Hierarchical collection of pages (posts) for King Lear, including material for McKellen film, the play itself, background on the play, creative engagement with the play, educational material for teaching the play, and ways to have fun with the play.
Painting of Olivier as Lear By Chuck Rose at strugglingtopaint.blogspot.com “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” (Edgar) At the end of King Lear Edgar asks the audience to “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” This is a ...
King Lear gives us a grim story through startling poetry. But it tells us neither how we must feel about it or how we must think about it. If anything, its closing moments of quiet hysteria deny just that power to the play itself. Edgar ...
As with most of Shakespeare’s famous plays, King Lear may be found each year in many individual print editions. At least twenty such editions were in print for King Lear as of Spring of 2009. Each attempts to realize some distinction relative to the others. ...
Ian McKellen has been praised as the Olivier of our age. But for the many Shakespearean roles he has taken on stage, we only have three previous Shakespearean plays with him in film—Macbeth with Judi Dench (1979), Othello in which he plays Iago (1990), and ...
The King Lear section of the Great Performances site owes its existence to the PBS broadcast of the film directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Ian McKellen. For the better part of 2007 the two produced and performed King Lear on stage, first at Stratford-on-Avon ...
The basic story of King Lear goes back to ancient English myths. The general idea of three daughters, two wicked and one good, with arbitrary love tests, goes back at least to a second century AD novel by Apuleius called The Golden Ass. A play ...
We are blessed with eleven film versions of King Lear (including the announced release of the McKellen film). While we might say that some are better than others, each has value and interest. Indeed, a more useful distinction might be between those taking a conventional ...
Learn about our online guest editor for King Lear, Kim Maxwell.
"It is we who paint the leaves" This King Lear section of Great Performances Online provides a wide range of resources for appreciating King Lear, as well as a living means by which the play may be actively and creatively engaged. The resources include: Ian ...
Shakespeare’s Sources As was his general habit, Shakespeare borrowed his two plots from previous sources. Holinshed reported in his Chronicles (1577) a story that dates back as far as Geoffrey of Monmouth (1136) in which a supposedly real King Leir who ruled England around 800 ...
