‘High-Engender'd Battles’: Gender and Power in ‘Queen Lear’

TLDR: For King Lear: Text and Performance as discussed by the authors, three teams of performers were commissioned, in collaboration with the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, to create over a two-day period their own variations on the Heath Scene in Lear.

Abstract: As a companion piece to the foregoing study of Ophelia and /, Hamlet , there follows a full appraisal of a project discussed in the previous issue (NTQ53) as part of our feature on the Open University/BBC experiments in ‘multimedia Shakespeare’. For King Lear: Text and Performance – one of the pilot CD-ROMS which were the end-products of the experiment – three teams of performers were commissioned, in collaboration with the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, to create over a two-day period their own variations on the Heath Scene in Lear . The most innovative of these, in Teresa Dobson's judgement, was conceived and directed by the Canadian performance artist and writer Beau Coleman, who envisioned a female Lear – a woman who, having found success in a male-dominated world, comes to confront the nature of that power in the process of relinquishing it. Teresa Dobson, who teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, witnessed and here records the development of the project, also assessing how far it succeeded in its intention to ‘raise questions about the gender and power relations in King Lear , as well as questions about what happens when Lear himself is cast against gender’.