Free King Lear by William Shakespeare Page A

shed abundance of tears.” 2 The Shakespearean editor George Steevens, after confessing his view that “Tate’s alteration … had considerably improved the great original,” went on to extol the virtues of Garrick’s acting: “Were we to inquire in what particular scene Mr. Garrick is preeminently excellent it would be a difficult circumstance to point it out.” He did, though, single out Garrick’s “mode of speaking the curse at the end of the first act of the play.” In his view Garrick “gives it additional energy, and it is impossible to hear him deliver it without an equal mixture of horror and admiration.” 3 John Philip Kemble (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 1788) played Lear with his tragedian sister, Sarah Siddons, as Cordelia. The critic and poet Leigh Hunt was disappointed: “He personated the king’s majesty perfectly well, but not the king’s madness … he is always stiff, always precise, and he will never, as long as he lives, be able to act any thing mad unless it be a melancholy mad statue.” 4
    During the Regency period, when old King George III was mad, the London theater managers tactfully abstained from staging the play. Soon after the king’s death in 1820, the fiery Romantic actor Edmund Kean played the role at Drury Lane later to mixed reviews. The London
Times
objected that the storm scene “was less effective than many others” chiefly because it was “exhibited with so much accuracy that the performer could scarcely be heard amidst the confusion,” but the reviewer was better pleased by the fifth act in which “there was scarcely a dry eye in the theatre.” 5 William Hazlitt felt that “Mr. Kean chipped off a bit of the character here and there: but he did not pierce the solid substance, nor move the entire mass.” 6 Hazlitt reviewed Junius Brutus Booth’s production at Covent Garden in the same year more favorably: “There was no feebleness, and no vulgarity in any part of Mr. Booth’s acting, but it was animated, vigorous, and pathetic throughout.” 7
    When Macready, who had played Edmund to Booth’s Lear, restored Shakespeare’s text in his Covent Garden production of 1838, the Fool, reintroduced for the first time in more than a hundred and fifty years, was played by a young woman, Priscilla Horton.Macready set the play in a pagan Saxon Britain replete with Druidic stone circles. Critics were generally enthusiastic:
    Mr. Macready’s Lear, remarkable before for a masterly completeness of conception, is heightened by this introduction of the Fool to a surprising degree. It accords exactly with the view he seeks to present of Lear’s character.… Mr. Macready’s representation of the father at the end, broken down to his last despairing struggle, his heart swelling gradually upwards till it bursts in its closing sigh, completed the only perfect picture that we have of Lear since the age of Betterton. 8
    It may be asked how someone writing a century and a half after the event could have known that Betterton’s was a “perfect picture” of Lear, but the point here is to stress how much the characterization of Lear gains from the restoration of his foil, the Fool.
    Samuel Phelps produced the play at Sadler’s Wells in 1845 using simpler staging and a fuller version of the text than that of Macready, which had remained heavily cut despite the rejection of Tate. The naturalism of Phelps’ performance was praised but the storm was thought excessive: “It is not imitation, but realization.” 9 Charles Kean staged a successful production at the Princess’s Theater in 1858. Set in Anglo-Saxon Britain, it boasted a strong supporting cast including Kate Terry as Cordelia. Meanwhile in New York, Edwin Booth, son of Junius Brutus, revived the play using Shakespeare’s text, giving a performance described by William Winter as “the fond father and the broken old man. It was the great heart, shattered by cruel unkindness, that he first, and most of all, displayed.”