The subject of the study is the peculiarities of Peter Brook's directorial method, examined through his productions of William Shakespeare's play "The Tempest" (1957, 1968, 1990). The article is dedicated to analyzing the principles of the director's work with the playwright's text, stage space, and actors in the context of time. Each performance marks a stage in Brook's creative evolution: from a theater dominated by visual imagery, he immerses himself in a laboratory experience exploring the possibilities of actors, then utilizes the opportunities of play theater and improvisation within different cultural spaces. Here, a persistent characteristic of style emerges – a rejection of a fixed system of techniques in favor of "formless premonition," following the original impulse of the author, which unfolds during rehearsals and is refracted through the individuality of the actor. The research employs a historical-cultural method, allowing for the reconstruction of the epoch's context that influenced the artistic appearance of the performance; a theater studies analysis of the productions is also applied, revealing the features of the actor's and director's approach to the interpretation of images. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the performances based on Shakespeare's last play are considered sequentially as a self-contained cycle-trilogy, having no less significance for Peter Brook's work than his famous productions of "Hamlet" or "King Lear." Through the comparison of the versions, a significant feature of the director's manner is uncovered – eclecticism in the use of techniques. Despite the variability of form, Brook pays close attention to the metaphysical aspect of Shakespeare's text, making the actors co-authors in realizing the playwright's main metaphor, theater as a world. This also means that Brook's theater is open to contemporary influences, other traditions, and looks for active participation from the audience, which aligns it with the Shakespearean tradition and allows it to be considered total.

English-Arabic Translation of Speech Acts: A Comparative Pragmatic Analysis of King Lear

Abstract This paper examines how contemporary literature, film, and theater shape public perceptions of dementia, often reinforcing negative stereotypes that contribute to the othering of individuals living with the condition. Popular fiction, such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, employs dementia-adjacent metaphors—like the soul-sucking Dementors—to depict memory loss as an erasure of identity. Similarly, films like Still Alice and The Father use dementia metonymically, reducing individuals to symbols of loss. Since the 1980s, cultural representations of dementia have ranged from depictions of the disease as a “living death” to more nuanced explorations of forgetfulness. However, today, dementia is frequently framed as a crisis of aging, often through symbolic narratives that heighten societal anxieties about cognitive decline. A key example that will be analyzed is Shakespeare’s King Lear, whose modern reinterpretations increasingly medicalize Lear’s descent into madness, diagnosing him with Lewy Body Dementia. This reading shifts the focus from Lear’s emotional and psychological turmoil to an ageist burden narrative that aligns with contemporary fears of cognitive decline, loss of autonomy, and aging as a social and economic crisis. This paper first analyzes these culturally influential examples to explore how mainstream narratives shape public discourse on dementia. It then turns to more nuanced portrayals to examine aesthetic strategies that offer alternative and more humane representations. Ultimately, we argue for a cultural politics of dementia informed by critical aging studies to challenge ageist frameworks and promote attitudinal change toward aging and dementia.

Introduction: Everything we say bears with it certain meanings and brings forth reactions and emotions, which is exactly the fundamental purpose of a language. While communicating, our utterances often take the shape of an apology, a promise, an order, a request, an appeal, a warning, an invitation, a refusal, or a compliment, and all the while we remain completely unaware that these are the true speech acts that keep communication strong. The first to write about them was John L. Austin, an Oxford philosopher, in his ”How to Do Things with Words” (1962), which paved the way for a new branch in pragmatics—the speech act theory. He makes a distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, while the American philosopher John Searle develops a classification comprising five illocutionary types: assertives, commissives, directives, expressives, and declaratives. Aim: This paper aims to, based on both approaches, analyze speech acts in Shakespeare’s plays in hopes of better understanding the meanings and actions of their characters. Materials and Methods: The corpus includes ”King Richard III” and ”King Lear” by William Shakespeare. The analysis was conducted both qualitatively and quantitatively, with a total of 40 examples collected and categorized, and the results are also presented graphically for clearer insight. Results: The analysis showed that directives and expressives dominate most of the dialogues, while commissives appear more frequently in key emotional scenes. Assertives play an important role in shaping the narrative flow, whereas declarations occur less often, mainly in pivotal moments. Conclusion: The obtained results confirm that every word has a consequence and that the way it is spoken alters its impact. The perception of literary characters depends not only on the plot but also on our interpretation of the dialogue, which relies significantly on speech act theory.

