Word: lear
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...deep sexual struggle for domination-malignly and methodically drives him insane. Her final ruse is to obsess him with the idea that he is not the father of their child. Strindberg is himself obsessed here, seeing all villainy in the world's wives, as the mad Lear saw it in the world's daughters. But if an unbalanced man, Strindberg was a far from impotent artist: he punctuated the play with flashes of insight and jabs of feeling...
...Hollywood character actor (A Tale of Two Cities, The Life of Louis Pasteur) ; of a heart ailment; in Santa Monica, Calif. In a long career (beginning in 1905) of cross-country barnstorming as actor-producer, Leiber became one of Shakespeare's chief interpreters (everything from Romeo to Lear) for two generations of smalltown Americans...
From 1681 to 1840-while Shakespeare spun in his grave-London theatergoers saw, and enjoyed, King Lear with a happy ending. In a version by Poet Laureate Nahum Tate, which used most of Shakespeare's plot and many of his lines, it was played by such theatrical greats as David Garrick and Edmund Kean, and applauded by Dr. Samuel Johnson. Even Charles Lamb, who disliked the happy-ending version, conceded that it had a certain stageworthiness when he wrote: "Tate has put his hook in ... this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers ... to draw it about more easily...
Theater, the old hook was sharpened for the first time in a century. With an apologetic epilogue to appease a generation of Bardolators, the Oxford University Players took a chance on Tate's happy Lear. Instead of a cruel death by hanging, Heroine Cordelia eventually got her man (Edgar) and a fatherly blessing from a mentally restored Lear. Risking all, the Oxford undergraduates even wore the ruffled costumes of Garrick's day, which gave their stage movements a look of mincing foppishness...
...pasting classical labels on contemporary commerce, the Shakespeare Hotel shoots the works: the management has named its bedrooms "Romeo and Juliet," "The Taming of the Shrew," its bathrooms "The Tempest," "King Lear," the bridal suite "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the dining room "As You Like It," and the bar "Measure for Measure." As the largest hotel in town, the Shakespeare entertains enough Americans to have become one of the few English hostelries where guests can get tomato juice for breakfast, and ice in their highballs...