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Passionate, comic, urgent, contrary, generous: the chorus of voices in this issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review demonstrates the fantastic complexity to be found in King Lear, the play that completes our season of Shakespeare in the Beaumont Theater.
As the multifaceted writer Michael Ignatieff says in his opening essay, Asking what King Lear is about is like asking what life is about. In this case, novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Strand confide how life is about the contract of love between parents and children that is expressed or censored, or, as poet Honor Moore describes in her tender tribute to her father, revealed at the last possible minute. For Ignatieff and novelist Jane Smiley, life is about duty, shifting alliances and the crushing intimacy of family. Expanding on these
explorations of order and disorder, Lears accomplished director Jonathan Miller articulates the larger metaphor of the play as exemplifying the danger of the collapse of monarchical authority. And who risks challenging the king but the fool, unmasked here by Beatrice Otto
as a chinwagger cloaking veracity in bebop and rhyme. We have our mischief-makers as wellcartoonist Jules Feiffer and lawyer Donald Carroll, who dare to tweak Shakespeares play.
Finally, Freuds fascinating essay proposes that the story of King Lear is an allegory for mans need to embrace his own eventual death. This last concept resonated with us especially, since as we were going to press we were shocked by the sudden death of the brilliantly witty John Gregory Dunne. He was a wonderful writer and friend and will be sorely missed. Looking to the future, with this issue we welcome our new editor, the novelist and librettist Deborah Artman.
The Editors
C O V E R P H O T O G R A P H E R
J U L I A M A R G A R E T C A M E R O N
Julia Margaret Cameron was forty-eight years old when she received her first camera as a gift from her daughter and son-in-law in an attempt to assuage her loneliness and depression. It was 1863. She was living in Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight, her six children grown and far from home, her husband off in Ceylon looking after his coffee plantations.
Cameron, a generous, impulsive, enthus-iastic woman who defied the conventions of her time, took to photography with intense passion. Converting her coal house into a darkroom, she embarked on a quest to not only capture the likenesses of her subjects but also record the greatness of their inner spirits.
Drawn to genius and beauty, she persuaded friends, family, parlor maids and local passersby to model for portraits and
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costume tableaux. Through her neighbor, the poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, and her sister, Sarah Prinsep, Cameron encountered many of the leading poets, writers, artists, statesmen and scientists of her day. Luminaries such as Robert Browning, Henry Longfellow, Charles Darwin and Anthony Trollope sat for her. The scientist Sir John Herschel (page 4) was a beloved friend and early supporter of Camerons work. In the cover photograph, her husband, Charles Hay Cameron, posed as Lear, and, on the far right, Alice Liddell, made famous as the Alice of Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland, played Cordelia.
Camerons powerful, psychological photographs, once the subject of heated debate and controversy, are now recognized as being decades ahead of their time. She died in 1879.
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