This chapter focuses on Eadmer’streatment of Edgar’s reign as the consummation of a golden age destroyed by the assassination of Edgar’s son and immediate successor, Edward the Martyr. It was Dunstan, at the coronation of Æthelred, who prophesied the disasters that would ensue. In telling this story, Eadmer was building on an analysis that can be traced back through his predecessor as cantor at Christ Church Canterbury, Osbern, to the lives of Dunstan written not long after Dunstan’s death by ‘B.’ and Adelard. Careful attention is paid to Eadmer’s use of his sources and to the ways in which earlier lives had been compiled. Shortly after Dunstan’s death, the saint had been seen as potentially a uniquely influential intercessor, who had the best hope of persuading God to alleviate the barbarian threat. Archbishop Ælfeah had promoted the cult, and Edward the Martyr’s. His own martyrdom meant that he would soon be twinned with his predecessor Dunstan. All three cults were then appropriated by King Cnut. Eadmer moved beyond Osbern in including the Norman Conquest amongst the acts of divine retribution prophesied by Dunstan, and attributed to the saint a soteriological significance in the hoped-for redemption of the English.

In 4.6, Edgar, who pretends to be Poor Tom, guides his blind father Gloucester towards Dover. Gloucester has asked to be led to the top of a cliff so that he can end his days. But the cliff is only an illusion created verbally by Edgar who wants to protect his father’s life. This scene uses the power of the Elizabethan stage to become a moment of pure theatre, calling for a bare stage to retain all its ambiguities. The aim of this contribution is to show how cinema and television can sometimes maintain, and even foster, the scene’s paradoxes of a non-space. The chapter interrogates the possibilities offered by the screen to reflect the complex dramatic and metadramatic tensions in several film productions of King Lear that use Shakespeare’s playtext. These screen productions, emerging from different media and production contexts, all present different strategies to represent the ‘cliff’ scene. From Richard Eyre’s 1998 film, to films made for television and video release, to feature films (Peter Brook’s in 1971), they all attempt, through textual cuts, framing and/or editing, to circumvent the problem posed by a scene that seems to encapsulate the very essence of the bare Elizabethan stage.