Shakespeare Magazine ~ A Review of A Midsummer Night's Dream

The following excerpt featured in this issue of Shakespeare is taken from The Shakespeare Book of Lists by Michael LoMonico (Shakespeare magazine editor).

Playing King Lear

Jan Kott says that King Lear can be compared to “Bach’s Mass in B Minor, to Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, to Wagner’s Parsifal, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, or Dante’s Purgatory and Inferno." Harold Bloom suggests that King Lear should only be read and not performed. “Our directors and actors are defeated by this play,” he says. “We ought to keep rereading King Lear and avoid its staged travesties.” Bloom notwithstanding, many of our greatest actors continue that long tradition of taking on the character that Shakespeare refers to as “every inch a king.”

Richard Burbage—1604
David Garrick—1772
Edwin Forrest—1826
William Charles Macready—1838
William Charles Macready—1851
Tommaso Salvini—1884
Henry Irving—1892
Robert Mantell—1911
John Gielgud—1940
Donald Wolfit—1943
Laurence Olivier—1946
William Devlin—1947
John Gielgud—1950
Michael Redgrave—1953
Orson Welles—1953
Charles Laughton—1959
Paul Scofield—1962
Frank Silvera—1962
Morris Carnovsky—1963
John Colicos—1964
Lee J. Cobb—1968
Eric Porter—1968
Michael Hordern—1969
Yuri Yarvet—1970
Timothy West—1971
James Earl Jones—1973
Tony Church—1974
Donald Sinden—1976
James Earl Jones—1977
Anthony Quayle—1978
Peter Ustinov—1979
Michael Gambon—1982
Michael Hordern—1982
Laurence Olivier—1983
Mike Kellan—1984
Anthony Hopkins—1987
Patrick McGee—1988
Michael Briers—1990
Ruth Maleczech—1990
Brian Cox—1990
Richard Briers—1990
Fritz Weaver—1990
John Wood—1990
Tom Wilkinson—1993
Ben Thomas—1994
F. Murray Abraham—1996
Kathryn Hunter—1997
Ian Holm—1997
Alan Howard—1997
Ted van Griethuysen—2000
Timothy West—2002

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