The History of King Lear
The History of King Lear is an adaptation by Nahum Tate of William Shakespeare's "King Lear". It first appeared in 1681, some seventy-five years after Shakespeare's version, and is believed to have replaced Shakespeare's version on the English stage in whole or in part until 1838.
King Lear
The only two significant screen performances of Shakespeare's text date from the early 1970s: Grigori Kozintsev was working on his "Korol Lir" at the same time as Peter Brook was filming his "King Lear". Brook's film starkly divided the critics: Pauline Kael said "I didn't just dislike this production, I hated it!" and suggested the alternative title ""Night of the Living Dead"". Yet Robert Hatch in "The Nation" thought it as "excellent a filming of the play as one can expect" and Vincent Canby in The New York Times called it "an exalting "Lear", full of exquisite terror". The film drew heavily on the ideas of Jan Kott, in particular his observation that "King Lear" was the precursor of absurdist theatre: in particular, the film has parallels with Beckett's "Endgame". Critics who dislike the film particularly draw attention to its bleak nature from its opening: complaining that the world of the play does not deteriorate with Lear's suffering, but commences dark, colourless and wintry, leaving, according to Douglas Brode, "Lear, the land, and "us" with nowhere to go". Cruelty pervades the film, which does not distinguish between the violence of ostensibly good and evil characters, presenting both savagely. Paul Scofield, as Lear, eschews sentimentality: this demanding old man with a coterie of unruly knights provokes audience sympathy for the daughters in the early scenes, and his presentation explicitly rejects the tradition of playing Lear as "poor old white-haired patriarch".