[In the following essay, Green argues that the omission of the Fool in Tate's King Lear resulted in more focus on the internal workings of Lear's mind, an element that has been retained in productions of Shakespeare's play.]

The major differences between Shakespeare's King Lear and Nahum Tate's redaction of it in 1681 are often viewed with either amusement or horror, and then dismissed as long-gone aberrations of little consequence. Tate's substitution of a happy ending for the play and his addition of a romance between Edgar and Cordelia have shared most of this attention, but his omission of the Fool may be his most enduring influence on King Lear. The Fool has almost all his scenes with Lear, and many of Lear's lines develop as direct or indirect responses to the Fool's dialogue or actions. The omission of the Fool would seem to require considerable alterations of these lines, but comparison of Tate's text with Shakespeare's shows that Lear's lines are substantially intact. The isolation of these lines from their context suggests strange changes for both Lear and the play.

In actual productions actors found it necessary to reconstruct for themselves the context that was omitted with the Fool. Tate's additions, the happy ending and the romance, had little effect on the situation, so the individual actor was left to his own imagination. This reliance on personal insight, rather than interplay with other characters, often had spectacular results. In time the actor's freedom in interpreting Lear became a dramatic tradition, and not even the restoration of Shakespeare's text and Fool could control this obsession with the inner workings of Lear's mind. A number of modern productions indicate that the concept of an internalized Lear has persisted, even though his context has been supplied once more by the Fool. This study into Lear's pathology as a basis for interpretation has lasted beyond the necessity of Tate's text and continued into more recent interpretations of Shakespeare's text.

The nature of the interpretive problem with Lear can be seen in the way Tate approached the entire play and his new romance in particular. Tate was more interested in plot than in characterization, and when he felt that motivations were needed, he turned to sentimentality. The romance at the center of the play was intended simultaneously to provide reasons for unexplained actions and to bind explicitly the plots of Lear and “Gloster” together. Tate evidently felt that the entire play, Fool and all, was too unrefined for Restoration tastes. In his “Epistle Dedicatory” Tate describes Shakespeare's play as a “Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht” and goes on to explain that “‘Twas my good Fortune to light on one Expedient to rectify what was wanting in the Regularity and Probability of the Tale, which was to run through the whole A Love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia, that never chang'd word with each other in the Original.”¹ In Act I, Tate's “Expedient” has Cordelia and Edgar declare their love for one another before the testimonial begins, and while it is in progress, she tells the audience she would rather make the king disown her than be forced to marry Burgundy (France has been omitted completely). The king does get angry and she does not marry Burgundy, but the king suspects the reason for her cold speech—“Thy Fondness for the Rebel Son of Gloster” (I, p. 4). After this Lear divides his kingdom and banishes Kent, but as the Court leaves, Edgar rejoices that Cordelia may be left to him and he offers her his panting heart. She rebuffs him, reasoning in an aside that Edgar, like Burgundy, may only be interested in her for her royal property, and that she will wait for proof of love before committing herself. In Act II, when Edgar realizes he is being sought, he decides to stay around in disguise since he feels that “Cordelia's in destress” and “Who knows but the white minute yet may come / When Edgar may do service to Cordelia” (II, p. 17). Fortunately for Edgar, Tate has packed the play with white minutes. In Act III Cordelia seeks Gloster's help for her father who is lost on the heath, and Edmund, overhearing their conversation, decides to rape her on the way. Just as his henchmen are about to seize her, Edgar, dressed as Poor Tom, beats the ruffians off with the ringing words “Is this a Place and Time for Villainy? / Avaunt ye Bloud-hounds” (III, p. 34), and the two lovers confess their feelings with heartfelt sighs and exclamations. In Act V Edgar saves Cordelia again, and after they are gloriously re-united, Edgar ends the play with the pronouncement that “Truth and Vertue shall at last succeed” (V, p. 67).

