SOURCE: Viguers, Susan. “The Storm in King Lear.” CLA Journal 43, no. 3 (March 2000): 338-66.

In the following essay, Viguers theorizes how the storm scene in King Lear would have been staged during Shakespeare's time and maintains that many modern presentations ignore important staging clues in the text.

The past twenty years have made us acutely aware of written texts as problematic, a perception given even more obvious weight in regard to King Lear by the existence of two primary texts, the First Quarto and the First Folio, and the argument that they represent different playwright-created versions of the play. And, of course, once we look at the play not as literature but as theater, as this article is doing, its problematic status is compounded. Theatrical performance is less stable than literature or even another performance medium such as film. “When one puts on a play,” comments Peter Brook in...