King LearBroadview Press, 2010 M07 10 - 240 pages The text of the play included here, prepared by Craig Walker for The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, has been acclaimed for its outstanding introductory material and annotations, and for its inclusion of parellel text versions of key scenes for which the texts of the Quarto and the Folio versions of the play are substantially different. Also included in this edition are excerpts from a variety of literary source materials (including Geoffrey on Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, the anonymous True Chronicle Historie of King Leir, and Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures); material on the historical Annesley case that raised many of the same issues as does Shakespeare’s play; and the happy ending from Nahum Tate’s version of the play, which held the stage for 150 years after its first performance in 1681. |
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... stories; their innovative dramatic qualities; the characters that populate them (and the ways in which these characters are created); the issues and ideas the plays explore (and the ways in which they explore them)—all these have ...
... stories. Fundamental, psychologically sophisticated stories, about love, death, growing up, families, communities ... story may be knitted together at the end, the threads of idea and of emotion in Shakespeare's plays are never tied ...
... story of Lear had been around since at least the twelfth century, when it appeared in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1135–39), and had been retold in Holinshed's Chronicles (1577), in the multiple-authored The ...
... story to its original pattern. In the preface to his 1681 revision of King Lear, Tate explained some of his reasons for undertaking an alteration of Shakespeare's play, describing the original as a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht ...
... story, almost like a folktale. Once upon a time there was a foolish king, who decided to divide his kingdom into three parts, and give one part to each of his three daughters. At this level, as George Orwell observed, “Lear is one of ...