King Lear: Who is that can tell me who I am?

This ‘intermedial’ production of Queen Lear (2022) – deploying ‘recorded and projected performance alongside “live” acting’, and having ‘technologies of digital projection (new) and hand-built scenery (old) work side-by-side’ (W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre, 2020) – followed a text scripted by Juan Carlos Rubio in collaboration with director Natalia Menéndez: Queen Lear: Fragmentos de una lectura microscópica y libre de ‘El Rey Lear’ de William Shakespeare. In the wake of the 2017 resurgence of the #MeToo movement, this Queen Lear could not but intersect with the enunciation of gender as performative rather than innate, giving agency to the female voice and character. It proffered a different ending from Shakespeare's King Lear , one thought to open a door to hope.

This text deals with Stanley Cavell’s approach to the problem of skepticism in his reading of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, contained in the essay The Avoidance of Love.2 The originality of this proposition lies in the fact that the motivation for Lear’s behavior is considered impenetrable, incomprehensible even to himself. In other words, Lear does not understand his own behavior in the first scene of the play – his attitude of rejection and disapproval of Cordelia’s conduct, expressed in his attitude of Avoidance (refusal) – triggering his anger, and thus, setting in motion the mechanism of action. At the same time, Avoidance stems from Lear’s refusal of the love he feels for Cordelia – this love, opening up the horizon of possibilities that are the domain of psychoanalysis, violates social taboos and elicits in Lear an attitude of denial and refusal. In rejecting Cordelia’s love (and his own love for Cordelia), Lear turns out to be a narcissistic skeptic, seeking to avoid the sense of dependence on the Other, which is one of the risks of love.

Intermediality has become one of the most significant concepts in contemporary film and media studies, highlighting the ways cinema negotiates its borders with other art forms. Pelin Esmer’s Queen Lear (2019) exemplifies this negotiation by bringing Shakespeare’s canonical tragedy into dialogue with the lived experiences of five women from the Toros Mountains. At once a documentary, a record of performance, and a cinematic re-imagining, the film becomes a space where theatre and cinema intersect, overlap, and reconfigure one another. This article explores the film as a case of cinematic intermediality, tracing how Esmer’s camera reshapes theatrical performance through framing, montage, and sound, while simultaneously opening new horizons of meaning. Yet Queen Lear is not only about intermedial crossings; it is also about how gender itself is performed, embodied, and contested. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, the article examines how the women’s staging of King Lear produces a double performance: enacting Shakespeare’s characters while voicing their own stories of labor, struggle, and resilience. In this sense, Esmer’s film does not merely adapt Shakespeare but re-visions him from the margins, offering a feminist intervention that destabilizes cultural hierarchies and reframes tragedy through local and collective voices. Ultimately, Queen Lear demonstrates the transformative potential of cinema as both a medium of intermediality and a site of gendered resistance.

ABSTRACT Investigating contemporary British Asian literature and its relation to tragedy, I focus on Preti Taneja and Kamila Shamsie’s work, especially Taneja’s We That Are Young and Shamsie’s Home Fire. These novels offer postcolonial feminist re-visions (in Adrienne Rich’s term) of their canonical tragic intertexts: King Lear and Antigone. I examine how they reimagine classical tragedy’s principles—for instance, how they depict surveillance and its impact on anagnorisis as a moment of terror and how they present tragedy in relation to the bildungsroman. I then explore how they invite us to look at other forms of tragic literature from outside the Aeschylus-to-Shakespeare, Western genealogy. Both novels allude to other cultural sources that might be considered tragic, with Taneja predominantly The Mahābhārata and with Shamsie the legend of Laila and Majnu. I propose that these authors allow us to think about tragedy, a genre that has been used as evidence of “Western” civilizational superiority, in new ways.

