Turgenev’s appropriation of King Lear: A case of medieval transmission and adaptation

This paper tries to provide a thorough analysis of Ivan Turgenev’s appropriation of King Lear, the Shakespearean tragedy, as it appears in the novella King Lear of the Steppes (1870), from the perspective of translation and adaptation studies, and how this was adapted to 19th - century Russia. This analysis highlights the role of cross-cultural relations and its influence on the evolution of target literatures. The comparison with Shakespeare’s source text shows evident similarities but also differences, all of which raise multiple questions from the perspective of philosophy, history and ideology, among others. In fact, the interpretation of Shakespeare’s work, in Turgenev’s work and in the Russian literature as a whole, has become essential to understand the intellectual development of this country since the 19th century, as well as the rise of some debates about the Russian cultural identity, which still continue today. By focusing on Turgenev’s novella King Lear of the Steppes, the relevance of processes such as appropriation and adaptation for the development of national literatures will be underscored and how these foster debate and discussion within cultural systems. And, in order to illustrate this, it will also be highlighted that Shakespeare’s King Lear was in fact based upon several previous medieval sources and suffered multiple changes and adaptations over the centuries, which proves that knowledge transforms and adapts to the literary, cultural and ideological features of each period of time and society

Designing King Lear: How Costume Design for a Theatrical Production is Affected by a Transition to Film

Designing King Lear: How Costume Design for a Theatrical Production is Affected by a Transition to Film Jacob Steven Currence William Shakespeare’s King Lear was written in 1606, and it recounts the folktale of a king losing his power and sanity. Several hundred years later, in 2022, West Virginia Public Broadcasting aired the West Virginia University School of Theatre & Dance production of King Lear. As costume designer for the play, it was my task to depict King Lear’s decline through his wardrobe. My costume work needed to reflect his descent into madness and ultimate loss of power. Moreover, this production of King Lear was gender-swapped, meaning that Lear, Kent, and Gloucester were portrayed as women. This allowed for a unique design approach, in which I sought to display these characters’ power and eventual loss and/or gain of it through the use of female garb and costume. These characters’ costumes also had to reflect the power dynamics between parents and children. Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, Edmund, and Edgar’s wardrobe all symbolized their standing with their respective parents and in society. I first provide an analysis of the play itself. Next, I discuss the inspiration, research, and design process for the costumes. Finally, I outline in detail the development and execution of building and utilizing the designs for the production. Though the challenges associated with this environment were never-ending, the final product’s broadcasting proves the strength and survival of theatre arts in numerous forms

Shakespeare and National Mythologizing in Czech Nineteenth Century Drama

The paper will discuss the ways in which Shakespeare’s tragedies (King Lear) and histories (1 and 2 Henry IV), translated in the period of the Czech cultural renaissance (known also as the Czech National Revival) at the end of the 18th and in the first half of the 19th century, challenge and transform the nationalist concept of history based on “primordialism” (Anthony Smith), deriving from an invented account of remote past (the forged Manuscripts of Dvur Kralove and Zelena Hora) and emphasizing its absolute value for the present and future of the Czech nation. While for nationalist leaders Shakespeare’s dramas served as models for “boldly painted heroic characters” of the Czech past, translators, dramatists and poets had to deal with the aspects of Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories which were disrupting the nationalist visions of the past and future. Contrasting the appropriations of King Lear and both parts of Henry IV in the translations and historical plays by the leading Czech dramatist Josef Kajetán Tyl (1808-1852) and the notebooks and dramatic fragments of the major romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha (1810-1836), the paper will attempt to specify the role of Shakespeare in shaping the historical consciousness of emerging modern Czech culture

King Arthur in the Marketplace, King Arthur in the Myth

Recounts and criticizes various contemporary examples of the use of the Arthurian mythos for commercial or political purposes. Applauds the rehabilitation of the myths by Stephen Lawhead

The “Anarchy” of King Arthur’s Beginnings: The Politics that Created the Arthurian Tradition

“The ‘Anarchy’ of King Arthur’s Beginnings: The Politics that Created the Arthurian Tradition” examines Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae in a political and historical context to illuminate the 12th-century politics that started the Arthurian tradition and show how those politics influenced later works about the legendary king. Based on literary and historical research, this paper covers the transmission of politics in the Historia in three sections: a summary of the politics during the time Geoffrey wrote the Historia, an examination of the way those politics were integrated into the Historia, and finally a consideration of how the political themes of the chronicle have been transformed and changed through adaptation. This paper sets out to show the influence the Historia’s politics had on the King Arthur tradition and to argue that some features of those politics remain within the Arthurian literary tradition

