[In the following essay, Massai examines Tate's use of different versions of Shakespeare's King Lear in his revision of the play.]

In his 1975 edition of The History of King Lear (1681), James Black could still claim that Nahum Tate's notorious adaptation was “one of the most famous unread plays in English.”¹ Since then, mainly as a result of an unprecedented interest in the afterlife of the Shakespearean text,²The History of King Lear has been studied both in relation to the changed stage and dramatic conventions of Restoration theaters and for its historical and political significance.³ Despite this revival of critical interest in Shakespearean adaptations and Christopher Spencer's advocacy of Tate,⁴ the stigma of mediocrity which was first associated with Tate in the nineteenth century still discourages critics and editors alike from investigating Tate's competence as a professional reader of Shakespeare.

Tate had the privilege of reading and adapting Shakespeare's King Lear in a preconflationist age, when no theory about the origin of the copy texts behind the Quarto or the Folio had been advanced. His adaptation is the only surviving instance of a critical assessment of the dramatic qualities of Quarto and Folio King Lear before Lewis Theobald's editorial policy of conflation and the theory of the lost original denied both texts a direct link with the author's holograph. Tate felt free to rely on his Quarto and Folio source texts independently of their formal qualities, thus highlighting dramatic differences between them which supporters of the theory of revision in King Lear now regard as intentional and possibly authorial. Unlike Black, who argues that Tate must have relied on his Folio source(s) more and more consistently after act I, because he had by then realized that the Quarto is formally inferior to the Folio,⁵ I believe that Tate must have regarded his Quarto and Folio source texts as dramatically independent versions of the same play and that he used them according to which text provided an alternative better suited to his own strategy of revision of the Lear story.⁶ This article therefore provides new indirect evidence in favor of the theory of internal revision in King Lear,⁷ by establishing a connection between Tate's dramatic and ideological agenda as an adapter of Shakespeare and his selective and discriminating reliance on his Quarto and his Folio sources in The History of King Lear.

I. QUARTO VARIANTS IN ACTS I AND II OF THE HISTORY OF KING LEAR AND TATE'S REVISION OF THE KING

Tate's political affiliations played an important part in his decision to replace Shakespeare's tragic ending with “the King's blest Restauration” (K1v, line 10).⁸ The new ending bears a close resemblance to the comic resolution in Shakespeare's main dramatic source, the anonymous The Chronicle History of King Leir (1605).⁹ More importantly, Tate's revision is symptomatic of the progressive decline of tragedy and the increasing popularity of tragicomedy in postrevolutionary drama.¹⁰ Similarly, Tate's expansion of the female roles and his introduction of the love affair between Edgar and Cordelia are clearly a tribute to the new practice of having women actors on the Restoration stage.¹¹ Further evidence of the influence of current dramatic conventions on Tate's revision is a strong concern with decorum, which, as Tate himself suggests, led him to tone down “Lear's real, and Edgar's pretended Madness” (“Epistle Dedicatory,” A2r, line 14; A2v, line 1). The omission of the Fool, however, seems prompted by matters of ideological rather than dramatic concern, the Fool being the main source of the vexing criticism the king is exposed to in the Shakespearean originals.

Tate's adaptation of Shakespearean tragedy into Restoration tragicomedy entailed a radical departure from both his Quarto and his Folio originals. Particularly interesting is Tate's recasting of his tragic hero in acts I and II.

In order to suit Tate's tragicomic revision of the Lear story, the king is transformed into a character with an obvious but minor flaw, easily blamed at the beginning for initiating his own fall, but also easily forgiven in the end, because of the obvious imbalance between his share of responsibility and the potential magnitude of the avoided catastrophe. Tate helps his audience detect a flaw in the king's character by introducing a new exchange between Gloucester and Kent in the opening scene:

KENT.
                                                            I grieve to see him
With such wild starts of passion hourly seiz'd,
As renders Majesty beneath it self.
GLOST.
Alas! 'tis the Infirmity of his Age,
Yet has his Temper ever been unfixt,
Chol'rick and suddain.

(B1v, lines 35-8; B2r, lines 1-2)

Although Tate's Lear is a flawed character, he is guilty of a lesser crime than his predecessors in Quarto and Folio King Lear, his disappointment for the outcome of the love trial being partly justified by Cordelia's ulterior motives. A brief exchange between Cordelia and Edgar immediately before Lear's first entrance discloses their secret engagement. Cordelia's original integrity is therefore compromised by her divided allegiances to Lear and Edgar:

CORD.
Now comes my Trial, how am I distrest,
That must with cold speech tempt the chol'rick King
Rather to leave me Dowerless, than condemn me
To loath'd Embraces!

