by Thomas G. Olsen
AuthorThomas G. Olsen
HardbackMarch 2025 • ISBN 9781644533567 • $130.00
PaperbackMarch 2025 • ISBN 9781644533550 • $34.95
* E-Book AvailableOrder Online
Lear’s Other Shadow: A Cultural History of Queen Lear offers a deep cultural analysis of the figure of Queen Lear, who shadows and eventually sometimes overshadows her royal husband across the nearly 1000-year life of this archetypal tale. What appears to be a deliberate strategy of suppression, even erasure in Shakespeare’s King Lear later inspired dozens of stage, page, and cinematic remakes and adaptations in which this figure is revived or remembered, often pointedly so. From Jacob Gordin’s Yiddish-language Miriele Efros (1898), through edgy stage remakes such as Gordon Bottomley’s King Lear’s Wife (1915) and the Women’s Theatre Group’s Lear’s Daughters (1987), to novelized retellings from Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991) to Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (2018) and J.R. Thorp’s Learwife (2021), and even the television series Empire (2015-2020) and Succession (2018-2023), Queen Lear regularly emerges from her shadowy origins to challenge how we understand the ancient King Leir/King Lear story. These and many other examples reveal fascinating patterns of adaptation and reinterpretation that Lear’s Other Shadow identifies and analyzes for the first time, showing how and why Queen Lear is at the center of this ancient story, whether she is heard from or not.
About the Author
Thomas G. Olsen is professor emeritus at the State University of New York, New Paltz, where he taught courses in Shakespeare, early modern English literature, and book history. He is editor of The Commonplace Book of Sir John Strangways (Arizona State/RETS, 2004) and Tales for Shakespeare: Stories that Inspired the Plays (Cambridge Scholars, 2019). His articles and reviews have appeared in SEL, Prose Studies, The Yale Library Gazette, The Huntington Library Quarterly, Shakespeare Yearbook, The Shakespeare Newsletter, Reformation, Annali d’Italianistica, The Sixteenth Century Journal, and elsewhere.
Reviews of Lear’s Other Shadow: A Cultural History of Queen Lear
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In this refreshing and well-researched book, Olsen shrewdly inverts the age-old question “why is Lear’s wife absent in King Lear?” More productively, he asks, “what does Lear’s wife’s absence do to King Lear?” Focusing on the erasure of the feminine and the maternal as a pivotal mythéme of the King Leir story, Olsen offers exciting insights into Shakespeare’s tragedy and a tour de force of historical overview from Geoffrey of Monmouth to early 20th century Yiddish theater to HBO’s Succession. [. . .] Both erudite and enjoyable, this book is a fun read for anyone interested in King Lear and its afterlives.
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- Zoltán Márkus, Associate Professor of English, Director of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vassar College
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While Shakespeare has little to say about King Lear’s wife and the mother of his children, Lear’s Queen appears throughout the play’s sources and afterlife. In this thorough survey, which stretches from the earliest British chronicles to HBO’s
Succession, Thomas Olsen traces the many ways that Lear’s queen has been represented, staged, and remembered. Olsen’s lively, readable volume shows how these productions and texts interrogate the masculine anxieties at the heart of Shakespeare’s
King Lear—as well as the lived realities of social inequality, environmental degradation, and globalization. Olsen’s sharp book documents the myriad ways that artists have imagined the contours of Lear’s marriage, helping us to better understand both Shakespeare’s greatest play and our own world.
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- James Newlin, Lecturer, Department of English, Case Western Reserve University
