Audience and actor response to a staged reading of Nahum Tate's The History of King Lear (directed by Joe Curdy) at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, 27 January 2008

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Notes

1. Notwithstanding Lamb's 1811 essay on Tate, the first known published dissent from the adaptation actually appeared a hundred years earlier in Joseph Addison's piece in The Spectator 40 (16 Apr. 1711). See Bond 1: 168–70.

2. Hazlitt was averse to endorsing any plays adapted from Shakespeare's. Taking aim at Davenant and Dryden's adaptation of The Tempest he wrote:

As we returned some evenings ago from seeing the Tempest at Covent-Garden, we almost came to the resolution of never going to another representation of a play of Shakespear's as long as we lived; and we certainly did come to this determination, that we never would go by choice. To call it a representation, is indeed an abuse of the language: it is travestie, caricature, any thing you please, but a representation. (5: 234).

3. In James A. Davies's article “Charles Lamb, John Forster, and a Victorian Shakespeare”, the influence of Lamb on Forster and Macready is well argued. Davies notes, “Lamb's textual views influenced the one man (Forster) able to exert great personal pressure on Macready at a time when the actor had grave doubts about complete restoration” (449).

4. Forster's close proximity to Macready as both an advisor and friend can best be displayed in his reviews: see Forster's review of Macready's Lear in The Examiner, 14 February 1838, reprinted Forster and Lewes (48–54).

5. Facsimiles of Tate's 1681 text show that Elizabeth Barry (who played Cordelia) read the epilogue. All evidence indicates that Barry was an actress “especially adept”, as James Black notes, “at delivering epilogues” (Tate 96).

6. According to the latest news out of Cannes 2008, whether or not the proposed $35 million film Lear starring Kiera Knightley as Cordelia, Sir Anthony Hopkins as Lear and Gwyneth Paltrow as Regan will embrace a happy denouement for film audiences remains to be seen (Singh).

7. Rose's observations here correspond closely to A.C. Bradley's own dicta concerning the desire to see a happy ending such as Tate provides: “I will take my courage in both hands and say boldly that I share it, and also believe Shakespeare would have ended his play thus had he taken the subject in hand a few years later, in the days of Cymbeline and the Winter's Tale” (206).