# King Lear (1917) Yale/Appendix B

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APPENDIX B
The History of the Play
We are fortunate in being able to fix with some precision the date of the composition of King Lear. It was written between 1603 and 1606. Harsnet's Popish Impostures, to which reference is made in our Notes, and which Shakespeare surely used in writing this play, was published in 1603. Edgar, who sings a bit of an old ballad, 'I smell the blood of a British man,' may possibly have substituted 'British' for the more common earlier word, 'English.' King James was crowned in 1603, but he was proclaimed King of Great Britain 24 October, 1604. Furthermore Gloucester mentions 'these late eclipses in the sun and moon.' Now in October, 1605, there was an eclipse of the sun, preceded within the space of a month by an eclipse of the moon. The Stationers' Registers say the play had been performed by 26 December, 1606. Some scholars think it was written in 1604, others in 1605; but all that we can be sure of is that it was written after the beginning of the year 1603 and before the end of the year 1606.
The earliest known edition of King Lear appeared in 1608. Indeed, two separate Quartos bear that date. One of these, at the foot of the title-page, has the following statement: 'Printed for Nathaniel Butter, and are to be sold at his shop in Pauls Church-yard at the signe of the Pide Bull neere St. Austins Gate.' It has thus come to be known as the 'Pide Bull' Quarto. The other omits everything after the word 'Butter,' and is now regarded as a spurious edition, really printed about 1619. The next printing of the play was in the First Folio, 1623, ​and in the Folios that followed in 1632, 1664, 1685. There was also a quarto edition of 1655, a reprint of the second Quarto mentioned above. Nearly three hundred lines appear in the Quartos that are not in the Folio, and about a hundred and ten lines in the Folio which are not in the Quartos. Delius thought that Shakespeare wrote only what is in the Folio, but there can be little doubt that the third scene in the fourth act, although wholly omitted in the Folio, is Shakespearian.
The first performance of the play, of which we have any record, was in the presence of the King at Whitehall, 26 December, 1606. In 1662 there is an allusion to King Lear, which seems to indicate that it was well known. In 1681 Nahum Tate made a revision which held the stage for a hundred and forty years, and was used by all the great eighteenth-century players. Edgar and Cordelia are united in marriage, and Kent and Lear live together. Tate's version seems insipid in comparison with Shakespeare's, but it was shaped to fit the fashion of the times. Tate paid a compliment to Shakespeare in his Prologue:
each Rustick knows 'Mongst plenteous Flow'rs a Garland to Compose, Which strung by his course Hand may fairer Show, But 'twas a Power Divine first made 'em Grow.
It was in 1823 that the great actor Edmund Kean, who had often appeared in Tate's version, finally decided to return to the original text, saying to his wife, 'The London audience have no notion of what I can do until they see me over the dead body of Cordelia.' The effect was even greater than he had hoped for. The most notable performance by an American actor in the nineteenth century was by Edwin Booth, who made an indelible impression on both critics and public. In the twentieth century, the ​play has been produced frequently in Germany and occasionally in Paris, while the best-known American production is that by Mr. Robert Mantell, who deserves much praise for giving his contemporaries their only opportunity to see the tragedy. Still, there is much truth in what Charles Lamb said nearly a century ago: 'The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted . . . the play is beyond all art.'