(B2v, lines 6-9)

Lear's rage stems not so much from his blindness and his misjudgment of Cordelia's motives as from his perspicacity. When she retorts “So young my Lord and True” (B3r, line 2), the king, along with the audience, knows that Cordelia is lying. The king's initial surprise at his daughter's open disobedience, “And goes thy Heart with this?” (B2v, line 32), which Tate borrows from the original, is followed by an indictment of her true motives:

LEAR.
'Tis said that I am Chol'rick, judge me Gods,
Is there not cause? now Minion I perceive
The Truth of what has been suggested to Us,
Thy Fondness for the Rebel Son of Gloster,
False to his Father, as Thou art to my Hopes.

(B2v, lines 33-7)

The king's reference to Edgar as “the Rebel Son of Gloster” is directly related to Tate's decision to open his adaptation with Edmund's soliloquy, “Thou Nature art my Goddess” (B1r, line 6). Toward the end of this soliloquy, Edmund informs the audience that Edgar is now unanimously regarded as a traitor as a result of his machinations:

BAST.
Here comes the old Man [Gloucester] chaf't with th'Information
Which last I forg'd against my Brother Edgar,
A Tale so plausible, so boldly utter'd
And heightned by such lucky Accidents,
That now the slightest circumstance confirms him,
And Base-born Edmund spight of Law inherits.

(B1r, lines 21-2; B1v, lines 1-4)

Tate's Lear is therefore misled about Edgar, but not about Cordelia. Tate, in other words, makes his audience aware that Lear is acting to the best of his knowledge as a wise and responsible monarch in opposing Edgar and Cordelia's engagement. Besides, Lear's disclaimer, “'Tis said that I am Chol'rick” (B2v, line 33), makes his flaw more easily forgivable.

According to Peter L. Sharkey, “King Lear possessed no ‘tragic flaw’ until Tate endowed him with one.”¹² Black expands on Sharkey: “Attempting to make the king more understandable or at least more recognizable, [Tate] prepares for Lear's irrational behavior by introducing ‘choler’ as a tragic flaw.”¹³ My objection to this argument is that Tate did not have to invent a new tragic flaw for his king. He simply accentuated the tragic flaw he found in the Quarto.

Tate follows the Quarto in omitting seven extra Folio lines from Lear's first speech. As a result, Tate's Lear fails to justify his decision to divide the kingdom, and, as in the Quarto, he sounds more willful and reckless. Tate's Lear also fails to explain (or to realize) that the division of the kingdom serves a noble and selfless purpose. By omitting the Folio lines,

We have this houre a constant will to publish
Our daughters severall Dowers, that future strife
May be prevented now.

(F, lines 48-50)

Tate follows the Quarto in depicting the king as strong-willed to the point of obstinacy.¹⁴

The Folio additions to Lear's first speech combine to make the king look older, weaker, and consequently unable to retain his title and power. In the Folio, the king's “darker purpose” (F, line 41) coincides with his decision to abdicate not only “all cares and business” of state (Q, line 40; F, line 44), as in the Quarto, but also the “Rule, and Interest of Territory” (F, lines 54-5). His decision to abdicate is fully justified by the fact that he is too old to rule. In the Folio, the king thinks he is soon to die:

                                                                                                                        'tis our fast intent,
To shake all Cares and Businesse from our Age,
Conferring them on yonger strengths, while we
Unburthen'd crawle toward death.

(F, lines 43-6; Folio variants in italics)

Lear in the Quarto is still as strong as the majority of his predecessors in the sources. In John Higgins and in Raphael Holinshed, for example, Lear never resigns. The division of the kingdom and abdication are two independent issues. The king divides his kingdom into marriage portions, but succession is postponed until after his death. In Higgins, the king punishes his youngest daughter by disowning her and by dividing the kingdom between his elder daughters, retaining his title and position until his death. Cordell happily marries the king of France and only her sisters' greed brings her back to England to defend her father's right to the throne. Similarly in Holinshed, the king proclaims his eldest daughters and their husbands his successors but does not abdicate. The Lear episode in The Faerie Queene is the only notable exception: here the king is old and tired and, as in the Folio, he voluntarily “eases” himself of the crown. In The True Chronicle History of King Leir, the king expresses a wish to abdicate before the love trial, but abdication is forced upon him only by its unforeseen outcome.¹⁵ In Shakespeare, Kent and Gloucester's opening exchange,

KENT.
I Thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany, then Cornwall.
GLOUC.
It did alwayes seeme so to us: But now in the division of the Kingdomes, it appeares not which of the Dukes hee valewes most, for equalities are so weigh'd, that curiosity in neither, can make choice of eithers moity.

