Nahum Tate's Revision of Shakespeare's "King Lears"

Abstract

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,2 TheHistory 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 KingLear 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 theirformal 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 ver-