Restored and Un-restored : King Lear on the 18th-Century London Stage
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Written primarily to cater to London audiences of the Restoration period, and to reflect current political tensions in the country, it may come as somewhat of a surprise that Nahum Tate's 1681 adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear kept Shakespeare's original text from the English stage for more than 150 years. In the course of the 18th century, however, there were at least three major attempts to bring the text of the play, as it had been known back then, closer to what Shakespeare had written at the beginning of the 17th century; these were made by the famous actor, theatre manager and bardolator David Garrick (1756), his colleague and, later, rival George Colman (1768), and John Philip Kemble, younger brother to the iconic 18th-century Shakespearean actress Sarah Siddons (1792). All these attempts were, from a long-term perspective, unsuccessful and were ultimately replaced by Shakespeare's original in the 1830s. However, a close analysis of these versions, which will be the goal of this presentation, provides a useful source of information on the reception of Shakespeare in the centuries after his death and on the gradual process of the stabilisation of Shakespeare's texts and canonisation of his works. |
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