SOURCE: Hardman, C. B. “‘Our Drooping Country Now Erects Her Head’: Nahum Tate's History of King Lear.” Modern Language Review 95, no. 4 (October 2000): 913-23.

[In the following essay, Hardman examines the changes made by Tate to Edmund, Edgar, and Albany in King Lear, considering how Tate's audience might have responded to the characters in light of contemporary political events.]

It was once thought that ‘political considerations’ had ‘a minimum of direct effect’ on Tate's rewriting of King Lear.¹ However, for some time now critics have attended to the play's contemporary political significance, placing it squarely in the political context of its period, and particularly of the exclusion crisis in the 1680s.² This article seeks to extend the discussion of Tate's rewriting of Edmund, Edgar, and Albany and to consider how a contemporary audience might have read them in the light of the politics of the day; for however Shakespeare's audience would have reacted to them, even names could sometimes suggest something different by the 1680s.

Tate seems to have consulted both quarto and folio versions of Shakespeare's play.³ Beginning with the quarto, he then turned to the folio, where the conclusion is precipitated not by invasion but by civil war, which was more to his purpose, and developed that somewhat (iv.2.100). In his King Lear a political crisis involving banishment, exclusion, and the overturning of legitimacy (especially in the Gloster plot, which now stands more prominently at the beginning of the play) leads to the abuse of freedom and eventually to internecine conflict. Despite its justification, an uprising to restore rather than depose monarchy and traditional order fails. It is a potent warning of the consequences of the wilful disturbance of proper succession that initiated the action in the first place.

The political situation in 1680 was so tense that there was a real fear, according to Bishop Burnet, that there would be another civil war over exclusion:

This was like either to end in a rebellion, or in an abject submission of the Nation to the humours of the Court. I confess, that which I apprehended most was rebellion, tho' it turned afterwards quite the other way. But men of more experience, and who had better advantages to make a true judgement of the temper of the Nation, were mistaken as well as myself.⁴

William Lloyd, preaching before the House of Lords on 5 November 1680, gave the same warning.⁵ To supporters of the legitimate succession, the banishment of Kent, Cordelia, and Edgar would have suggested the potential predicament of the Duke of York, should the exclusionists triumph. The alternative to the legitimate Duke of York was the illegitimate Duke of Monmouth. It has already been recognized that a number of similarities between Monmouth and Edmund are suggested as the play continues. The Duke was attractive, if not particularly intelligent, and was certainly considered by many contemporaries to live a libertine life. The development of that aspect of Shakespeare's Edmund by Tate would have offered obvious parallels. By his own admission Edmund disregards conscience: ‘Awe thou thy dull legitimate slaves’, he says, for ‘I ❙ Was born a libertine, and so keep me’ (v.5.19-20). In Shakespeare, Edmund's calculated self-interest had always had a sexual aspect in his adulterous alliances with Goneril and Regan; now this is extended and more blatant. First of all he is very quick to wish to become a part of the revelling, self-indulgent life of feasting and masking at the court of Gonerill and Regan, the noise of their entertainment drowning the storm while they callously disregard those on the heath. In Tate's play Edmund receives messages from both Gonerill and Regan before the blinding of his father and is ‘sick of expectation, ❙ [panting] for the possession’ (iii.2.26-27). In his opening speech in Act iii, Scene 2, social aspiration combines with sexual desire:

Oh for a taste of such majestic beauty,
Which none but my hot veins are fit t'engage!
Nor are my wishes desperate, for even now
During the banquet I observed their glances
Shot thick at me; and as they left the room
Each cast by stealth a kind inviting smile,
The happy earnest—

(iii.2.9)

Only a hundred lines later, he plans to rape Cordelia.⁶ At the opening of the fourth Act he is revealed in a grotto with Regan ‘amorously seated, listening to music’ and protesting his affection (iv.1.3-6), though within twenty lines he leaves to meet Gonerill and offer her the same pledges. Before the battle he confesses that he has already ‘enjoyed’ Regan and looks forward to the ‘dear variety’ to be afforded by Gonerill's ‘untasted beauty’ (v.3.7-9).⁷

