• Written around 1605-6 when James I of England (James VI of Scotland who became King of England and Wales in 1603) was trying to foster a sense of a united kingdom.
• Performed in 1606 at Whitehall Palace, in front of the King on 26 December, that is, St Stephen’s or Boxing Day, a day when it was traditional to give money to the poor.  
• At this time Shakespeare’s company usually performed at the Globe Playhouse, south of the River Thames.
• Shakespeare, generally, did not put effort into getting his plays published; he earned more money from people paying to see his plays performed in the playhouse that he did if they bought a copy of the play to read. However, a single play edition, the Quarto text, The History of King Lear, was published in Shakespeare’s lifetime in 1608. In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616, the Folio of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies was published. The Folio text of The Tragedy of King Lear differs from the Quarto in several important respects, and may be revised, possibly by Shakespeare himself. Most modern editions present a composite of the Quarto and Folio texts.

• All roles in Shakespeare’s day were played by men and boys. After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, women began playing the female roles. In 1997 Kathryn Hunter became the first woman to play Lear on a professional British stage. Hunter was directed by Helena Kaut-Howson, at the Leicester Haymarket, and she reprised the role, again directed by Kaut-Howson, at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2022.

• The Dover Cliffs scene between Gloucester and Edgar-as- Poor-Tom is a challenge to perform. In part this is because the sequence poses searching questions about the ethics of theatre-making, acting and performance.
• Edgar attempts to play therapist to his blind, despairing father, Gloucester; he stages a fake scenario in which Gloucester believes he has chosen to end his life but is miraculously saved.
• The Quarto stage direction indicating that when Gloucester chooses to die he ‘falls’ is particularly hard to stage; this sequence can appear comic, absurd, surreal, implausible.
• Edgar’s ‘therapy’ does not work; later, in 5.2, Edgar finds Gloucester ‘in ill thoughts again’. Edgar’s treatment is unconventional for 1605 and appalling from a 21^st century perspective on mental health.

Watch two filmed performances of King Lear and ask:

• How does Gloucester fall? Is it comic? Tragic? Absurd? Is it plausible that Gloucester might believe that he has fallen?
• Do the audience become Edgar’s allies in his ‘treatment’ of Gloucester?
• How do costume, setting and music affect how you feel about the stories of Lear and his daughters, and Gloucester and his sons? How might the decision to use modern dress affect the meanings the play can generate?
• How is nature – in the form of the storm, the cliffs, the wild places – evoked? How do these staged natural spaces contrast or connect with locations that are set inside?  
• How does Lear’s demand that his daughter make public declarations of their love for him, sometimes called ‘the love test’, resonate with constructed reality television today?

• King Lear has been popular on the stage for five hundred years but the play’s bleakness has made it particularly popular since World War 2.
• It has been set in Jacobean times, in modern dress, in Ancient Britain in a pre-Christian English culture (sometimes associated with Stonehenge). It has been adapted many times and the first adaptation, by Nahum Tate, in 1681, gave the play a happy ending in which Cordelia marries Edgar.
• During the early nineteenth century, when the reigning monarch, George III experienced bouts of madness, King Lear was not performed. This is also the period when critics like Charles Lamb suggested the play was inevitably bathetic in the theatre and that reading it was preferable to seeing it performed.
• Since the rise of second wave feminism, more questions have been asked about the mother of Lear’s three daughters and why she is absent from the play.
• The play’s interest in land, dispossession and disenfranchisement has enabled it to speak to some First Nations contexts and experiences.

Christie Carson discusses the two texts of King Lear in ‘The Quarto of King Lear - representing the early stage history of the play?’ https://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/lear.html

Nigel Hawthorne insightfully discusses playing Lear in a production that he felt went astray in Players of Shakespeare 5, ed. Robert Smallwood, Cambridge University Press, 2003: 179-191.

Anthony Sher, who later in his career played Lear, discusses performing the role of the Fool in Players of Shakespeare 2: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company ed. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood, Cambridge University Press, 1989: 151-166

RSC productions are showcased at https://www.rsc.org.uk/king-lear/past-productions

Simon Russell Beale talks about playing Lear at the National Theatre at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgXM0b6PaHw

For Further Reading see

Dennis Kennedy, ‘King Lear and the Theatre’. Educational Theatre Journal Vol.28 no.1 (1976): 35-44.

This 50 year old essay explores Lear and adaptation, both Shakespeare’s adaptation of the play King Leir and subsequent theatrical productions that radically adapt the play. The latter include Nahum Tate’s ‘happy’ adaptation and Peter Brook’s nihilistic production/adaptation.

Leah Marcus, ‘Retrospective: King Lear on St Stephen’s Night, 1606’, in Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents,  Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988: 148-159.

S.C. Estok, ‘Dramatizing Environmental Fear: King Lear’s Unpredictable Natural Spaces and Domestic Places’, Chapter 2 in Ecocriticism and Shakespeare. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2011.

For Further Watching see

Akiro Kurosawa’s 1985 film Ran, a particularly stunning cultural and historical transposition of the play.

Important questions about Lear’s family are posed in the novel A Thousand Acres and the 1997 film adaptation.