| Act 4, scene 7, line 25-87 - Cordelia with Lear as he awakes (Arden edition) Act 5, scene 2, Edgar's "Away, old man, give me thy hand, away!" Act 5, scene 3, "No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison" Ian Holm ... Lear Victoria Hamilton ... Cordelia David Burke ... Kent Paul Rhys ... Edgar Timothy West ... Gloucester Holm has been acting professionally since joining the Royal Shakespeare Company as a spear-carrier in 1954. He was a young 66 when he filmed this "Lear". AC Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth: "...already recognized his injustice towards Cordelia, is secretly blaming himself, and is endeavouring to do better, the disposition from which his first error sprang is still unchanged. And it is precisely the disposition to give rise, in evil surroundings, to calamities dreadful but at the same time tragic, because due in some measure to the person who endures them. The perception of this connection, if it is not lost as the play advances, does not at all diminish our pity for Lear, but it makes it impossible for us permanently to regard the world displayed in this tragedy as subject to a mere arbitrary or malicious power. It makes us feel that this world is so far at least a rational and a moral order, that there holds in it the law, not of proportionate requital, but of strict connection between act and consequence. It is, so far, the world of all Shakespeare's tragedies. But there is another aspect of Lear's story ... |
