When was King Lear written and first performed?
Shakespeare wrote King Lear in late 1605 or early 1606. The earliest known performance was on Saint Stephen's Day, the 26th of December 1606, before the court of King James I at Whitehall.
Questions about King Lear
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What are the main sources Shakespeare used for King Lear?
Shakespeare's most important source was the second edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, published in 1587. He also drew on the anonymous play King Leir, published in 1605, Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia for the Gloucester subplot, and Samuel Harsnett's 1603 Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures for Edgar's mad language.
Why did Nahum Tate rewrite King Lear and how long did his version last?
In 1681, Nahum Tate revised King Lear to align it with neoclassical standards and contemporary tastes, omitting the Fool, adding a happy ending in which Lear and Cordelia survive, and introducing a love story between Cordelia and Edgar. His version displaced Shakespeare's from the professional stage until 1838, when William Macready at Covent Garden performed the original text.
What are the differences between the Quarto and Folio texts of King Lear?
The 1608 Quarto contains 285 lines not found in the 1623 First Folio, while the Folio contains around 100 lines absent from the Quarto. At least a thousand individual words differ between the two texts, punctuation styles diverge throughout, and about half the verse lines in the Folio appear as prose or differently divided in the Quarto.
How is King Lear connected to The Beatles song I Am the Walrus?
John Lennon was working at Abbey Road Studios on "I Am the Walrus" on the evening of the 29th of September 1967, when a BBC Third Programme broadcast of King Lear was airing. He held a microphone to a radio and overdubbed fragments of Act IV, Scene 6 onto the recording, capturing the voices of Mark Dignam as Gloucester, Philip Guard as Edgar, and John Bryning as Oswald.
What is Akira Kurosawa's film Ran and how does it relate to King Lear?
Ran, released in 1985, is Kurosawa's adaptation of King Lear transposed to feudal Japan. It tells the story of Hidetora, a fictional 16th-century warlord who divides his kingdom among three sons. At the time of its release it was the most expensive Japanese film ever made, and Emi Wada's colour-coded costumes for each family's soldiers won an Academy Award.