Adaptation and Protest: Postmodern Constructivism in Edward Bond’s Lear

This article considers Edward Bond’s Lear (1971) as an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s King Lear to investigate how Shakespearean tradition undergoes changes in Bond’ work. Since one of the aims of adaptors is to express discontent with the work they adapt, a part of adaptation studies can be concerned with the whyness and howness of making changes to the source text with the aim of imposing a certain philosophy. This approach can be applied to the investigation of the texts of both Bond and Shakespeare as each of them make significant changes to their available texts based on their unique concerns for the philosophy of human existence. This article, in addition to referring to the adaptive concerns and aesthetic qualities of Shakespeare’s King Lear, focuses on Bond’s Lear to discuss the adaptor’s protest against the handed-down Shakespearean tradition. To this end, postmodern approaches to adaptation studies as mentioned by Linda Hutcheon and Julie Sanders and Roland Barthes’ emphasis on naturalization as an ideological process are applied as theoretical framework of the study to emphasize the transition from essentialism to constructivism in Bond’s adaptation.