ABSTRACT
Between 1660 and the 1760s, as Michael Dobson writes, Shakespeare became England’s “national poet.” Since that time, “Shakespeare has been as normatively constitutive of British national identity as the drinking of afternoon tea, and it is now probably as hard for any educated Briton to imagine not enjoying the former as it would be to imagine forgoing the latter” (Dobson 7). But while Shakespeare himself became a cultural touchstone for England, King Lear seems not to have played a particularly prominent role in the national project between 1660 and the end of the nineteenth century. As R.A. Foakes writes, King Lear has come down to us through a Romantic paradigm that located “the tragedy within the mind of Lear, and tended to reduce the external action to a domestic drama centered on the Old King’s quarrels with his daughters” (Foakes 47). Outside this dominant paradigm, however, there exist domestic versions of the play that, by exchanging Charles Lamb’s drama of intellect with an emphasis on family dynamics-in particular, the daughter’s role within the family-address issues of social concern and national character.
