8 May: King Lear

William Shakespeare’s King Lear was published on this date in 1605. 10 things you might not know about it:

1. It’s based on an old story about a legendary British king who was called Leir or Lyr and is said to have lived around the 8th century BC. Shakespeare wasn’t the first to adapt the tale. There had already been many re-tellings, including an anonymous 16th-century play called The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three Daughters.
2. The Bard was also influenced by Edmund Spenser's poem The Faerie Queene and Sir Philip Sidney's prose work Arcadia, in which a fallen king is blinded by his illegitimate son.
3. The story is about an ageing king who decides to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. He asks them each how much they love him. Two of them, Goneril and Regan, don’t love their father much at all, but say they do so they can get their hands on the land. The youngest daughter, Cordelia, loves her father very much but says she can’t put into words how much. Lear misinterprets this and banishes her, dividing the kingdom between the other two. He soon finds out how wrong he was, and ends up being deposed by them and banished himself, along with his fool. He is reunited with Cordelia, but slowly goes mad. It’s not a happy ending. Cordelia doesn’t get to be queen, but is executed instead.
4. The play's first recorded performance took place at Whitehall on St Stephen's Day (December 26) in 1606.
5. There were people even in those days re-writing literature to make it more palatable to “modern” audiences. The English Poet Laureate in 1692, one Nahum Tate, decided to do that to some of Shakespeare’s plays, before he got the Poet Laureate gig. In 1681 he wrote a version of King Lear in which Cordelia survives, is betrothed to Edgar, and is named queen.
6. The play was banned entirely during the reign of George III because King Lear’s descent into madness mirrored what was happening to the real king too closely. All performances of King Lear were banned 1810 and 1820.
7. There are more references to animals and nature in King Lear than in any other Shakespeare play. Scholars have even counted references to "nature," "natural," "disnatured," and "unnatural”. They were mentioned 40 times. Characters are compared to animals frequently. Goneril and Regan are often compared to Wolves, Snakes, and Vultures, whereas the Fool likens Lear to “the hedge-Sparrow fed the Cuckoo so long/That it's had its head bit off by its young.”
8. This play is also one of just two of Shakespeare’s plays to mention Football (the other being Comedy of Errors). Kent insults Goneril's servant, Oswald by calling him 'Thou base football player.'
9. The youngest actor to play Lear in a professional production was Nonso Anozie, who was 23 when he took the title role for the RSC in 2002.The oldest was Alvin Epstein, who played Lear for the Boston Actors' Theater in 2006, at 81.
10. Possibly the wackiest of all adaptations was one by the English English playwright Missouri Williams in 2014. It was called King Lear With Sheep, and told the story of a director who decides to put on a performance of King Lear in which all the parts are played by Sheep. Needless to say the sheep won't cooperate; the director suffers a breakdown and begins acting out the narrative himself. The London performance featured nine actual sheep and just one human actor.

Character birthday

Sunlight, aka Hildy Muller. She is a member of the Ultra League, and her power is light based – she is able to generate light, which she has learned to concentrate into a laser beam through a ring she wears on her finger. She is gay and developed a crush on Shadow while training to be a social worker. on completing her course, Hildy left for London, hoping to find a Lesbian community there. Unable to find a suitable social work position, she applied for a job as a doctor's receptionist to pay the bills. Her prospective employer, Superwil, hinted that there may be greater opportunities for "the right person." The fact she was a variant and trained in a profession where discretion was highly important, she got the job.

She loved the work, and with Superwil's help, explored her own abilities. She appears in Eternal Flame.

Eternal Flame

The Freedom League's numbers have dwindled to three - but leader Unicorn knows his team isn't finished yet. The turning point comes with Russell, a boy with bright red hair and a genetic variant ability to start fires. He's the first of an influx of new members who will take the League into the future. 

Judith and Wil are child prodigies - Judith in physics and electronics, and Wil in medicine. They have another thing in common - they are both genetic variants. And another thing - they both have fiery red hair. They are drawn to one another as their destinies intertwine, but the course of true love doesn't always run smoothly!

Richard is not a variant. He's an Olympic athlete who has picked up useful knowledge from his unusual friends to add to his own natural abilities. A chance encounter with a dying alien throws him into a Freedom League mission in which his skills are put to the ultimate test, along with theirs.

The Freedom League's arch-enemy, the super-villain Obsidian, wants his family fortune all to himself. One person stands in his way - his niece, Fiona. Fiona, devastated by a family tragedy and her failure to get in to her first choice university, is miserable and has few friends. When she realises her brother's death was no accident, and his killer is also after her, she fears it may be too late to gather allies around her and learn how to use her own genetic variant powers.

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