"All our lives we'd looked out for each other the way that motherless children tend to do": King Lear as Melodrama

Abstract

Written by Laura Jones, an adept and prolific adapter of literary texts to screen, 'A Thousand Acres' (1997) presents Jane Smiley's revisionist version of Shakespeare's 'King Lear' within the cinematic conventions of the melodrama, Whether we view Smiley's novel or Shakespeare's play as the resultant film's 'originary' source, its affiliation with the genre of melodrama is indisputable; the tagline, "Best friends. Bitter rivals. Sisters," foregrounds the importance of its female protagonists within the context of "family," and precipitates emotional excess.