It is impossible to imagine a drama that accommodates itself less         to the stage. Henry James


The first recorded performance of King Lear was on December 26th 1606 for King James VI/I at Whitehall. It is thought that Richard Burbage (c.1567-1619), “the greatest actor of his age”, a shareholder in Shakespeare’s company, played the title role and that Robert Armin (1568-1615) played the Fool. At that time, Armin was the principal comic actor in Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men. However, the critic William Ringler attributes the role of Edgar to Armin, arguing that the character takes on a range of disguises and would therefore best demonstrate Armin’s skills, since Armin was renowned for his versatility. Ringler suggests that the boy actor playing Cordelia doubled as the Fool. In Act 5, Lear says of Cordelia, ‘my poor fool is hanged’ (5.3.304). The editor of the Arden edition, RA Foakes, thinks ‘the double reference, making us suppose the Fool is dead too, gives a special poignancy to these six short words.’ (Arden edition, King Lear 1997)


King Lear was unsuccessfully revived in its full original text after the restoration by William Davenant (1606-68) in 1664 and then again in 1675, but only really came to public attention when the Irish poet and dramatist, Nahum Tate, adapted it in 1681. Tate cut the Fool’s part, deeming it inappropriate to tragedy, and gave the play a ‘happy’ ending: in Tate’s Lear, Cordelia, Lear and Buckingham all survived. Cordelia married Edgar and they ruled as regents while Lear lived on in his dotage. A companion for Cordelia named Arante was also added. Tate was a shrewd manager and his romantic adaptation was more fitting to the theatrical tastes of the Restoration than Shakespeare’s original and was used throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, completely obliterating Shakespeare’s text during that time.


Tate’s text only really came into question when the actor-manager David Garrick (1717-79) staged his first production at Drury Lane in 1742, aged just 25. Garrick’s adaptation of Lear was an amalgamation of Tate’s version and Shakespeare’s play. He cut over 200 of Tate’s lines but retained the happy ending and omitted the Fool. Lear became one of Garrick’s most acclaimed roles. He played it regularly between 1742 and his retirement 34 years later. In 1756, he found himself in competition with his great rival, the Irish actor Spranger Barry (1719-77), performing Tate’s version at Covent Garden. These lines were written to compare their performances:

        ‘A king, nay every inch a king,

        Such Barry doth appear,

        But Garrick’s quite a different thing,

        He’s every inch King Lear.’

Writing about Garrick’s performance, Thomas Wilkes wrote ‘his old grey hair standing, as it were, erect on his head, his face filled with horror and attention, his hands expanded, his whole frame actuated by a dreadful solemnity… methinks I share his calamities, I feel the dark drifting rain and the sharp tempest.’

Throughout the 30 years he played the role, Garrick restored more and more of Shakespeare’s text but always retained Tate’s happy ending. Critics debated this decision, many arguing that Shakespeare’s tragic ending was too overwhelming for audiences: ‘Perhaps after all the heart-piercing sensations which we have before endured through the whole piece it would be too much to see this actually performed on the stage’, wrote Arthur Murphy. Other critics, like Charles Lamb, disagreed: ‘A happy ending! – as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through – the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him.’ 1811. (Cited in Arden edition of King Lear, ed. K. Muir, 1972)


Garrick never did reinsert the Fool or Shakespeare’s ending. He toyed with these ideas but dismissed them fearing ‘the feelings of Lear would derive no advantage from the buffooneries of the parti-coloured jester.’ Thus Tate’s text was still influential and in 1809, John Kemble reverted to the Tate version of the play. However, he met with little success and performances of King Lear were suspended the following year as they were deemed to be inappropriate during George III’s bout of supposed madness.


The ban was lifted after the death of George III in 1820 and Edmund Kean mounted a production that came near to restoring the full text, but still retained Tate’s ending. He played to critical acclaim, ‘the mild pathos of his voice and the touching simplicity of his manner when he kneels down before [Cordelia] and offers to drink the poison, can never be forgotten’ Blackwood Magazine (cited in The New Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. Jay L Halio, 1992). However, three years later Kean decided to attempt the play with the tragic ending. He claimed that ‘no one could know what he was capable of until they had seen him over the dead body of Cordelia’. He lasted a mere 3 performances before reverting to Tate’s version.


The English actor-manager William Charles Macready was the first to play a fully Shakespearean version, Fool and all, in 1838. The Fool was reintroduced as a female character, a parallel to Cordelia, played by Miss Priscilla Horton (Miss Horton presented ‘a domesticated fool, bonded to Lear by sentiment…not a dangerous, topsy-tuvy figure showing up the corruptions and abuses of power.’ John Forster, writing at the time, said the production was ‘heightened by this introduction of the Fool to a surprising degree’. However, while the characters and the entire text was Shakespeare’s, Macready did rearrange and cut various scenes to enhance the effect of his spectacular setting. ‘Castles sat upon the stage, Druid circles adorned the landscape, and the storm scenes were ferocious’ (Jay L Halio, ed. New Cambridge).