To a contemporary audience the word ‘libertine’ would not have suggested simply promiscuity but that Edmund was a follower of the currently popular idea of what constituted Epicurean philosophy and, motivated by self-interest, saw himself as free from the restraints of conventional morality: an incarnate opponent of legitimacy, irreligious, independent, and free thinking.⁸ It is a philosophy that quickly leads to ambitious self-assertion and he very soon has his eyes on a throne: ‘Thus would I reign could I but mount a throne’ (iii.2.2). Edmund and the Duke of Monmouth both seek to displace a legitimate brother and are libertine in their attitude to the laws of inheritance and sexual morality. One of Tate's additions to the play in the last act reinforces the argument for a connection between Edmund and Monmouth. Shakespeare's Edmund had never cast any doubt upon his paternity; Tate's Edmund does so in a way that would have reminded his contemporaries of the question of Monmouth's paternity. When Edgar says: ‘The dark and vicious place where thee he got ❙ Cost him his eyes’, Shakespeare's Edmund replies: ‘Th'hast spoken right.’ Tate's Edgar adds to his moralizing the remark: ‘From thy licentious mother ❙ Thou draw'st thy villainy’, and this provokes the response:

Thou bear'st on thy mother's piety,
Which I despise. Thy mother being chaste
Thou art assured thou art but Gloster's son.
But mine, disdaining constancy, leaves me
To hope that I am sprung from nobler blood,
And possibly a king might be my sire.
But be my birth's uncertain chance as 'twill,
Who 'twas that had the hit to father me
I know not.

(v.5.46)

At times in the course of the exclusion crisis Monmouth's paternity was questioned, along with the morals of his mother, suggesting of course that the King may not have been his father, exactly the opposite of Edmund's suggestion that a king might be his. In both cases, real and fictional, sexual immorality and dubious legitimacy are highlighted. Dying, Edmund admits that in the play, as was to be the case in contemporary Britain, ‘Legitimacy ❙ At last has got it’ (v.5.77-78). In the rewriting of Edmund, Tate presents an apprehensive look into the kind of future one might expect to attend upon a policy of exclusionism before falling back with some relief into legitimacy.

The play concludes with the emergence from national and domestic disorder, the return of sanity, the endorsement of legitimacy in Edgar, and the celebration of the piety of Edgar and Cordelia inaugurating the re-establishment of empire and of peace and plenty:

Our drooping country now erects her head,
Peace spreads her balmy wings, and Plenty blooms.

(v.6.154)

All references to piety, to empire, and to peace and plenty are Tate's, not Shakespeare's. Gloster speaks pointedly of a ‘second birth of empire’ and of ‘the king's blest restoration’ (v.6.117-18). The survival of Lear and Cordelia in Tate's version of the play necessitated the removal of the striking entrance, ‘Re-enter Lear, with Cordelia dead in his arms’, which Tate replaced with ‘a reminiscence of Aeneas bringing Anchises out of Troy’:⁹

Look, sir, where pious Edgar comes
Leading his eyeless father.

(v.6.111)

It is clearly not, however, simply the replacement of one moving passage with another, for Tate's recollection of the Aeneid at this point in the play signals his major change to Shakespeare's dramatic structure, the substitution of a happy ending: Shakespeare's pietà-like tragic tableau is replaced by a reminder of the refugees from Troy, the culmination of whose narrative was the establishment of empire. Further, this archetypal example of filial piety has a potent political significance in the 1980s, by recalling the political discourse of the 1660s. At the Restoration the idealized representation of the re-established kingdom often explicitly referred to the golden age and imperium of Augustus. Now the King is under pressure to upset the order established then. When Charles II returned to London in 1660 he had been welcomed to the city, as had his grandfather James I, as another Augustus leading back a golden age. Once again, the lines from Virgil's Fourth Eclogue that had first celebrated Octavius's messianic assumption of power, ‘Redeunt saturnia regna’, appeared on a triumphal arch, together with the explicit acknowledgement of the Augustan parallel, ‘Adventus Augusti’ and quotations from the epic endorsement of Roman imperial power, the Aeneid.¹⁰ The association of Charles and Aeneas as the wandering exile who founds a new empire featured in contemporary national poetry of praise (Knowles, p. 25).

