SOURCE: Spencer, Christopher. “A Word for Tate's King Lear.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 3, no. 1 (winter 1963): 241-51.

[In the following essay, Spencer claims that Tate's King Lear should not be dismissed as hackery and a mutilation of Shakespeare's version, arguing that the play is coherent, entertaining, and has its own plan.]

In 1959 Kenneth Muir remarked of Tate's King Lear, “The beautiful scene in which the King of France receives the despised and rejected Cordelia is cut, presumably because there was no room for a rival to her affections. … [And Tate] provides a scene with Lear and Cordelia in prison, lest we should be unable to imagine it from Lear's words before and after the death of Cordelia.”¹ Whatever the value of this criticism for Shakespeare's play, it is irrelevant to the adaptation. Since Cordelia is pursued and won by Edgar in Tate's version, what happens to France is not a question of “room” but of relevance: France's presence in the adaptation would be absurd. And since Cordelia does not die in Tate's play, the scene we are to “imagine” is not suggested by “Lear's words before and after the death of Cordelia” (which does not take place). The critic is obviously thinking only of Shakespeare's play; yet at stake here is the taste of about five generations of our theater-going ancestors, who supported the adaptation on the main London stages from 1681 to 1838.²

A similar irrelevance, as I hope to show later, exists in Lamb's eloquent denunciation of the happy ending:

A happy ending!—as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through,—the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation,—why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station,—as if at his years, and with his experience, anything was left but to die.³

Since Lamb wrote, few criticisms of Tate's adaptation have been kind: A. W. Ward's unexpanded reference to Tate as “a painstaking and talented writer who, with enduring success, adapted King Lear,”⁴ stands almost alone against a commentary which, Odell observed in 1920, had made Tate “perhaps the most universally execrated of the daring souls who violated the precious shrine of [Shakespeare's] plays.”⁵ Hazelton Spencer, with his eye constantly on Shakespeare's play, was only a little less unsympathetic.⁶ More recently, Moody Prior has studied Tate's King Lear as “a curious example of how far the heroic play had altered the current conception of the tragic pattern,” and his observations lead to a somewhat better understanding of what Tate was trying to do.⁷ Another approach, which George C. Branam has used with eighteenth-century adaptions, is to examine the play against the background of neo-classic theory. However, this avenue would not lead us very far toward really understanding what Tate was trying to accomplish: as Branam observes, “The adapters of Shakespeare … seldom felt constrained to obey a ‘rule’ to the letter. They demonstrated a generalized awareness of critical principles rather than a well-memorized knowledge of a rule book.”⁸ Instead, I wish to approach Tate's adaptation as a play with its own plan and to study its parts in relation to each other with the intention of arriving at a better knowledge of Tate's—not Shakespeare's—King Lear. Such a study will show, I believe, that Tate's play is coherent and entertaining—in other words, that our ancestors did not show such bad taste as they are thought to have shown in supporting it and that there is even something in the play for the modern reader.

The adapter seems to have considered the added love plot to be the most important of his alterations. In his Dedication he remarks that he found Shakespeare's play “a Heap of Jewels, unstrung, and unpolish'd; yet so dazling in their Disorder, that I soon perceiv'd I had seiz'd a Treasure”; he then explains the addition of the love plot:

'Twas my good Fortune to light on one Expedient to rectifie what was wanting in the Regularity and Probability of the Tale, which was to run through the Whole, as Love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia; that never chang'd Word with each other in the Original. This renders Cordelia's Indifference, and her Father's Passion in the first Scene, probable. It likewise gives Countenance to Edgar's Disguise, making that a generous Design that was before a poor Shift to save his Life. The Distress of the Story is evidently heightened by it; and it particularly gave Occasion of a new Scene or Two, of more Success (perhaps) than Merit. This Method necessarily threw me on making the Tale conclude in a Success to the innocent destrest Persons: Otherwise I must have incumbered the Stage with dead Bodies, which Conduct makes many Tragedies conclude with unseasonable Jests.⁹