Cordelia.’s Portrait in the Context of King Lear’s Individuation

This analysis attempts to show the relations between the individual psyche and the contents of the collective unconscious. Following Von Franz.’s analytical technique, the tragic action in King Lear will be read as an individuation process that will rescue archetypal contents and solve existential paradoxes that cause an imbalance between the ego and the self, leading to self-destruction. Once communication is eased and balance is restored, the transformation-seeking process that engaged the design of the play itself becomes resolved, and events can be led to a conventional tragic resolution. Jungian analysis will therefore provide a critical framework to unveil the subconscious contents that tear the character of the king between annihilation and survival, the anima complex that affects the king, responding thus for the action of the play and its centuries-old success. Este análisis pretende sacar a la luz las relaciones entre la psyche individual y los contenidos del inconsciente colectivo. Siguiendo la técnica analítica de Von Franz, la acción trágica de King Lear será entendida a través del proceso de individuación que revierte sobre los contenidos arquetípicos y resuelve las paradojas existenciales que causan el desequilibrio entre ego y self. Una vez que la comunicación es facilitada y el equilibrio psíquico recuperado, el proceso transformativo que afecta la génesis de la trama se resuelve y el argumento alcanza una resolución convencional. El análisis junguiano ofrece el soporte crítico necesario para desvelar los contenidos del inconsciente que escinde el personaje central del monarca entre la supervivencia y la aniquilación. El complejo de ánima que afecta al rey responde de esta manera por la complejidad de la acción dramática y el éxito que ha hecho que esta obra perdure a través de los siglos

Foucault and Shakespeare : ceremony, theatre, politics

Foucault only refers to Shakespeare in a few places in his work. He is intrigued by the figures of madness that appear in King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth. He occasionally notes the overthrow of one monarch by another, such as in Richard II or Richard III, arguing that “a part of Shakespeare's historical drama really is the drama of the coup d’État.” For Foucault, the first are illustrations of the conflict between the individual and the mechanisms of discipline. The second are, however, less interesting than moments when the sovereign is replaced, not with another sovereign, but with a different, more anonymous, form of power. Yet, in his 1976 Collège de France course, Society Must Be Defended, where he treats the theme at most length, he intriguingly suggests that Shakespearean historical tragedy is “at least in terms of one of its axes, a sort of ceremony, or a rememorialization of the problems of public right.” Foucault was long fascinated by the theatre, and especially its relation to political ceremony. Drawing especially on his 1972 lectures in Paris and a related presentation in Minnesota, this paper asks how we might understand the relation between ceremony, theatre, and politics in Foucault and Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare's plays, both histories and tragedies, thus demonstrate the importance of ritual and ceremony, a political theatre. Examining the disrupted ceremony of King Lear, the repeated ceremony of King John, the denial of ritual in Coriolanus, and the parody of the ceremonial in Henry IV, Part One opens up a range of historical, theoretical, and political questions

Transtextuality, (Re)sources and Transmission of the Celtic Culture Through the Shakespearean Repertory

This dissertation explores the resurgence of motifs related to Celtic cultures in Shakespeare’s plays, that is to say the way the pre-Christian and pre-Roman cultures of the British Isles permeate the dramatic works of William Shakespeare. Such motifs do not always evidently appear on the surface of the text. They sometimes do, but most often, they require a thorough in depth exploration. This issue has thus far remained relatively unexplored; in this sense we can talk of a ‘construction’ of meaning. However, the cultures in question belong to an Ancient time, therefore, we may accept the idea of a ‘reconstruction’ of a forgotten past. Providing a rigorous definition of the term ‘Celtic’ this study offers to examine in detail the presence of motifs, first in the Chronicles that Shakespeare could have access to, and takes into account the notions of orality and discourse, inherent to the study of a primarily oral culture. The figure of King Arthur and the matter of Britain, seen as the entrance doors to the subject, are studied in relation to the plays, and in the Histories, the analysis of characters from the ‘margins’, i.e. Wales, Ireland and Scotland provides an Early Modern vision of ‘borderers’. Only two plays from the Shakespearean corpus are set in a Celtic historical context – Cymbeline and King Lear – but motifs surge in numerous other works, such as Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale and others. This research reveals a substrate that produces a new enriching reading of the play

“The wonder is, he hath endured so long”: King Lear and the Erosion of the Brutan Histories

Using the plays Leir and Shakespeare’s King Lear as case studies, this article argues that the early modern performance of pre-Roman Britain should be understood as emerging from a 500-year tradition in which the British, or more properly the English and Welsh, believed themselves descended from the Trojan exile Brute. Although originating in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1135), the traditional term for this account, “Galfridian”, neglects the centuries of cultural transmission through which these narratives became embedded as the authoritative version of British origins. Therefore, I propose the term “Brutan histories” in order to de-centre Geoffrey’s authorship. Brutan pageants and plays can be dated to the fifteenth century. However, by the late Elizabethan era many playgoers may have experienced a sense of dissonance as historiographers’ discovery of the histories’ fictional origins worked outwards into popular consciousness. The Jacobean moment saw renewed focus on Brutan tropes due to their rhetorical value for James VI and I’s project to unite England and Scotland. However, Leir and King Lear’s dissonant approaches to temporality, anachronism and negation may have triggered a disturbing sense of the Brutan histories’ collapse as lived history even as they were utilised in the name of British unity