King Lear Totally Explained

Everything about King Lear totally explained

King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1603 and 1606, and is considered one of his greatest works. The play is based on the legend of King Leir of Britain. It has been widely adapted for stage and screen, with the part of Lear being played by many of the world's most accomplished 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.

Sources

Shakespeare's play is based 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 Geoffrey Monmouth's History of the Kings of England in which the youngest daughter was named Cordellia, 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 Malcontent (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 doesn't please him.'
   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.
Date and text
Although a precise date of composition can't be given, many editions 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). 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, wasn't 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). 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".
   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 [Leirand Lear] has been inverted": Shakespeare's Lear came first and that the anonymous Leir is an imitation of it. 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. However, the majority view is that these two references are simply variant spellings of the same play, King Leir. 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) 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, wasn't 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 isn't 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 an adaptation in 1681: he gave the play a happy ending, with Edgar and Cordelia marrying, and Lear restored to kingship. The Fool is eliminated altogether, and a confidant for Cordelia - Arante - is added. 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. The original text didn't return to the London stage until William Charles Macready's production of 1838. 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 20th 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 2004 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 Rene 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 based 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:

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 starred in a live television version (now preserved on kinescope) in 1953 for CBS directed by Peter Brook. This production condensed the play to ninety minutes and eliminated the Edgar-Edmund subplot. Welles played Lear again at the New York Civic Center in 1958, breaking his ankle during previews 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 played Lear in a 1982 PBS telecast shown as part of the BBC Television Shakespeare series.
William Devlin starred in a drastically shortened live television version in 1948, directed by Royston Morley.
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 2004 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 2007 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 12 January 2008. 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" ) is Lear's youngest daughter and personifies truth. At the beginning of the play, she's yet to marry and has two suitors: the Duke of Burgundy and the King of France.
The Duke of Albany is Goneril's husband. Goneril scorns him for his "milky gentleness". He turns against his wife later in the play.
The Duke of Cornwall He bases this analysis on the conversation between Kent and Gloucester which are the first seven lines of the play and serve to help the audience understand the context of the drama about to unfold.
   Ball interprets this statement to mean that the court already knows how the King is going to divide his kingdom; that the outcome of the ceremony is already decided and publicly known. If the court knows that the outcome of the contest isn't going to change, then they must also be aware that it's only a formality, or in Ball's words "a public relations stunt."
   There are only two clues from the text on how balanced the king's division of the kingdom that the audience needs to take into account for understanding the nature of this ceremony. The first is the above quoted section where Gloucester describes the shares as equal. The second is in Lear's description that while Regan's portion of the kingdom is "No less in space, validity, and pleasure/Than that conferred on Goneril." (Act I/Scene 1) but for Cordelia's "more opulent than [her] sisters" (Act I/Scene 1). There is a contradiction in how the court views the coming action and how the king presents it.
   Alternatively, it has been suggested that the King's "contest" has more to do with his control over the unmarried Cordelia. On receiving her proclamations of devout love and loyalty, he plans to force her into a marriage which she couldn't possibly object to after claiming such stolid obedience. Of course, the trap fails disastrously for all parties. It isn't clear whether or not Shakespeare intended his audience to be aware of this subtext, or whether he assumed the details of the situation were not relevant.
Tragic ending
The adaptations that Shakespeare made to the legend of King Lear to produce his tragic version are quite telling of the effect they'd have had on his contemporary audience. The story of King Lear (or Leir) was familiar to the average Early Modern theatre goer (as were many of Shakespeare's sources) and any discrepancies between versions would have been immediately apparent.
   Shakespeare's tragic conclusion gains its sting from such a discrepancy. The traditional legend and all adaptations preceding Shakespeare's have it that after Lear is restored to the throne, he remains there until "made ripe for death" (Edmund Spenser). Cordelia, her sisters also dead, takes the throne as rightful heir, but after a few years is overthrown and imprisoned by nephews, leading to her suicide.
   Shakespeare shocks his audience by bringing the worn and haggard Lear onto the stage, carrying his dead youngest daughter. He taunts them with the possibility that she may live yet with Lear saying, "This feather stirs; she lives!" But Cordelia's death is soon confirmed.
   This was indeed too bleak for some to take, even many years later. King Lear was at first unsuccessful on the Restoration stage, and it was only with Nahum Tate's happy-ending version of 1681 that it became part of the repertory. Tate's Lear, where Lear survives and triumphs, and Edgar and Cordelia get married, held the stage until 1838. Samuel Johnson endorsed the use of Tate's version in his edition of Shakespeare's plays (1765): "Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor".
Cordelia and the Fool
The character of Lear's Fool, important in the first act, disappears without explanation in the third. He appears in Act I, scene four, and disappears in Act III, scene six. His final line is "And I'll go to bed at noon", a line that many think might mean that he's to die at the highest point of his life, when he lies in prison separated from his friends.
   A popular explanation for the Fool's disappearance is that the actor playing the Fool also played Cordelia. The two characters are never on stage simultaneously, and dual-roling was common in Shakespeare's time. However, the Fool would have been performed by Robert Armin, the regular clown actor of Shakespeare's company, who is unlikely to have been cast as a tragic heroine. Even so, the play does ask us to at least compare the two; Lear chides Cordelia for foolishness in Act I; chides himself as equal in folly in Act V; and as he holds the dead Cordelia in the final scene, says "And my poor fool is hanged" ("fool" could be taken as either a direct reference to the Fool, or an affectionate reference to Cordelia herself, or it could refer to both the fool and Cordelia).
   In Elizabethan English, "fool" was a term used to mean "child" (cf. foal). For example, in Hamlet, Polonius warns Ophelia that if she doesn't keep her distance from Hamlet, she'll "tender me a fool," for example present him with a child. As Lear holds the dead body of Cordelia, he remembers holding her in his arms as a baby.
Adaptations and cultural references