One further strain developed by Tate in his rewriting of the play also had its roots in the history of the Restoration. On the first arch there had been ‘a trophy of “decollated heads”’ under the inscription ‘Sequitur Rebelles ❙ Ultor a tergo Deus (“Gods Vengeance Rebels at the Heels pursues”)’, explained by Ogilby as ‘representing in a Trophy the late Example of God's justice apon the Rebels, who committed that most horrid murther upon His Majesties Royal Father of Blessed Memory’ (p. 18). Ogilby linked this to the theme of the returning Augustus by recalling that Augustus likewise avenged the murder of his father when the wars had ended. Tate's Gloster and his Cordelia both express a clear wish for just vengeance for the treatment of the king which has no source in Shakespeare. Gloster asks:

Must I then tamely die, and unrevenged?
So Lear may fall: no, with these bleeding rings
I will present me to the pitying crowd,
And with the rhetoric of these dropping veins
Enflame 'em to revenge their king and me.

(iii.5.83)

Cordelia regrets her inability to ‘shift my sex, and dye me deep ❙ In his opposer's blood’ (iv.5.64-65), but calls on the gods to enact the revenge she cannot accomplish herself. Her conviction that an act of rebellion against the king constitutes an affront to the gods themselves emphasizes the divine ordination of kingship:

          You never-erring gods
Fight on his side, and thunder on his foes
Such tempest as his poor aged head sustained:
Your image suffers when a monarch bleeds.
'Tis your own cause, for that your succors bring,
Revenge yourselves, and right an injured king.

(iv.5.64)

In the 1680s audiences would have recalled the fate of regicides after the Restoration and would no doubt have seen this as a warning against disturbing legitimacy again.

It has been suggested that by the mid-1670s the royalist vision of restoration was already anachronistic and that in Dryden's Aureng-Zebe, for example, one sees a retreat from the ‘lost heir’ trope and a shift of narrative focus ‘from restoration to succession by presenting the story of a royal family whose internal divisions nearly destroy an empire. The situation calls for a successor capable of creating a consensus out of the deep divisions within the royal-family-as-state’.¹¹King Lear, of course, both incorporates the lost-heir theme and provides a succession apparently capable of resolving the crisis within the royal family. In 1681, the motif of the return from exile was not, however, an anachronism, not just a question of remembering the past. The exile and recall of James, Duke of York, was an important issue in the current exclusion crisis. James and his Duchess had been exiled to Brussels in March 1679, only days before the Parliament that was to discuss the first Exclusion Bill met. Early in 1680 the King resisted petitions to meet Parliament: instead, it was prorogued and James was welcomed back to Court. In October 1680 he was sent to Scotland, despite his reluctance, and did not return until April 1682, though no doubt his return was looked for during 1681 by those who opposed exclusion and hoped for the triumph of the Court, with Shaftesbury in the Tower on a capital charge. It was at this time that Absalom and Achitophel, the most accomplished of the contemporary effusions of the propagandists, appeared. If, then, Tate's play looks back to the return of a legitimate sovereign in 1660 and in doing so reinforces the importance of stability, the preservation of time-honoured values of descent, inheritance, tradition, and legitimacy, the cry ‘Legitimacy ❙ At last has got it’ (v.5.77-78) at the end of the play also looks forward optimistically to the continuance of these values in the future, to the return from exile of another pious ruler, to the resolution of family and state conflict, and to the defeat of the exclusionists and of the illegitimate libertine championed by some of them. The representations would have been by no means precise to a contemporary audience, but as Edmund would have reminded them of Monmouth, perhaps Edgar would have stood for the hopes that were placed in James.

