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.

Bill Moyers speaks with John Lithgow about playing King Lear, and the themes of old age, tyranny, forgiveness, madness, inequality and suffering.He reflects on why we are so drawn to the tale of this flawed, contradictory leader at this moment.

Family, Politics and the State. A look at Lear from a modern feminist point of view, opening up discussions in class about gender roles in Shakespeare’s text. Investigating the famous tragedy through different perspectives. This video juxtaposes the text as performed against specially written scenes to illustrate the issues of family from a character perspective. By focusing on the characters of Lear’s daughters, you can see how family politics...

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;...

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,...