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King Lear

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Advice from the players: 10 great actors on performing Shakespeare
Shakespeare and Beyond

Advice from the players: 10 great actors on performing Shakespeare

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Ben Lauer

Read a few favorite quotes from actors who have  joined us on our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Lolita Chakrabarti, the late Glenda Jackson, Sir Derek Jacobi, Paterson Joseph, Adrian Lester, Sir Ian McKellen, Patrick Page, the late Antony Sher, Harriet Walter, and Stephan Wolfert offer their insights on everything from backstory to the famous bits to the question no actor should ask.

Excerpt: "King Lear: Shakespeare's Dark Consolations"
Shakespeare and Beyond

Excerpt: "King Lear: Shakespeare's Dark Consolations"

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Shakespeare & Beyond

King Lear is about insiders who with terrible suddenness are shoved outside, and what they learn or don’t learn from finding themselves positioned there,” writes Arthur Frank.

Making BEDLAM: Creating a Shakespeare mash-up series
Production crew of BEDLAM: The Series
Shakespeare and Beyond

Making BEDLAM: Creating a Shakespeare mash-up series

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Eric Tucker Musa Gurnis

Production crew of BEDLAM: The Series. Photo by Ashley Garrett. Eric Tucker is an off-Broadway director and Artistic Director of Bedlam Theatre. Musa Gurnis is an early modern theater scholar and actor. When we pitched our Shakespeare mash-up series BEDLAM…

Excerpt: Learwife by J. R. Thorp
Shakespeare and Beyond

Excerpt: Learwife by J. R. Thorp

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Shakespeare & Beyond

Picking up where Shakespeare’s King Lear ends, a new novel imagines the life of Lear’s wife, who in this telling has been banished for 15 years when she receives word of her family members’ deaths. Learwife by J.R. Thorp gives…

Of Roys and kings: “The shadow of Succession”
Shakespeare and Beyond

Of Roys and kings: “The shadow of Succession”

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Austin Tichenor

Austin Tichenor explores the copious Shakespearean echoes in HBO’s Succession series, in which the Shakespearean actor Brian Cox plays a key role.

Speaking what we feel: Shakespeare’s plague plays
Shakespeare and Beyond

Speaking what we feel: Shakespeare’s plague plays

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Austin Tichenor

How do Shakespeare’s plays reflect a life filled with plague outbreaks, asks Austin Tichenor — and do we see his plays in new ways now?

And so they play their parts: Double-casting Shakespeare’s plays
Shakespeare and Beyond

And so they play their parts: Double-casting Shakespeare’s plays

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Austin Tichenor

Double-casting is a theater technique (as opposed to a literary one) that creates a meta-narrative, transforming a large-cast play into a present-tense adventure. Actors swapping costumes and changing roles (and sometimes genders) becomes part of the thrilling ride, and theater’s…

William Charles Macready and the restoration of William Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’
Shakespeare and Beyond

William Charles Macready and the restoration of William Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’

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Alexandra E. LaGrand

Imagine a King Lear that cut the character of the Fool, created a romance between Edgar and Cordelia, and featured a happy ending in which Lear and Cordelia both live. That was the most popular version of Shakespeare’s play for…

“Ambiguous and dangerous meat:” Herpetophagy in the early modern world
Newts
Shakespeare and Beyond

“Ambiguous and dangerous meat:” Herpetophagy in the early modern world

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Michael Walkden

Why was herpetophagy (eating reptiles and amphibians) linked with madness in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”? Unpack the cultural anxieties involved in early modern English encounters with unfamiliar dietary norms.

The madness of Hamlet and King Lear: When psychiatrists used Shakespeare to argue legal definitions of insanity in the courtroom
King Lear, III, 2. Johann Heinrich Ramberg. 19th century. Folger Shakespeare Library.
Shakespeare and Beyond

The madness of Hamlet and King Lear: When psychiatrists used Shakespeare to argue legal definitions of insanity in the courtroom

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Shakespeare & Beyond

King Lear, III, 2. Johann Heinrich Ramberg. 19th century. Folger Shakespeare Library. Well-known Shakespeare characters such as King Lear and Hamlet suffer (or appear to suffer) from madness — and early American psychiatrists took note. Observations drawn from literature began…

Drawing Shakespeare: King Lear
King Lear by Paul Glenshaw
Shakespeare and Beyond

Drawing Shakespeare: King Lear

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Paul Glenshaw

Artist Paul Glenshaw writes about drawing the bas-relief of King Lear by sculptor John Gregory on the front of the Folger Shakespeare Library building.

Excerpt: 'Year of the Mad King' by Antony Sher
Antony Sher
Shakespeare and Beyond

Excerpt: 'Year of the Mad King' by Antony Sher

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Shakespeare & Beyond

What’s it like to play the role of Lear onstage? In this excerpt from Year of the Mad King: The Lear Diaries, actor Antony Sher gives us a window into the rehearsal process for the Royal Shakespeare Company production of King…

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