King Lear
Advice from the players: 10 great actors on performing Shakespeare
Read a few favorite quotes from actors who joined us on our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, including the late Glenda Jackson, Adrian Lester, and Sir Ian McKellen.
Excerpt: "King Lear: Shakespeare's Dark Consolations"
“King Lear is about insiders who with terrible suddenness are shoved outside, and what they learn or don’t learn from finding themselves positioned there,” writes Arthur Frank.
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
Folger Public Programs is pleased to present ENCORES, recalling the rich history of programming on the historic Folger stage. This week, we revisit a performance of ‘King Lear’ by Folger Theatre and The Classical Theatre of Harlem (2007).
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”
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
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
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…
William Charles Macready and the restoration of William Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’
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…
“Ambiguous and dangerous meat:” Herpetophagy in the early modern world
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.