Shakespeare's King Research Articles

Review of Shakespeare's King Lear (directed by Grace Wessels for House on the Hill Productions) at the Rose, London, 18 March 2012

Review of Shakespeare's King Lear (directed by Grace Wessels for House on the Hill Productions) at the Rose, London, 18 March 2012

A poetics of nothing: Air in the early modern imagination

This essay explores the materiality of air in three forms: Global Winds, Embodied Breath and Nothing. Each of these three representations appears in different source texts, including Shakespeare's King Lear, early modern scientific writings, cartography, meteorology and classical philosophy. Searching for places in which invisible air pushes back against human perceptions and conception, the essay explores what air has to offer early modern ecocritics.

The Intertextual Suttree : Walker Percy, Cummings, and Community

Cormac McCarthy's novel Suttree has perhaps more intertextual references than any other of his works. They serve as metaphorical hyperlinks that make use of literary shorthand to develop and signify themes, motifs, and meaning. At times these allusions are somewhat obscure; characters don't speak lines from Waste Land and then attribute them to Eliot. We are instead introduced to a city constructed on no known paradigm (3) and shown the filthy river with its trash and suicides, and once even a dead baby. In addition to these allusions to Eliot's Unreal City and Madame Sosostris's admonition to fear death by water (55), we also have subtle references to the Fisher King legend (Shelton 74) and to the rats' alley / Where the dead men lost their bones (115-116). As Vereen Bell points out, the novel also contains references and quotations from Auden, Cummings, Frost, and Faulkner (106). To that list I believe we can add Longfellow (457), Shakespeare's King Lear (366), and Steinbeck's Cannery Row. Perhaps the most significant of these intertextual riffs are Suttree's repeated references to Walker Percy's 1966 novel The Last Gentleman and E.E. Cummings's poem Just. As his use of Waste Land makes clear, McCarthy employs these references and quotations as kinds of thematic signposts, meant to help steer the more astute readers in the right direction, much as a jazz saxophonist will quote earlier interpretations of songs in order to demonstrate his own take on a particular standard. Similarly, McCarthy's quoting of The Last Gentleman throughout the novel constitutes a kind of shorthand that does not accomplish the introduction of complex themes so much as it furthers the complication of already present themes. Given McCarthy's reluctance to discuss either his work or his life, it cannot be stated with certainty that McCarthy has read Percy. However, the assumption that McCarthy read The Last Gentleman during the twenty years he presumably spent working on Suttree is not a risky one. Even as a lapsed Catholic, he must have been aware of Percy after the famously Catholic Mississippi native won the National Book Award in 1962 for his first novel, The Moviegoer. It would be wrong to suggest that McCarthy serves as any kind of ephebe to Percy in the way he might be considered an heir apparent to, say, Faulkner in his earlier works and Hemingway in his latter ones. Instead, McCarthy's repeated references to Percy's novel in turn suggest the seemingly contradictory philosophies of existentialism and Christianity and draws upon the Kierkegaardian reconciliation of those philosophies. Criticism by Bell, William Prather, and Frank Shelton has been dedicated to the existentialist dimensions of Suttree. At the same time, the novel makes persistent and effective use of Christian--particularly Catholic--symbolism. In contrast to the prevailing view, I believe that McCarthy is not espousing existentialism in Suttree any more than he is arguing in favor of Christianity. From McCarthy's point of view, walking too far down the slippery slope of existentialism can lead to suicide and death, as demonstrated by Sartre and Camus. Rather than retreat into the safe strictures of organized Catholic dogma or dally along the precipice of existentialism, Cornelius Suttree must find a balanced middle path between the two that leads to life rather than death. The most overt references to Percy occur in the use of certain names in Suttree. Critics like Richard Marius have pointed out that Suttree's name may be derived from the nineteenth century East Tennessee humorous Sut Lovingood created by George Washington Harris (4). However, the name Suttree seems instead to be an anagram for Sutter, the elder Vaught son in The Last Gentleman, whom the protagonist Will Barrett chooses as a kind of mentor figure and who, in turn, is possibly saved by Will. Suttree's black and ageless androgyne gay friend, Trippin Through the Dew, tells Suttree in an encounter late in the novel about his visit with the infamous Lexington transvestite Sweet Evening Breeze. …

Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, & the Possibility of Politics by Emily Sun

Emily Sun. Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, & Possibility of Politics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Pp. 180. $50. Critics have long obsessed over whether Wordsworth's poetry may best be understood through idiom of division or addition, loss or gain. And while idea of poetry as an additive (a tonic or other form of recompense that reconstitutes wholeness) persists in haunting question, it is division (from self, other, and world) that has defined value of poet's life and works in aesthetic, political, and ethical registers over past several decades. notable contribution of Emily Sun's Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, & Possibility of Politics is that it implicitly argues for figure of addition as definitive Wordsworthian topos while simultaneously making rich use of and indeed contributing to critical legacy that would seem to have foreclosed this line of thought. twin peaks of Wordsworth's poetic inheritance, Shakespeare and Milton, are themselves powerfully associated with topos of division, and Sun's book puts Wordsworth's writing into active dialogue with Shakespeare's King Lear (Know that we have divided in three / Our kingdom). Nevertheless, Sun's book prioritizes addition. central term of this study is succession, which Sun defines against grain of its own etymology, and persuasively so, as literary and political that puts sovereign power into state of indefinite crisis. Sun's concept of succeeding is both additive and transformative, working against idea that succession automatically serves fundamental conservatism of traditional sovereign power, in which there is continuous transmission of power that in turn serves to maintain it. Sun reinforces idea of successive politics of transformation in very structure of her book. After short introduction, Part I offers one very long chapter on Shakespeare's King Lear, in which Sun establishes play as paradigmatic in its representation of sovereignty as politics of exposure. Part 2 consists of two short chapters on Wordsworth, one devoted to concept of autobiography and reading of Borderers and other to concept of indifference and reading of The Discharged Soldier episode of Prelude. And Part 3 consists of one medium-length chapter that reads multi-media work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans that was first published in 1941. extraordinary historical sweep of this book and its unequal parts could initially cause skepticism in readers either for its unconventionality or seeming randomness of design. Quickly enough it becomes clear that book's form is highly controlled and contributes to its force of inquiry into relationship of literature and politics. Sun's theory of succession enables her ingeniously to weave together readings of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Agee & Evans, with King Lear serving as ground for practice of affiliation that complicates traditional genealogical framework of literary historiography (3) and inspiring creative generation of new artistic genres and modes (3) in historical periods of 1790s and 1940s respectively. Sun establishes her archive by exploring direct references to King Lear in Wordsworth's Borderers and Agee & Evans's Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, references which center on heath as spatial figure that becomes rhetorical commonplace. In King Lear heath is place of exile that reinforces idea of political sovereignty: a site of exposure, barren inhospitable place that, in juridical-political terms, is non-place between sovereign jurisdictions of England and Scotland (106). In turn, heath becomes ground for Sun's theorization of the common in Wordsworth's poetry (that will extend to work of Agee & Evans), which she defines as place, or theater, of non-hierarchical literary succession. …

Minds in and out of time: memory, embodied skill, anachronism, and performance

Contemporary critical instincts, in early modern studies as elsewhere in literary theory, often dismiss invocations of mind and cognition as inevitably ahistorical, as performing a retrograde version of anachronism. Arguing that our experience of time is inherently anachronistic and polytemporal, we draw on the frameworks of distributed cognition and extended mind to theorize cognition as itself distributed, cultural, and temporal. Intelligent, embodied action is a hybrid process, involving the coordination of disparate neural, affective, cognitive, interpersonal, ecological, technological, and cultural resources. Because the diverse elements of such coupled systems each have their own histories and dynamics, many distinctive or competing times are built in to the very mechanisms of remembering and reasoning. We make this argument by means of two distinct case histories: a reading of the site-specific audio walk of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff; and an extended discussion of a famously anachronistic moment in William Shakespeare's King Lear. These readings reveal the inherent polytemporalities of human mental and social life.

