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King Lear
King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, considered one of his greatest works, and is ****d on the legend of King Leir of Britain. The part of Lear has been played by many great 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, which appeared in the First Folio in 1623, a more theatrical version. 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 nihilistic flavour, but since World War II it has come to be 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 on a cosmic scale.
Sources
Cordelia’s Portion by Ford Madox Brown
Cordelia’s Portion by Ford Madox Brown
Shakespeare’s play is ****d on various accounts of the semi-legendary Leir. Shakespeare’s most important source is thought to be 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. The name of Cordelia was probably taken from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, published in 1590. Spenser’s Cordelia also dies from hanging, as in King Lear.
Other possible sources are A Mirror for Magistrates (1574), by John Higgins; The Mal******* (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, where a father rejects his youngest daughter on the basis of a statement of her love that does not please him.[1]
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.[2]
Date and text
Although a precise date of composition cannot be given, many editors 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).[3] 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).[4] 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".[5]
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.[6] 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.[7] However, the majority view is that these two references are simply variant spellings of the same play, King Leir.[8] In addition, Eva Turner Clark, an Oxfordian denier of Shakespeare’s authorship 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 (Q1) and 1619 (Q2) [10] respectively, and the version in the First Folio of 1623 (F1). The differences between these versions are significant. Q1 contains 285 lines not in F1; F1 contains around 100 lines not in Q1. 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 F1 are either printed as prose or differently divided in the Q1. 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, Q1 is "authorial"; F1 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 at the start of the Restoration era, 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 his famous — or infamous — adaptation in 1681: he gave the play a happy ending, with Edgar and Cordelia marrying, and Lear restored to kingship. 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 insane[11]. The original text did not return to the stage till William Charles Macready’s production of 1838.[12] Other actors who were famous as King Lear in the nineteenth century were Samuel Phelps and Edwin Booth.
The play is among the most popular of Shakespeare’s works to be staged in the twentieth century. The most famous staging may be Paul Scofield’s 1962 performance as Lear, directed by Peter Brook; it was voted as the greatest performance in a Shakespearean play in the history of the RSC in a 2024 opinion poll of members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and immortalized on film in 1971. The longest Broadway run of King Lear was the 1968 production starring Lee J. Cobb as Lear, with Stacy Keach as Edmund, Philip Bosco as Kent, and René 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 is ****d on a translation by Boris Pasternak, and Estonian actor Jüri Järvet plays the mad king.
Other famous actors to play King Lear in the twentieth century are:
* William Devlin, who starred in a drastically shortened live television version in 1948, directed by Royston Morley.
* Orson Welles, who starred in another live television version (now preserved on kinescope) in 1953 for CBS. This one severely condensed the play to ninety minutes, and eliminated the Edgar-Edmund subplot.
* Laurence Olivier, who decided to tackle the role for the second time at the age of 75 in a television production in 1982 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 thirty-nine at the Old Vic, but without much success. His 1982 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 Theatre in 1931, and played the part in three additional stage productions. 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 again played Lear at the New York Civic Center in 1958, breaking his ankle during the run 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 Raul Julia as Edmund, Paul Sorvino as Gloucester, and Rene Auberjonois as Edgar. This production was videotaped and telecast in 1974 by PBS.
* Michael Hordern, who played Lear in a 1982 PBS telecast shown as part of the BBC Television Shakespeare series.
The first great 21st century Lear may be Christopher Plummer, who became the first actor to receive a Tony Award nomination for playing King Lear in the 2024 Broadway production at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre.
Other recent Lears were Stacy Keach in a production at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and Kevin Kline in a critically reviled production at the New York Shakespeare Festival.
Ian McKellen (who had performed the play twice before in the roles of Edgar and the Earl of Kent, winning a Drama Desk Award for the former) was also triumphant as King Lear after opening in the play at the Courtyard Theatre at Stratford-Upon-Avon for the Royal Shakespeare Company in April of 2024 before taking the production 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 the Earl of Gloucester and Jonathan Hyde as the Earl of Kent. It then took up residence at the New London Theatre, Drury Lane, where it ended its run on 12th January 2024. The play was directed by Trevor Nunn and was being played alternatively with The Seagull.
