National Review, March 9th, 1984
King Lear
HARLEY GRANVILLE-BARKER remarks that King Lear doesn't ask our sympathy on easy terms. Lear is an impossible old man, imperious, arbitrary, violent. But even at his worst he has admirable grandeur, and Shakespeare, with wondrous subtlety, surrounds him with a set of lovable characters--Cordelia, Kent, Gloucester, the Fool, the nameless Knight--whose devotion to the old king engages our hearts for him before we see his desert.
Laurence Olivier, who is not without his own subtlety, makes it too easy. He makes his first entrance with his arm wrapped affectionately around Cordelia; h...
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