Performance Context

Question 1

The Stationer’s Register (26th November 1607) reports that King Lear was played…

Answer 1

“before the King’s Majesty at Whitehall upon St. Stephen’s night at Christmas last”

Also performed several times at globe a little before 1606 Boxing Day probs

King Lear - Richard Burbage
Fool- Robert Armin
Gloucester - John Hemmings
Albany - Shakespeare

Fool and Cordelia doubled is legend

Question 2

Why do some people think Cordelia and Fool doubled?

Answer 2

Common practice at time

Lear confuses like 304 Act 5 Scene 3: “And my poor fool is hanged”

Question 3

1608 _________ Quartos

Answer 3

Pied Bull

Question 4

Davenant, a bon viveur who produced King Lear in 1664and, along with Thomas Killigrew, one of the two theatrical panteens who attained a monopoly of public theatre, died. What came along with his death?

Answer 4

the end for well over 150 years of King Lear being performed as Shakespeare had written it: change in public tastes following the Restoration, meant play no longer popular in its original form

Question 5

Who was Nahum Tate?

Answer 5

1) 1652-1715, rewrote King Lear 1681
2) Son of Irish Puritan, Faithful Teate
3) Described it as ‘a heap of jewels unstrung and unpolished’
4) Under Tate’s confident zeal (‘Tis more difficult to save than ‘tis to kill’) the play was enthusiastically reconstructed as a ‘History’
Play remained popular, and Lear sent to theatrical wilderness

Question 6

Which two characters are missing from Nahum Tate’s version of the play?

Answer 6

The Fool, the King of France

Question 7

What does Cordelia do in Nahum Tate’s version of the play?

Answer 7

1) Does not leave for France, but stays in England and tries to find and save her father in the storm
2) She has an on-then-off-then-on love affair with Edgar
3) She grants Edgar her love again only after he has saved her from being raped by a less psychologically complex Edmund, who has sent 2 thugs to abduct her and bring her to him
4) C and E united; wicked receive their just desserts
5) Edgar and Albany arrive in the nick of time with a reprieve for Cordelia

Question 8

Who is written in in Nahum Tate’s version of the play?

Answer 8

a servant, Arante, in whom Cordelia can confide

Question 9

Why is Edmund’s personality different in Nahum Tate’s version of the play?

Answer 9

He shows no last-minute kindness

Question 10

How is Gonerill and Regan’s fate different in Nahum Tate’s version of the play?

Answer 10

They secretly poison each other, instead of Gonerill poisoning Regan and later stabbing herself

Question 11

How is Gloucester different in Nahum Tate’s version of the play?

Answer 11

1) he is called Gloster, but still blind

2) he survives the shock of learning the identity of Edgar

Question 12

How is Lear different in Nahum Tate’s version of the play?

Answer 12

No longer frail and suddenly invigorated, he kills not just one but two of the henchmen who attempt to hang Cordelia
1) gives Cordelia to Edgar in a betrothal: ‘I wrong’d him too, but here’s the fair amends’; the audience see E and C as future monarchs

Question 13

What is the outcome of the Civil War in Nahum Tate’s version of the play?

Answer 13

Albany wins (the forces loyal to lear are defeated), resigns the crown to the old king and Lear instructs that ‘Cordelia shall be Queen’

Question 14

What happens to the elderly (Lear, Kent, Gloster) at the end of Nahum Tate’s version of the play?

Answer 14

they retire ‘to some cool cell’, safe in the knowledge that Britain is about to be governed wisely and benevolently by Cordelia and Edgar, who happily exclaims at the conclusion: ‘Truth and virtue shall at last succeed!’

Question 15

How are Tate’s Puritan upbringing and Tory leanings evident in his other re-workings of Shakespeare?

Answer 15

He was so disconcerted that Richard II might give sustenance to Whigs, liberals and anti-monarchists that he re-wrote it as ‘The Sicilian Usurper’ (1681), changing the character’s names, moving the action abroad and altering the text so that every scene was
‘full of respect to Majesty and the dignity of Courts’

Question 16

Shakespeare’s cosmic bleakness did not appeal to Tate, who, more than 80 years after the appearance of The History of King Lear, was lauded for his endeavors by…

Answer 16

Samuel Johnson, who was so shaken by Cordelia’s death that he couldn’t bear to return to Shakespeare’s original until paid to do so as an editor

Question 17

What did Samuel Johnson say of Tate’s treatment of Cordelia?

