kinglear
...temporary taste. Tate concerned himself largely with clarification of motives as well as softening story. He modified the very essence of the play removing the subtlety of the characters schemes so as to make them more $believable.‘ By making Lear, Cordelia and Gloucester survive and live $happily ever after,‘ Tate effectively transformed King Lear into a romance. Tate‘s revised version of King Lear was greeted with enormous approval thus sparking off a 200-year battle for the reinstatement of the original play. Charles Gildon aptly stated the belief of the time, ” the king and Cordelia ought by no means to have died, and therefore Mr. Tate has very justly alter‘d that Particular.2„ due to the popularity of the new version it was performed at least once every year from 1702 till the year of Tate‘s death. 1 P. Kelly, Shakes spears King Lear, (pp 33) 2 J. Halio ed., The Tragedy of King Lear, (pp 37) Ryan Melman 2 It was not until the 18th centaury that the play began its arduous task of returning to it‘s original version. Garrick was the first to curtail Tate‘s love story though he still clung to Tate‘s happy ending. George Colman followed this move back to the original text in1786 restoring a large amount of the original text and reinstating the unhappy ending. The public responded poorly to this as ” they could not stomach the loss of Tate‘s neat Romance closure in favour of the indefinition and the monstrous and inexplicable nature of Shakespeare events3„ Due to the audiences poor reaction a prominent attempt to restore the original text did not occur again till 1823, however after only three performances Tate‘s version was re-instituted. The play had to wait until 1834 and the director Charles Macready, for the original text to start its final comeback. Charles successfully managed to restore the original ending and language and by 1838, had even accomplished the reinstatement of the fools role. However his version was not with out concessions and it took more then 10 years, from Charles later restoration, for most of Shakespeare‘s original text to be restored. It had taken nearly 200 years but most the original version was finally restored. However, there was still a great distaste for Shakespeare‘s relentless portrayal of suffering. Kelly believes that it was this relentless portrayal of suffering which lead Tate to his rewriting of the original play. Apparently King Lear‘s lack of popularity was not based solely on the fact that ” the concept of fallen royalty was too close to what England had just lived through.4„ It was also based strongly on the audience‘s lack of ability to endure the intense suffering faced by Lear and the characters in the play. Even as late as the 1950‘s critics were still complaining about the harshness of the suffering of King Lear. John Middleton Murry even went as far as writing ” I could almost believe that Shakespeare was on the verge of madness himself when he wrote King Lear.5„ Kelly focuses strongly on the interpretations of the play from the 1940‘s onwards, displaying how the directors‘ portrayal of the play are swayed by the political climate and their own interpretations. This effect of the political climate on the interpretation of ” King Lear„ is obvious if we contrast Grigori Kozintev‘s film and play versions. In the 1940‘s play version, performed in the midst of the Leningrad siege during World War Two, Grigori po...