This expedient of Tate's supplies the regularity the play wanted, but it also indicates the type of jewels he was stringing together. Almost all his dramatic high-points and turns in the plot occur either at the end of a long speech or in a sudden action on stage. As a result Lear's dramatic moments of self-realization are reserved for the ends of speeches. The speech must include all the necessary information and at the same time build emotionally to the desired brilliance. Polishing these dramatic moments is difficult with Lear because they usually occur in Shakespeare after a series of fast exchanges with the Fool. The Fool's language itself is highly figurative and simultaneously points to several different levels of meaning. The manner in which he jumps around from one line to the next perhaps baffled Tate's impulse towards regularity and probability, but it is a very efficient manner of revealing what is troubling Lear. The Fool is continually focusing on Lear from different directions which shift as quickly as Lear responds to them. In the longer speeches which follow these fast exchanges, Lear is free to give vent to his emotions. His feelings have already been exposed by the Fool, so Lear is under no burden to explain them within the speech itself. He needs only to express them in the intensity the Fool aroused. These are the noble speeches which interested Tate, and despite some condensation and rearrangement,² they remain substantially intact. The Fool's end of the conversation, however, has been excised. This turns both Lear's dialogue and his extended responses into dramatic monologue. After three acts of monologue the isolation of Lear from his Fool becomes the isolation of Lear's character. A comparison of the relevant scenes from Shakespeare and Tate indicates the extent of this isolation and its consequences for the interpretation of Lear.

The Fool first appears in Act I, scene iv,³ as Lear and Kent finish tripping-up Oswald. Lear is accustomed to being treated as a king, and the Fool's constant flow of songs, coxcombs, and pared crowns makes both Lear and the audience more conscious of the enormous change in Lear's state. Goneril breaks in upon them, and the Fool comments on Lear's new-found concern for his daughter's frowning. His remarks make Lear more sensitive to any affront, and at the same time they let Goneril frame her attack around the insolent, all-licensed Fool. Before Lear can respond to her argument, the Fool interjects with a song that likens her to a killer-cuckoo and further focuses Lear's attention on her attitude instead of her words. Lear cannot believe such a speaker could be his daughter or that such a listener could be Lear. His incoherent questioning is disoriented even more by the Fool's interjections. Lear is unable to understand or to respond, and when Goneril contemptuously ignores his anger and pain, he explodes into “Darkness and devils!—”

In Tate's revision (I, p. 10) there is no preliminary exchange between Kent and the Fool on status and employment, so that Goneril's instructions to her servant and his subsequent affront to Lear both lose much of their irony. The entire scene is less an inversion of the hierarchy in Lear's confused public and private lives, and more a spiteful, gratuitous action on Goneril's part. She enters while Lear and Kent are still tripping-up her servant, and her verbal attack responds directly to this act. When Lear asks “Now, Daughter, why that frontlet on? / Speak, do's that Frown become our Presence?” this situation makes the first question sound sheepishly guilty and the second one an indignant return to decorum. Her accusation reads more like a routine administrative announcement than a violation of a king's decree. Lear's response “Are you our Daughter?” seems a rather odd reply and unrelated to either his previous style of speaking or to Goneril's announcement. She resumes in the same manner, but Lear replies with a series of questions about himself and his identity. Goneril's final speech (“Come, Sir, this Admiration's much o' th' favour / Of other your new humours …”) is then a reply to disconnected questioning. At no time does Lear appear to be saying anything relevant to what Goneril is saying nor is there any indication of his state of mind that might relate his speeches to the scene. When he suddenly bursts into “Darkness and Devils!,” there seems to be little basis for his conduct or speech.

Lear's incoherent questions become incomprehensible and are unable to stand by themselves without the Fool to interpret both Goneril's speech to Lear and Lear's speech to the audience. Prior to the cursing of Goneril the Fool establishes the image of the rod simultaneously as the sceptre, the whip, and Lear's manhood:

LEAR:
When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?
FOOL:
I have used it, nuncle, e're since thou madest thy daughters thy mothers; for when thou gavest them the rod and puttest down thine own breeches. …

(I.iv.164-167)

