King Lear: text, performance, and adaptation

Abstract

This article examines how King Lear acquires meaning on stage and screen through adaptive practices that go beyond the Shakespeare text. Bakhtin’s (1981) notions of heteroglossia and dialogism provide us with a useful framework to understand the dialogic interplay of various texts, languages, and discourses through which King Lear is reinvented in different contexts and media. Looking at the play from a dialogic angle widens the scope of a text-centred view of Shakespeare that positions the text both as a stable artefact and the primary source of meaning in productions and adaptations of Shakespeare’s works. We shall see how Lear was reimagined distinctively through associations with modern theatre in a stage production and a film adaptation of the play.