King Lear

FURTHER READING

AND VIEWING

CRITICAL APPROACHES

Booth, Stephen, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy (1983). Not for beginners, but very penetrating.

Bradley, A. C., Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). Still worth reading a century after publication.

Cavell, Stanley, “The Avoidance of Love,” in Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (1987). A skeptical philosopher’s reading; still less for beginners, but so full of deep insight that it has claims to be among the best pieces ever written on the play.

Colie, Rosalie L., and F. T. Flahiff, Some Facets of “King Lear”: Essays in Prismatic Criticism (1974). An unusually strong collection of critical essays.

Danby, J. F., Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (1949). Contexts for Edmund.

Dollimore, Jonathan, “King Lear and Essentialist Humanism,” in Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (1984). Inflected by neo-Marxist cultural politics.

Elton, William R., King Lear and the Gods (1966). Useful contextualization in the intellectual history of Shakespeare’s time.

Empson, William, “Fool in Lear,” in The Structure of Complex Words (1951). Superb essay on a key word.

Goldberg, S. L., An Essay on King Lear (1974). Consistently thoughtful.

Greenblatt, Stephen, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in Shakespeare Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988). Inventive account of why Shakespeare used an anti-Popish treatise for the mad language of Poor Tom.

Heilman, R. B., This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear (1963). Good account of image patterns.

Kermode, Frank, ed., King Lear: A Casebook (1969). Fine collection of studies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Kott, Jan, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964). The chapter on King Lear as a bleak, absurd drama analogous to Samuel Beckett’s Endgame has been hugely influential; Peter Brook saw an early version, which did much to shape his 1962 production.

Mack, Maynard, King Lear in Our Time (1966). Remains valuable in our time.

Taylor, Gary, and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear (1983). Groundbreaking collection of essays on Quarto and Folio variants.

THE PLAY IN PERFORMANCE

Brooke, Michael, “King Lear on Screen,” www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/566346/index.html. Overview of film versions.

Chambers, Colin, Other Spaces: New Theatre and the RSC (1980). Includes fine account of the powerfully intimate Buzz Goodbody production.

Jackson, Russell, and Robert Smallwood, eds, Players of Shakespeare 2 (1988). Interviews with actors, including Antony Sher on playing the Fool in Adrian Noble’s production.

Leggatt, Alexander, King Lear, Shakespeare in Performance (1991). Good survey.

Ogden, James, and Arthur H. Scouten, eds, Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism (1997). Contains several illuminating essays.

Rosenberg, Marvin, The Masks of King Lear (1972). Many fascinating details of performances down the ages.

AVAILABLE ON DVD

King Lear, directed by Peter Brook (1970, DVD 2005). Bleak interpretation with magisterial performance by Paul Scofield.

King Lear (Korol Lir), directed by Grigori Kosintsev (1970, DVD 2007). Powerful Russian version.

King Lear, directed by Jonathan Miller (BBC Television Shakespeare, 1982, DVD 2004). Michael Hordern as Lear in a reworking (with fuller, perhaps overlong text) of an earlier television version by Miller, based ultimately on a stage production at Nottingham.

King Lear, directed by Michael Elliott (Channel 4 Television, 1983, DVD 2007). Laurence Olivier’s last Shakespearean performance.

Ran, directed by Akira Kurosawa (1985, DVD 2006). Epic Japanese adaptation in Samurai setting.

A Thousand Acres, directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse (1997, DVD 2006). Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in a film version of a novel by Jane Smiley that transposes the story to the American Midwest and tells it from the point of view of the three daughters.

King Lear, directed by Richard Eyre (BBC2 Television 1998, DVD 2006). Filming of Eyre’s exemplary small-scale National Theatre production.

My Kingdom, directed by Don Boyd (2001, DVD 2005). Richard Harris’ last role: the Lear plot transposed to the world of a twenty-first-century Liverpool drug baron.