This provides a basis for a steady rise to a level from which Lear can appeal to Nature to curse Goneril's womb, and from that new level he can threaten her for shaking his manhood. Tate does not establish this basis, nor does he have the lines with the Fool to serve as stepping stones for this rising passion. Tate, instead, reverses the order of Shakespeare's two speeches (the curse and the threat) and avoids the references to Lear's manhood. Tate's Lear presents himself as a wronged father and curses her, then calls on Nature for Goneril to have an ungrateful child who will make her “curse her Crime too late” (I, p. 12). The language of the final curse is substantially Shakespeare's, but Tate's previous lines do not provide an adequate spring-board to its intensity. Lear's total response to Goneril has been largely generated by the Fool's remarks, and the irony of his outbursts has been increased by framing them with references to the Fool and foolishness. Without the Fool, Tate's Lear must generate the effect of those remarks himself if he is to fill out Shakespeare's language. The cues and the path for rising passion have been built into Shakespeare's lines. They are not present in Tate's lines, and it is much more difficult to reach the power the speeches demand. At this point it is necessary for the individual actor to supply his own cues, either through voice, expression, or gesture, and to create for himself the context for these speeches.

In Shakespeare's play the Fool is with Lear almost continually during the first three acts, so that the Fool establishes both the literal context in which Lear speaks as well as the broader figurative context for both Lear and the play. Kent, Goneril, Edmund, and Lear all refer to foolishness in the beginning of Shakespeare's play, and their differing ideas contribute to the audience's sense of conflict.⁴ Shakespeare develops this further as Lear, Kent, and the Fool prepare to leave for Regan's palace. The Fool tells Lear he is deluding himself to think his other daughter will use him kindly and that he was foolish to part his kingdom so. Lear responds by thinking simply of Goneril's monstrous ingratitude, and the Fool tells him that he would make a good Fool. When Lear was master, or thought he was in control, he could threaten the Fool to take heed of the whip, but more than that has changed now:

FOOL:
If thou wert my Fool, nuncle, I'ld have thee beaten for being old before thy time.
LEAR:
How's that?
FOOL:
Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.
LEAR:
Oh let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!—

(I.v.38-44)

Tate has completely omitted this dialogue so that the sense of irony Shakespeare built into the lines as a basis for Lear's speeches is missing. It must be developed by Lear himself, if he is to retain his later language. The basic context of inverted relationships and unsteady standards is particularized and controlled in Shakespeare through Lear and his Fool. The differing attitudes of Goneril, Kent, and Lear towards hierarchy, their differing values and conceptions of foolishness, are all measured against the Fool and his relationship with Lear. Thus this relationship both defines Lear to the audience and controls the discrepancy between this view and Lear's own opinion of himself. With the loss of the Fool and many of the references to foolishness this basic irony is missing, so that Lear himself must somehow supply the sense of continual cross-reference his language calls for. The sharp focus the Fool provided on this shifting context is gone, and Tate's actor can provide it only by responding to a shifting image of Lear that exists solely in his own mind.

Lear perceives the broader dimensions to the stocking of Kent only after the Fool's interjections. The Fool replies to Kent's narrative by telling Lear he shall see his children kind only as long as he still bears bags for them. Lear's climbing sorrow is as much an impassioned response to the Fool's interpretation as to Kent's story. The depth of sorrow brought out in Lear by the Fool provides the basis for the terrible and erratic curses upon the sisters. The Fool's constant presence is a visual reminder of this, and Lear ends his curse with “—O Fool, I shall go mad!” (II.iv.283)

Tate has no pause between Kent's story and Lear's response to it. There is no time for his thoughts and speech to gather the dimensions that would have been interjected by the Fool, although the language remains. Tate's Lear replies directly to Kent's stocking with “climbing Rage.” Where Shakespeare's Lear is starting to climb to a sorrow that will embrace far more than just his daughters, Tate's Lear is furious about a personal insult. Before Regan's entrance in Shakespeare, Lear struggles with his rising heart, only to have the Fool tell him a tale about beating down wanton eels who resisted being cooked alive. Lear's forced restraint bubbles through the scene with the sisters, until it breaks into passion bordering on madness. Tate has no such dialogue or pause before Regan's entrance. Instead he requires the actor to generate his own pressure for the scene. With the loss of depth and power that the Fool released, the actor now has the necessity as well as the opportunity to respond freely to whatever he thinks it is that makes Lear tick. There is no control on Lear's diction now. The Fool no longer pulls Lear's language back into reality or serves as a standard to measure the changes in that language.