Tate's recollection of the politically charged Virgilian narrative at the time of the exclusion crisis can be seen as one of several allusions to the re-establishment of order at the Restoration and to the disorder it resolved. The rebellion and confusion that had been then set aside was now in danger of breaking out again. The madness so prominent in King Lear and reflected in the nakedness of Poor Tom and the casting-off of clothes by the king recalls the depiction of Confusion on the first arch erected in the City for Charles's entry in 1660. She was ‘a deformed shape [wearing] a Garment of several ill-matched Colours, and put on the wrong way’, alluding to the familiar topic of a disordered and upside-down world and to madness.¹² Clarendon, when writing about the recent hostilities, observed with profound regret that they had been characterized by a loss of reverence and respect. It is no surprise to find him detailing the usual disruption of hierarchies, breakdown of order, and dissolution of family ties:

Parents had no Manner of Authority over their Children, nor Children any Obedience or Submission to their Parents; but every one did that which was good in his own Eyes. This unnatural Antipathy had its first Rise from the Beginning of the Rebellion; when the Fathers and Sons engaged themselves in the contrary Parties. […] The Relation between Masters and Servants had been long since dissolved by the Parliament, that their Army might be increased by the Prentices against their masters' Consent. […] In the Place of Generosity, a vile and sordid Love of Money was entertained as the truest Wisdom, and any Thing lawful that would contribute to being rich.¹³

All this would have been familiar in Tate's source and the audience would have been well aware of the fear that the circumstances of the interregnum might easily repeat themselves.

Considerable changes were needed to Shakespeare's play for the resolution to reflect the triumph of legitimacy it was hoped would come with a decision for James as Charles's heir and assure the country once again of the harmony of the Restoration. In Shakespeare's play, Lear does not survive to enjoy a restoration, the reuniting of families is merely a prelude to the separation of death, and Lear's grasp on his sanity does not seem entirely secure. For Tate it is very different: sanity is regained, Lear and Gloster are reunited with their virtuous children, their families joined in marriage, the monarchy is restored and legitimate inheritance assured when Lear hands on his power to Cordelia and then to Cordelia and Edgar, ‘this celestial pair’ (v.6.151). Nancy Maguire has, however, questioned the assumption that Tate was offering a straightforward Tory resolution here and suggests that he was rather ‘hedging his bets’:

The happy (and Whiggish) arrangement to have Cordelia and Edgar rule is, in a sense, elective monarchy rather than divine right, and their joint rule, of course, foreshadows the succession of William and Mary in 1688.¹⁴

After their accession William and Mary may indeed have thought their joint rule was reflected in that of Cordelia and Edgar. However, it is hard to see what happens as elective and ‘Whiggish’. At the beginning of the play Lear chose his successors; now the more sensible choice of Cordelia, his only surviving legitimate heir, is inevitable, but the choice is still his. It is hardly consonant with Shaftesbury's rejection of the theory of divine right in 1675 as a Stuart fiction and his conviction that not God but English law determined who should rule.¹⁵ Instead it seems to take the view expressed by Hobbes that with kings ‘the disposing of the Successor is alwaies left to the Jugement and Will of the present Possessor’ (Chapter 19, p. 100), for ‘they that are subjects to a Monarch, cannot without his leave cast of Monarchy’ (Chapter 18, p. 88).¹⁶

The prosperous reign of an Edgar to which the conclusion of the play looks forward would have reminded audiences of another Edgar, the British king who had often been invoked in the Stuart discourse of sovereignty, in the iconography of the Restoration, in the reconstruction of the navy, and in two contemporary plays. In the long-running claim of Britain to have dominion over the British seas in opposition to the Dutch support for mare liberum, it was King Edgar (959-75) who was cited as a precedent and said to have claimed maritime sovereignty and possibly actually exercised it.¹⁷ It was part of the argument in John Selden's Mare clausum, written first for James I and then augmented for Charles I in 1635. Charles I had placed Edgar's effigy on the beak of his ship The Sovereign of the Sea and had the inscription Carolus Edgari sceptrum stabilivit aquarum on each of the 102 brass guns. The ship was represented on the arches welcoming Charles II, who was portrayed as the British Neptune (Knowles, pp. 32-34), emphasizing that Charles, like his royal predecessor, sought to be master of the sea. In the course of the bitter war with Holland that broke out in 1664 this ambition became hopeless.¹⁸ However, reconstruction of the fleet followed eventually and to this end Charles provided money from his privy purse in 1677 to finance a thirty-ship programme directed by Pepys and the naval architect Anthony Deane.