By “what was wanting in the Regularity … of the Tale” Tate surely means the lack of ties between the Lear and Gloucester plots; his remedy, the love affair, is the raison d'etre of most of the passages he adds. These are as follows: 1) in I.i, a 9-line addition just before Lear divides his kingdom introduces the lovers and gives Cordelia a chance to state the motive for her “indifference”; 2) a 46-line passage after Cordelia's rejection and Lear's angry departure enables Edgar to rejoice that Burgundy is no longer a rival, but Cordelia turns away from her lover and resolves to test his faithfulness; 3) in 65 lines added to III.ii Cordelia begs Gloucester for aid in finding her father and, with her maid Arante, disguises herself to search for him, unaware that Edmund has eavesdropped and is determined to ravish her; 4) in 111 lines Poor Tom rescues Cordelia from ruffians sent after her by Edmund; when her rescuer unmasks, Cordelia confesses her love for him; 5) in Act IV just after Poor Tom and the blinded Gloucester have met, they encounter Kent and Cordelia (46 lines); 6) the happy ending calls for much rewriting in Act V, including a tournament between Edgar and Edmund followed by the indecorous quarreling of Goneril and Regan over Edmund's body, together with the announced retirement of Lear, Gloucester, and Kent, and the elevation of Cordelia and Edgar to the throne. The other lengthy addition—the only one outside of Act V that does not involve at least one of the two lovers—is a 48-line scene at the beginning of Act IV located in a “Grotto,” “Edmund and Regan amorously Seated, listening to Musick.” Thus, the adapter increases the meetings of the two families: to Edgar's encounter with Cordelia's father in Act III Tate adds two passages that bring together Cordelia and Edgar's father; and in five passages Edgar and Cordelia meet. Edmund's lust for Cordelia early in Act III enables Edgar to perform the “heroic” deed that brings Cordelia and her lover together. Edgar nearly becomes the hero, and the love story becomes almost as important as the main plot.

By these same additions Tate felt that he had improved the “probability” of the tale in motivating Cordelia's “indifference” toward Lear: she tells us in advance that since she detests the “loath'd Embraces” of Burgundy and prefers “her Edgar's Arms,” she will “with cold Speech tempt the Chol'rick King.” Shakespeare does not supply an explicit motive for Cordelia's reticence, though it is not hard to find a reason for her behavior if one feels it to be natural or if one emphasizes her symbolic value. However, there is still room to question her motivation, and from the Augustan point of view her act must have seemed abnormal—a violation of probability—and in need of an explanation that would make it normal and probable.¹⁰ In Tate, moreover, Cordelia is not Truth itself, nor is she rigorously honest: she deliberately misleads both her father and Edgar in this very scene. The change in Cordelia's behavior and character in Tate makes explicit motivation more desirable.

However, Cordelia's motive has the still more far-reaching effect of relieving Lear of some responsibility for his error. Since Cordelia, like her sisters, deliberately misleads her father, Lear is presented with a choice not between Falsity and Truth but between two kinds of Falsity: he is more misled than self-misleading, and Cordelia must share the responsibility for the results. Yet Cordelia should not be harshly judged either; her lie is meant to be for everyone's good and is conventionally “good” in that the younger generation is trying to realize its true love in opposition to an autocratic parent and can succeed only by tricking the latter until he can be brought to see his mistake. It is not that Lear does not know himself, Cordelia, and the truth, but that he is like many other parents in not knowing himself, his child, and the wisest course of action—a typical Augustan metamorphosis. Lear's Error, then, is reduced in stature to a very common sort of misunderstanding and is not entirely his fault. Accordingly, his punishment and suffering are reduced, and the happy ending follows more naturally.

Lear's punishment is made to seem less by heavy cutting in Act III and by the omission of the Fool. Not only are the great speeches of Lear in the storm shortened, but some of the more moving figures are omitted from the speeches, with the consequence that, like the hero of the heroic play, Lear tends to rant, to express himself in language which—cut though it is—still seems to exceed the actual emotion. After comparing Tate's version of the “Blow winds” speech with Shakespeare's, Prior remarks, “In short, most of the figures which [in Shakespeare] relate this passage to the large scheme of images which runs through the play, to the immediate turmoil of Lear's mind, and to the thought which lies at the heart of it are either weakened or destroyed, and all we have is the expression of violence of feeling and rage.”¹¹ III.i and ii, 150 lines in Shakespeare, are condensed to 44 in Tate; III.iv, 189 lines, is shortened only slightly to 168 lines, but includes a few passages from Shakespeare's III.vi (122 lines), which is otherwise omitted entirely. Furthermore, excluding the Fool and his conversations with Lear diminishes our awareness of the depth of Lear's suffering; we do not see the Fool rubbing salt in his master's wounds. In fact, some of the interest in Act III is shifted from Lear's sufferings to Edgar's. This diminution of the King's agony—both quantitatively, his time on the stage and sharing his suffering with others, and qualitatively, the thinner language and the missing dimension of the Fool—plus the King's lesser responsibility, and, of course, the survival of Cordelia make Lear's continuing to live the better ending in Tate's play. Lamb, like many modern readers, was reading Shakespeare between the lines.

