(Re)Writing Lear

Nahum Tate’s 1681 King Lear has become infamous in literary history as the version of Shakespeare’s play in which Cordelia and Edgar marry, and Lear himself survives to give the bride away. Few now prefer Tate’s play to Shakespeare’s: “In Tate’s alteration,” Hazleton Spencer wrote, “the principle of poetic justice receives the most pitiable sacrifice in all the English drama.” ¹ Yet this version actually replaced Shakespeare’s on stage until David Garrick’s version replaced Tate’s. While a few arguments about the stifling power of neoclassical principles have been offered to explain this phenomenon, critics have overall tended to share a belief in a massive aesthetic and philosophical blind spot that lasted from Tate to the middle of the nineteenth century when theaters restored the Shakespearean text in its entirety. This argument is circular, though: if we begin by positing Shakespeare as the poet for all time, then any age or culture that prefers an altered text appears populated by aesthetic deviants. The assumption of Shakespeare’s eternality has buried Tate’s unique contribution to the canonization of King Lear, as well as the historically changing relationship between literary property and dramatic authorship.