The two contemporary plays that took Edgar as their subject were Edward Ravenscroft's King Edgar and Alfreda (London, 1677) and Thomas Rymer's Edgar or the English Monarch (London, 1678). Audiences for Tate's play may have known these, though there is no record of a performance of Rymer's play. Both plays speak of the importance of naval power during Edgar's reign. Ravenscroft's play has a brief life of the king as found ‘in our English Chronicles’ in place of a preface. It describes a king who ‘had no War all his Reyn, yet [who was] always well prepar'd for warr; he govern'd the kingdome in great Peace, Honour and Prosperity, gaining thence the Sirname of Peacemaker’, and particularly stresses his naval preparedness:

His Care and Wisdom was great in guarding the Coast around with Ships, to the number of Three thousand six hundred, which he divided into Four Squadrons to sayl to and fro about the Four Quarters of the Land, meeting each other. Thus he kept out wisely the Force of Strangers, prevent'd Foreign Warr and secur'd the Coasts from Pyrots.

(King Edgar and Alfreda, A2^v)

Ravenscroft claimed in the prologue that his play had been written ‘at least Ten Years ago’. If that was the case, any comparison with Charles's own reign at that time of crisis, when plague and fire had been followed by the Dutch War, would have been to its disadvantage and Edgar's care of the realm would have been an exemplary model. On the other hand, those contemporaries who frequently recorded the vice of the Court and in particular the profligacy of the King would have recognized a similarity at the end of the following passage: ‘His Acts were some Virtous, some Politick, some Just, and some Pious, and some with a mixture of Vice; but those related to women.’ By the time the play was published, however, it would have been easier to see the description of the reign of Edgar as offering a complimentary comparison than a contrast, although the king's vices remained the same. The advertisement to Rymer's play described it as ‘an Heroick Tragedy’ in which he ‘chiefly sought occasion to extoll the English Monarchy’. The preliminary verses ‘To the King’ refer to Edgar as his ‘great Fore-runner’, though by comparison his ships were ‘mere infants of the Main’, while each of Charles's would then have seemed a ‘God o' th' Sea’. ‘Empire without End’ is promised as other nations do homage while ‘Peace [the] larger Empire happy made’ and the King ‘alone, great Edgar's Person bear[s]’. In the play Edgar's barge is rowed by subject kings who compare their narrow dominions with his ‘Empire's vast extent’ (1.9, p. 10). In Act iv there is a masque in which Neptune lays his trident at Edgar's feet and Proteus and Nereus do obeisance to him. It is his valour rather than his fleet of ships that establishes English power, and from Edgar ‘England's glory grows’ and ‘More than one Edgar Fate to England owes’ (p. 38). Yet the masque is interrupted, Edgar starts up, and this ‘Dream of Majesty’ is ‘dethroned by Love’ (p. 40). Masques had traditionally offered both praise and counsel to their patrons, and the audience in 1678 would no doubt have seen this as a delicately critical reflection on the conflict between private passion and duty. The play concludes with Edgar's denial of the power of Rome to forbid his marriage to his goddaughter. This episode asserts, if nothing more, the independence of the monarchy from the dictates of a foreign religious power at a time when Catholic plots and the threat of Popery were at the centre of British political discussion.

In these plays it seems that Edgar's empire is a type of Charles's, a promised ‘Empire without End’. In Tate's play the plenty and peace of this ‘second birth of empire’ seem to reflect the idea of a legitimate Stuart imperium existing from the Restoration and stretching into the future as a legitimate James, like Edgar, is preferred before an illegitimate Monmouth, like Edmund.

