‘How fine a play was Mrs Lear’: The Case for Gordon Bottomley’s King Lear's Wife

Summary

‘[H]ow fine a play was Mrs Lear’ recalled the artist and stage designer Paul Nash when he wrote to its author Gordon Bottomley on 17 January 1917. A few years later Nash was to make a significant contribution to the afterlife of Bottomley’s King Lear’s Wife – and consequently to that of Shakespeare’s King Lear upon which it was based – when his costume and set designs, created for the Amsterdam Theatre Exhibition, were shown at the International Theatre Exhibition in London in 1922, by which time his reputation was established as an outstanding war artist. The correspondence between the two men had begun in 1910 when Nash, born in 1889, was a student at the Slade School of Fine Art and Bottomley, fifteen years his senior, had already made his mark in literary circles. The son of a cashier in a worsted mill in Keighley, where he attended the local grammar school, Bottomley fought a lifelong battle against ill health despite which he produced a steady output of poetry which was highly regarded by discriminating admirers amongst whom was Edward Marsh.