Portions of a radio performance of the play on BBC Radio 3 in the UK were used by John Lennon in The Beatles' song "I Am the Walrus", starting at about the halfway point, but most audible towards the end and during the long fadeout. Lennon added the BBC audio (live as it was being broadcast) on a whim during mixing of the track. The character Oswald's exhortation, "bury my body", as well as his lament, "O, untimely death!" (Act IV, Scene VI) were interpreted by fans as further pieces of evidence that band member Paul McCartney was dead.
A lake in Watermead Country Park, between Birstall and Thurmaston, Leicester is named King Lear's Lake, owing to its proximity of the legendary burial tomb of King Leir. A statue in the lake depicts the final scene of Shakespeare's play.
Adaptations
A number of significant and diverse readings have emerged from eras and societies since the play was first written; evidence of the ability of Shakespeare to encompass many human experiences. The play was poorly received in the 17th century because the theme of fallen royalty was too close to the events of the period; the exile of the court to France. In 1681 Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear to suit a 17th century audience: Tate's History of King Lear changed Shakespeare's tragedy into a love story with a happy ending. The plot is rewritten, though much of Shakespeare's text retained: the King of France and the Fool are omitted; Edgar saves Cordelia from ruffians on the heath; Lear defeats the assassins sent to the dungeon to kill him and Cordelia, and Edgar and Cordelia are betrothed in a final scene, where Edmund declares that "Truth and Virtue shall at last succeed."
   As society and time changed to take more notice of pain and suffering, especially in the nineteenth century, Shakespeare's tragic ending was reinstalled, first, briefly, by Edmund Kean in 1823, then by William Charles Macready in 1834. Macready removed all traces of Tate in an abridged version of Shakespeare's text in 1838, and Samuel Phelps restored the complete Shakespearean version in 1845.
   The only recent production of Nahum Tate's seventeenth century version of the play, History of King Lear, was staged by the Riverside Shakespeare Company in 1985, directed by W. Stuart McDowell, at The Shakespeare Center in New York City.
Critical Analysis
The twentieth century saw a number of diverse and rich readings of the play emerge as a result of the turbulent social changes of the century. A.C. Bradley saw this play as an individual coming to terms with his personality; that Lear was a great man and therefore the play is almost unfathomable. A feminist reading of the play reveals a number of Lear's misogynist remarks and has fueled the debate over whether the play's chaos occurred because power was given over to women, with order restored only when men were returned to their leadership roles.
The Family Drama reading has also become prevalent in the 20th century. King Lear can be read as being about the dynamics in the relationship between parent and children. Key issues include the relationship between Lear and Goneril/Regan, between Lear and Cordelia and the relationship between Gloucester and his sons.
   The play has been interpreted by many societies. Communist Russia emphasised the suffering of the common people and the oppressive nature of the monarch in Korol Lear (1970).
   Lear's suffering as a form of purgatory, within a shifting religious landscape in contemporary England, has also been put forward and has been extended onto other Shakespeare dramas like Hamlet.
Reworkings
Since the 1950s, there have been various "reworkings" of King Lear. These include:

The novel A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
The play Lear by Edward Bond
The play Lear's Daughters by WTG and Elaine Feinstein
The play Seven Lears by Howard Barker
The play Lear Reloaded by Scot Lahaie
The play Aspects of Lear directed by Joseph Timko
The film The King is Alive, directed by Kristian Levring
The film Ran, directed by Akira Kurosawa
Film adaptations

1909 - A silent, black and white film directed by J. Stuart Blackton and William V. Ranous, with William V. Ranous as Lear.
1916 - Directed by Ernest C. Warde, with Frederick Warde as Lear.
1934 - "Der Yidisher Kenig Lear," or The Yiddish King Lear, is an adapted of Jacob Gordin's play set in Jewish Vilna, Lithuania. The film is directed by Harry Thomashefsky.
1971 - Directed by Grigori Kozintsev with Jüri Järvet as Lear. Russian version, original title: Korol Lir.
1971 - Directed by Peter Brook with Paul Scofield as Lear, Alan Webb as Duke of Gloucester, Irene Worth as Goneril, Susan Engel as Regan, Anne-Lise Gabold as Cordelia, Jack MacGowran as Fool. The text has been severely cut and the remainder has been reassembled. All is bleak in this black and white, existential experience.
1974 - A Thames Television production, directed by Tony Davenall with Patrick Magee as Lear.
1975 - Directed by Jonathan Miller for BBC TV, as part of the "Play for the Month" series, with Michael Hordern as Lear.
1982 - Directed by Jonathan Miller for BBC TV with Michael Hordern once again cast as Lear. Part of the Shakespeare Plays series, this version follows the text closely.
1984 - Directed by Michael Elliott with Laurence Olivier as Lear. The film begins and ends at Stonehenge, and features Dorothy Tutin as Goneril, Diana Rigg as Regan, Anna Calder-Marshall as Cordelia, John Hurt as the Fool, Colin Blakely as Kent, Leo McKern as Gloucester, and Robert Lindsay as Edmund. (External Link). Olivier won the Emmy Award for his performance.
1985 - The film Ran by Akira Kurosawa is loosely based on "King Lear", and sets the story in Sengoku-period Japan and replaces the three daughters with three sons.
1987 - Jean-Luc Godard directed his own adaptation of King Lear.
1997 - A modern retelling, set on a farm in Iowa, was Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. This novel attempted to explain the elder sisters' hatred of their father, was later adapted as a 1997 film directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse and starring Jason Robards, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Colin Firth.
1998 - Directed by Richard Eyre and starring Ian Holm as Lear. Aired on BBC TV and later on PBS as a part of the Masterpiece Theatre series.
1999 - Directed by and starring Brian Blessed as Lear .
2001 - My Kingdom stars Richard Harris, Lynn Redgrave. A modern gangland version of King Lear.
2002 - Patrick Stewart played John Lear in a television adaptation called King of Texas, set in frontier Texas and directed by Uli Edel.
2007 - Baby Cakes Sees a Play, Brad Neely's retelling of King Lear through the eyes of Baby Cakes. It has recently been reported on Comingsoon.net that a new adaptation of King Lear is in the works. It was recently announced at the Cannes Film Festival that Sir Anthony Hopkins would don the role of King Lear, while Keira Knightley will portray Cordelia and Gwyneth Paltrow is set to play Regan.(External Link)
Notable performers as King Lear

Richard Briers, with Emma Thompson as his fool
Richard Burbage
Brian Cox
Michael Gambon, with Antony Sher as his fool
John Gielgud
Ian Holm
Anthony Hopkins
Michael Hordern
William Hutt
James Earl Jones
Stacey Keach
Kevin Kline
Laurence Olivier, with Alec Guinness as his fool in one production, and John Hurt in a televised production
Samuel Phelps
Christopher Plummer
Paul Scofield
Robert Stephens
Orson Welles
Donald Wolfit
Ian McKellen, 24 March - 21 June 2007, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Tatsuya Nakadai in Akira Kurosawa's RanFurther Information
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