When Charles died suddenly in 1685 Dryden was writing an opera later to be called Albion and Albanius, including Charles (Albion) and also his successor James (Albanius) in the title. There can be little doubt that James's part was already prominent before his brother's death, though that event may have brought about a change of title. In the work Dryden implies that both men were supporters of the naval power, which as he well knew was necessary to defend the trade on which the country's imperial future depended. In other words, it was using a different fiction to present a picture of an ideal empire essentially similar to that presented above. Albion was the name given in the chronicles to the Britain ruled over by Brute after his flight from fallen Troy and more pertinently here was, as Spenser recorded, (Faerie Queene, iv) the name of a mythical son of Neptune. The events of the opera clearly reflect recent history: for example, the arrival of Charles at Dover, the exile of the Duke of York, and the Popish Plot. Ronald Knowles has pointed out that Dryden certainly explicitly recalled Charles II's triumphal entry in 1660 when he took as an epigraph for his opera the Virgilian line which appeared on the first arch ‘Discite justitiam moniti et non temnere divos’ and when ‘at the end of the first act (an allegory of the Restoration) Ogilby's triumphal arches appear as part of the stage machinery’ (Knowles, pp. 24, 46 (note 102)). The choice of the name Albanius for James is interesting. It is taken from one of his titles, Duke of Albany, a title held by the Stuart family since the fourteenth century. Modern editors have suggested that Dryden may have been influenced in his choice by an association with ‘the noble Duke of Albany in Shakespeare's King Lear’,¹⁹ but contemporary perception of Albany's character was more likely derived from Tate.

The folio version of Shakespeare's play, most recently accessible in the third folio (1663-64), had removed much of Albany's moral indignation evident in the quartos and as a result, some critics find him an ambiguous figure in this version.²⁰ He has been seen as morally wavering, ineffectual, and a cuckold. Albany's presence is even less apparent in Tate than in the Folio, but criticism of him is muted, he is less overtly ineffectual, and his cuckolding is less obvious. Goneril's reference in Shakespeare to ‘his milky gentleness’ (1.4.320-23) is entirely omitted. Her scornful, detailed criticism:

It is the cowish terror of his spirit
That dares not undertake. He'll not feel wrongs
Which tie him to an answer.

(iv.2.13)

is reduced by Tate to: ‘It is his coward spirit’ (iv.3.13); she does not contrast him unfavourably to Edmund as in Shakespeare:

My most dear Gloucester
O, the difference of man and man!
To thee a woman's services are due;
My fool usurps my body.

(iv.2.26)

and Tate omits Goneril's outbursts, ‘Milk-livered man’ and ‘O vain fool’, in response to Albany's criticism (iv.2.32,37). In Tate, the poisoning of Regan at a banquet is planned in detail by Gonerill, and Edmund, who has already ‘enjoyed’ Regan (v.2,7), additionally plans to usurp Albany's bed and kingdom after the battle. The effect of all this is to blacken Gonerill's character more, to divert some of the thoughts of Albany's cuckolding by paying attention to Regan's relations with Edmund too, and to see Edmund's sexual and political ambitions as signs of his depravity rather than of Albany's weakness. In Shakespeare, Edmund speaks of Albany's indecisiveness before the battle: ‘He's full of abdication ❙ And self-reproving’ (v.1.4): this is not in Tate.

The abiding impression of Albany in the last act of the Folio is of a ‘worthy prince’ at last trying to take control but who is not quite capable of the decisive direction needed nor able to cope with the circumstances in which he finds himself; Shakespeare's play ends with Albany's attempt to hand over power to Kent and Edgar: the first definitely declines and the second does not clearly accept. Tate's Albany gives a very different impression in the last act. It is Albany and not Edmund who enters with the prisoners after the battle. His authority is clear and his behaviour humane:

It is enough to have conquered; cruelty
Should ne'er survive the fight. Captain o'th' guards,
Treat well your royal prisoners till you have
Our further orders, as you hold our pleasure.