Review of Shakespeare's King Lear (directed by Ian Brown), the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, 12 October 2011

Playing Lear poses many challenges for the veteran thespian. Perhaps one of the most infuriatingly frequent pieces of unsolicited advice offered to an actor embarking upon the role is to “get a lig...

Dramatic Text, Music Text:

Even in the midst of their dubious claim that “philosophers did not go to the opera very often,” Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar cannot escape acknowledging the combination of “the splendor of court spectacles, the pomp of national myths, and the sentimental melodramas” that have traditionally driven opera in its social contexts (1).1 Discussions of the Restoration dramatic stage follow the same tripartite preoccupations—they also typically focus on the return of theater to London after the Interregnum, the appearance of women on stage in drama, and the increasing importance of music to theater life before the full arrival of opera seria in the eighteenth century with Georg Friedrich Handel’s appearance in London. However, the specifically interactive relationship between English nationalism, literature, theater, and music is often overlooked. In particular, the role of musical form in these displays of nationalism, especially in conjunction with patriotic libretti, is largely ignored, despite its ability to bridge the divisions between each disciplinary field. Textual studies of libretti rapidly recognize the pro-Imperial feeling that followed the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, the Exclusion Crisis’s attempts to prevent the Catholic James II from ascending to the throne in 1685, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when James (the last Catholic monarch of England) was displaced by the Hanoverian Protestant William III and Mary II (formalized in 1689). This is readily seen in the histories of John Dryden, Nahum Tate, John Crowne, and many others. Moreover, anti-Papist sentiments frequently appear in an only vaguely coded form as resistance to tensions based on the French and Italian influences via Catholicism on James II and Charles II.

Review of Shakespeare's King Lear (directed by David Farr for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 30 March 2010

Halfway through a successful three-year project, the Royal Shakespeare Company remains highly committed to the principles of ensemble theatre: its website states, “We believe that dynamic, distinct...

The Tragedy of Good Friday: Sacrificial Violence in King Lear

In this article I claim that the presentation of sacrificial or persecutory violence in William Shakespeare's King Lear is heavily influenced by ambivalence in Reformation England towards acts of religious violence. I begin by arguing that the crowds attending the execution of martyrs manifested what can be understood as a Girardian sacrificial crisis, where the unifying force of the deaths was undercut by an ethical dilemma over the justice of physical coercion, and contend that the Acts and Monuments of John Foxe exemplified this dilemma and contributed to it. I then examine passages from the Acts and Monuments alongside the blinding of Gloucester and the death of Cordelia arguing that, like Foxe, Shakespeare demystifies sacrificial violence, exposing it as something ugly, unjust, and alienating.

‘Both are Alike, and Both Alike We Like’: Sovereignty and Amity in Shakespeare's King John

This essay offers a new way of interpreting Shakespeare's King John by showing that amity is one of its central themes and is inextricably connected with the play's construction of sovereignty. In the play, amity primarily refers to political accord or harmony within a country or between countries, but is conceptualised in and through the rhetoric of idealised male friendship and sworn brotherhood. The essay demonstrates the way in which the play contrasts a friendship between two reigning sovereigns, which ends in enmity and war, with hierarchal friendships between King John and his two most trusted followers, Hubert and the Bastard, that create amity and peace within England.

William Shakespeare's KING LEAR and Albert Camus's THE STRANGER

Despite the fact that they are among the most widely read and written about of all pieces of literature, no writers have noticed the similarity between the characteristics of King Lear's unfortunat...

‘Who Told You There Was Meaning?’: Mimesis and Narrative Complexity

This paper reports on longitudinal research into a partnership between a youth arts organisation and an inner city secondary school, using case study and reflective practitioner methodological approaches. Earlier projects in this same field of study explored a mimetic model of theatre practice, based on young people's dramatised stories that culturally diverse teenage participants described both as ‘real’ and delivering moral messages to their peers and wider community. In 2009 a play-building process, combining text from Shakespeare's King Lear with original material inspired by Beckett's Waiting For Godot and a devised contemporary narrative, was used to generate a new play called Searching For Lear. This work wove tragic and absurdist perspectives into a contemporary young person's street story. In this article, the project is analysed using literary theory and an analysis of mimetic processes. The play utilised a model of mimesis that complicated the relationship between the audience and the dramatic narrative, interrogating the basis on which dramaturgical meaning was constructed. These theoretical perspectives are considered in relation to research data, revealing participant and community audience perceptions of this work and its significance in its local cultural context.

