyond

And so they play their parts: Double-casting Shakespeare’s plays

Posted
Author
Austin Tichenor
Double-casting is a theater technique (as opposed to a literary one) that creates a meta-narrative, transforming a large-cast play into a present-tense adventure. Actors swapping costumes and changing roles (and sometimes genders) becomes part of the thrilling ride, and theater’s fundamental artifice becomes its strength. Theater’s very artificiality becomes a feature, not a bug. Shakespeare utilized this trick to both amplify subtext and heighten the drama.
William Charles Macready and the restoration of William Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’
Shakespeare & Beyond

William Charles Macready and the restoration of William Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’

Posted
Author
Alexandra E. LaGrand
Imagine a King Lear that cut the character of the Fool, created a romance between Edgar and Cordelia, and featured a happy ending in which Lear and Cordelia both live. That was the most popular version of Shakespeare’s play for more than 150 years, until William Charles Macready’s landmark production in 1838.
“Ambiguous and dangerous meat:” Herpetophagy in the early modern world
Newts
Shakespeare & Beyond

“Ambiguous and dangerous meat:” Herpetophagy in the early modern world

Posted
Author
Michael Walkden
Why was herpetophagy (eating reptiles and amphibians) linked with madness in Shakespeare's "King Lear"? Unpack the cultural anxieties involved in early modern English encounters with unfamiliar dietary norms.
The madness of Hamlet and King Lear: When psychiatrists used Shakespeare to argue legal definitions of insanity in the courtroom
King Lear, III, 2. Johann Heinrich Ramberg. 19th century. Folger Shakespeare Library.
Shakespeare & Beyond

The madness of Hamlet and King Lear: When psychiatrists used Shakespeare to argue legal definitions of insanity in the courtroom

Posted
Author
Shakespeare & Beyond

King Lear, III, 2. Johann Heinrich Ramberg. 19th century. Folger Shakespeare Library. Well-known Shakespeare characters such as King Lear and Hamlet suffer (or appear to suffer) from madness — and early American psychiatrists took note. Observations drawn from literature began…

Drawing Shakespeare: King Lear
King Lear by Paul Glenshaw
Shakespeare & Beyond

Drawing Shakespeare: King Lear

Posted
Author
Paul Glenshaw
Artist Paul Glenshaw writes about drawing the bas-relief of King Lear by sculptor John Gregory on the front of the Folger Shakespeare Library building.
Excerpt: 'Year of the Mad King' by Antony Sher
Antony Sher
Shakespeare & Beyond

Excerpt: 'Year of the Mad King' by Antony Sher

Posted
Author
Shakespeare & Beyond
What's it like to play the role of Lear onstage? In this excerpt from Year of the Mad King: The Lear Diaries, actor Antony Sher gives us a window into the rehearsal process for the Royal Shakespeare Company production of King Lear in 2016, directed by Gregory Doran.
Excerpt from Dunbar: Edward St. Aubyn retells King Lear
Shakespeare & Beyond

Excerpt from Dunbar: Edward St. Aubyn retells King Lear

Posted
Author
Shakespeare & Beyond
In "Dunbar," a new novel by Edward St. Aubyn that retells the Shakespeare play "King Lear," Henry Dunbar makes the mistake of handing over control of his global corporation to his eldest daughters, who bribe a doctor to declare him mentally unfit and send him to a care home in England.
'Sweetly Writ': King Lear and the First Folio in Oregon
Shakespeare & Beyond

'Sweetly Writ': King Lear and the First Folio in Oregon

Posted
Author
Esther French

Barry Kraft as Lear in King Lear, produced by Southern Oregon University, Oregon Center for the Arts. (Credit: Prechtel photo) What can we learn from Shakespeare’s revisions to his plays, and what does that mean for the actors and directors…