(v.6.1)

This is established before Gonerill (not Edmund as in Shakespeare: a further blackening of Gonerill's character) sends the captain to murder them. Albany intervenes in person to save Lear and Cordelia, releases them, directs the return of Kent and Gloster, and, in revealing the infamy of Gonerill, identifies himself with Lear's suffering:

                                                                                                    Ere they fought
Lord Edgar gave into my hands this paper,
A blacker scrowl of treason and of lust,
Than can be found in the records of hell.
There, sacred sir, behold the character
Of Gonerill, the worst of daughters, but
More vicious wife. […]
Since then my injuries Lear, fall in with thine,
I have resolved the same redress for both.

(v.6.77, 85)

To Cordelia his voice seems ‘The charming voice of a descending god’ (v.6.88) and Tate's version of the speech that is so ineffectual in the Folio here offers a satisfactory resolution:

The troops by Edmund raised I have disbanded.
Those that remain are under my command.
What comfort may be brought to cheer your age
And heal your savage wrongs, shall be applied;
For to your majesty we do resign
Your kingdom, save what part yourself conferred
On us in marriage.

(v.6.89)

Tate's Albany may then be seen as ‘the noble Duke’, a man who is certainly ‘more sinned against than sinning’, a virtuous victim of unnatural wickedness, for ‘What will not they that wrong a father do?’ (v.6.84), rather than a cowed cuckold. Furthermore, by the conclusion of the play he has become a powerful directing force for good. The contemporary Duke of York and Albany would certainly have been able to see a satisfactory reflection in him.

When Tate's play was first performed, perhaps early in 1681, the conclusion seems, through the presentation of Edgar and Albany, to have been reinforcing tradition and legitimacy, looking back to the classical and native iconography used to support the restored Stuart dynasty, and promising the certainty of a future as prosperous as that enjoyed in the past in Albion, under the rule of King Edgar, or in Imperial Rome. When the play was subsequently performed before James II at Whitchall, on 9 May 1687 and 29 February 1688, things were very different. Presumably, since he saw it twice, the King found the treatment of the subject congenial. By then the promised future of 1681 had become reality, though James did not enjoy it for long. Exclusionism had failed, James had succeeded his brother, Monmouth's rebellion had been put down, the Duke executed and his supporters systematically destroyed, while the King pressed on with his religious and political agenda. The play was not seen again until it was staged at Drury Lane in 1699 and then it became very popular after 1700. Perhaps the gap after 1688 is explained partly by the association of the play with the ousted régime. By the turn of the century, on the other hand, the political readings that would have been so obvious and topical in the late 1680s would no longer have been evident.

Notes

1. Christopher Spencer, Nahum Tate (New York: Twayne, 1972), p. 68.

2. See James Black's introduction to his edition of Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear (London: Arnold, 1975); all references to Tate's Lear are from this edition. Also see Nancy Klein Maguire, ‘Nahum Tate's King Lear: “The King's Blest Restoration”’, in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. by Jean I. Marsden (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 29-39.

3. See Black, Appendix A. All references to Shakespeare's King Lear are to The Tragedy of King Lear, in The Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

4. History of His Own Time (London, 1724), pp. 459-60.

5. Lloyd explicitly warned of the ‘danger of another civil war’ in A Sermon Preached before the House of Lords on November 5 1680 (London, 1680), p. 37.

6. The imagery he uses identifies him with Jove, a mythological example both of sexual vigour and active aspiration and of a destructive force, for Jove too displaced his father and Semele was killed by the thunderbolts of her divine lover: ‘Like the vig'rous Jove I will enjoy ❙ This Semele in a storm’ (iii.2.119-20).

7. In Shakespeare, by comparison, Edmund is still undecided at this stage: ‘To both of these sisters have I sworn my love, ❙ […] Which of them shall I take?—❙ Both?—one?—or neither? Neither can be enjoyed ❙ If both remain alive’ (v.1.46-50). Once again, Tate's Edmund is sexually more precocious than Shakespeare's.