The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare (review)

Reviewed by: The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare Peter Cockett Robert Hornback . The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009. Pp. xiii + 240. $95.00. The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare is a fascinating book filled with important revelations about the significant functions clowning played in the religious and political discourse of early modern England. The book is historicist and materialist in approach, drawing together information from a wide range of sources to construct its arguments but deliberately distancing itself from the binary polemics of New Historicism. The result is a book that is admirable in its breadth of vision and its specificity and which challenges some long-held assumptions about the role of clowning and comedy in early modern England. Although the title implies a comprehensive approach to English clowning, the book is concerned primarily with the specific instances of clowns operating as "religio-political" satirists, more specifically: the use of blackface fools, the adoption of traditions of misrule by religious propagandists, the puritan as clown in pamphlet satire and on the stage, and the royal fool as evinced by the two editions of Shakespeare's King Lear. The famous clowns from the period, Tarlton, Kempe, and Armin play a central and yet strangely marginal role in the book. At times one feels that much is being inferred about their clowning from passing references in satirical texts while less attention is paid to the books and plays they authored or to roles we can be relatively sure they played on the stage. The role of Derrick in Famous Victories, a likely Tarlton role, for example, contains none of the religious satire Hornback argues characterized his clowning. There is much about the English clown tradition that is not explored in this book. That said, the specific investigations the book undertakes are impressive and their contribution to scholarship invaluable. The first chapter challenges the critical assumption that the use of blackface to represent fools is religious in origin, signaling the connection between folly and the devil. Hornback provides telling evidence connecting the performance practice with emergent racist discourse associating blackness with a lack of intelligence being used as justification for the slave trade. It is also proposed that the use of blackface for fools in plays and in Morris dancing forms a line of continuity with later antebellum blackface minstrelsy. In chapter 2, through an intensive exploration of documentary records, Hornback traces the manipulation of festive traditions of misrule to serve the propaganda of religious reformers and counter reformers through the reigns of Edward VII and Mary Tudor. He demonstrates that the objections of political-religious factions to festive practices arise only when the comic intention is directed at their party. In the third chapter, Hornback examines the satirical exploits of [End Page 354] Martin Marprelate and his detractors, developing connections between this satire and the professional clowns Tarlton and his successor Kempe. Hornback argues persuasively that Jack Cade and Dogberry, both likely parts played by William Kempe, would have been seen as puritan clowns by their original audiences. The fourth chapter argues that the two editions of King Lear offer contrasting but equally effective versions of the Fool. Counter to common arguments, Hornback argues that the Fool of the Folio is a natural fool and that the Fool of the Quarto is a bitter artificial fool. Here, Hornback relies on an unsustainable dichotomy between the natural and artificial fool, insisting that artificial fools are all bitter, natural fools sweet, and that playing bitter artificial fools was Robert Armin's specialty. The introduction to Armin's Two Maids of More-Clacke informs us to the contrary that the play was inspired by the popularity of his impersonation of local natural John of the Hospital, and the introduction to his Nest of Ninnies (1608) makes it clear that artificial fools, like Armin, imitate natural fools "liking the disguise."1 Hornback quotes this statement but fails to understand the deliberate confusion between artificial and natural folly that was central to Armin's art, and this undermines the dichotomy between Quarto Fool and Folio Fool attempted in this chapter...

