The Voices of King Lear

A pre-show talk, with illustrative help from actors, ahead of the Jonathan Miller production of King Lear, part of the York International Shakespeare Festival

By the time he wrote King Lear Shakespeare had developed an unsurpassed mastery in the writing of stage dialogue. This talk will explore, with the help of performed excerpts from actors, the richness and variety of the performance possibilities of this extraordinary script.

Michael Cordner, Ken Dixon Professor of Drama and Head of Theatre in the Department of TFTV, University of York, is founding General Editor of Oxford University Press's Oxford English Drama and regularly directs productions of 17th-century plays on the main stage of York’s TFTV Department.