(Q, lines 1-6; F, lines 1-7; Quarto variants in italics)

informs the audience that the king's decision regarding the settlement of his daughters' dowries has already taken place, and not, as it is generally assumed when this passage is read retrospectively, within the context of a conflated King Lear, that the king has decided to abdicate.

In his first speech in the Quarto, the king announces his “darker purposes”: arranging Cordelia's marriage, dividing the kingdom in three parts to bestow on his daughters as their marriage portions, and testing them to decide who deserves the richest share of the kingdom. In the Quarto, chronologically closer to the sources, the succession motif is not as yet linked to the abdication motif, as it will be in the later Folio version. Lear's plan in the Quarto betrays a wish to retain, rather than resign, his power by settling the succession in his own terms and perhaps postponing it till after his death, as in the sources.

The so-called abdication speech, “Cornwall, and Albanie, / With my two Daughters Dowres, digest the third,” is identical in the two versions of King Lear. Only in the Folio, however, does the king's abdication happen de facto. The last line of Lear's abdication speech, “This Coronet part betweene you,” is not meant to prompt the king to take off his crown and hand it over to his sons-in-law, because “Coronet,” as Wilfried Perrett first observed in 1904, is not a synonym for crown.¹⁶ The first meaning of “coronet” listed in the OED is “a small or inferior crown; spec. a crown denoting a dignity inferior to that of the sovereign, worn by the nobility, and varying in form, according to rank.” In his 1992 New Cambridge edition of The Tragedy of King Lear, Jay L. Halio specifies that “Shakespeare uses ‘coronet’ for the diadem of a nobleman in Henry VI Part I and Julius Caesar and in The Tempest, he explicitly contrasts ‘crowns and coronets.’” He therefore concludes that “it is unlikely that Lear gives his sons-in-law his own crown to divide between them,” and that “probably Lear refers to the coronet he meant for Cordelia.”¹⁷ It is however worth noting that the Folio omits “one bearing a coronet” from the stage direction which marks the first entrance of the king and his retinue in the opening scene. Although the absence of this stage direction does not necessarily mean that the coronet was not brought on stage, the Folio implies a degree of ambiguity, thus reinforcing the idea that abdication and division of the kingdom are taking place simultaneously. In the Quarto, however, the king is perfectly fit to rule, expresses no wish to abdicate, and is merely forced to divide his kingdom by letting Cornwall and Albany “digest” Cordelia's dower, signified by the presence of the coronet on stage. As Sir Walter W. Greg argues, “if Shakespeare was responsible for [the Quarto's] direction, ‘there is subtlety in the provision he makes. When Lear says to his “Beloued Sonnes” Cornwall and Albany “This Coronet part betweene you,” he is bidding them share the executive office only; he retains on his own head the crown as symbol of “The name, and all th'addition to a King.”’”¹⁸ In the Quarto, the abdication speech is not, technically speaking, an abdication speech after all.

Other Quarto variants in act II confirm Tate's tactful avoidance of the abdication motif. The first variant occurs at the end of Kent's confrontation with Goneril's messenger outside Gloucester's castle. As in the Quarto, Tate's Gloucester begs Cornwall and Regan to reconsider their decision to punish the king's messenger. Gloucester reminds them that although “His fault is much, and the good King his Master / Will check him for't” (D1r, lines 2-3). Both in the Quarto and in Tate, Gloucester warns Cornwall that his decision will lead to a clash of authorities. Tate's king, as his Quarto counterpart, has divided his kingdom and devolved his former responsibilities but has never abdicated his power. Gloucester's warning, omitted from the Folio, reminds Lear's opponents that the latter is still a king de facto. Once again Tate retains a Quarto line which is more in keeping with his recasting of the character of the king in act I than the alternative provided by the Folio.

