King Lear Research Articles

“Why Brand They Us?”: The Metaphors and Metamorphoses of Stigma in King Lear

“Why Brand They Us?”: The Metaphors and Metamorphoses of Stigma in <i>King Lear</i>

A Tale of Two Fools: Middleton, Shakespeare, and Co-Authorship in Timon of Athens and King Lear

A Tale of Two Fools: Middleton, Shakespeare, and Co-Authorship in Timon of Athens and King Lear

Becoming Lear: Shakespearean adaptation and the memory of performance

This article analyses the modalities in which a performance of Shakespeare's King Lear structures two late twentieth century plays, Thomas Bernhard's Minetti (1976) and Enzo Cormann's Storm Still (1997). It argues that the memory of a traumatic performance of Shakespeare's tragedy enables the protagonists of these plays – both ageing actors – to negotiate their relationship with painful memories and tell their story within what looks like a ‘surrogate’ performance of King Lear. The article also addresses the issue of the intertextual status of these dramatic works, arguing that they seem to announce more recent engagements with Shakespeare in stage performance.

Lessons King Lear Learn From His Sufferings

Abstract- In his madness and suffering, Lear learns how fragile and temporary his former power was, and in the play's falling action this insight allows him to be reconciled with Cordelia. He no longer demands that his daughter treat him like a king. He is happy to be treated as a “foolish, fond old man” (IV.act-).King Lear drowned himself in the blindness of love towards his daughters, whom he might thought of the importance of selfless love towards him. Lear's eldest two daughters (Goneril and Reagan)were only greedy to his kingdom wealth and property.

A Comparative Study on the Translation of Character Discourse of Fool in King Lear - Taking Liang Shiqiu's and Zhu Shenghao's Translations as an Example

A Comparative Study on the Translation of Character Discourse of Fool in King Lear - Taking Liang Shiqiu's and Zhu Shenghao's Translations as an Example

PLOT AND STRUCTURE IN A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF "KING LEAR" BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Known for its complicated character interactions and complex narrative, William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear is the subject of this paper's critical analysis of the play's structure and plot. The analysis centers on the ways in which Shakespeare enhances the play's thematic resonance through the utilization of structural components, subplots, and parallel narratives. Shakespeare explores themes of power, insanity, familial devotion, and human suffering by intertwining King Lear and Gloucester's narratives. The symmetrical split of the play into acts and scenes reflects the fall into anarchy that occurs when Lear's power crumbles. The structural elements are also considered in this analysis, as they add to the dramatic tension by emphasizing the inevitable disaster through the pace of events. Dramatic irony and foreshadowing are also examined in the article; these devices are fundamental to the structural intricacy of the play and help the audience become more invested in the tragedy as it unfolds. Based on what we know now, King Lear's structural aspects are more than just plot devices; they are fundamental to the play's thematic development and provide light on the human condition via Shakespeare's expert use of the plot.

An Imposter Among Shakespeare’s Fools: The Tempest’s Trinculo

The plays of William Shakespeare often feature a fool who resembles the historic jester of the Elizabethan era. Overtime, the Shakespearean fool developed into a powerful character who challenges and questions both the other characters in the play as well as the audience. This article analyzes the fool known as Trinculo from Shakespeare’s The Tempest who I argue does not amount to the great Shakespearean fool archetype. The criteria for a true Shakespearean fool is drawn from the work of Robert Bell, who studies the progression of Shakespeare’s clown character, and the work of Roberta Mullini, who analyzes the traits of Shakespeare’s fools. When Trinculo is compared to these outlined standards, such as prophetic ability and powerful speech, he falls short. Trinculo’s lacklustre character is especially apparent when compared to King Lear’s Fool in King Lear. King Lear’s Fool excels in the necessary qualities that Trinculo does not. Rather than serving as mere comedic relief, King Lear’s Fool drives the plot forward with his capacity for knowledge and awareness of the audience. Trinculo, on the other hand, embodies Shakespeare’s early, underdeveloped clown characters who exist purely to amuse the crowd and nothing more.

The ‘full-flowing stomach’: unwholesome food, climate, and colonialism in King Lear and Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive

Abstract This article considers Kristian Levring’s 2000 film The King is Alive from a radically open historicist methodology, analysing the film as a product of multiple interleaved archives. An adaptation of King Lear, the film’s relevant archive includes documents from the English Renaissance like the early modern recipe books and seventeenth-century medical treatises that this article uncovers. Yet because The King is Alive was filmed in an abandoned German mining colony in the Namib desert, the archive must also include accounts of the colonialist ‘Scramble for Africa’ more than two centuries after King Lear was written. The methodological deftness of history-as-adaptation allows us to see the film’s anxieties about food that rest at the nexus of these two archives. Shakespeare’s play worries about liminal foods—species-specific foods, foods that fail to nourish, and foods that become poison—but the film updates these concerns to implicate Western imperialism and global capitalism. Surrounded (and, in one instance, killed) by potentially botulistic cans of carrots that remain after the German occupation, the characters in the film must grapple with the toxic leftovers of colonialism, including Shakespeare’s playtext. The film thus asks its audience to consider further archives related to the imperialist roots of the invention of canning, the discovery of vitamins, and the export of Shakespeare as a ‘civilizing’ figure. Finally, the film gestures to the foodway challenges exacerbated by both capitalism and climate change, becoming a palimpsest of archives from across multiple temporalities: a Shakespearean past, a colonialist present, and a warming future.

