SOURCE: Hardman, C. B. “‘Our Drooping Country Now Erects Her Head’: Nahum Tate's History of King Lear.” Modern Language Review 95, no. 4 (October 2000): 913-23.

In the following essay, Hardman examines the changes made by Tate to Edmund, Edgar, and Albany in King Lear, considering how Tate's audience might have responded to the characters in light of contemporary political events.

It was once thought that ‘political considerations’ had ‘a minimum of direct effect’ on Tate's rewriting of King Lear.¹ However, for some time now critics have attended to the play's contemporary political significance, placing it squarely in the political context of its period, and particularly of the exclusion crisis in the 1680s.² This article seeks to extend the discussion of Tate's rewriting of Edmund, Edgar, and Albany and to consider how a contemporary audience might have read them in the light of the politics of the day; for however Shakespeare's...