The Two Texts of King Lear: a Characterization Issue

A deep understanding of patients in psychiatry requires an ability to appreciate and describe the biopsychosocial determinants of health. Great works of theatre portray a nuanced observation of the human condition, but these have not been formally evaluated in psychiatric literature as teaching tools. The purpose of this study was to explore Shakespeare's King Lear as an educational intervention in supporting formulation skills training in geriatric psychiatry residency. Seven residents attended a half-day educational session where they interacted with four professional actors of diverse backgrounds in creating five scenes from King Lear, with faculty debriefing. Residents completed pre-and post-surveys measuring confidence on topics related to the workshop learning objectives. Three-month follow-up surveys and semi-structured interviews were conducted with all participants. A non-parametric Friedman test among repeated measures indicated statistically significant improvements in confidence in formulating a biopsychosocial understanding (chi-square 9.30, p = 0.01), in communicating an understanding of social and cultural determinants of health (7.60, p = 0.02), and in describing the role of ageism and stigma associated with mental disorders in older adulthood (8.09, p = 0.02). Key themes from the semi-structured interviews included the importance of contextualizing and taking a holistic approach to formulation. This experience was deemed helpful and recommended for inclusion in the residency program. The study demonstrates the potential benefits of using live performance of ancient text on residents' confidence in formulation, communicating determinants of health, and in describing ageism in geriatric psychiatry.

Abstract: In its adaptation of King Lear , Ran presents a threefold transformation in the moral imagination, moving from the collapse of the traditional warrior ethos, through the fleeting ascendance of Pure Land faith, to the emergent oceanic faith. Saburo, the idealized figure of samurai virtue, is set in a losing contest against historically grounded, pragmatic, and villainous warriors. This demystifying process dismantles the bushido ideal as a pillar of Japanese identity. In its place, the Pure Land faith is briefly offered as refuge, only to falter under the weight of doctrinal constraint, with its stringency mirrored in Hidetora’s rejection of the Buddhist wisdom, a defiance that engenders the fruition of negative karma. In its closing movement, the film gestures toward an oceanic faith whose openness serves as resolution, yet the ultimate vision remains transcendental: expansive, fluid, and free from institutional bounds.

Review of Shakespeare's King Lear (Directed by Roxana Gilbert) at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, 29 March 2025 (Afternoon Performance)

Review of Shakespeare’s King Lear (Directed by Clive Brill) on BBC Radio 4 in Two Parts, 8 and 15 June 2025

After a brief introduction to “frame” and “framing” in various disciplines, I will attempt to show that these notions can be applied to the analysis of the play The Cordelia Dream (2008) by the Irish playwright Marina Carr. I will analyse the various interrelated frames which compose the macro-construct and cognitive worldview of the play. This play is a contemporary reworking of William Shakespeare’s King Lear in which I highlight similarities, dissimilarities and references. In moving from one frame to another, in fact, a conceptual activation process is started, and it partly revises the ‘acquired knowledge’ underlying Carr’s play, such as the father-daughter relationship and the reading of King Lear. Finally, I will apply frame analysis to the process of translation in the Italian version, highlighting the various translational strategies adopted.

This research paper analyzes the intersection of gender and power in three of Shakespeare’s tragedies such as Macbeth, Othello and King Lear. The research seeks to understand how Shakespeare either upholds or contests the modern gender and power paradigm of his time through the scrutiny of gender role. The paper applies feminist literary theory The Second Sex (1949) by Simon De Beauvoir to analyze the construction of femininity, the negotiation of power, and the tragic imposition of gender norms within the selected Shakespeare’s tragedies. The findings reveal that women’s defiance in Shakespeare’s works is often depicted through his female characters. Though, they do mindlessly submit to patriarchal norms but when they attempt to challenge the patriarchy such act results in an increases in their oppression.