O, Shakespeare and Peking Opera Mixed, Reason in Madness: When Wu Hsing-kuo's Autobiographical King Lear Encounters with William Shakespeare's King Lear

O, Shakespeare and Peking Opera Mixed, Reason in Madness: When Wu Hsing-kuo's Autobiographical King Lear Encounters with William Shakespeare's King Lear

Voices of Violence: Medieval French Farce and the Dover Cliff Scene in King Lear

strangest moment in act 4, scene 6, of Shakespeare's King Lear involves humiliation of recently blinded Gloucester at hands of his supposedly loving son. In so-called Dover Cliffscene Gloucester wrongly believes that mad beggar Poor Tom, who is actually his son Edgar, has led him to place where he intends to commit suicide. In order to fool him, Edgar describes cliff in poetic but horrifying terms, and he then steps away from his father, whose attempt to jump results in only a fall to ground. Edgar then disguises his voice yet again, though not as Poor Tom, to convince Gloucester that he has fallen from cliff but was rescued by gods from a demon at top. trick evidently persuades Gloucester that he has been saved by a miracle, and he decides to go on living. (1) Although Edgar says that his mistreatment of Gloucester is an attempt to cure him of his despair, it remains gratuitous and difficult to explain within context of play, so in this essay I would like to move beyond Lear to examine scene in relation to drama that provides surprising analogues to it: medieval French farce featuring blind men and their cruelly deceptive guides. Scholars have long agreed that idea of a suicidal blinded man who wants to be led to a cliff to end it all came to Shakespeare through story of Paphlagonian king in book 2, chapter 10, of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. king, father of one legitimate and one illegitimate son, is persuaded by lies of bastard son Plexirtus to turn against legitimate heir, who is named Leonatus. After bastard usurps throne, he blinds his father, a development that resembles involvement of Gloucester's bastard son Edmund with those who blind his father. Then Leonatus, in order to help king, returns from a nearby country where he has disguised himself as a soldier. despairing king asks Leonatus to help him find a rock from which to throw himself, but Leonatus refuses. (2) Thus story sketches rough outlines of subplot of Gloucester and his sons, but significantly, it stops short of anything resembling episode in which Edgar tricks his father into believing he has jumped from cliff. So passage from Arcadia does nothing to explain Edgar's surprising and rather cruel response to his father's death wish, nor does redoubtable Geoffrey Bullough in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare have anything to say about way scene plays out. (3) Edgar's trickery has long troubled critics. In Wheel of Fire, G. Wilson Knight writes of scene, The grotesque merged into ridiculous reaches a consummation in this bathos of tragedy: it is furthest, most exaggerated, reach of poet's fantasticality. Knight reads episode as evidence that the Gloucester-theme throughout reflects and emphasizes and exaggerates all percurrent qualities of Lear-theme. (4) For him, scene is a towering stroke of grotesque and absurd to balance fantastic incidents and speeches that immediately follow. (5) Building literally on notion that scene is absurd, Jan Kott in 1960s tried to contextualize this scene among others in relation to Theater of Absurd. Kott echoes some of Knight's vocabulary when he writes, The pantomime performed by actors on stage is grotesque, and has something of a circus about it. blind Gloucester who has climbed a non-existent height and fallen over on flat boards, is a clown. (6) Kott goes on to compare scene to Beckett's Endgame. In Arden edition of Lear, editor R. A. Foakes writes that Edgar's treatment of his father can be viewed as a game, and he adds, No wonder that there has been much debate about nature of this episode, which may be seen as grotesque, comic, absurd, tragic, or a combination of these. (7) This vein of critical history of Lear yields such terms as grotesque, absurd, clown, and game, which are surely rare in discussions of scenes from Shakespearean tragedy. …

Doing the Usual Things: Gender, Race, and Inwardness in Harley Granville Barker's The Marrying of Ann Leete and The Secret Life