In 1845 Samuel Phelps made a move away from Victorian spectacle and performed Shakespeare’s complete text at Sadlers Wells, with no alteration to scene order and a move towards developing an ensemble production rather than putting a virtuoso actor in the title role. However, Phelps’ style did not catch on and Charles Kean (son of Edmund Kean) performed an ‘Anglo-Saxon Lear’ in 1858, with elaborate sets and costume, very much in the style of Macready.


Irving cut 46% of Shakespeare’s lines for his production in 1892 in an attempt to make the play more palatable to contemporary tastes. He set out to reduce the violence and the sexuality of the writing and, to this end, omitted the blinding of Gloucester. The nineteenth century audience was obsessed with spectacle and Irving’s Lyceum production was, on the recommendation of the historical artist Ford Madox Brown (1821-93) , set shortly after the Romans left Britain and the set included ruins of villas and temples. Despite Irving’s numerous cuts the production still ran for several hours, due to the complex scene changes made necessary by this extravagant setting.


In 1894, William Poel created the Elizabethan Stage Society in order to experiment with Elizabethan theatre techniques. During his career, Poel used both good and bad quarto texts, placed the audience on the stage with the actors and occasionally tried using boy actors to play the female roles. Harley Granville-Barker played Richard II for Poel and was influenced by his ideas, which he carried into production when he directed John Gielgud (1904-2000) as Lear at the Old Vic in 1940. Despite being just 35 at the time, this was already Gielgud’s second Lear.


Like Garrick, Gielgud was just 25 the first time he played Lear, and like Garrick, he tackled the role of the king many times during his career. With the help of Anthony Quayle, Gielgud directed and starred in a production of King Lear for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1950 to great critical acclaim. TC Worsley used his performance as support for the argument that King Lear could be effectively realised on the stage: ‘I have never seen the recognition scene... so movingly played. The bewildered waking, the ghost of a voice, speaking as if from some other dimension, the fall onto his knees that is half a fall from the bed, and then the stumbled pleading recognition – I should not believe that anyone, however visually imaginative, could in his own study, bring the tears to his own eyes as Mr Gielgud does to ours here.’


The critic Kenneth Tynan wrote ‘Michael Redgrave has played King Lear and won... Lear is a labyrinthine citadel, all but impregnable, and it needed a Redgrave to assault it.’


In the latter half of twentieth century, there was a trend towards looking at Lear as a psychoanalytical rather than a political play. In his introduction to the Oxford Shakespeare (2000), Stanley Wells highlighted some productions that ‘drew parallels with modern society’. He cited Deborah Warner’s 1990 production at the National in which Lear went from the king ‘whizzing on in a wheelchair wearing a red nose’ in Act 1 to being ‘bundled up with a rug over his knees [like] a geriatric out-patient waiting for the ambulance to take him home.’ He also makes reference to Helena Kaut-Howson’s production starring Kathryn Hunter as Lear. Kaut Howson’s interpretation was that the entire play was the ‘hallucination of a dying patient in a geriatric hospital… wheelchairs becoming chariots, a bathtub Tom’s hovel, and the hospital bed the one in which Lear awakened to Cordelia.’




‘It is not… a production for advocates of traditional Shakespeare’ wrote JC Trewin in the Birmingham Post. Peter Brook directed Paul Scofield in the title role in this famously Brechtian production. Milton Shulman described Brook’s stark, bare set as ‘an eerie world somewhere between an antiseptic operating theatre and a concrete segment of nowhere’ (London Evening Standard). Don Chapman (Oxford Mail) felt Brook had ‘followed a little harder than need be on the heels of Brecht.’ The Daily Herald’s critic admired Scofield’s performance: ‘Grizzled and cropped like the late Ernest Hemingway, barking with a voice of command … Paul Scofield stormed the stage at Stratford-on-Avon… Here was a king who had fought for, not inherited, his throne. A tough, savage, wardog, magnificent and majestic.’ Stanley Wells felt that ‘no one present at the first night will forget the sight of the cruelly blinded Gloucester groping his way toward the wings as the houselights slowly rose to signal the interval.’


