ABSTRACT
Potentially, all illustrated editions of King Lear fall into that category and might be considered as productions of the play: visual interpretations of the text contribute to the author experience. Claire van Vliet created and printed the woodcut illustrations, painted the wooden covers and designed the binding of the fine press King Lear published in 1986. As against the van Vliet/Alpert brooding, dark meditation, Pollock's story is a surreal caricature of the author world — vibrant colour, dizzying movement, ugliness, sexuality, macabre humour. In the end, this production is primarily an experience of language — but it is not disembodied language, but text that has visual, physical presence. The black lines against the white background give the author speech that is visually insistent. The positioning of text blocks, moreover, their horizontal rather than vertical placement, makes problematic, or at least unimportant, the temporal ordering of lines.