For the Greeks, the hidden life demanded invisible ink. They wrote an ordinary letter and in between the lines, set out another letter written in milk. The document looked innocent enough until one who knew better sprinkled coal-dust over it. What the letter had been no longer mattered; what mattered was the life flaring up undetected ... till now. --Jeanette Winterson (1) Biographer and scholar Eric Salmon, editing a letter written by Harley Granville Barker, fusses over what he calls a mysterious momentary aberration, or even a slip of the pen on the playwright's part. In a letter to his second wife Helen Huntingdon, Barker describes a weak production of Shakespeare's King Lear he attended the previous night, marveling that the power of the Cordelia-Lear waking is able to shine through the mistakes and shortcomings and sheer bungling and misapprehension of the players. He quotes to Huntingdon two lines from the scene between Lear and his daughter: 'But as a man do believe this lady to be my child Cordelia'; 'And so am--I am?' (2) Salmon finds Barker's curious rendition of Cordelia's response worrying because it includes a final question mark that does not exist in the First Folio or in any extant version of Shakespeare's play: Even allowing for the fact that he was (presumably) quoting from memory, it is hard to imagine how the question mark got there or what Barker intended to imply, either about the speaking of the line or about the character of Cordelia. It does not appear in any standard text of the play, and Barker himself makes no comment on the normal reading of the line in his own Preface to the play, published in 1927 (327). Barker transforms Cordelia's reassuring, repetitive utterance in the original (And so am; am) into a more ambivalent confirmation of her identity (And so am--I am?). (3) Barker's error has Cordelia both confirming and challenging the identity given to her by her father. The question mark changes the second I am into an interrogative expression of doubt that interpolates the 'T' of the first half of the line as stranger, as Other, transforming the exchange into a sublime moment of fractured identity for Cordelia. Viewed more broadly, this apparent slip has profound symbolic resonance in relation to Barker's own plays, especially his representations of women. Indeed, his canon is filled with female characters that suffer within a male-dominated culture, relegated to roles as male redeemers, caretakers, and mere repositories for Victorian middle-class values. (4) For the most part, such characters, forced to capitulate to an oppressive social imperative for women, are treated sympathetically. While he provides very few who are successful in refusing the old poses in favor of more empowering ones, a handful of Barker's female characters struggle to gain, retain, and be recognized for their autonomy as they negotiate the transition between the Victorian and the Modern, searching for some kind of stable foundation for self-assertion and fulfillment. Ann Leete, in The Marrying of Ann Leete (1899), and Joan Westbury, in The Secret Life (1923), are resistant, active, and dynamic and so initially stand out among so many characters cast as mere patriarchal casualties. Bookending Barker's twenty-year career in the theater, Leete takes place in a pre-Victorian world marked by the collision of domestic issues of manners with revolutionary economic and social change while The Secret Life depicts the empire on the verge of collapse, the last gasp of Victorian ideals. Despite their differences, these two plays among his others stand out in squarely addressing the problems of female subjectivity. (5) Like Barker's Cordelia, Ann and Joan possess a double-consciousness, and their Otherness is unusually expressed in conjunction with images of racial oppression, a paratactic juxtaposition that is unexpected and tenuous in the early play but which solidifies in the later one into a more complex critique of colonialist ideology. …

The Return of Women in Howard Barker’s Seven Lears: The Pursuit of the Good

Recent feminist criticism on Shakespeare's King Lear, led by psychoanalytic critics such as Coppelia Kahn and Janet Adelman, has attempted to excavate 'the maternal subtext,' disclosing patriarchal ideology and the hidden mother inscribed in Lear's inner psyche. Concentrating on the complete absence of literal mothers in the play and exploring male anxieties and fantasies about maternal presence, the feminists examine the way in which a repressed femaleness called 'the mother' returns. In a similar vein, Howard Barker's Seven Lears: The Pursuit of the Good, a prequel to King Lear, stems from the observation that maternal characters are completely absent from the Shakespeare play. Tracing the development of Lear from a boy to a tyrant, Barker's bold adaptation puts a central question of why the mother is expunged from memory, and why she is reduced to the object of an 'unjust but necessary hatred' from Lear. Interpreting this absence as a deliberate form of oppression, Barker tries to restore the motivations and histories of the female characters subsumed into a narrative dominated by Lear in King Lear. Focusing on the contradictory relationship between goodness and politics and the issues of ethical responsibility in a patriarchal world, this paper explores how Barker's adaptation deals with the effect of the missing mother from a feminist perspective. Barker subverts the classical tragic (and misogynist) rhythm inscribed in the text through the unsympathetic characterization of Lear, his repressive relations with his daughters and the introduction of the missing queen, Clarissa. First of all, Barker sees Lear as a man veering between social conscience, embodied by the Gaol, a collective of the unjustly imprisoned, and the corrupting influences of Bishop, an authoritative father figure to Young Lear. The process of Lear's gradual absorption into patriarchal ideology is explored through his complicity in inventing his own version of abuse by the 'wicked' daughters. In Barker's adaptation, Lear's incestuous desire towards Cordelia, suggested by Kahn and Adelman, is further developed and expanded through Lear's repressive relationship with Prudentia, his mother-in-law and the very site where his sexual needs are unfold. Above alt, Barker's missing queen, Clarissa, embodies the qualities of moral integrity totally lacking in Lear himself. Establishing her final expulsion as a clear sign of Lear's moral inertia and degradation, Seven Lears moves further than the psychoanalytic insights provided by Kahn, who saw Lear's madness as a product of the rage at being deprived of maternal presence. Barker suggests Clarissa's unflinching honesty and political perception as a constant attempt on Lear's sanity as welt as a real reason for his anxiety.

