Chapter 5 - Performing Restoration Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

Summary

This chapter uses David Garrick’s career-long engagement with Nahum Tate’s King Lear (1681) to demonstrate two points about Restoration Shakespeare. First, it shows how Garrick’s production of Tate’s alteration continued the work undertaken by the late seventeenth-century playwright to fit the Jacobean tragedy to new theatrical contexts. Promptbook evidence and review accounts indicate that Garrick, like Tate and his contemporaries, added music and other special effects to the King Lear story, thus augmenting the already strong multimedia dimensions of the Restoration versions of Shakespeare’s plays. These same sources, however, also indicate how Garrick modified Tate’s own alteration to provide an even greater focus on the monarch, one of this actor-manager’s most famous and most often performed parts. Second, this chapter takes Garrick’s reworking of Tate’s King Lear as an example of how generations of theatre practitioners – including our own – might use the writings of Tate and his contemporaries as a useful intermediary between themselves and Shakespeare’s works.