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; he is smiling, whispering in her ear. We see his feebleness, his eagerness to be loved. When his favorite daughter refuses to indulge him publicly, he is stunned, uncomprehending, hurt, not outraged. Already—too early —he is “more sinned against than sinning.” The television production subserves Olivier’s ingratiating approach by cutting out some of Lear’s more savage lines (likening Cordelia to a cannibal, for instance). Even when Olivier grabs a sword to smite the outspoken Kent, the effect is pathetic: He is so weak he hardly needs to be restrained.
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