The second relevant Quarto variant in The History of King Lear occurs after Lear has found Kent-as-Caius in the stocks. Although Tate follows the Folio in assigning to Lear Goneril's lines, “Who stockt my Servant? Regan, I have hope / Thou didst not know it” (D3r, lines 23-4), he continues to refer to his Quarto source for the characterization of the king in this scene. Lear's original reaction to Oswald is expanded to read:

LEAR.
This is a Slave whose easie borrow'd pride
Dwells in the fickle Grace of her he follows;
A Fashion-fop that spends the day in Dressing,
And all to bear his Ladie's flatt'ring Message,
That can deliver with a Grace her Lie,
And with as bold a face bring back a greater.
Out Varlet from my sight.

(D3r, lines 15-21)

The lines in italics represent Tate's addition to the original passage, as it appears in both the Quarto and the Folio. There is a telling similarity between Lear's new lines and Kent's billingsgate against Oswald in the original:

STEW.
What dost thou know me for?
KENT.
A knave, a rascall, an eater of broken meates, a base, proud, shallow, beggerly, three snyted hundred pound, filthy wosted stocken knave, a lilly lyver'd action taking knave, a whorson glassegazing supersinicall rogue, one truncke inheriting slave, one that would'st bee a baud in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, begger, coward.

(Q, lines 908-15; F, lines 1087-94; Quarto variants in italics)

Lear in Tate is not overwhelmed by “the Mother,” Hysterica Passio. He borrows instead Kent's forceful idiom to express his disgust at seeing a rogue preferred to his messenger. This first alteration shows the audience that the king is still as strong and capable of indignation as he was at the beginning of the play.

Straight after Lear's arraignment of Goneril's messenger, Cornwall asks the king, “What means your Grace?” (D3r, line 22), and Lear speaks the lines quoted above, “Who stockt my Servant?” Only at this point does Goneril enter. Though Tate follows the Folio in having Lear repeat his question, he moves the stage direction “Enter Gonerill.” from its original position, after Cornwall's “What means your Grace?”, to the end of Lear's “Who stockt my Servant?” As a consequence, Lear, who in the Folio fails to realize that Goneril has already entered, appears as alert and in control as in the Quarto, where Goneril's line “Who struck my servant” attracts everybody's attention, Lear's included. The king in The History of King Lear does not seem to have lost touch with reality. Tate's Lear is not mad with sorrow and overwhelmed by self-pity and hysteria because of his daughters' betrayal, as is his counterpart in the Folio. Like Lear in the Quarto, Tate's king is mad with rage at seeing his power taken away from him and he struggles to resist.

The Quarto variants Tate retains in the first two acts of The History of King Lear contribute to presenting the audience with a strong, if unflattering, image of the king, who is as willful and reckless as in the Quarto, although, on the whole, guilty of a lesser crime. When Tate follows the Folio at the end of act I, he modifies Albany's mild disagreement with Goneril about the king's riotous knights from “Well, you may feare too farre” (F, line 849) to “Well, you may bear too far” (C2v, line 33). Although “bear” could be a misprint for “fear,” it is intriguing that up to the end of act I, even Tate's Albany, who will act as a champion of royalty in act V and restore Lear to the throne, should appear to feel no sympathy for the willful king.

The end of act II, however, marks an inversion of strategy on Tate's part, and the willful king is gradually redeemed through repentance and forbearance. The shift from the tragic to the pathetic mode becomes fully manifest only in acts III and IV. As early as the middle of act II, however, Tate retains the Folio line “Are they inform'd of this? my Breath and Blood!” (D2r, line 21), where the king draws attention to his despondency for the first time. This line represents what Black refers to as a “sentimental ingredient,” a recurrent element in the second half of The History of King Lear, where Tate's characters “invariably turn the pathos back upon themselves.”¹⁹ From the end of act II, Tate starts to rely on the Folio more and more consistently as a source of similar sentimental lines. As the textual evidence in section II suggests, Tate switches from his Quarto to his Folio source, because, contrary to the Folio, the Quarto provides no such lines, and, more importantly, denies its audience the opportunity to identify and sympathize with its tragic hero.