Characters
* King Lear is ruler of Britain. He is a patriarchal figure whose misjudgment of his daughters brings about his downfall.
* Goneril (sometimes written Gonerill) is Lear’s treacherous eldest daughter and wife to the Duke of Albany.
* Regan is Lear’s treacherous second daughter, and wife to the Duke of Cornwall.
* Cordelia (poss. "heart of a lion" [13]) is Lear’s youngest daughter. At the beginning of the play, she has yet to marry and has two suitors: the Duke of Burgundy and the King of France.
* The Duke of Albany[14] is Goneril’s husband. Goneril scorns him for his "milky gentleness". He turns against his wife later in the play.
* The Duke of Cornwall[14] is Regan’s husband. He has the Earl of Kent put in the stocks, leaves Lear out on the heath during a storm, and gouges out Gloucester’s eyes. After his attack on Gloucester, one of his servants attacks and mortally wounds him.
* The Earl of Gloucester[14] is Edgar’s father, and the father of the illegitimate son, Edmund. Edmund deceives him against Edgar, and Edgar flees, taking on the disguise of Tom O’Bedlam.
* The Earl of Kent[14] is always faithful to Lear, but he is banished by the king after he protests against Lear’s treatment of Cordelia. He takes on a disguise (Caius) and serves the king without letting him know his true identity.
* Edmund (sometimes written Edmond) is Gloucester’s illegitimate son. He works with Goneril and Regan to further his ambitions, and the three of them form a romantic triangle.
* Edgar is the legitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester. Disguised as Tom O’Bedlam, he helps his blind father. At the end of the play he assumes rule of the kingdom and the ‘Divine Right of Kings’ is restored.
* Oswald is Goneril’s servant, and is described as "a serviceable villain". He tries to murder Gloucester, but instead he is killed by Edgar.
* The Fool is a jester who is devoted to Lear and Cordelia, although his relationships with both are quite complex. Although he misses Cordelia when she is gone, we never see the two together. He has a privileged relationship with Lear; no one else would get away with taunting him the way the Fool does, through riddles and insults. When Lear begins to consider the feelings of others and the effects of his actions, he first thinks to help the Fool.
Synopsis
The play begins with King Lear taking the decision to abdicate the throne and divide his kingdom among his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. The eldest two are already married, while Cordelia is much sought after as a bride, partly because she is her father’s favourite. In a fit of senile vanity, he suggests a contest — each daughter shall be accorded lands according to how much she demonstrates her love for him in speech. But the plan misfires. Cordelia refuses to outdo the flattery of her elder sisters, as she feels it would only cheapen her true feelings to flatter him purely for profit. Lear, in a fit of pique, divides her share of the kingdom between Goneril and Regan, and Cordelia is banished. The King of France however marries her, even after she has been disinherited, since he sees value in her honesty, or perhaps a casus belli to subsequently invade England.
Soon after Lear abdicates the throne, he finds that Goneril and Regan’s feelings for him have turned cold, and arguments ensue. The Earl of Kent, who has spoken up for Cordelia and been banished for his pains, returns disguised as the servant Caius, who will "eat no fish" (that is to say, he is a Protestant), in order to protect the king, to whom he remains loyal. Meanwhile, Goneril and Regan fall out with one another over their attraction to Edmund, the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester — and are forced to deal with an army from France, led by Cordelia, sent to restore Lear to his throne. A cataclysmic war is fought.
The subplot involves the Earl of Gloucester and his two sons, Edgar and Edmund. Edmund concocts false stories about his legitimate half-brother, and Edgar is forced into exile, affecting lunacy. Edmund engages in liaisons with Goneril and Regan. Gloucester is confronted by Regan’s husband, the Duke of Cornwall, but is saved from death by several of Cornwall’s servants, who object to the duke’s treatment of Lear; one of the servants wounds the duke (but is killed by Regan), who throws Gloucester into the storm in order for him to, "smell his way to Dover" after plucking out his eyes. Cornwall dies of his wound shortly thereafter.
Edgar, still under the guise of a homeless lunatic, finds Gloucester out in the storm. The earl asks him whether he knows the way to Dover, to which Edgar replies that he will lead him. Edgar, whose voice Gloucester fails to recognise, is shaken by encountering his blinded father and his guise is put to the test.