Accent Depundent: 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".
Underage Casting: 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 Colm Feore, age 56, at the Stratford Festival in 2014.
2009 saw two adaptations being planned - the first featuring Al Pacino as Lear and the second Anthony Hopkins. The latter also slated Gwyneth Paltrow as Goneril, Naomi Watts as Regan and Keira Knightley 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.
Giuseppe Verdi, 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.
The 1971 Peter Brook adaptation:
Dueling Works: With Grigori Kozintsev's adaptation in Soviet Russia.