Shakespeare describes the physical scene of the storm on the heath before we see it. A gentleman tells Kent that Lear is contending with the elements, and the Fool is with him trying to outjest his pains and sorrows. Thus Lear himself is free to respond to the storm with pounding apostrophes, and the Fool to respond to both Lear and the storm. Even a Fool knows when Lear should come out of the rain and ask his daughter's blessing, but Lear's mind is on greater things. When he alludes to generation and all creation, the Fool is still singing about Lear's earlier choice of his toe over his heart. It is during the Fool's song of self-control, wisdom, and folly that Lear regains his own control, or at least subsides. When Kent enters, the Fool ironically points out in summation “Marry, here's grace and a cod-piece; that's a wiseman and a fool” (III.iii.40-41).

Tate's heath scene has Lear raging against the storm, while his only companion, Kent, tells the audience what is going on. Instead of a contrast between the Fool and Lear, between their different attitudes toward the storm and one another, there is only Lear delivering orations to the rain, while Kent asks him to consider the pros and cons of what he is doing. Where Shakespeare's Lear thinks of the universe and says “No, I will be the pattern of all patience,” Tate's Lear grabs a line that had expressed an earlier, supposedly superseded emotion: “I will forget my Nature, what? so kind a Father, / I, there's the point” (III, p. 24). Again Tate has left much of the language of Shakespeare, despite alterations, but he has removed the context of it that was developed by the interplay of Lear and his Fool. Tate's Lear has an essentially uninterrupted speech on the heath, and Kent's explanatory speeches simply confirm that the old king deserves compassion—indeed, pathos is about all that an actor can develop from this vestigial scene. Lear is even robbed of his awareness and compassion for his Poor Fool, since “how dost my Boy? art cold?” is addressed to the stalwart Kent, making this speech sound somewhat silly and sentimental.

The scene before the hovel and Lear's mock-trial of daughters have both been telescoped and rearranged in Tate to form one scene, and the Fool's soothing effect on Lear in his madness has been completely lost. When Shakespeare's Lear starts to unbutton, the Fool cries “Prithee, nuncle, be contented” (III.iv.106), while in Tate, all Kent can say is “Defend his Wits, good Heaven!” (III, p. 31)

This scene indicates the great difference in the characters of Shakespeare's Lear and Tate's. Just as the Fool's ironies previously pointed to a significance greater than the immediate situation, now Lear's lines refer to matters greater than himself. He is losing his capacity to reason, and the speed with which his images follow one another outstrips even the Fool's scope. The Fool's relationship to Lear continues to define Lear to the audience, at the same time serving as the measure of his madness. Tate's Lear, however, is essentially a rational man who temporarily loses his reason. Without the Fool to help supply the context he is not free to rage. Instead he must explain to the audience that he is raging (“Blow Winds and burst your Cheeks, rage louder yet”). He is never too far from rationality, and even Kent thinks Lear simply is not thinking clearly tonight; he says, “Consider, good my Liege. Things that love Night / Love not such Nights as this” (III, p. 24). Here the second sentence is offered to Lear as a new approach to a logical problem. In Shakespeare Kent is more concerned about Lear's safety and ability to reason at all, and the same anti-thesis is more of a confirmation by Kent to himself that it is dangerous on the heath: “Alas, sir, are you here? Things that love night / Love not such nights as these” (III.ii.42-43). The rhetorical question is one of concern, but the situation is not quite this serious in Tate, where Kent is still trying to reason with Lear. Kent does not supply the contrastive presence that the Fool did, so that when Lear flashes from rationality to madness there is no way to grade the difference. The actor must single-handedly convey both Lear's madness and the reasons for it, all without textual guidelines.

The possibility remains that within the heroic context of Tate's play the remnants of Shakespeare's lines took on dimensions omitted with the Fool, but the testimonial scene is the only point of contact in the first three acts between Lear and Tate's “Expedient.” In a discussion of the effects of Tate's concerns for probability, Christopher Spencer has noted that this single contact diminishes Lear.⁵ All three sisters are scheming against their father in the first scene—Goneril and Regan to obtain power and Cordelia to avoid marriage with Burgundy. Lear seems simply to have chosen the worse of two deceits, and if the purpose of the Fool is to make clear the magnitude of Lear's error, he is not necessary for Tate's family misunderstanding.