Critics generally assume that the Fool does not appear in Tate's version because of the neo-classic objection to mixing comedy with tragedy. Perhaps so, but there would seem to be every other reason for omitting the Fool as well. His remarks are frequently obscure and indirect in a play Tate was making more obvious and direct. The Fool deepens the experience of King Lear without contributing to its rhetoric, but characters and actions were doubtless justified to Tate in terms of the play, not in terms of what they might reveal about human nature.¹² Hazlitt suggested that the Fool was a safety-valve, and Keats commented that “the Fool by his very levity give[s] a finishing-touch to the pathos.”¹³ Paradoxically, he does both, but in Shakespeare's play: in Tate's a safety-valve would be superfluous, and Tate's kind of pathos—ladies in distress and angry men in storms—would not be enhanced by the Fool. Tate makes Lear more rhetorical and less poetic, more worldly and less cosmic (the people are not Titans, or are less titanic); the situations are more conventional and more artificial. The Fool belongs with none of these. Finally, if the Fool serves to make clear to the King the magnitude of his Error, he is correspondingly less necessary as the Error dwindles into a mistake.

It might seem that reducing Lear's suffering does not fit well with the interest Tate has in the “distress” of his story, but the adapter is thinking of the “distress of lovers caught in unhappy crises, of virtue exposed to injuries that asked for pity, of noble heroism restrained from exercise of its strength—in short, the kinds of distress which the plots of Restoration heroic drama had made the familiar stock in trade of the serious dramatist.”¹⁴ As Lear is less tragic, so is Gloucester, though the latter's suffering is given a “distressing” twist. Gloucester exhibits himself publicly, intentionally stirs up a rebellion, and then, seated under a tree during the battle, becomes a portrait of heroism in distress:

The Fight grows hot; the whole War's now at work,
And the goar'd Battle bleeds in every Vein.
Whilst Drums and Trumpets drown loud Slaughters Roar;
Where's Gloster now that us'd to head the Fray,
And scour the Ranks where deadliest Danger lay?
Here, like a Shepherd, in a lonely Shade,
Idle, unarm'd, and listning to the Fight;
Yet the disabled Courser, maim'd and blind,
When to the Stall he hears the ratling War,
Foaming with Rage, tears up the batter'd Ground,
And tugs for Liberty.
No more of Shelter, thou blind Worm, but forth
To th'open Field; the War may come this Way
And crush thee into Rest.—Here lay thee down,
And tear the Earth, that Work befits a Mole.
Or dark Despair! When, Edgar, wilt thou come
To pardon, and dismiss me to the Grave?

Moreover, Gloucester is made less credulous in Tate than in Shakespeare, for Edmund reveals at the end of the first speech of the play (his “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” soliloquy) that his father already believes Edgar a villain. (Tate is even ingenious enough to have Lear reproach Cordelia a few minutes later for her friendship with “the Rebel Son of Gloster.”) If Gloucester is the old “Courser” of the heroic stable, Edgar is the younger and, to be worthy, must disguise himself not as “a poor Shift to save his Life,” but for the acceptably heroic motive of protecting Cordelia. It is Edgar who steps forward to speak the edifying moral of the adaptation:

Our drooping Country now erects her Head,
Peace spreads her balmy Wings, and Plenty blooms.
Divine Cordelia, all the Gods can witness
How much thy Love to Empire I prefer!
Thy bright Example shall convince the World
(Whatever Storms of Fortune are decreed)
That Truth and Vertue shall at last succeed.

Thus, the suffering of the royal family is lessened, the heroism of the noble family is raised, and the two families are united by a third strand of love and marriage. For Shakespeare's two plots, Tate gives us three in one.

