Edward Bond's Lear vs. Shakespeare's King Lear Adapting Lear for modern audiences:

Edward Bond's Lear vs. Shakespeare's King Lear

Shakespeare's King Lear is considered one of the greatest tragedies of human literature, as it grapples with the question of the nature of humanity, human goodness, and the purpose of life. Lear is envisioned as an existentialist hero in some modern adaptations of the play, although for many years the mad king and his faithful fool and youngest daughter were sentimentalized in more conventional representations of the tragedy. For example, a 1681 production of the actor and author Nahum Tate "cuts out the Fool, gives the play a happy ending, and rewrites and replaces much of the original text.[footnoteRef:1]" Because Lear was not a sufficiently optimistic play in which the good were rewarded and the wicked were punished, Tate wrote that Shakespeare's play seemed to him "a heap of jewels unstrung and unpolished, yet so dazzling in their disorder that I soon perceived I had seized a treasure."[footnoteRef:2] In fact, very few authentic versions of Lear were actually staged and the cultural imagination of Lear as a fairy tale of a good princess and her wicked older sisters became an embedded part of the cultural consciousness. "Even at a time when Shakespeare was entering the canon in the eighteenth century and Shakespeare editing was putting a premium on textual fidelity to the original text(s), theatrical Cordelias still managed to survive to the end."[footnoteRef:3] [1: James Robert Wood, review of Adapting King Lear for the Stage, by Lynne Bradley, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). Early Modern Studies...

He was not the first man of the theater to think this during the 1960s and the 1970s, of course. The director Peter Brook, who criticized so much of the theater of his contemporaries as 'deadly theater' and irrelevant, produced an acclaimed version of Lear with Paul Scofield. "Brook considered King Lear not only Shakespeare's greatest work, but a play very much in the vein of the Absurdist drama of Ionesco and Beckett, a work in which the blindness of mankind was thrillingly dramatized. His theatrical production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962, with Paul Scofield, had brilliantly visualized this universal, tragic reality.[footnoteRef:4]" Brook's version was heavily influenced by Beckett and many aspects of the staging recalled Waiting for Godot. "The world of this Lear, like Beckett's, is in a constant state of decomposition. Sets made of rusting metal, tattered, worn-out looking costumes (even for court personalities), beat-up furniture all gave the production a haggard, haunted look. The decay of vision, of tradition, and finally the end of all certainty was made frighteningly material in this understanding of Lear."[footnoteRef:5] [4: Kevin Hagopian, "King Lear: Writer's Notes," New York State Writer's Institute, http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/filmnotes/fns98n11.html] [5: Ibid.]
However, for Edward Bond, even Brook's vision…