The problem seems to lie in Tate's overall structure. He used probability and a love-theme to tie the parts together in a more emotional manner (“The Distress of the story is evidently heightened by it”), and he placed Lear in reasonably defined situations. Unfortunately, Tate placed Lear's speeches in a context of plot and probability, when they were meant to function in a context of allusion and metaphor. The Fool's stream of paradoxes, references, and ironies all reverberated with a universe beyond just Lear, at precisely those moments when Tate wanted to make the play easy to comprehend.⁶ In addition to the confusion he caused, the Fool also appeared somewhat coarse to Restoration minds. Although there is very little about the Fool's speech that is actually comic, perhaps he was also omitted because of his name, as a sort of lipservice to the neoclassical theory that decreed separation of comedy and tragedy. Certainly some of Kent's speeches and his activity with Oswald would indicate that comedy was really acceptable as long as it was not called comedy.

With the omission of the Fool the metaphoric context for Lear's speeches was gone. Despite the probability and the plot machinations surrounding Lear's speeches, there was not enough energy to fill out his language. With the reduction of Lear's lines to speeches and the isolation of those speeches from their context, Lear's character also became isolated. The only way left around this was for the individual actor to create a metaphoric context outside of the lines themselves, to have a private understanding of what gave rise to Lear's speeches and actions, since the play itself did not supply such an understanding. In short, Tate's text required the actor to create an internal reality for Lear apart from the play. In actual productions of King Lear after 1681 this is precisely what happened.

The first actor to play Tate's Lear was Betterton. His response to this problem of context in 1681 was symptomatic of almost all subsequent interpretations. Something had to be wrong with Lear's mind, since what he said did not make sense with the play around him. Betterton concluded that Lear's speeches “must be spoke with an elevated Tone, and enraged Voice, and the Accents of a Man all on Fire, and in a Fury next to Madness.”⁷ Thus this need in Tate for a new context would seem to be the source of elaborate study of Lear's pathology to find a basis for creating a role. From this study it is not far to the critical attempt to understand the play by understanding Lear's mind. Despite Betterton's near-madness and Tate's own claim that “I found it well receiv'd by my Audience,” King Lear does not appear at first to have been as popular as Hamlet or Othello.

Apparently a superlative Lear was required to save the play from oblivion. Conversely, Tate's play provided the background from which such a Lear could appear. King Lear was the only one of Shakespeare's tragedies during the Restoration to present this dual requirement and opportunity. In the period from 1700 to 1750 there were several surges of interest in Shakespeare, but the London box-office success of Tate's King Lear was independent of the mutual fortunes of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello, even when the latter plays were adaptations or refinements. The play had two periods of popularity during this time, and each coincided with the emergence of a new actor: Boheme appeared in the 1720's and Garrick in the 1740's.⁸ Actors soon realized how few restrictions Tate's plot had placed upon their imaginations and how much the play needed a context for Lear. The combination of such freedom and need resulted in a very attractive challenge to an ambitious actor. The taste of the 1720's ran towards sentimental, tear-strewn drama, and Boheme accordingly emphasized the unhappy, grief-stricken side of Lear. After his death in 1731 the play fell into a slump. Despite a succession of popular actors in the heroic roles of Edgar and Cordelia, Tate's romantic play was not able to sustain itself without a superlative Lear. Garrick first appeared as Lear in 1742, after his debut in Richard III, and single-handedly brought the play to the forefront of the London stage again. After 1745 King Lear became almost Garrick's private property, and the play continued to be performed only by theaters at which he happened to be acting.