Virtue succeeds but Vice, of course, fails. Goneril, Regan, and Edmund are portrayed by Tate as more lustful—or, at least, more explicitly lustful—than they were in Shakespeare. This contrast of Virtue and Vice is heightened by a family resemblance: Like Edgar, Edmund belongs at moments to the heroic world, and when he is challenged by the disguised Edgar, he replies instantly,

What will not Edmund dare! my Lord, I beg
The Favour that you'd instantly appoint
The Place where I may meet this Challenger,
Whom I will sacrifice to my wrong'd Fame;
Remember, Sir, that injur'd Honour's nice,
And cannot brook delay.

And as Goneril and Regan snarl at each other over his mortally wounded body, he remarks,

Now, Edgar, thy proud Conquest I forgive;
Who wou'd not choose, like me, to yield his Breath
T' have Rival Queens contend for him in Death?

Edmund's lust for Cordelia increases her “distress,” and the “love” interest is provided for an audience that expected it. Furthermore, as J. H. Wilson and Lucyle Hook have emphasized, places had to be provided for the actresses. By developing the parts of the sinful sisters—and the star part of Cordelia—Tate was adjusting the play to the theater situation of his time. Wilson suggests that the parts of Regan and Cordelia were planned for Mary Lee, who was “the leading tragedienne and villainess,” and Elizabeth Barry, her “ambitious young rival.”¹⁵

Tate was not a distinguished poet, and few compliments can be paid the style of the adaptation; however, the worst is usually what is quoted. Tate has trimmed Shakespeare's lines throughout as part of the general pruning, clarifying, and surface emphasis of this as of other Augustan adaptations of Shakespeare. Edgar and Cordelia speak a language that is highly conventional at one moment, as

… Do I kneel before thee,
And offer at thy Feet my panting Heart?
Smile, Princess, and convince me; for as yet
I doubt, and dare not trust the dazling Joy.

Then seventeen lines later Cordelia speaks what is hardly more than prose:

When, Edgar, I permitted your Addresses,
I was the darling Daughter of a King,
Nor can I now forget my Royal Birth,
And live dependant on my Lover's Fortune;

Gloucester, just blinded and imagining his suicide, is bathetic:

Whence my freed Soul to her bright Sphear shall fly,
Through boundless Orbs, eternal Regions spy,
And, like the Sun, be All one glorious Eye.

On the other hand, much of Act V is successfully written. After Lear has killed two of the guard, Albany and Edgar enter. Lear assumes that they have come to carry out the sentence the guards failed to execute, and when his chains are removed, his language is firm:

Com'st thou inhumane Lord, to sooth us back
To a Fool's Paradice of Hope, to make
Our Doom more wretched? Go to, we are too well
Acquainted with Misfortune to be gull'd
With Lying Hope; no, we will hope no more.

Kent, befitting his character, is more willing to listen to Albany: “What wou'd your Highness?” he asks; but Albany is slow to explain, and Lear interrupts raspingly, “And whether tends this Story?” Then he is silent for some lines as Albany, Kent and Cordelia remark on Edmund's death; recovering, he exclaims over his own return to power (he retracts a few minutes later) and over Cordelia's:

Cordelia then shall be a Queen, mark that:
Cordelia shall be a Queen; Winds catch the Sound
And bear it on your rosie Wings to Heav'n.
Cordelia is a Queen.

If only the wings had not been “rosie,” these lines too would convey their enthusiasm forcefully.

Tate's work is spotty—sometimes fairly good, sometimes bad—but doubtless his contemporaries, like ours, were attracted to the theater less by the consistency or quality of style than by adequately written scenes of the kinds they liked to see, hung together on an interesting story line. To scenes of rage and horror, made brief and shorn of much of their power, Tate adds passages of distressed love, heroic rescue, joyful reunion with happy prospects, and adulterous lust. For the depth of Shakespeare's play he substitutes speed and a quick succession of moving situations.¹⁶ His play has an inner consistency of its own, but it is a play rather than an experience, bringing several groups of characters through a series of complications to a resolution consisting of punishment for the wicked and reward for the good and the regenerate.

