Follow TV Tropes

Following

Context Trivia / KingLear

Go To

1!! The original play:
2* AccentDepundent: When Fool says "Sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace", this is a pun on how in 17th Century English "peace" sounded the same as "piss".
3* ActorInspiredHeroism: Edmund is said to be inherently evil because [[ValuesDissonance he's an illegitimate child]]. As he does get a brief bit of redemption towards the end, it's very easy to turn him into a full-blown AntiVillain without changing the text.
4* UnderageCasting: In the source material, Lear had ruled for sixty years before his abdication. It is not uncommon to see actor's under sixty play the role, such as Creator/ColmFeore, age 56, at the Stratford Festival in 2014.
5* WhatCouldHaveBeen:
6** 2009 saw two adaptations being planned - the first featuring Creator/AlPacino as Lear and the second Creator/AnthonyHopkins. The latter also slated Creator/GwynethPaltrow as Goneril, Creator/NaomiWatts as Regan and Creator/KeiraKnightley as Cordelia. Both were cancelled, and it was speculated that it was due to the recession. A screen adaptation featuring Anthony Hopkins was eventually released in 2018.
7** Music/GiuseppeVerdi, who composed successful operas based on three other Shakespeare plays, considered it his dream project to make an opera of ''King Lear'', and he developed the opera with several different writers over the course of his long life, but never actually wrote any music for it. Toward the end of his life, he confided to a younger composer that he was "afraid" to write the scene where Lear is alone on the heath.
8
9!!The 1971 Peter Brook adaptation:
10* DuelingWorks: With Grigori Kozintsev's adaptation in Soviet Russia.
11
12!!The 1983 TV Movie:
13* DisabledCharacterDisabledActor: Creator/LeoMcKern lost an eye during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, just as his character Gloucester gets his own eyes gouged out.
14* PlayingAgainstType: Creator/DianaRigg of course was famous for her role as glamorous PluckyGirl Emma Peel on ''Series/TheAvengers1960s''. Playing TheSociopath like Regan is different.
15* RealLifeRelative: Creator/LaurenceOlivier's brother-in-law David Plowright was the executive producer.
16* ThoseTwoActors: Esmond Knight, who played the Old Man, had appeared in all of Creator/LaurenceOlivier's other Shakespeare adaptations.
17* WhatCouldHaveBeen: Creator/FayeDunaway turned down the role of Regan in order to star in ''Film/TheWickedLady''.

Top