Lear's Daughters

Lear’s Daughters was certainly one of the most interesting plays I’ve seen. It was a little too “out-there” for me, but I could definitely appreciate the vision that the playwright had when it was originally written. I feel like this is something that would have been better directed as a traditional play, in the same vein as the rest of Shakespeare’s works, but that could be my own personal taste. For me, the play was overly morbid and dramatic, and at parts seemed to come off as a stereotype of bad theater. The actors did a fine job; the problem seemed to lie in the material.
Despite the problems I had with the play, I thought it was very interesting how Elain Finestein and the Women’s Theatre Group were able to create an extensive feminist play based off something written hundreds of years ago, and make it relevant in the modern world. Lear’s Daughters offered further hypothetical insight into characters that have been analyzed by Shakespearean scholars for centuries.

Having seen the play before reading King Lear, it was a little difficult to follow the plot, but now that we’re treating the original King Lear in class, things are starting to come together. It’s interesting to have the hypothetical background of Lear’s daughters in mind as we go through it; Cordelia’s actions make more sense with an actual sense of her relationship with her father as a child, and Goneril and Regan’s quickness to lie and cheat their father is given a possible explanation as well.

We see more competition between the sisters, and although the characterizations applied to them in Lear’s Daughters seems to be completely made up, it’s interesting to see them as more typified characters. Cordelia, for example, is shown to be a dancer, and Regan as a painter. It doesn’t add much to the plot, but it helps to visualize the characters as more than vengeful princesses.

One of the reasons Shakespeare is still read so much and analyzed by scholars throughout the world is because the characters are designed to have unexplored depth to them. The plays generally aren’t extensive enough to give a full background of the characters, aside from perhaps the tetralogy, so most of the analysis we make of the characters are from the limited material we are given, and lots of assumption; writing a prequel to a famous piece of literature would not work unless this were the case. The extensive exposition that they added to the characters certainly doesn’t rewrite King Lear, and it will obviously not be considered canonical with how radically different the play is performed when compared to Shakespeare’s typical work. However, the play gives some interesting insight into the characters, and some points to think about while reading the original King Lear.