Lear's Daughters, Adaptation, and the Calculation of Worth

Abstract

By rewriting King Lear in 1987, the Women's Theatre Group (WTG) challenged the ideology of the New Right in Britain, which was characterized by an appeal to an allegedly idyllic past and the promotion of free market economics, individualism, and patriarchialism. The WTG contested the dominant political climate of the 1980s by being committed to feminist theater and composing collectively Lear's Daughters, a prequel to Shakespeare's tragedy. Valuing feminist collaboration like that done by the WTG is key to understanding the play, the WTG, and the concept of adaptation, in particular its relationship to the prequel. As it illustrates the characteristics of adaptation, the WTG's prequel opposes two conservative measures of worth: fidelity criticism, which values source over adaptation, and the commodification of women and their creative endeavors being championed by the New Right in the 1980s. Through an unflattering portrayal of Shakespeare's monarch, Lear's Daughters exposes the devastating consequences of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's calculation of human worth. Ultimately, in both form and content Lear's Daughters objects to Thatcherism and illustrates the difficulty women and artists experienced when attempting to escape this ideology.