PBS Masterpiece Theatre's Emmy-nominated HD presentation of The Royal Shakespeare Company's multi-award winning production of King Lear was reviewed as the greatest version in a generation. In this masterful, sympathetic rendition of the tragedy, Ian McKellen gives a powerful, once-in-a-lifetime performance as the aging monarch, driven mad by his paranoid family fantasies of the "monster ingratitude" of his daughters. The play's stage director, Trevor...

This Russian adaptation of King Lear, based on Boris Pasternak's translation, is considered one of the greatest of all filmed versions of Shakespeare. It was the final film of the renowned Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. The masterful black-and-white cinematography and the memorable score by Dmitri Shostakovich make the film all the more powerful.

In his personal view, Professor Frank Kermode suggests that "one purpose of tragedy may be to make us look steadily at things we prefer not to think about, death, of course, and the way the world works."

Shakespeare's tragic story of love, family feud, and double suicide is a masterwork woven with conflict, crisis, and counterstroke. In this program, prime scenes are dramatized and Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespearean experts Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood dissect them and their major topics and themes. Discussed are the play's popular appeal; the importance of the balcony scene as core to the work; how the lovers' youth plays with modern audiences;...

Without doubt the Lear of the century, this performance surpasses the skill of the critics to praise it; its all-star cast and crew have won every award that exists for performance and production. More important, the production makes a taut, compressed, and difficult play into a work that reaches out to modern audiences in its grip on the elemental human emotions-emotions common to ancient Celts and modern Americans, rowdy Elizabethan playgoers and...

It is perhaps the most famous love story in history, so famous that it needs no introduction. Even so, its tragic aspects are worth discussing. Although it shares many of the qualities of tragedy in the classical sense, it concerns a love that is doomed not for any fault in the hero or heroine but because their love is too good for their world. This play follows young drama students who prepare, perform, and share their thoughts on Act II, Scene 2,...

Journalist and novelist Bidisha was fascinated by Bronte's Jane Eyre as a teenager, but re-reading the story as an adult left her feeling uncomfortable. What Bronte had to say about sex and race was darker and more disturbing than she remembered. Revisiting this classic Victorian novel, Bidisha sees her role model, and the society which spawned her, through very different eyes. Is Jane Eyre really the spirited, independent woman Bidisha admired as...