It is not surprising that Restoration and eighteenth-century audiences preferred this lively adaptation to the original. Shakespeare's King Lear is an unconventional play by the standards of any age and especially so by the comparatively brittle criteria of the neo-classic theater. Although the Augustans saw enough in Shakespeare to establish his popularity firmly, they were often not interested in the method or direction his plays took: the manner and moral of the Jacobean King Lear must have seemed as much the opposite of what the Restoration admired in art as Tate's making the play more superficial seems inartistic to us. Since the adapters felt no obligation to keep what they did not like, they sometimes used the Shakespearean material for other ends which interested them. The enduring success of the adaptation was probably due to both playwrights: to what was left of Shakespeare's matter and to the skillful and canny alterations made by Tate in an extraordinary literary experience as he changed it into an ordinary literary work.

Our own inability to appreciate Tate's adaptation seems to result largely from the radical disappointment of our expectation that Tate will remain as faithful as he can to Shakespeare's purposes as we conceive them, and that his adaptation can be treated as an Augustan equivalent of the early Jacobean play. We expect Tate to value Shakespeare's variety, richness of suggestion, and deep analysis of the human spirit; and, of course, he does not do so. Since both our comprehension of Shakespeare's play and our expectations of a reworking of it differ greatly from those of the Augustans, we can best read Tate's King Lear as a new play with its own purpose and thus avoid judging it in terms of expectations it was never intended to satisfy. Read in this fashion, it is both coherent and entertaining.

Notes

1. “Three Shakespeare Adaptations,” Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section, VIII (1959), 238-239.

2. Actually, more and more of Shakespeare's play was restored beginning about 1756, but Tate's version was played along with other adaptations at least until 1800: see G. W. Stone, Jr., “Garrick's Production of King Lear,” SP, XLV (1948), 89-103; G. C. D. Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 2 vols. (New York, 1920); and C. B. Hogan, Shakespeare in the Theatre, 1701-1800, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1952-57). According to Odell (II, 154), the tragic ending was restored at Drury Lane on February 10, 1823.

3. The Works of Charles Lamb, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London, 1924), I, 137. This and several other well-known comments on Tate's Lear, including the remarks of Charlotte Lennox, Dr. Johnson, Hazlitt, and A. C. Bradley (Addison's are not included), are in The King Lear Perplex, ed. Helmut Bonheim (San Francisco, 1960). What Lamb saw on the stage may have been Tate's Lear with some of Shakespeare's restored, but his words are often cited as final condemnation of Tate's play itself—by Muir, for example (“Three Shakespeare Adaptations,” p. 238).

4. In The Cambridge History of English Literature, VIII (Cambridge, 1934), p. 41.

5. Odell, I, 51.

6. Shakespeare Improved (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 241-252.

7. The Language of Tragedy (New York, 1947), pp. 180-185.

8. Eighteenth-Century Adaptations of Shakespearean Tragedy, University of California Publications, English Studies, No. 14 (Berkeley, 1956), p. 66.

9. Quotations are from Shakespeare Adaptations, ed. Montague Summers (London, 1922).

10. H. Spencer remarks (p. 242), “In seeking to motivate Cordelia's failure to speak out, Tate recognizes the structural weakness of Shakespeare's play from a realistic point of view, which, of course, is precisely the point of view it is fatal to adopt.” It is “fatal” for Shakespeare's play, but necessary for Tate's: again, the critic is thinking only of Shakespeare.

11. Prior, p. 184.

12. The difference appears in the following remark by Dr. Johnson on Hamlet: “Of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause, for he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity.” (Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. [New York, 1960], p. 112.) To find the “cause” of behavior, modern readers look less to the action the characters must perform or to the action's demands upon the playwright than to the character himself and his past. A playwright asking himself which of the actions in King Lear “might not have been done” without the Fool might well conclude that there were none.

13. Quoted together by Kenneth Muir in his introduction to the Arden edition of King Lear (London, 1955), p. lxiv.

14. Prior, p. 181.

15. J. H. Wilson, All the King's Ladies (Chicago, 1958), p. 104; Lucyle Hook, “Shakespeare Improv'd, or A Case for the Affirmative,” SQ, IV (1953), 289-299.

16. Also, W. M. Merchant, Shakespeare and the Artist (London, 1959), p. 24, remarks that Tate's Lear “has more visual interest than any other of the non-operatic adaptations.”