King Lear

Patrick Page on King Lear and Shakespeare's Villains
Patrick Page tells us how he gets inside the mind of Lear in the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s 2023 production.

ENCORES: 'King Lear' performed by Folger Theatre and The Classical Theatre of Harlem

Making BEDLAM: Creating a Shakespeare mash-up series
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…

J.R. Thorp on Learwife
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 181 A banished queen receives word that her husband and three daughters are dead. Learwife, a new novel by J.R. Thorp, picks up where Shakespeare’s King Lear leaves off: The queen is Berte, Lear’s wife and Regan,…

Excerpt: Learwife by J. R. Thorp
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”

Speaking what we feel: Shakespeare’s plague plays

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

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

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

Shakespeare and Folktales
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 138 You probably know where Shakespeare got the ideas for his plays. His Histories come from Holinshed’s Chronicles. Caesar and other Roman plays depend on Plutarch’s Lives. The Comedy of Errors is based on Plautus’s Menaechmi. But what…

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. 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…