William Shakespeare - 24 - King Lear - John Gielgud 1994

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurour and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's molds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!”

Though set in ‘cold, dim and gloomy’ ancient Britain, and first performed c.1605 at about the beginning of the early modern age, the play itself is one of the first evidences of a disturbed cosmos. . Himself a ruin shaken by the frame of Nature, Lear’s outcries recall ‘the lamentation of the wind amid a labyrinth of ruined masonry’ (the first scene of Olivier’s ITV version was set at Stonehenge)

Gielgud’s final version of King Lear, done with Kenneth Brannagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company in 1994 (at the age of 90) and broadcast by the BBC. A CD rip. Kindly seed.