Filming King Lear and Kurosawa Akira's Ran

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Ran as Kurosawa's special adaptation of King Lear, and to explore the reason Ran gets the best compliments compared with the other films of King Lear produced in Western countries. Kurosawa shows an eastern view of the world which is represented by the rotating cycle of the past, the present, and the future, while we find some different western views of Shakespeare's King Lear, such as dual conflicts between good and evil, and between old generation and new generation. The suffering and unhappiness which Kurosawa's hero, Hydetora endures are presented as the result of his past cruel behaviors. However, Kurosawa's view of the world is not moralistic, but quite pessimistic. Both the innocent and the criminal cannot avoid pain and death. The innocent can't change the world, being the victims of this evil world. The world Kurosawa portrays is the one full of pain and agony rather than evil and corruption, while Shakespeare in King Lear criticizes the corrupted world where liars and thieves prosper, and where the powerful and the wealthy don't care the poor. The world upside down is what Shakespeare portrays through the suffering of Lear who goes through the fall from a king to a mad beggar. This subverted life of a king and his realization of the truth becomes the typical fate of a tragic hero in the traditional sense of tragedy, and the prerequisite of the renewal of human life in this world. Therefore, while the world of King Lear may suggest morality and change through condemnation and mockery, the world of Ran denies the possibility of hope and change through desperation and death. The reason why Ran gets more compliments than other films of King Lear lies not only in Kurosawa's excellent camera techniques and the screen constitution of symbolic solemnity. Kurosawa succeeds in presenting the essential view of human cruelty and the pessimistic world by using the main plot of King Lear, in which an old man is betrayed by his own children. He adapted this view of the world to a historical age of Samurai in Japan. In King Lear, we can find more complex and various views of the world and human life. However, in Ran, we can find more painful and desperate views of the world, which is represented through beautiful scenery and calm appreciation.

Review of Shakespeare's King Lear (directed by Dominic Dromgoole) at Shakespeare's Globe, London, April–August 2008, and Timon of Athens (directed by Lucy Bailey) at Shakespeare's Globe, London, July–October 2008

“Totus mundus agit histrionem”: since its inception the Globe has regularly marketed its productions under the banner of a unifying season slogan. This summer, his third in office, Dominic Dromgool...

Lend me your 84 million ears: Exploring a special radio event Shakespeare's King Lear on BBC World Service radio

On 15 October 2006, the BBC World Service claimed a historic first in the history of British radio Shakespeare: a live recording of King Lear at the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. The one-off show was subsequently broadcast to 42 million listeners around the world in December 2006, 400 years after the play was first performed on stage. The special nature of this radio theatre tells us much about the power of radio to determine cultural content on a global scale in the highly competitive mediascape of the twenty-first century. It also offers a focal point from which to consider Shakespeare as a cultural signifier across the history of British public service radio. Based on personal experience of the production process and interviews with production personnel, this article examines the different meanings attached to a programme that was promoted both as a national cultural event and an internationally significant adaptation of Shakespeare.