King Lear and the Irony of Capacity

Abstract This essay considers the relation between lyric utterance, dramatic irony, and intellectual disability in King Lear, particularly in Lear’s famous address to Cordelia—which begins with “Come, let’s away”—just before Edmund sends both to prison. Reading “Come, let’s away” alongside early modern prison literature, the essay argues that the speech’s work as lyric within tragic drama erodes dramatic irony, removing the audience from the superior knowledge position that such irony affords and that enables ableist perspectives to begin with. In shifting attention from tragic action to lyric power, Lear’s speech renders the ability and willingness to understand one’s situation, and to act efficaciously in that situation, irrelevant to accessing what is beautiful and true. Shakespeare thus separates the question of mental capacity from that of felicitous choice. The irony of capacity in “Come, let’s away,” then, is this: that when readers focus on the value of mental capacity and on the power over action that Lear lacks, they miss what his speech does, the lyric capacity that it has.

King Lear by Fiery Angel and The Shed (review)

King Lear by Fiery Angel and The Shed (review)

Through Silence She Speaks: The Rearticulation of the Female Voice in King Lear

Through Silence She Speaks: The Rearticulation of the Female Voice in King Lear

An Analysis of Badawi’s and Ramzi’s Arabic Translations of the Speech Act of Compliments in Shakespearean Play ‘King Lear’: A Pragmatic Contrastive Study

The current study aims at investigating into the appropriateness of the translations of Badawi and Ramiz of the speech act of compliments of the Shakespearean play 'King Lear'. The researcher applied a content analysis of the original version of the play being compared to the Arabic versions as target texts. 20 texts of compliments are sampled for analysis. The study adopted a pragmatic analysis of the speech act under study with reference to the taxonomy of Al-Mansoob, Patil, and Alrefaee (2019). The analysis taxonomy consists of 20 compliment strategies. There occurred a reasonable number of similarities between the original version of the play and the TTs. 75% of Ramzi’s translations and 65% of Badawi’s translations seemed to be identical to the original contexts in preserving the function of the speech act of compliment in the selected 20 texts. The encountered differences between the ST and each of the target translations are not serious to the extent which could break the function of the original context in the target setting as they appropriately preserved the naturalness and smoothness of approximately more than 80% of the target texts. The translators further assimilated each other in handling the ST compliment strategies to the TL context in 12 of the total 20 complimenting contexts.

Accruing Gravitas, or Why There Isn’t a Latino King Lear (Yet)

ABSTRACT This essay examines the ethnic and racial factors that inform the casting of BIPOC actors as Shakespeare's royal and authoritative characters. Utilizing an ethnic category – that of the U.S. designation of Hispanic/Latinx – rather than a racial category, and the specific case study of King Lear, the essay argues that notions of vocal command, sensuality, and the challenge for Latinx actors to be cast consistently in main roles all work against the necessary element for the role of Lear: gravitas. The essay details a theatrical and filmic history of Latinx actors and adaptations of King Lear to illustrate that in order to play King Lear, the Latino actor must be associated with the perception of having accrued gravitas, a capacious characteristic that functions in contrast to mainstream U.S. perceptions of Latinx.

“Is this the promised end?”; Travels with/in &lt;i&gt;King Lear&lt;/i&gt;

This article began as a paper for the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa conference, “Shakespeare Towards an End” at Spier, Western Cape, South Africa in May 2023. In its revised form it still seeks to connect to the conference title. There are three types of journeys in King Lear: journeys away from (like Lear’s from Goneril to Regan); journeys towards (like almost everyone’s towards Dover); and journeys without destination (Gloucester’s “I have no way”). From the chaotic, imprecise, unmappable travels within the play, there is the possibility of charting the ways in which the play itself travels and what the ends (as aims) as well as end (as terminal) are that those charts might show, whether it be to Hull (Ben Benison’s Jack Lear), to Korea (Kim Myung-Gon’s King Uru) or to the United States (Theatre of War’s King Lear Project), or by tracking the journeys into our awareness of characters Shakespeare excluded but whose rethought inclusion serves to show what the play resists and how we might – even must – resist it.

