A Thousand Acres
A01=Thomas G. Olsen
Author_Thomas G. Olsen
Category=ATD
Category=ATFA
Category=ATJ
Category=DS
Category=DSBD
Category=DSG
Cultural history
dramaturgy
Empire
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
feminist Shakespeare
feminist theory
Gordon Bottomley
J. R. Thorp
Jane Smiley
King Lear
King Lear adaptations
King Lear's queen
King Lear's Wife
King Leir
King Leir's queen
Lear's Daughters
Learwife
Literary Studies
performance studies
Preti Taneja
Queen Lear
Renaissance literature
Renaissance studies
Shakespeare
Shakespeare and feminism
Shakespeare and film
Shakespeare and television
Shakespeare and the novel
Shakespeare studies
Shakespearean influence
Shakespearian adaptation
Succession
theatre and performance studies
theatre studies
We That Are Young
William Shakespeare
Women's Studies
Women's Theatre Group
Product details
- ISBN 9781644533567
- Weight: 481g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 11 Mar 2025
- Publisher: University of Delaware Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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 one-thousand-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.
THOMAS G. OLSEN is a 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 (2004) and Tales for Shakespeare: Stories That Inspired the Plays (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.
