Secularizing King Lear: Shakespeare, Tate, and the Sacred

Summary

Drama and religion, having lived in holy matrimony for some five hundred years, are given a decree of divorce nisi at the Reformation, which, under the pressures of the Renaissance, is made absolute shortly after the Restoration.

(Glynne Wickham)

Nahum Tate's King Lear was first seen in the winter of 1680-1, and it was in his adaptation, or in further adaptations of it, that the play was always performed until Macready went back to a (heavily cut) Shakespearian text in 1838. For over 150 years, then - half its post-Restoration stage life - Lear appeared on the English stage without the Fool, with a happy ending, and usually with an added love story leading to the marriage of Edgar and Cordelia. Moreover, it was during the years when this travesty held sway that the play secured its leading place in the canon. It had been revived between 1660 and 1680, but not often. It was Tate's version that established itself as a stock play in the early eighteenth century; it was Tate's King Lear that Garrick took up in 1742 and made into his greatest role; by the time he retired in 1776 it was one of the acknowledged mountain peaks of the English repertoire, undertaken as such by Kemble in 1788 and Kean in 1820. Ironically, it was just this exalted reputation which eventually brought Tate's theatrical reign to an end: to literary Romantic playgoers such as Lamb and Keats, the adaptation now seemed a vulgar affront to the sublimity of the true play. Sentiment swung against the happy ending, Macready's experiment was accepted as a success, and for Victorian bardolatry Tate was already, as he has remained, a derisory footnote to the history of a masterpiece.