When scholars view characters in King Lear through a Machiavellian lens, they read Edmund, Goneril, and Regan as stock Machiavels. In contrast, they often perceive Cordelia, Kent, and Edgar as selfless, apolitical characters. This essay argues that the latter characters are more complicated and politically adroit than they are often judged to be. They are Machiavellian as well, but Shakespeare conceives them within a more appreciative view of the concept of realpolitik. This essay explains the characters’ strategies by relating them to Machiavelli’s tenets of achieving and maintaining political power. The central quandary of the play is the lack of a male heir to the throne. Cordelia attempts to solve the problem by marrying the King of France for political reasons. She has an alliance with Kent, who helps her to justify her invasion of her homeland with French forces. Once the plans for a surprise attack go awry, Cordelia does not follow Machiavellian strategies and is consequently killed. Ironically, Edgar is as ambitious as Edmund, whom he lets plot against his father and bring about Gloucester’s slow decline so as to inherit his father’s fortune while Edmund incurs the blame for his father’s demise. Like Kent, he enlists a disguise for self-advancement. The most adroit Machiavellian characters—Edgar, Kent, and the King of France—all survive through chicanery and cunning. Shakespeare illustrates that secular methods of governorship defeat the old world of divine politics.

This paper explores the evolution of female character portrayals in three adaptations of Shakespeare’s works: Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968), Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Ju- liet (1996), and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s televised production of King Lear (2008). By examining visual representations, characterizations, and thematic explorations, the study inves- tigates how societal changes and feminist discourse have influenced these adaptations. Zeffire- lli’s Juliet embodies innocence and traditional femininity, whereas Luhrmann’s Juliet is assertive and empowered, reflecting contemporary gender dynamics. Similarly, the King Lear adaptation highlights the complexities of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia within a patriarchal context, show- casing their struggles for power and agency. The comparative analysis reveals how these adap- tations reimagine Shakespeare’s heroines, emphasizing the shift from traditional gender roles to more dynamic and empowered female characters, mirroring societal transformations and the ongoing relevance of Shakespearean drama in contemporary storytelling.

This article explores the interaction between the Realist literary style and contemporary scientific discourse in Ivan Turgenev’s novella King Lear of the Steppes (1870). Drawing on recent research on the intersections between Realism and modern scientific knowledge, the analysis focuses on the influence of 1860s physiological psychology and affect theory – fields that, as the article argues, were of particular interest to Turgenev. Through a close reading of the physiological depiction of the protagonist, Martyn Charlov, and his body, the article demonstrates how Turgenev constructs the character’s subjectivity at both the stylistic and narrative levels through descriptions of his affects, especially those caused by melancholy. The article also uncovers the medical connotations of the term “melancholy” in the 1860s, when it was regarded as a form of mental illness and clinical diagnosis. Consequently, Charlov’s episodes of melancholy may be interpreted as an authorial allusion to this disorder, casting an ironic light on the narrator’s claims regarding the protagonist’s authentic “Russianness”.

This research paper examines power and ethics in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Macbeth, focusing on how the playwright portrays power dynamics and authority structures within these works. This study reveals the complexities and the impact of power on personal and political spheres. The paper explores how Shakespeare’s characters represent power and ethical norms in society. We used Foucault’s power theory as a framework to analyse the plays selected. The findings underscore the nuanced approach Shakespeare takes to ethics and power, offering insights into the historical context of his plays and their relevance to contemporary discussions on gender and authority. Human beings despite moral education have remain or become amoral. Such people tend to be found among certain criminal types who cannot seem to realise they have done anything wrong. They tend not to have any remorse, regret or concern for what they have done. It seems an underlying factor that the binding tie between good and bad governance lies in ethical consideration and moral judgement by those on whom power is being exercise.