Following the immense success of the Brook-Scofield collaboration, expectations of Trevor Nunn’s production [RSC 1968] were high and critics were generally underwhelmed by the production, although much attention was given to its visually stunning opening: ‘A slow-moving procession defiles from the darkness, the torches borne low or swung on high: ceremonial robes glinting and gleaming. Last, while the company kneels, a swathed tent is carried in beneath a flaring cresset. When it is unveiled the King is upon his throne, the Fool crouched at his feet.’ (JC Trewin)


Buzz Goodbody’s intimate production in The Other Place focussed on King Lear as a family tragedy rather than a political one. ‘Lear was performed by a cast of nine… the acting area was empty, except for a few props, like a rug and banners which unfurled when Lear appeared… when Gloucester’s first eye was plucked, half the lights were put out, and on the second there was full blackout.’ ‘he is out in the cold because of who is he – not a mighty monarch fallen from grace, but an old man on the point of death.’ Goodbody wanted to make sure that the sexual aspects of the play were not ignored, leading to moments such as Lear ‘forcing Goneril’s legs apart when [he] curses her womb.’ (Colin Chambers, Other Spaces). The production sold out and toured to the USA and Australia.


‘An old undisciplined child, consumed by dreads, desires, rages and affection,’ was Benedict Nightingale’s description of Donald Sinden’s Lear in Trevor Nunn’s eclectic setting [RSC 1976]. ‘The costumes fully implemented Poel’s prescription: borrowed, with complete eclecticism, from many periods, each typified rank, taste or character.’ Sinden’s Lear was ‘magnificently presented’ and highly acclaimed.


‘The production vibrates with intensity [and passion]’ wrote a critic in the Wolverhampton Express and Star of this production directed by Adrian Noble [RSC 1982]. Along with most of the press, this critic’s attention was focussed on the relationship between Gambon’s Lear and Antony Sher in the role of the Fool. ‘Antony Sher’s Fool has become a centrepoint, a Samuel Beckett-style circus clown. Mocking a world grown cynical and opportunist as he cavorts in impressionistic postures.’ The critic for the Shropshire Star agreed: ‘the last haunting memory was of Lear and the Fool’.


This was an experimental production directed by Cicely Berry at The Other Place. ‘A production that directly transferred her voice work to the stage… was accompanied by open sessions on language with audience, cast members and playwright in residence, Liz Lochhead’. (Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company, Colin Chambers). Berry’s focus was naturally on the verse, as Neil Taylor described (in Plays and Players): ‘the text is lucidly expressed, crystal clear to the extent that phrases, images, concepts are revealed which one has never noticed or appreciated before.’


‘For full four hours the plot thickens and quickens, but such is the force of Mr Hytner’s grasp on the play and its pace, it seems not a second of our time is squandered, ‘ wrote Jack Tinker in The Daily Mail of Nicholas Hytner’s production [RSC 1990], in which John Wood played Lear. One critic described the set as: ‘a vast open-ended box structure centre-stage which revolved around to reveal a solitary throne, an underground hovel, and a sunlit cornfield did justice to the play’s immense scope and created a fantastic sense of movement.’


‘As a confident Lear dissects the map of the Kingdom, the Fool paints the lines in what looks suspiciously like blood. In the later scenes a disintegrating map lies as testimony to error. The three “madmen”, Lear, Edgar and Fool, escape evil pursuit through a hole in the map to the hovel beneath and the incision precipitates a further shredding of Britain until battling soldiers collect fragments of what was left. Now there is no map, only a surface the colour of a scar.’ (Paul Lapworth, Stratford Herald)

Robert Stephens’ Lear was hotly anticipated and widely acclaimed, particularly for his moving performance in the latter half of the play: ‘this Lear is too frail to carry his daughter’s body unaided, and his broken howls and whimpers as he surveys her lifeless body bring the audience to the very heart of grief and loss. It is an extraordinary achievement’ (Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph). ‘No actor that I have seen has marked the onset of his madness so vividly… Stephens tears at one’s soul.’ (Jane Edwardes Time Out)


‘Sir Nigel Hawthorne’s brittle king gives us a rage that is internal but not majestic’ wrote Richard Chilvers in the Stratford Herald of this production by Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa, in which Hiroyuki Sanada played the Fool. Critics felt that the cultural differences within the mixed English and Japanese cast set up a barrier. Chilvers had little positive to say about Sanada’s Fool: ‘He rarely engaged with Lear or the audience and the jokes were lost in the telling’ - Or in fact with the production in general: ‘sand cascaded from the gods and boulders dropped in an effect that only emphasised the emptiness of the action.’ He concluded that ‘the concept seems neither fully Japanese nor Elizabethan nor modern, but a dissonant clash of all three and all the technical mastery of sound and light cannot disguise it.’ Hawthorne himself received mixed reviews: ‘Hawthorne has touching moments, as when he hugs John Carlisle's blinded, weeping Gloucester or droops over Cordelia's corpse; but they lack the force to shake - let alone crack - your heart. We're left with a poignant, warm-hearted, occasionally even comical Lear, not a majestic savage burning on his invisible "wheel of fire"... (The Times)


Links to related sections: 'Using Film' in the section 'For Teachers'.