Garrick recognized the magnificent opportunity for solo performance in the vacuum left by the Fool. He made no changes in Tate's version until 1756, although G. W. Stone believes he was continually adding lines from Shakespeare throughout his career.⁹ Garrick expanded on Tate's possibilities by enlarging the role, and his versions printed in 1774 and 1786 show extensive restorations. Despite his expurgations of Tate from the text, he kept the romance and the happy ending, and kept out the Fool. Still there were restrictions on Garrick's seemingly free-handed creation. The omission of the Fool omitted the sense of continual cross-reference and “cosmic” reverberations, so that the possibilities for Lear's universe were limited. An account of Garrick's last performance is an indication of how Lear was portrayed as the “ill-used” old king:

The curse at the close of the first act, his phrenetic appeal to heaven at the end of the second on Regan's ingratitude, were two such enthusiastic scenes of human exertion, that they caused a kind of momentary petrifaction thro' the house, which he soon dissolved universally into tears. Even the unfeeling Regan and Goneril forgetful of their characteristic cruelty, played through the whole of their parts with aching bosoms and streaming eyes. …¹⁰

The depths and range of sorrow that the Fool set free in Lear have here been replaced by soaring pathos as Garrick seized his opportunity for an operatic cadenza. After Garrick's spectacular interpretation the role became the test of an actor's talents.

By this time almost all alterations, adaptations, and interpretations were directed towards improving the solo performance of Lear. Colman, Garrick's contemporary, produced a short-lived version that crossed Shakespeare's language with Tate's structure and kept the Fool out of Lear's way: “I had once some idea of retaining the Fool, but after the most serious consideration I was convinced that such a character in a tragedy would not be endured on the modern stage” (Odell, I, 380). Barry, Garrick's understudy, returned to the purity of Tate's adaptation in 1774. This was kept by Kemble until 1810, when he restored some of the language.

Edmund Kean concentrated upon the workings of Lear's insane mind and presented Lear on the heath as a dream-like recollection. The need for a speaking context independent of the text allowed Kean to create a Lear who responds to a mysterious influence or inspiration rather than to immediate feelings and faculties (Furness, pp. 440-443). Again the requirements for Lear's speeches has led to two plays—the one in the text and the second in Lear's mind. Again Lear's response to the missing Fool has created a dramatic monologue that tends towards a confused soliloquy. Kean produced the Tate version until 1823, when he restored the tragic ending, although it was not Shakespeare's ending. Odell hails this as a revolutionary breakthrough (II,155), but in fact the production was a disaster: “Kean could not carry Mrs. W. West without difficulty—this is said to have set the audience into a laugh, which continued till the curtain dropt” (quoted in Black, p. 46).

By the time of Macready the tradition of the self-sufficient Lear was so firmly established that even the restoration of the Fool could not alter it. The tradition instead altered the Fool when he appeared. In 1834 Macready restored nearly all of Shakespeare's text, but still left out the Fool. In preparing for a production in 1838 he wrote that the Fool was such a terrible contrast that “in acting representation it will fail of effect; it will either weary and annoy or distract the spectator” (Odell, II,195). At the last minute Macready conceived of the Fool as a “sort of fragile, hectic, beautiful-faced boy” (Furness, pp. 67-68). He finally settled on having a woman play the poor fool and knave in the Fool's first appearance since 1681.

Two pages later Odell piously intones that “With this production the ghost of Nahum Tate—so far as England, if not America, was concerned—was laid forever.” Unfortunately, his ghost, if not his text, may remain with us considerably longer. The element of pathos which has always existed in Lear was kept in check by the Fool, whose lines would continually undercut sloppy sentiment, but when the Fool was taken away this element ran wild. Coupled with the loss of dimension and language, the omission of the Fool led to extravagant deliveries of Lear's speeches and extensive explorations into the causes of his pathology. Those few times that Lear actually does talk in a situation that exists only in his mind, as with Goneril's ingratitude (I.v.20-40), have the impact of the internal shift obliterated by the successive cadenzas. The Fool's restoration after 150 years of stage tradition and criticism has not in itself been enough to cause actors and directors to abandon their dramatic field day. Maynard Mack has traced the production of King Lear through recent times, and concludes that most of the nineteenth-century Lears after Macready were senile, old, pathetic men.¹¹ Charles Laughton's interpretation, as recent as 1959, portrayed Lear as a diminutive, sympathetic “representative of the common man” and was intended “to put the play within the scope and comprehension of a mass Shakespearian audience” (Mack, p. 27), playing upon emotions which are considerably less in scope than Shakespeare's play, with the Fool, would seem to call for. Herbert Blau's production in 1961 treated the storm on the heath as an extension of Lear's mind, complete with a cacophonic electronic score and improvised ballet between Lear, the Fool, and Poor Tom—“one felt the storm as a nightmare; one saw the descent to absolute dispossession on the part of the King.”¹² The entire production was based upon a “sub-text” (the play behind the text) taken from Cordelia's response “nothing.” Thus the creation of an internal reality for Lear continues long after the Fool's return to the stage, and modern productions can deliver that “nightmare” directly to the audience without any interference from the text.

What began as a side-effect or corollary to Tate's major alterations may well prove to be his most long-lasting effect. Tate's adaptation in 1681 produced a play that appealed to contemporary dramatic tastes, and it took over 150 years for his love-theme to be discarded. It is unlikely that the modern audience will ever encounter this particular love story. Some current stage ideas, however, continue to have Lear responding in isolation to a world largely of his own creation, and this leaves the Fool scampering along side him, uttering unneeded paradoxes. Perhaps this would have been Lear's fate on the modern stage without Tate's help, but his redaction made it all but unavoidable. Instead of presenting a Lear who can build only on the context provided by the Fool, there is an internalized Lear with diminished proportions. It may take some time for the Fool to reassert himself on stage and restore the needed interplay with Lear. Until then we can cry out with Lear “And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!”

Notes

1. Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear (London, 1681), “The Epistle Dedicatory.” All further citations from The History of King Lear are to this edition, referenced by act number and page number.

2. Tate made numerous stylistic changes as well. Hazelton Spencer has examined a number of these in Shakespeare Improved (Cambridge, 1927), pp. 250-251. They result from grammatical corrections, modernizations, prosaic clarity, literalization of figurative language, and often pure capriciousness.

3. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. H. H. Furness, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (New York, 1880). All further citations from King Lear are to this edition.

4. The entire subject of majesty falling to folly is first brought up in the testimonial scene by Kent. When he reappears disguised in Act II his earlier words are literally expressed in the inverted roles of the king and his Fool. Shakespeare uses this broader subject of foolishness as a tool in exploring the problem of how to deal with experience and as an indication within the play of the different characters' attitudes towards the problem. For a fuller discussion of this aspect in Shakespeare, see R. B. Heilman, This Great Stage—Image and Structure in “King Lear” (Seattle, 1963), pp. 182-192.

5. Christopher Spencer, “A Word for Tate's Lear,” Studies in English Literature, III (Spring, 1963), p. 246. Spencer argues that this diminution of Lear is irrelevant to an appreciation of Tate's Lear, and that such a judgment must be based on Restoration standards rather than those applied to Shakespeare's plays.

6. Tate thought the problems the play posed were best understood as moral choices. This ultimately resulted in a triumph for Lear, since truth and virtue had to succeed. For an account of the production difficulties and critical repercussions of this concern with moral motivations, see Peter L. Sharkey, “Performing Nahum Tate's King Lear: Coming Hither by Going Hence,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, LIV (December, 1968), pp. 398-403.

7. James Black, “An Augustan Stage-History: Nahum Tate's King Lear,” Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research, VI (May, 1967), p. 40. Tate wrote for both the individual actors' interest in the roles and the theater's capabilities. In 1681 the Duke's Theatre held exclusive rights to any production of Shakespeare's King Lear, and if the theater decided not to accept Tate's play, it could not be produced at all. The theater had both prison and grotto sets. Tate wrote one scene showing Lear and Cordelia actually in prison, and another with Edmund and Regan amorously engaged. The two lead actresses, Elizabeth Barry and Mary Lee, were vying with one another, and research by Black suggests the grotto love-scene was written primarily for the second actress.

8. Max F. Schulz, “King Lear A Box-Office Maverick Among Shakespearian Tragedies on the London Stage 1700-01 to 1749-50,” Tulane Studies in English, VII (1957), pp. 83-90.

9. G. W. Stone, Jr., “Garrick's Production of King Lear: A Study in the Temper of the Eighteenth-Century Mind,” Studies in Philology, XLV (January, 1948).

10. George C. D. Odell, Shakespeare—From Betterton to Irving (New York 1920), I. 454.

11. Maynard Mack, “King Lear” in Our Time (Berkeley, 1965), p. 2.

12. Herbert Blau, “A Subtext Based on Nothing,” Tulane Drama Review, VIII (1963), p. 130.