II. FOLIO VARIANTS IN ACTS III AND IV OF THE HISTORY OF KING LEAR AND THE POLITICS OF SENTIMENTALISM

Acts III and IV form the dramatic heart of Tate's adaptation: here suffering is elaborately expressed and externalized by the king and the good characters and, at the same time, contained and transformed into pity. Pain in Tate is never associated with a tragic sense of loss, waste, and disorientation; neither is it the source of a redemptive, but nonetheless tragic, resolution. Pain becomes the object of a public display, thus inviting both the on-stage and the real audience to share the characters' experience and values. In Tate, the feelings of sympathy, pity, and compassion imply a communion of values and beliefs between the characters and their fictional and real audiences, and make the happy ending not only emotionally but also ideologically desirable. Lear's delusive certainty that the Gods will take pity on Cordelia and himself, “Upon such Sacrifices / The Gods themselves throw Incense” (I1v, lines 32-3), is transferred to Tate's Cordelia, who, unlike her father, is not hallucinating, but foreseeing the inevitable.

Although neither the Quarto nor the Folio version of Shakespeare's King Lear provides an ideal model for the dramatic technique which Tate uses in the second half of his adaptation, the Folio is followed more consistently, because, unlike the Quarto, it does not prevent identification. Tate, for example, omits all the moralizing passages which appear only in the Quarto, such as the servants' exchange after Gloucester's blinding at the end of act III, or the gentleman's description of Cordelia in act IV. His decision to ignore the Quarto might seem odd, because these passages attract the audience's attention to the characters' emotions and could have been exploited for their pathetic potential. One however only needs to look a little closer to realize that the Quarto's moralizing passages elicit a peculiar response from the audience, one which is quite irreconcilable with the sympathetic identification encouraged by Tate's adaptation.

In the Folio, the omission of the servants' exchange after Gloucester's blinding serves both dramatic and practical purposes. According to Gary Taylor, the Quarto was designed for uninterrupted performance, and this passage was meant to give Gloucester enough time to exit, change clothes and reenter after Edgar's soliloquy at the beginning of the next scene. The introduction of act intervals in the Folio made this passage theatrically redundant.²⁰ Its omission, however, also has interesting dramatic effects because it protects the audience from the brunt of the violence, and also from the immediacy of emotional identification.

In Tate, the servants' exchange is replaced by a long monologue in which Gloucester laments the sudden change of his fortune and exposes his inner being to the full view of the audience. Gloucester's original, heartrending “All Dark and Comfortless” is followed by twenty-six new lines. This passage is crucial to Tate's strategy of revision of the original, in that it shows how the externalization of grief can turn black despair into restoring pathos. Suicide is soon dismissed in favor of revenge. Gloucester's share of responsibility for precipitating Lear's and his own downfall does not seem to prevent him from thinking that revenge can right the play's topsy-turvy universe. Whereas Shakespeare's Gloucester is crushed by his own despair, Tate's Gloucester uses his suffering to help the king:

GLOUC.
                                                  with these bleeding Rings
I will present me to the pittying Crowd,
And with the Rhetorick of these dropping Veins
Enflame 'em to Revenge their King and me.

(F4r, lines 24-7)

Gloucester's world is unshaken by his misfortunes and its values are never questioned. Grief does not prevent him from seeking redress; on the contrary, grief becomes the means whereby he will overcome his enemy. His certainty of ultimate success rests on the fact that Gloucester, like Tate, knows that an audience can be stirred to sympathy through the pathetic display of undeserved suffering. This kind of sympathy implies a shared belief in the political and aesthetic necessity of poetic justice.

Immediately after IV.ii, the Quarto provides an extra scene which Tate chooses to ignore. This scene contains an exquisite portrait of Cordelia, which exemplifies the process whereby sympathy is transformed into a visible theatrical phenomenon:

KENT.
Did your letters pierce the queene to any demonstration of griefe.
GENT.
I say she tooke them, read them in my presence,
And now and then an ample teare trild downe
Her delicate cheeke, it seemed she was a queene over her passion,
Who most rebell-like, sought to be King ore her.
KENT.
O then it moved her.
GENT.
Not to a rage, patience and sorow streme,
Who should expresse her goodliest you have seen,
Sun shine and raine at once, her smiles and teares,
Were like a better way those happie smilets,
That playd on her ripe lip seeme not to know,
What guests were in her eyes which parted thence,
As pearles from diamonds dropt in briefe,
Sorow would be a raritie most beloved,
If all could so become it.

(Q, lines 2104-18)

Cordelia's composure and stillness are suggestive of the emblematic quality of a precious icon: her tears are “pearls,” her eyes “diamonds.” The gentleman's description of Cordelia's state of mind is also highly emblematic. Cordelia's private feelings become the actors of an allegorical psychomachia. Sorrow is personified and described as striving to be “king” over Cordelia's emotions. Unlike Lear, who succumbed to the “Mother,” Histerica Passio, Cordelia faces her kingly sorrow and triumphs over it. As the gentleman explains, “Sorow would be a raritie most beloved, / If all could so become it.” The Quarto provides the audience with a compelling example of how grief can be turned into art. Grief becomes something “rich and strange” for the audience to admire, but not to identify with.