Answer 17

He loved what he had done with her:
“In the present case the public has decided. Cordelia from the time of Tate has always retired with victory and felicity”

Question 18

Who said that Tate had ‘mutilated’ King Lear?

Answer 18

Joseph ADDISON

Question 19

Nahum Tate’s version of the play, a ‘History’ cobbled together from a Tragedy with the ending of a Comedy, was popular and unrivaled. What did Sir Stanley WELLS say of it?

Answer 19

it was ‘one of the longest-lasting successes of English drama’, completely supplanting Shakespeare ‘in every performance given from 1681 to 1838.

Question 20

Which actor, who played King Lear between ___ and ___, instigated a more naturalistic style of acting that replaced the deliberately grandiose ‘bombastic’ style popular from the seventeenth century?

Answer 20

1742 and 1776

David Garrick

won praise for his presentation of a distressed, outcast father
Retained the whole of Tate for a 1742 production but reintroduced a little more Shakespeare into the play in 1743 and 1756.
At first he presented his KL in modern dress, but in later years he changed the setting to Ancient Britain; became established ‘era’ of play until experimental mid 20thc

Question 21

How did Garrick present King Lear?

Answer 21

He was described in performance as a ‘little old white-haired man… with spindle shanks, a tottering gait and great shoes upon little feet’ (Sir John HILL, 1755)
AND THUS was able to inculcate in the audience a sense that they were watching an ordinary man suffering and having to cope with extraordinary circumstances
Audiences even able to cry in sympathy

Question 22

Nahum Tate’s version– jig of happy delirium: Lear says to Kent at end

Answer 22

“Why I have News that will recall thy Youth /
Ha! Didst thou hear’t, or did th’ inspiring Gods/
Whisper to me alone? Old Lear shall be/
A king again”

Question 23

Who was Garrick’s rival, who mounted a rival production of the play using The History of King Lear that, according to what source, moved the whole house to tears?

What was the same source nonplussed about?

Answer 23

Rival: Spranger Barry
Source: poet and playwright Francis Brooke

That both actors gave Tate’s work ‘the preference to Shakespeare’s excellent original’, and that Garrick should ‘prefer the unadulterated cup of Tate to the pure genuine draught offered him by the master he avows to serve with such fervency of devotion’

Question 24

Which actor performed Lear’s famous death scene, encouraged by essayists Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, restoring it whilst leaving out the Fool and keeping much of Tate’s earlier scenes?

Answer 24

Edmund Kean
‘The London audience have no notion of what I can do till they see me over the dead body of Cordelia’
but indifferent reviews, he reverted to Tate completely: public preferred, non-threatening and conformist

Question 25

in 1834, William Charles Macready did what?

Answer 25

Restored the tragic ending: found Tate’s version a ‘miserable debilitation and disfigurement of Shakespeare’s sublime tragedy’
the audience ‘broke out into loud applause in the fourth and fifth acts’
in 1838 he included the fool (Priscilla Horton)
followed vogue for ANCIENT BRITISH SETTING: surrounded Lear with dolmens and druidic stone circles

Question 26

What did William Charles MACREADY say of Lear?

Answer 26

actors equivalent of performing the impossible
daunting and difficult
‘In reflecting on Lear I begin to apprehend I cannot make an effective character of it. I am oppressed with the magnitude of the thoughts he has to utter’
He saw the magnitude of the masterpiece, having researched it scrupulously before playing, whereas Tate had seen something that needed to be ‘rectified’

Question 27

Who wrote about Shakespeare’s ‘uncontrollable despair’ in 1936

Answer 27

John Middleton Murry

Question 28

Expounding Murry’s ‘uncontrollable despair’ analysis, What did Caroline Spurgeon in 1935 see as the dominant image of the play?

Answer 28

a human body in a variety of desperate and shocking poses:
“in anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured and finally broken on the rack’

Question 29

Who describes the play as Shakespeare’s ‘cruelest’?

Answer 29

Frank Kermode, 2000