New Paltz Shakespeare

YouTube - Shakespeare "King Lear"- Laurence Olivier: end of play

The clip I chose is Act 5, scene three, of Michael Elliot’s King Lear released in 1983 staring Laurence Oliver as King Lear. The clip contains the entire scene, but what I am interested in is the last three minutes of the play with Lear speaking to his dead daughter hoping she still is alive followed by his death. I feel Oliver’s performance of crying while speaking his lines and holding Cordelia’s dead body makes the scene more authentic. It shows how much Lear really did love Cordelia and suggests that Lear now realizes he made a mistake when he disowned her earlier in the play. I chose this clip for two reasons. First reason is I simply wanted to see how Lear’s death was staged since he seems to die out of nowhere in the text. Viewing his death on screen opposed to reading a stage direction he dies completely changes the emotions and feelings of the scene for me. While reading it I found it kind of comical that the play simply stated he dies. While watching the scene I felt the emotions Shakespeare probably intended us to feel; sadness, remorse, and even sympathy for Lear. The second reason I chose this clip is because in class we discussed nihilism in the play and debated whether the ending of the play gives viewers any hope for humanity or not. Similar to Shakespeare’s text, this version’s ending also lacks a definitive answer to the question of doom or hope.

The question I would like to get opinions on is:
“Does the ending of Elliot’s version of Lear leave viewers with the sense of doom or a sense of hope for the future of England?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_GXJ3zvr18