

King Lear
Author: William Shakespeare, Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Narrator: a full cast
Unabridged: 2 hr 44 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download (DRM Protected)
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 04/29/2014
Author: William Shakespeare, Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Narrator: a full cast
Unabridged: 2 hr 44 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download (DRM Protected)
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 04/29/2014
William Shakespeare was born to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden in late April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. He wrote about 38 plays (the precise number is uncertain), many of which are regarded as the most exceptional works of drama ever produced, including Romeo and Juliet (1595), Henry V (1599), Hamlet (1601), Othello (1604), King Lear (1606) and Macbeth (1606), as well as a collection of 154 sonnets, which number among the most profound and influential love poetry in English. Shakespeare died in Stratford in 1616.
Established in 1935, the Tony Award–winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival offers an eight-month season with a wide-ranging playbill of eleven productions, including Shakespeare, American classics, musicals, contemporary works, and world premieres. Plays originating at OSF have gone on to be produced by many regional theaters, and its productions have been recognized and honored nationally. In 2011, the Blackstone Audio and Oregon Shakespeare Festival collaboration of Hamlet was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.
Bill Rauch became OSF’s fifth artistic director in 2007, after several seasons at the Festival as a guest director. In a total of fourteen seasons there, he has directed five world premieres and sixteen other plays.
I've read Lear many times, and, although I didn't learn much about the play this reading, I did learn a little about myself. I have always loved the play, but in the past I found its injustice and evil nigh overpowering, its victims pathetically guiltless, its perspective verging on the nihilistic.......more
Hot Shakespeare Summer continues with this tale of a King that should have internalized the phrase “flattery gets you nowhere.” Flattery gets you a pile of dead bodies and a collapsed kingdom now, Pops, but hey I guess thats why they call these “tragedies.” Brush the bodies aside for a moment becaus......more
King Lear can be read in various ways - as a theological drama, as a philosophical one, as a supreme example of Shakespeare's intuitive egalitarianism or even as a melodrama lifted towards tragedy only by its superb poetry. It is the most titanic of Shakespeare's tragedy.......more
"How sharper than a serpent's ( snake's ) tooth it is to have a thankless child"...Good King Lear, feared in his younger days, has two, in pagan Britain, the inhabitants worship the numerous gods, there, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, the ancient ruler, in his eighties, can no longer......more
“By sticking to their American accents and vocal rhythms, Michael Winters (King Lear) and the entire Oregon Shakespeare Festival cast bring emotional freshness, ease, and clarity to the dense and heightened language and classic characters of this cornerstone of world literature. Well-mixed transitions, percussive music, and intense and convincing sword and battle sound effects add layers to the production, making it sound more film-like than stage-like…A solid and well-spoken interpretation of a time-honored classic.” AudioFile