Main ideas and artistic originality of Shakespeare’s “King Lear”

King Lear was first acted on December 26, 1606, St. Stephen’s Night, by Shakespeare’s acting company, The King’s Men, before King James I and the court at Whitehall.

In 1608, the FirstQuarto of the play was published.

There are twelve copies of the Pied BullQuarto extant today, but they are not uniform because of the way proofreading was done. Sheets were read as the quartos were printed, resulting in the separate volumes having different corrected and uncorrected sheets bound together.

A 1619 edition of the First Quarto was printed, although falsely dated 1608, by William Jaggard for Thomas Pavier, reprinting one of the original 1608 editions. In 1623, King Lear appeared in the Folio volume of Shakespeare’s work that John Heminges and Henry Condell, his fellow actors in The King’s Men, published in tribute to him. The Folio text varies significantly from the First Quarto texts. The Folio text has an additional 300 lines that the first Quarto texts do not have and the Folio text is missing 100 lines found in the Quarto editions.

There are a number of sources for the story of King Lear. The primary source is an earlier play,

probably dating from around 1594, with which Shakespeare was undoubtedly acquainted, called The True Chronicle History of King Leir. The story of Lear and his daughters, however, can also be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin work, History of the Kings of England (c.1136), in the collection The Mirror for Magistrates (1574), in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), in William Warner’s Albions England (1586), and in Edmund Spenser’s epic The Fairie Queene (1596). The

source for the Gloucester plot is found in Book II, Chapter 10 of Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia (1590). Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures (1603) is the source for

much of Edgar’s mad talk and references to demons.

King Lear has a strange performance history. In 1642, the English Parliament, politically at odds with King Charles I, and Puritanical in its religious inclination, ordered the theaters closed in London. And closed they remained during the English Commonwealth which the Puritan government established in 1649 under Oliver Cromwell. It was not until 1661, a year after the restoration of the monarchy, when Charles II ordered them to be re-opened. When the theaters reopened, the theater, as well as English culture itself, was quite different from the way it had been in Shakespeare’s day. Boys no longer acted the parts of women—women did. The stage was no longer a bare stage—something like a platform at an inn yard—but a proscenium stage adapted to using, even depending upon, scenery.

Most significantly, with the restoration of the monarchy, the grim universe of King Lear, with its plot about the defeat of a king, did not fit the official temper of the time. Although it was presented on the stage in its original form a few times, in 1681, Nahum Tate revised King Lear giving it a happy ending. Lear and Cordelia do not die; Lear is restored to the throne and Cordelia marries Edgar. The part of the Fool is excised completely. This version of King Lear held the stage in place of Shakespeare’s version for a 150 years, until 1834, when William Charles Macready at the Drury Lane in London performed Shakespeare’s unaltered original play.