SOURCE: Sharkey, Peter L. “Performing Nahum Tate's King Lear: Coming Hither by Going Hence.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 54, no. 4 (December 1968): 398-403.

In the following essay, Sharkey examines a 1967 staging of Tate's King Lear, revealing the influence of stage history on modern versions of Shakespeare's Lear.

Producing Nahum Tate's seventeenth-century adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear illustrates how much past stage history affects our modern view of Lear. Over the years popular tragedians of the English and American stages developed a declamatory acting style that was born of Tate's modifications, and their success profoundly influenced the philosophy of producing Shakespearean tragedy. Neither the restoration of Shakespeare's text nor a change in rhetorical fashion could reverse a trend started by Tate and fully realized in the radical internalization of Shakespeare's dramaturgy in the modern theatre. The experimental production by students at the University of California, Berkeley, traces another source of the...