Overview

Lear’s Other Shadow: A Cultural History of Queen Lear offers a deep cultural analysis of the figure of Queen Lear, who shadows and eventually sometimes overshadows her royal husband across the nearly one-thousand-year life of this archetypal tale. What appears to be a deliberate strategy of suppression, even erasure in Shakespeare’s King Lear later inspired dozens of stage, page, and cinematic remakes and adaptations in which this figure is revived or remembered, often pointedly so. From Jacob Gordin’s Yiddish-language Miriele Efros (1898), through edgy stage remakes such as Gordon Bottomley’s King Lear’s Wife (1915) and the Women’s Theatre Group’s Lear’s Daughters (1987), to novelized retellings from Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991) to Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (2018) and J. R. Thorp’s Learwife (2021), and even the television series Empire (2015–2020) and Succession (2018–2023), Queen Lear regularly emerges from her shadowy origins to challenge how we understand the ancient King Leir/King Lear story. These and many other examples reveal fascinating patterns of adaptation and reinterpretation that Lear's Other Shadow identifies and analyzes for the first time, showing how and why Queen Lear is at the center of this ancient story, whether she is heard from or not.

Full Product Details

Author:   Thomas G. Olsen
Publisher:   University of Delaware Press
Imprint:   University of Delaware Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.481kg
ISBN:  

9781644533567

ISBN 10:   1644533561
Pages:   260
Publication Date:   11 March 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments A Brief Note on Texts and Terminology Introduction    Toward a Cultural History of Queen Lear                               Chapter 1        The King Leir Legend Before Shakespeare                         Chapter 2        Queen Lear in King Lear                                                       Chapter 3        King Lear’s Other Shadow: Staging the Absent Queen       Chapter 4        Fire Us Forth on Fox TV: The Queen on Screen                 Chapter 5        Reviving Queen Lear in Modern Fiction                             Chapter 6        Conclusion: The Quality of Nothing                                     Appendix        Works Briefly Mentioned in Chapters 1-6                             Notes                                                                                                           Bibliography                                                             Acknowledgments xi A Brief Note on Texts and Terminology xiii Introduction: Toward a Cultural History of Queen Lear 1 1 The King Leir Legend before Shakespeare 25 2 Queen Lear in King Lear 35 3 King Lear’s Other Shadow: Staging the Absent Queen 51 4 Fire Us Forth on Fox TV: The Queen on Screen 89 5 Reviving Queen Lear in Modern Fiction 135 Conclusion: The Quality of Nothing 179 Appendix: Works Briefly Mentioned in Chapters 197 Notes 201 Bibliography 225 Index 237                                    

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Author Information

THOMAS G. OLSEN is a professor emeritus at the State University of New York, New Paltz, where he taught courses in Shakespeare, early modern English literature, and book history. He is editor of The Commonplace Book of Sir John Strangways (2004) and Tales for Shakespeare: Stories That Inspired the Plays (2019). His articles and reviews have appeared in SEL, Prose Studies, The Yale Library Gazette, The Huntington Library Quarterly, Shakespeare Yearbook, The Shakespeare Newsletter, Reformation, Annali d’Italianistica, The Sixteenth Century Journal, and elsewhere.

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