The Tale the Tale of King Lear and His Daughters Had Been Circulating for Hundreds of Years Before Shakespeare Adapted It
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The Tale The tale of King Lear and his daughters had been circulating for hundreds of years before Shakespeare adapted it. He worked from a variety of sources including an earlier play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella (fresh off the presses in 1605), and Raphael Holinshed’s book, The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Wales. Shakespeare’s retelling makes King Lear’s story darker, even hopeless. Audience members of 1606 would have been deeply surprised by what they saw and heard in Act 5. Some might have expected the old king to die—he is after all, over 80 years old. But the rest of it? Shocking. The play’s sweeping desolation carries with it references to the recent deadly London outbreak: “A plague upon your epileptic visage,” Kent cries at the toadying Oswald. Lear regards his eldest child Goneril as “a disease that’s in my flesh,” and a “plague-sore.” Towards the end, Lear seems to curse everyone with illness, including the audience: “a plague upon you, murderers, traitors, all.” Such lines may allude directly to the plague of 1606, but they reverberate today as we grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps the ubiquity of illness is why these lines made the cut in both of the existing versions of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Yes, Shakespeare’s treatment also comes to us in two separate variations. The Quarto (1608) promotes the play as the true chronical historie, while the King Lear, Page 1 revised Folio (1623) calls itself a tragedie. Vast textual differences distinguish them including missing scenes and who speaks the play’s final line. The poet Alexander Pope first joined the Quarto and the Folio into a single text in 1723 that remained popular for over two centuries. NY Classical’s 2020 hybrid- script derives from a conflation of the two texts with deep cuts and an added twist: we present neither Shakespeare’s Quarto, Folio, nor Pope’s conflated ending but one written by Restoration theater impresario, Nahum Tate. Tate’s Lear In 1642, the London theaters were closed again—not for the plague this time—but because the Puritan “Long Parliament” considered plays to be indecent and sinful. Upon the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, plays were once again all the rage, but theatrical tastes had changed. Audiences expected Christian moralizing that punished the bad and rewarded the good. Theatrical practices had also changed: women were finally allowed to perform on the public stage. Actresses, several of them rumored to be Actress Nell Gwynne mistresses of the king, drew crowds curious to witness a different erotic energy than when boys had played the female roles. With these new tastes and practices in mind, the enterprising Nahum Tate revived and adapted Shakespeare’s King Lear in 1681. Believing “’tis more difficult to Save than ’tis to kill,” his version—slightly shorter and without the Fool or the King of France—grants the good characters a happy ending. Tate’s adaptation, The History of King Lear, Revived with Alterations, dominated the stage for the next 150 years, which means that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson likely never saw Shakespeare’s darkly tragic vision of Lear on stage. Nahum Tate King Lear, Page 2 NY Classical’s 2020 Production This production of King Lear is also a revival. NY Classical last produced the play 11 years ago with a company of 18 actors. Associate Artists John Michalski and Nick Salamone return; Michalski, who played Gloucester, now plays Lear, and Salamone, who took on Cornwall in 2009, now plays Gloucester. Tonight we perform the play with Tate’s happy ending, using 7 actors instead of 18. The choice to use such a small company is part of an exploration of some of the conditions that Shakespeare’s touring company might have faced. Actors travelled to small towns and large manor houses to perform when the London theaters closed due to plague. These touring companies economized by limiting the number of actors whom they had to transport, feed, house, and, of course, pay. Most of the actors, like ours, had to play more than one role, and likewise, badly needed the work! Infection The summer of 2020 in New York City and the summer of 1606 in London bear some eerie similarities. As Shakespeare was writing his bleak, brilliant King Lear, a resurgence of the deadly bubonic plague beset London. Shakespeare had already survived many plague outbreaks, including one in Stratford-upon-Avon when he was a boy. At its peak, the pestilence killed hundreds per week. First came fever, headaches, and breathlessness. Then the lymph nodes blackened, swelled, and burst. Death could come within three days. The cause was unknown; no therapy was effective; mass gatherings were banned; the rich and powerful left London for their country homes; church bells tolled the deaths day and night. As in 2020, theaters were among the first businesses to close, creating financial hardship for acting companies such as Shakespeare’s The King’s Men. The plague worsened in the summer months—high season for the Globe Theatre. When winter came, The King’s Men mounted a production of a new play—King Lear—at court. King Lear, Page 3 Inheritance King James I had succeeded his mother’s cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, to the throne in 1603. The principle of primogeniture dictated that the monarch’s first-born or next-surviving male offspring would inherit all the wealth and power. Succession questions arose, however, when the only surviving heirs were female—especially if they had married. How could a wife rule England when, in the eyes of the church and the law, she had to “obey” her husband? Elizabeth avoided sharing power with a husband by never marrying, craftily gendering her power as masculine and calling herself a Prince. Childless, she left no direct heirs. When she died, James was the closest male relative to her in blood, religion, and ideology. But there were others, some of them female, who had compelling claims to the throne. King Lear presents a vexing hypothetical to the principle of primogeniture: what if the only heirs to the throne are female, and the king wants to divide his kingdom among them? As 1606 playgoers witnessed the deterioration of King Lear’s power, his family, and his mind, they were surely reminded of England’s past and present dynastic instabilities. King Lear, Page 4 Themes In performing this play, this way, at this moment, we emphasize that King Lear’s story remains accessible and pertinent. Whether it is framed as a tale, a history, or a tragedy, whether bleak or joyful, whether Shakespeare’s ending or Tate’s, whether performed with a large or small cast, the play blends the familial with the political, and the cosmological with the mundane, as it dissects the origins of authority, the rights of succession and inheritance, the vagaries of old age, the trauma of human suffering, imbalances of power, and family dysfunction. Above all, the play emphasizes humankind’s reliance—in1606 and in 2020—on the belief, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Dramaturgical material written by Sid Ray, Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, Pace University, NYC King Lear, Page 5 .