As with the servants' exchange at the end of act III, Tate follows the Folio and omits this Quarto passage, replacing it with a living portrait of Cordelia weeping. Tate's Cordelia rejoins the action as early as the second half of act III, thus creating several opportunities for a pathetic anticipation of the long awaited reunion at the end of act IV:

CORD.
As 'tis too probable this furious Night
Has pierc'd his tender Body, the bleak Winds
And cold Rain chill'd, or Lightening struck him Dead;
If it be so your Promise is discharg'd,
And I have only one poor Boon to beg,
That you'd Convey me to his breathless Trunk,
With my torn Robes to wrap his hoary Head,
With my torn Hair to bind his Hands and Feet,
Then with a show'r of Tears
To wash his Clay-smear'd Cheeks, and Die beside him.

(E2r, lines 28-37)

A quick glance at the effects this spectacle of pity has on the on-stage audience is probably the best way to establish the kind of response Tate meant to elicit from his real audience. Gloucester, who has questioned Cordelia's motives for wanting to rescue her father, is finally persuaded of her good intentions: “Rise, fair Cordelia, thou hast Piety / Enough t'attone for both thy Sisters Crimes” (E2r, line 38; E2v, line 1). Far more interesting, however, is the reaction Cordelia's tears elicit from the other character on stage. Unseen by Gloucester and Cordelia, Edmund is spying on them, and like Milton's Satan in Eden, he is entranced by his vision:

BAST.
O charming Sorrow! how her Tears adorn her
Like Dew on Flow'rs, but she is Virtuous,
And I must quench this hopeless Fire i'th'Kindling.

.....

I'll gaze no more—and yet my Eyes are Charm'd.

(E2r, lines 17-26)

Unlike the serpent in Milton's book 9 of Paradise Lost, however, Tate's Edmund is mesmerized not only by Cordelia's beauty and unspotted innocence, but also by her distress. He claims that Cordelia's tears adorn her like dew on flowers. This episode reveals a more general mechanism underlying Tate's strategy of revision. In Tate, the exposure of the good characters' inner being encourages identification not only through sympathy but also through the voyeuristic pleasure of the onlooker.

The Folio's naturalistic use of sympathy as a response to tragic experience, although substantially different from Tate's technique of exposing his characters' inner being to the full view of his audience, is not incompatible with his strategy of revision. The Quarto's moralizing passages, on the other hand, are irreconcilable with Tate's efforts to bridge the distance between the character and the onlooker through sympathy and pathos. Tate follows the Folio because the Quarto creates a gap between the characters and the audience which ensures understanding rather than identification. The Captain's two-line speech in act V, where he seeks a motive for obeying Edmund and killing the old king and his daughter, “I cannot draw a cart, nor eate dride oats, / If it bee mans worke ile do't” (Q, lines 2697-8), is probably the best, if not the most consequential, example of another “Brechtian” passage in the Quarto which Tate chooses to ignore.

III. TATE'S “CRITICAL EDITING” OF QUARTO AND FOLIO KING LEAR AND THE REVISIONIST HYPOTHESIS

The theory of authorial revision in King Lear was first advanced when textual scholars stopped wrestling with the problem of the possible origin of a specific variant and concentrated on its function, both in relation to its immediate context and to other variants. By looking at Quarto and Folio King Lear as scripts, the revisionists started to notice patterns of interrelated variants which suggest a “substantial and consistent recasting of certain aspects of the play.”²¹ The selection of Quarto and Folio variants in The History of King Lear shows that Tate, who never worried about the origin of his source texts, also spotted patterns of interrelated variants. The similarity in some of the patterns of variants spotted by Tate and by the revisionists strikes me as more than a suggestive coincidence.

