KING LEAR AND REDEMPTION.

If the story of the reception of Hamlet keeps returning to Hamletism and politics, the reception of King Lear has to do for the most part with an evasion of political issues. I start with the Romantics, who first claimed for the play the special status it now has. They saw themselves as recuperating King Lear as a reading text from the approval by Dr Johnson of the happy ending devised by Nahum Tate, on the grounds that the death of Cordelia was ‘contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles’. Tate's was, of course, the version played on the stage during this period, with its happy ending – restoring Lear to a power he promptly hands over to Cordelia and Edgar, who are to marry – and from 1810 till the death of George III in 1820, the play was not staged at all in London because of the analogy that might be drawn between Lear and the mad old king on the throne. Tate's version, made in 1681, is conservatively political in making the action move towards a restoration of the monarchy, and ‘an endorsement of obedience and civil order’; and the reasons for banning of the play in 1810 were also political.