TO COPE WITH SHAKESPEARE: EDWARD BOND’S LEAR

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Edward Bond is a major voice in contemporary political theatre. He has played a great role in shaping the landscape of British theatre. His career spans over sixty-five years and he has written more than fifty plays as well as poems, penned drama theory and drama notes. Lear (1971) is seen as one of Edward Bond’s most important plays by many critics. With Lear, which is the rewriting of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Edward Bond seems to express his hidden instinct to overcome Shakespeare and to make Lear mythology more useful for his age. In the play he questions the possibility of social change, explores oppressive systems of the contemporary world, discusses the social role of the artist and gives hope with optimism for salvation of the human being. The aim of this paper is to examine Edward Bond’s ambition of rewriting Shakespeare’s King Lear in order to reveal the political and social ills of contemporary societies, and to investigate his effort to cope with Shakespeare and to evaluate his criticism of Shakespeare in the play.

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Edward Bond , Lear , Shakespeare , King Lear

Celal Bayar University Journal Of Social Sciences

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Celal Bayar University Journal Of Social Sciences