8. Dale Underwood has written of the ‘at least implied recognition by most seventeenth-century libertines that the stress upon freedom led in actuality to a state of “war” much like that which characterised the natural man for Machiavelli and Hobbes’ (Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of Manners (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 27). On Hobbes and Tate, see James Black, ‘The Influence of Hobbes on Nahum Tate's King Lear’, Studies in English Literature, 7 (1967), 377-85.

9. Black suggests that ‘to compensate for its excision [Tate] offers one of the best things he knows’ (The History of King Lear, p. xxii).

10. See John Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II in His Passage through the City of London to His Coronation (London, 1662): A facsimile with introduction by Ronald Knowles, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 43 (New York: Medieval & Renaissance Texts, 1988), p. 21. Knowles writes: ‘As Charles approaches the first arch his symbolic position is that of Aeneas accompanied by the sibyl viewing the torments of the Titans in Erebus; the English Titans are the rebels of the interregnum. Passing through the arch Charles becomes the imperial embodiment of the Augustus “promised oft, and long foretold”, prophesied by Anchises to Aeneas in the sixth book of the Aeneid.’ See below for Dryden's explicit recollection of the celebrations of 1660 in Albion and Albianus (1685), and see Knowles p. 43, note 30, for Logan's engravings of the arches, reprinted in 1685 for a version of The Relation of His Majesties Entertainment, which had been Ogilby's first attempt to provide a record in 1661.

11. See Richard Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 117.

12. Christine Stevenson suggested that Confusion's appearance was typical of the Bedlamite, in an unpublished paper, ‘Anti-masque, Pageant: Restoration and Bedlam at Moorfields’, given in the series of Reading Seminars in Medieval and Renaissance Buildings, 28 May 1998. She has drawn my attention to Natsu Hattori, ‘“The Pleasure of your Bedlam”: The Theatre of Madness in the Renaissance’, History of Psychiatry, 6 (1995), 283 308, on dress and madness in the Renaissance. The quarto stage directions in Shakespeare's The History of King Lear describe Edgar as disguised as a Bedlamite. Tate simply describes the disguise as that of a madman. See also Jonathan Sawday, ‘“Mysteriously Divided”: Civil War, Madness and the Divided Self’, in Literature and the English Civil War, ed. by Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 127-43.

13. The Continuation of the Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 2 vols (London, 1759), ii, 39-41.

14. ‘Nahum Tate's King Lear’, p. 39, and see Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 85.

15. See Paul Hammond, ‘The King's Two Bodies: Representations of Charles II’, in Culture, Politics and Society in Britain, 1660 1800, ed. by Jeremy Black and Jeremy Gregory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 33.

16. Leviathan (London, 1651).

17. T. W. Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1911), pp. 27-28, 326. See F. T. Flahiff, ‘Edgar: Once and Future King’, in Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism, ed. by Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 221-37. Some of what Flahiff has to say refers to Edgar's reputation in the seventeenth century after King Lear: for example, Thomas Heywood's A True Description of His Majesties Royall Ship, Built this Yeare 1637 at Wooll-witch in Kent. To the great glory of our English Nation, and not paralleled in the whole Christian World (London, 1637) refers to Edgar as ‘the first that could truely write himselfe an Absolute Monarch of this Island’ (p. 30) and describes the figure of the King mounted on horseback trampling seven kings carved on the beak head of the ship.

18. At first the war was popular and was prosecuted with enthusiasm by naval men; the fleet matched the Dutch and despite some mistakes and severe losses held its own. However, in June 1667 there was a great disaster: a Dutch squadron bombarded Sheerness, penetrated as far as Chatham, destroyed half the fleet with fire ships, and took the flagship the Royal Charles as a prize. An ignominious peace followed and in 1672 a further unsuccessful war.

19. See Albion and Albanius, in Works of John Dryden, xv, ed. by Earl Miner, George R. Guffey, and Franklin B. Zimmerman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 329.

20. See Gary Taylor, ‘King Lear: The Date and Authorship of the Folio Version’, in The Division of the Kingdoms, ed. by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 425; Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare's Revision of ‘King Lear’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).