King Lear

There is a record of a court performance at Whitehall on St. Stephen’s night, 26 December 1606. It was a bold choice to play the mad king and the image of a “dog obeyed in office” before the court. A play of “king Lere” was performed at Gowthwaite Hall in Yorkshire in 1610. This was probably Shakespeare’s version, not the old Leir play (which recently scholarship has ascribed to Thomas Kyd, author of the highly successful Spanish Tragedy). A company of English actors in Dresden in 1626 played the “Tragoedia von Lear, König in Engelandt,” probably also Shakespeare’s version.

The play was revived briefly after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and subsequent reopening of the theaters, but in 1681 Nahum Tate staged a production using a text that he himself had adapted. In his dedicatory epistle Tate emphasized the idea of the rough and unfinished nature of Shakespeare’s work. It was a “heap of jewels” that needed to have order, regularity, and polish applied to it for its true beauty to be revealed. Tate simplified language, plot, and character, eliminating the Fool and much of the play’s complexity. He included a love story between Edgar and Cordelia, together with a confidante for Cordelia, Arante. The play’s happy ending concludes with Lear restored, handing his throne over to Edgar and Cordelia. Tate’s Lear and various revised forms of the adaptation, including one by David Garrick, replaced the original on stage, except possibly in Dublin, where the Smock Alley promptbooks are based on Shakespeare’s printed text. The authentically Shakespearean original was not performed on the London stage again, save for a handful of performances by Edmund Kean in the early nineteenth century, until Macready’s restored (if heavily cut) production of 1838.

2. William Charles Macready as Lear in 1838, with the dead Cordelia: until this revival, the stage was dominated by Nahum Tate’s reworking with a happy ending in which Cordelia survives and marries Edgar.

Thomas Betterton had been Tate’s Lear. David Garrick, the most celebrated actor-manager of the eighteenth century, restored parts of Shakespeare’s text in his own production at Drury Lane but retained Tate’s ending. His performance was acclaimed for its pathos and humanity. In his diary James Boswell records: “I was fully moved, and I shed abundance of tears.”² The Shakespearean editor George Steevens, after confessing his view that “Tate’s alteration … had considerably improved the great original,” went on to extol the virtues of Garrick’s acting: “Were we to inquire in what particular scene Mr. Garrick is preeminently excellent it would be a difficult circumstance to point it out.” He did, though, single out Garrick’s “mode of speaking the curse at the end of the first act of the play.” In his view Garrick “gives it additional energy, and it is impossible to hear him deliver it without an equal mixture of horror and admiration.”³ John Philip Kemble (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 1788) played Lear with his tragedian sister, Sarah Siddons, as Cordelia. The critic and poet Leigh Hunt was disappointed: “He personated the king’s majesty perfectly well, but not the king’s madness … he is always stiff, always precise, and he will never, as long as he lives, be able to act any thing mad unless it be a melancholy mad statue.”⁴

During the Regency period, when old King George III was mad, the London theater managers tactfully abstained from staging the play. Soon after the king’s death in 1820, the fiery Romantic actor Edmund Kean played the role at Drury Lane later to mixed reviews. The London Times objected that the storm scene “was less effective than many others” chiefly because it was “exhibited with so much accuracy that the performer could scarcely be heard amidst the confusion,” but the reviewer was better pleased by the fifth act in which “there was scarcely a dry eye in the theatre.”⁵ William Hazlitt felt that “Mr. Kean chipped off a bit of the character here and there: but he did not pierce the solid substance, nor move the entire mass.”⁶ Hazlitt reviewed Junius Brutus Booth’s production at Covent Garden in the same year more favorably: “There was no feebleness, and no vulgarity in any part of Mr. Booth’s acting, but it was animated, vigorous, and pathetic throughout.”⁷

When Macready, who had played Edmund to Booth’s Lear, restored Shakespeare’s text in his Covent Garden production of 1838, the Fool, reintroduced for the first time in more than a hundred and fifty years, was played by a young woman, Priscilla Horton. Macready set the play in a pagan Saxon Britain replete with Druidic stone circles. Critics were generally enthusiastic: