[In the following essay, Sharkey examines a 1967 staging of Tate's King Lear, revealing the influence of stage history on modern versions of Shakespeare's Lear.]

Producing Nahum Tate's seventeenth-century adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear illustrates how much past stage history affects our modern view of Lear. Over the years popular tragedians of the English and American stages developed a declamatory acting style that was born of Tate's modifications, and their success profoundly influenced the philosophy of producing Shakespearean tragedy. Neither the restoration of Shakespeare's text nor a change in rhetorical fashion could reverse a trend started by Tate and fully realized in the radical internalization of Shakespeare's dramaturgy in the modern theatre. The experimental production by students at the University of California, Berkeley, traces another source of the narrowness of the historically influential concept that the generative kernel of each Shakespearean tragedy is to be found solely in the pathology of the central character.

The revival of Tate's operatic version at Berkeley last year was probably the first in over a century. Perhaps it has taken that long to forgive those who preferred Tate to Shakespeare and who demanded exclusively to see the “restored” version on their stage in the 150 years from 1681 to 1837. The experiment helped surprisingly to identify and clarify Tate's lingering, curiously stubborn influence upon modern views of the play, especially in regard to structure and psychological coherence. Although the last age has tried to forget Tate, modern productions of Lear as an existential-psychological drama stem, in fact, in a greater part than we realize from the exaggerated style of elocution of that period. In retrospect, the tonal similarities between Tate's “improvement” and modern renditions of the original provoke more thought than the quaint differences in the respective texts.

Two critical events connected with the Shakespeare Quadricentennial inspired and shaped the Berkeley experiment: in 1964 Professor Maynard Mack as Beckman Lecturer delivered three talks on the history of Lear criticism and production,¹ and in 1965 Professor Christopher Spencer edited, and the University of Illinois Press published, a collection of redactions entitled Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare. Professor Spencer supplied a bright new copy of Tate's obscured heroic text, and Professor Mack, weighing with great wisdom the history of redactions, put Tate's “restoration” in a new and attractive light.²

Professor Mack emphasizes Tate's direct and honest efforts to solve the Lear dilemmas for Restoration taste, devoted as it was to formal order and realism in dramatic art. As a result, he has demonstrated the need to estimate the extent to which contemporary productions build upon the partial solutions and compromises of past performances and to evaluate this legacy of interpretation as a phenomenon apart from the directions implicit in the text. The stage success or failure (for example) of the blinding of Gloucester, or the imaginary plummet over the cliff have traditionally served as critical points of departure in judging productions. The verisimilitude of the King's insanity on stage has too often been the unfortunate measure of an actor's handling of the complex role, and this has had a pernicious effect upon the stage tradition. Thus, problematic loci in the text have become, through the memorable performances of individuals, the histrionic foci of director and actor.

An excellent case in point is David Garrick's brilliant modification of Tate's King to fit his own talent. By restoring to the role more and more of Shakespeare's lines over the years, his performances soared in pathos. Eighteenth-century listeners flocked to his performances in the role of the “ill-used” old man, and their tears flowed. So lachrymose was the atmosphere of those productions that the very actresses who played the obdurate, evil sisters could not refrain from weeping during Garrick's pyrotechnical declamations of the curses against them. Did the contrastive rhetoric of Shakespeare's lines within the melodramatic setting radically increase the pathos, or did the tears result from the actor's sheer sympathetic talent?³ How did this affect the Lear role when Shakespeare's text was restored completely in the next century? Mack suggests that we have been so influenced by the productions and actors of the past that our dramatic expectations have been shaped in a way that no purely historical, textual analysis could, or should, supersede.

Taking its cue from Mack, the Berkeley production attempted to present seriously Tate's radical solution to problems inherent in Shakespeare's play. By writing into the play a psychology of “ruling passions,” Tate conveniently managed to dispose of such familiar problems as the lack of any apparent motivation for the ancient King's precipitous, destructive actions, or for the otherwise dutiful Cordelia's refusal to conform to her obsequious sisters, or for Edmund's evil machinations, or for Edgar's disguise and his persistent virtue. Tate changed Shakespeare's plot in these particulars: He invented a love affair between Cordelia and Edgar, omitted France and the Fool, and gave Cordelia a lady-in-waiting to accompany her across the blasted heath in search of her father throughout the middle of the play. Edmund intends to rape Cordelia and follows her hence, but his plan is foiled when his ruffians are dispersed by the lover-hero Edgar, a miniature Hercules dressed as Tom-O-Bedlam. Through Edgar's, Gloucester's and Lear's heroic acts the play ends happily “at the seashore” (Dover) with the virtuous characters restored to power and the others destroyed by their foul devices. Thus, “Vice is punished and Virtue rewarded,” poetic justice is established, and natural probability abandoned.

Lear's curses and his ravings in the mad scenes, Gloucester's and Edmund's oaths of revenge, and Edgar's and Cordelia's love complaints and vows constitute the heart of Tate's play; each is a rhetorical cameo or locket of the single passion ruling the corresponding character, and the scenes in which they appear are essentially rhetorical frames. This results in a kind of declamation contest between good and evil. By putting passionate hymns to love and duty in Cordelia's mouth Tate arrests the momentum of the horror that is the essence of his model. He gives Cordelia, thereby, an interest in the total plot not just equal to her sisters', but comparable to her father's. Each scene is built around an emotional high point. Elocution is the name of this interpretative game; to perform Tate, the cast must build from this simple rhetorical schema. The great speeches, soliloquies as well as exhortations, which in Shakespeare throw so much light in all directions at once, in Tate become isolated from the tone and content of the surrounding discourse; they are freed from the figurative, allusive diction which originally functioned in Shakespeare to keep the subplots alive in the minds of the audience and actors and to expand the meaning vigorously on many levels of thought at once. In Tate this tumult of sound and sense has been quieted so that the single revealing speech stands alone as a paradigm of its passion. The Fool has been eliminated altogether, not only because his medicine is too harsh for Tate's audience, but because he is a constant distraction from the stark effect of the King's declamation. Consequently, much of Lear's speech sounds like dramatic monologue. The dialogues throughout the play merely lead up to and down from the great bursts of tears and ravings.⁴

In his dedicatory letter Tate expressed admiration for Shakespeare but qualified it by noting that the master had left behind a “heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolished.” By “Jewels” Tate meant specifically a number of noble speeches whose moral impetus was unclear because the motivation of the characters who spoke them was obscured in the confusion of plots. As he found the play, the action did not conform to Restoration standards of dramatic unity, and the mixed style failed the test of genre. Tate was determined to make the action more probable and the dilemmas more obviously moral. Thus in the first sixty-five lines of his improved version, each character, except the King, tells us directly why he is going to do what he does. The fact that Lear does not know his own nature or intentions sets him apart. He is intended to become the potentially “tragic” character who, by learning and adjusting to his fate, will, in the last analysis, live and thrive. He is tragic in this context because his rational faculty is inoperative while he continues to perform his regal functions. King Lear possessed no “tragic flaw” until Tate endowed him with one. In itself this modification in the King's characterization would not have led future generations so far astray. Tate's mistake was that he tried to make too much of a good thing and over-developed the psychological motivations of all his major characters somewhat mechanically. Certainly Tate cannot be held wholly responsible for the endless, hopeless search of critics for the tragic flaw of all of Shakespeare's heroes. The germ of inquiry into Lear's pathology, however solidly planted by Tate, had to be nourished by the directors and actors from Tate to the present day to make it grow into its maturity on our contemporary “subjective” stages.

Listen to Edmund who opens Tate's play:

Thou Nature art my Goddess, to thy Law
My Services are bound, why am I then
Deprived of a Son's Right because I came not
In the dull Road that Custom has prescribed?
Why Bastard, wherefore Base, when I can boast
A Mind as generous and a Shape as true
As honest Madam's Issue? Why are we
Held Base, who in the lusty Stealth of Nature
Take fiercer Qualities than what compound
The scanted Births of the stale Marriage-bed?
Well, then, legitimate Edgar, to thy Right
Of Law I will oppose a Bastard's Cunning.
Our Father's Love is to the Bastard Edmund
As to Legitimate Edgar: with Success
I've practis'd yet on both their easie Natures:
Here comes the old Man chaf't with th'information
Which last I forged against my Brother Edgar,
A Tale so plausible, so boldly uttered
And heightened by such lucky Accidents,
That now the slightest Circumstance confirms him,
And Base-born Edmund spight of Law inherits.

Tate has added a key causational concept in the terms “plausible,” “lucky accidents,” and “opposed.” Edmund's place in nature and his moral capacity are never in doubt. There is no hesitation and intellection, no frustrated introspection. For contrast, here are the crucial lines from the original speech in Shakespeare:

Why brand they us
With base? With baseness? bastardy? base, base?

From here Tate's plot moves swiftly and deliberately. A few lines later Kent and Gloucester expatiate upon the King's “ruling passion”:

KENT:
I grieve to see him
With such wild Starts of Passion hourly seized
As renders Majesty beneath itself.
GLOS:
Alas 'tis the Infirmity of his Age,
Yet has his Temper ever been unfixt,
Cholerick and suddain.

Thus the audience is prepared for the suddenness of Lear's change of heart in the ensuing testimonial scene. Also antecedent to that scene is the following exchange between Edgar and Cordelia:

EDGAR:
Cordelia, royal Fair, turn yet once more,
And e're successfull Burgundy receive
The Treasure of thy Beauties from the King,
E're happy Burgundy forever fold thee,
Cast back one pitying Look on wretched Edgar.
CORD:
Alas what would the wretched Edgar with
The more unfortunate Cordelia;
Who in obedience to a Father's Will
Flys from her Edgar's arms to Burgundy's.

In her preference for Edgar over Burgundy she reveals further grounds for Lear's sudden outrage at her disobedience. Then comes a very abbreviated testimonial scene in which the traditional, rhetorical speeches on merit and value by the sisters have been truncated in order to avoid comparison with Cordelia's expanded, idealistic remarks. This strategy reverses Shakespeare. It is the anti-rhetorical bias of Cordelia there which focuses our attention on true value. In Tate, the overall effect of this opening is that a clear geometry of moral interests is presented with its matching hierarchy of rhetoric: love is on the top and hate and distrust are on the bottom. The love tryst simplifies the dependence of Lear, Cordelia, and Edgar upon each other and encloses the physical and psychological space they inhabit and share with the audience. This serves to meld the subplot into the main action, bringing the play in line with classical models. Lear's malady is diagnosed according to the familiar formula of humours identifying him with those reasonable, but occasionally choleric gentlemen in Tate's audience. Thus, by polarizing the elements of love and hate, and identifying the protagonist's natural affliction, Tate neutralizes the debate on the preeminence of cosmic and natural accidence which he had found infecting the tone of Shakespeare's opening act. This allows him to establish the theme of amor vincit omnia and to evade the poignancy of the coincidence of Lear's and Gloucester's misfortunes which is the essence of Shakespeare's tragedy.⁵

Quite naturally, therefore, when the student readers came to realize that passionate exaggeration was indeed the intended effect of the rhetoric they were interpreting, the first crisis of the production arose. How could they possibly read without irony the patriotic ravings of the blind Gloucester, or the love-longing of Edgar, or the exhortations of Cordelia as she wanders the heath in search of her lost father? Could the production be saved from sick laughter and high camp sneers? This drew their attention directly to the more central matter of how to sustain the action, create continuity of character, and develop a recognizable tone which would modulate a steadily rising vocal intensity and increasing rhythm until the very end. It was quickly settled that, since the ideal of melodrama is to keep the audience on edge in a state of emotional uncertainty, they must not be allowed to laugh or cry in relief, but they must be kept just at a breaking point for the maximum effect. True success depended upon the control of tension up to the concluding reconciliation scene, when, having at last swept aside the forces of evil, and relaxed at the seashore, the happy, healthy, restored King would pronounce to the relief and joy of the audience that:

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

The actor who lapses into eye-rolling parody of this kind of hyperbolic discourse before the climax destroys the ambiguous melodramatic tension and deflates his characterization.

Notice here that the modern actor who lacks schooling in the grand manner of elocution will find it much harder to sustain Tate's characterization of Lear than Shakespeare's simply because there exist practically no clues in Tate for developing psychological continuity in the valleys between the emotional outbursts; when the character is not revealing his ruling passion in a set speech, he is usually speaking rationally in rather polished blank verse and periodic prose. The actor is required suddenly to leap to the heights of passion.⁶

In this interpretive dilemma the Tate production touches modern portrayals of Lear. In modern performances of Shakespeare's play this legacy of grotesque histrionics often results in aberration and breakdown of tone, usually caused by the actor's over-regard for the portrayal of Lear's pathology which was Tate's interest far more than Shakespeare's. Also, because of a failure to appreciate and control the profound stress pattern of the bass drum beat in the rhythm of Lear's preliminary speeches, the modern actor is often swept too far along in the first waves of Lear's oncoming madness, and he often reaches an unfortunate, premature crescendo in the first curse at the end of Act I that cannot be topped again. Thus he may spend the rest of the play trying to convince himself and his audience that madness, once it has begun, has the same tonal consistency throughout its run.⁷ At this point “method” acting takes over.

When we return at last to imagine the quality of the famous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century performances of Lear we cannot help but be impressed by the strength of the tradition of elocution and declamation in that period. The success of those performances can be said to be “immortal” in a number of senses, a few of which we still fail to understand. Naturally, the pathetic renditions of Lear did not end with the restoration of Shakespeare's text near the middle of the last century; and although most teachers would deny it, the ability to declaim a set speech from Shakespeare often persists today as the tacit goal of an education in oral interpretation. The search for ourselves in Lear's pathology is the bias which conserves wrongly a mental landscape for the play's context despite the fact that the grand declamatory style which originally grew up in response to this view has long since dried up, cracked, and fallen away from the kernel. One consequence of this phenomenon is the fact that in most Lear productions the prose passages bear very little tonal relation to the rhapsodic verse speeches. Too often in a modern production we fail to hear the poetry in the heath scenes because of the special “psychedelic” sound effects and music which drown out the actors.⁸ What are we to think of the now-accepted renditions of the Fool as Lear's partially cracked psychiatrist who never directs a word out to the audience? And perhaps worst of all, what are we to feel when we are suddenly plunged into darkness and the action completely halts following each scene? If we too are left darkling, and all the world is madder than Lear, then who will be left to speak the final admonitory speech? Through psychological reductions most modern directors lead us to premature conclusions about the play that differ little from Tate's view. They present a skillful dramatization of Lear's tortured psyche, but never a drama of all the forces of nature working together simultaneously on all the characters on the stage. In today's productions, as in the heyday of Tate's adaptation, we continue to suffer the presentation of a sick, dotty old man, not a great tormented king.

Notes

1. Since published as King Lear In Our Time, University of California Press (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965).

2. This is the first comprehensive analysis of the play's stage history to appear since George C. D. Odell's classic Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving (2 vols., New York, 1920, 1966). Modern scholarship on the tradition of Shakespeare redactions begins with Hazelton Spencer's invaluable study, Shakespeare Improved, The Restoration Versions in Quarto and on the Stage (Cambridge, Mass., 1927).

3. George Winchester Stone, Jr., describes the contemporary controversy concerning the presentation of passion on the stage stirred by Garrick's Lear in “Garrick's Production of King Lear: A Study in the Temper of the Eighteenth Century Mind,” Studies in Philology, XLV (January 1948), 89-103. Evidently, the strong audience reaction discouraged Garrick from abandoning Tate's structure even though he was inclined to do so on numerous occasions.

4. Throughout the play Tate regularized the blank verse without regard to the dramatic context. By smoothing out Lear's speeches and yet retaining Shakespeare's diction he presents the King basically as a man of reason who suddenly runs off his trolley. This is disturbingly noticeable in the heath scenes where his own descriptive speeches seem emotionally similar to Kent's, while his ravings and curses are sudden and “epileptic” compared to either. The absence of the Fool in these scenes places a monstrous burden upon the actor.

5. Even though many critics following Addison had judged Tate's text inferior to Shakespeare's, by the mid-eighteenth century his psychology remained in vogue and seemed to be dominating the best criticism.

6. Faced with the same problem. Garrick gradually restored the lines of Shakespeare's King without changing Tate's context. See Stone, p. 101.

7. Hazelton Spencer speculates that Tate may have seen one of Davenant's rare productions of Shakespeare's Lear in the late 1670's, which, if true, might begin to explain his extraordinary interest in the King's pathology.

8. Addison complained of the growing vogue of spectacle on the English stage in his time in The Spectator, No. 44. He pointed particularly to distractive, ill-conceived “special stage effects” such as bells, thunder and ghosts. For further discussion of the neoclassical critical approach to Shakespeare see Robert Witbeck Babcock, The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry, 1766-1799 (New York, 1964), especially Chapter XII, “The Psychologizing of Shakespeare.”