Tate's reliance on his Quarto source for the recasting of the old king into a stronger and more willful character, for example, is suggestively in keeping with the revisionists' view that, whereas “the behaviour of Q[uarto]'s Lear partakes of the brisk arbitrariness of myth and fairy-tale,” “the Folio version lays a strong foundation for the development of sympathy,” and the old king grows into a “larger and more intensely tragic” figure.²² David Richman, who directed a performance of King Lear based exclusively on the Quarto, similarly realized that the shorter version of Lear's first speech conveys a stronger image of the king as ruler: “[The Quarto] presents a clear, strong image of the king which is borne out and developed during the first two acts … Quarto's Lear allows nothing to distract him from his division of the kingdom, his disposal of Cordelia in marriage, and the love-test of his daughters.”²³

Despite the attention paid to individual variants in relation to the character of the king, none of the revisionists has identified the abdication motif as a potential pattern of revision in King Lear. MacD. P. Jackson and Taylor, for example, claim that Shakespeare revised Lear's first speech in order to stress the “full political import of his abdication,” by making it more “explicable” and “noble,” whereas Thomas Clayton refers to Lear's plans in I.i as “division and partial abdication” (emphasis added).²⁴ The revisionists' diverging views on this issue reflect the textual ambiguity inherited from the standard conflated text. Tate's preference for the Quarto variants, on the other hand, suggests a connection between the Quarto's characterization of the king as a strong and willful ruler and his unwillingness to relinquish power. As in the Quarto and the majority of its sources, Tate's Lear never abdicates, thus departing from the revised and weaker king of the Folio, whose age and noble attempt to avoid a civil war fully justify his willingness to relinquish power.

Tate's omission of the moralizing passages analyzed above sheds light on another pattern of revision in King Lear. Michael Warren agrees with Steven Urkowitz that “Such cameos, in which the progress of plot is briefly arrested and an image of moral life is presented, are a distinctive feature of the dramatic technique of the Quarto, a readiness to allow the action to pause so that the moral impact of events can be demonstrated verbally and visually. In the Folio, by contrast, the plot just takes its mighty course” (emphasis added).²⁵ Warren's remarks are supported by Urkowitz's view that the Quarto passages provide “more ‘meaning’” but “less ‘experience’” and “fewer sensations of ‘drama’” than the Folio.²⁶ The Quarto presents and demonstrates, thus encouraging critical detachment, whilst the Folio stresses emotional intensity, a precondition of sympathetic identification.

Tate's omission of the Quarto moralizing passages confirms Warren and Urkowitz's analysis of their function, and, more generally, the hypothesis of internal revision in King Lear. Tate's adaptation, in other words, provides indirect evidence to argue that these Quarto passages are a cluster of interrelated variants and that Quarto and Folio King Lear must have been conceived as two different tragedies, not only in terms of plot and characterization, but also in terms of their dramatic effect. In Henry Norman Hudson's view, Tate's adaptation was a distorting mirror, which marred the greatness of its original;²⁷ in my view The History of King Lear is rather a magnifying glass, through which Shakespeare's “unstrung jewels” shine even more clearly than through the thick coat of editorial dust which three centuries of conflation have laid upon them.

Notes

1. Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear, ed. James Black (London: Arnold, 1975), p. xv.

2. Recent reconstructions of the establishment of the Shakespeare myth and the appropriation of Shakespeare's works include Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730-1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) and The Genius of Shakespeare (London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1997); Margreta De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: Vintage, 1991); Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Paulina Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

3. On the Lear narrative's relation to dramatic convention, see Harry William Pedicord, “Shakespeare, Tate, and Garrick: New Light on Alterations of King Lear,” TN 36, 1 (1982): 14-21; James Black, “An Augustan Stage History: Nahum Tate's King Lear,” RECTR 6 (1967): 36-54. Among the main historical-political interpretations of the History, J. Douglas Canfield, “Royalism's Last Dramatic Stand: English Political Tragedy, 1679-89,” SP 82, 2 (Spring 1985): 234-63; Nancy K. 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. Jean I. Marsden (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1991), pp. 29-42; and Matthew H. Wikander, “The Spitted Infant: Scenic Emblem and Exclusionist Politics in Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare,” SQ 37, 3 (Autumn 1986): 340-58.

4. Christopher Spencer, “A Word for Tate's King Lear,” SEL 3, 2 (Spring 1969): 241-51; see also his Nahum Tate (New York: Twayne, 1972). For more details on this stigma, see Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, ed. Spencer (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1965), p. 8.