“(The) Play’s the Thing”: Shakespearean drama as an end in itself

Drama, more obviously than other genres of art, is a form of play; and play, according to Johan Huizinga, is essentially autotelic, or not a means to an end. Shakespeare’s plays are trivialised if they are seen essentially as means to other ends. Science conceives of the material world as an endless chain of causes, just as utilitarianism demands that all human artefacts and endeavours take their place on an eternal chain of purposes. This model devalues all its elements, for they acquire their worth only in terms of what appears next along the chain, never in or of themselves. The model is also counter-intuitive, since human experience values things, people and events differently from one another. Some items give us more pause than others; a few invite us to lose ourselves, as a child becomes lost in a game. Drama asks an audience to play along with its playing actors, pointlessly. If there is a point – moral or utilitarian – it is a mere side effect. A play, like Cleopatra’s hopping, is a digression from the straight journey of human lives toward death; and, as Freud suggests in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, detours are the only places in which the life drive makes any inroads into the death instincts’ relentless onward progress. Shakespeare’s dramatic works not only demonstrate play, and hook their audiences into the delightful, terrifying and all-absorbing world of (the) play, but they also provide a metanarrative about play, playing with the idea of playing. This essay resists the tendency to interpret Shakespeare’s dramatic works pragmatically, and instead shows, with examples from comedies and romances, especially The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and from tragedies including King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, how they refuse to be means toward other ends, but “play till doomsday”, throwing reflective aspects up to their audiences and defying the puritans to stop them as they do so.

Performance review: King Lear by Kenneth Branagh

Performance review: <i>King Lear</i> by Kenneth Branagh

Tragedy in Shakespeare’s Plays

Tragedy is an eminent genre in the functions of William Shakespeare, fringing p plays like “Hamlet," "Macbeth," and "Romeo and Juliet." Shakespeare's tragedies are prominent for their inspecting human nature, characters’ convolution and the rendering of tragic happenings. This retaliation will provide research-backed information, including citations and quotes, on the topic of tragedy in Shakespeare's plays. Tragedy as a Reflection of Human Nature: According to critic A.C. Bradley, Shakespeare's tragedies dig extensively into the human psyche and unmask fundamental veracity about human nature. In his book "Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth," Bradley states, "Shakespearean tragedy, as a rule, displays man in his general environment and character... the tragic blunder, however, accords to the nature of the particular, not to his fate" (Bradley, 1904). This reflects how Shakespeare's tragedies investigate the vulnerabilities and flaws of individuals, advancing to their downfall. Complexity of Characters: Shakespeare's tragic characters are complex and often possess both flawed and admirable elements. In his essay "The Tragic Hero," critic F.L. Lucas throws light “Shakespearean tragic heroes are... multidimensional, not simple. They are neither wholly positive nor wholly heinous, but persons of eminent who are destroyed by a moral flaw or an error" (Lucas, 1959). This demonstrates how Shakespeare's characters are not condensed ideals but rather convoluted beings with internal conflicts, making their tragic course all the more fascinating. Portrayal of Tragic Circumstances: Shakespeare's tragedies require circumstances that leads the way to deep agonize and loss. In her assessment of Shakespearean tragedies, critic Marjorie Garber points out, "Shakespearean tragedy moral and a social world in which they are often trapped and caught and even pressed by larger political and social forces" (Garber, 2004). This emphasizes how Shakespeare's plays often include larger societal or political issues, adding to the tragic results faced by the characters. In conclusion, Shakespeare's tragedies are well known for their deepest exploration of human nature, complex characters, and the depiction of tragic circumstances. Through diligent character development and the interplay of destiny and free will, Shakespeare designed plays that continue to resonate with audiences across centuries. Reference: • Bradley, A. C. (1904). Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited. • Lucas, F. L. (1959). The Tragic Hero. In R. S. Crane (Ed.), Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (pp. 271-287). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. • Garber, M. (2004). Shakespeare After All. New York: Anchor Books. • Knight, G. W. (1961). Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy. London: Chatto &amp; Windus.

Soon Jae Lee's King Lear by Yeonwoo Theater Company at the LG Art Center (review)

Soon Jae Lee's King Lear by Yeonwoo Theater Company at the LG Art Center (review)

‘Wilt Break My Heart?’ Takotsubo Syndrome and Shakespeare’s Discourse of Heartbreak in Antony and Cleopatra and King Lear

ABSTRACT Shakespeare’s characters knew well the dangers and causes of an overcharged heart. This article places representations of heartbreak in Shakespeare’s canon in dialogue with twenty-first-century medical understanding of heartbreak or Takotsubo syndrome (TTS). Over thirty years since its coinage in cardiac medicine, heartbreak syndrome or TTS remains poorly understood. In response to this dearth of information around TTS, this article turns to early modern accounts of heartbreak – particularly its dramatic representation in King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra – and examines these alongside unfolding research into TTS. The essay illuminates a contagious inter-heart dynamic at play in King Lear and analyses best practice treatments for supportive management of stress-induced cardiomyopathy in Antony and Cleopatra. This comparative analysis of broken hearts in Shakespeare and in twenty-first century medical knowledge of TTS aims to offer mutual enlightenment across Shakespeare studies and cardiac medicine.

King Lear and the Ethics of Brutal, Caring Faith

King Lear and the Ethics of Brutal, Caring Faith