5. Black, p. 99.

6. See Sonia Massai, “Tate's Critical ‘Editing’ of His Source-Text(s) in The History of King Lear,” in AEB n.s. 9, 4 (1995): 168-96, where it is established that, contrary to Black's conclusion, Tate uses a copy of the First Quarto and both a copy of the First and the Third Folio throughout acts I to IV. A shorter version of this article appears in Textus: English Studies in Italy, ed. Keir Elam and Ann Thompson (Geneva: Tilgher, 1996), pp. 501-22. For specific examples of Tate's critical “editing” of his source-texts, see Bate and Massai, “Adaptation as Edition,” in The Margins of the Text, ed. David C. Greetham (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 129-51.

7. For the main studies exploring the two-text theory in King Lear, see Michael J. Warren, “Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar,” in David Bevington and Jay L. Halio, Shakespeare, Pattern of Excelling Nature (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1976), pp. 95-107; Taylor, “The War in King Lear,” ShS 33 (1980): 27-34; Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare's Revision of “King Lear” (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980); Peter W. M. Blayney, The Texts of “King Lear” and Their Origins: Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982); and The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of “King Lear,” ed. Taylor and Warren (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983). P. W. K. Stone, in The Textual History of “King Lear” (London: Scolar Press, 1980) also supports the theory of revision in King Lear, although, as opposed to the bitextual scholars mentioned above, he rejects the hypothesis of authorial revision. For the latest developments of the “two-text controversy,” see “Lear” from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism, ed. James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1997), and recent editions, such as Rene Weis's parallel-text edition (London: Longman, 1993) and the single-text Quarto editions prepared by Halio (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994) and Graham Holderness (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall, 1995).

8. All quotations from The History of King Lear are followed by line-reference to Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear (London: Cornmarket Press, 1969). All quotations represent the source exactly except in one respect: the long “s” and italic type are not preserved.

9. It is worth stressing that Black's view that this parallel is fortuitous remains virtually unchallenged. For more details, see Black, pp. 97-8.

10. Maguire suggests that the popularity of tragicomedy reflects an attempt to exorcise the specter of regicide, which was still haunting the collective memory of Tate's contemporaries. For more details, see Maguire, Regicide and Restoration English Tragicomedy, 1660-71 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992).

11. Tate's own account of his introduction of the love affair between Edgar and Cordelia seems solely aimed at advertising his “improvements” on the Shakespearean original: “'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 A Love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia, that never chang'd word with each other in the Original” (The Epistle Dedicatory, A2v, lines 12-7).

12. Peter L. Sharkey, “Performing Nahum Tate's King Lear: Coming Hither by Going Hence,” QJS 54, 4 (December 1968): 398-403, 400.

13. Black, p. xx.

14. Quotations from the 1608 Quarto (hereinafter Q) and the 1623 Folio King Lear (hereinafter F) are followed by line reference to Warren, The Complete King Lear: 1608-1623 (Los Angeles, Berkeley, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1989). The long “s,” italic type, and the old spelling of “u” and “v” are not preserved.

15. The main sources of King Lear referred to in this paper are available in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 7 vols. (London: Routledge, 1957-75). For more details on the abdication motif in the sources, see Wilfried Perrett, The Story of King Lear: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Shakespeare (Berlin: Mayer and Müller, 1904), pp. 181-3.

16. Perrett, pp. 151-2.

17. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. Halio (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), I.i.32n.

18. Sir Walter W. Greg, quoted in MacD. P. Jackson, “Fluctuating Variation: Author, Annotator, or Actor?” in The Division of the Kingdoms, pp. 313-49, 338.

19. Black, p. xxxi.

20. Taylor, “The Structure of Performance: Act-Intervals in the London Theatres, 1576-1642,” in Taylor and John Jowett, Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606-1623 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 3-50, 48-9.

21. Warren, “Quarto and Folio,” p. 99.

22. Jackson, p. 338; Thomas Clayton, “‘Is this the promis'd end?’: Revision in the Role of the King,” in The Division of the Kingdoms, pp. 121-41, 125; Grace loppolo, “The Idea of Shakespeare and the Two Lears,” in “Lear” from Study to Stage, pp. 45-56, 50.

23. David Richman, “The King Lear Quarto in Rehearsal and Performance,” SQ 37, 3 (Autumn 1986): 374-401, 376-7.

24. Jackson, p. 336; Taylor, “King Lear: The Date and Authorship of the Folio Version,” in The Division of the Kingdoms, pp. 351-468, 382; Clayton, p. 125.

25. Warren, “The Diminution of Kent,” in The Division of the Kingdoms, pp. 59-73, 65.

26. Urkowitz, p. 52.

27. Henry Norman Hudson, in Five Restoration Adaptations, p. 8.