King Lear, Part 4: Interpretations, Adaptations, Critical Lenses and Evaluating Productions

Hook: the 150-year spoiler

Imagine a famous film whose ending was changed by a studio, and for the next 150 years audiences saw only the new, happy version. People quoted it, loved it and assumed it was the original.

That really happened to King Lear. In 1681, the writer Nahum Tate rewrote the play so that Cordelia lives, marries Edgar, and Lear gets his throne back. For about a century and a half, that was the Lear audiences saw. This lesson asks why each age has changed or restaged the play, what the critical lenses reveal, and how to judge a production fairly.

Rewriting the ending

Nahum Tate (1681) cut the Fool, invented a romance between Edgar and Cordelia, and ended with Lear restored and Cordelia alive. He was writing for audiences who expected poetic justice.

Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century critic and editor, defended Tate's choice. In the notes to his 1765 edition of Shakespeare he wrote that Cordelia's death had shocked him so much that for many years he could not bear to reread the last scenes, until he had to as an editor. It is a valuable piece of reader-response evidence: one of the most intelligent readers of his century found the original ending almost unbearable.

Restoration of the original: in the 19th century actors returned to Shakespeare's text. In 1838, William Charles Macready staged a version much closer to the original, bringing back the Fool.

Why it matters: the history shows that an ending is not just a fact about a text; it is a choice that each age argues about, and the arguments reveal that age's values.

Lenses on Lear

Feminist. Goneril and Regan are often played as monsters. But look closely at Act 1: Lear's hundred knights are, Goneril says, disorderly and riotous in her house, and Lear responds by calling down a curse on her ability to have children, a shocking attack on her body. A feminist reading asks whether the play shows daughters trapped by a father's demands for performed love, and notices that its one good daughter must be silent and self-sacrificing. Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres (1991; Pulitzer Prize, 1992) retells the story on an Iowa farm from the point of view of the eldest daughter, revealing a family history that changes how the father looks. (It deals with serious family abuse; preview first.)

Marxist / class. The play is about land and property: who inherits, who is shut out (Edmund, by law; Lear, by his daughters). In the storm Lear discovers the poor; in Act 4 he sees that rich clothes hide crimes that rags reveal. A Marxist reading argues the play exposes how wealth and title disguise power and cruelty.

Historical. The play speaks to a moment when King James wanted to unite kingdoms, and when laws of inheritance (legitimacy, the eldest son's rights) decided people's fates. Edmund's soliloquy is a direct challenge to those laws.

Age and care. Many recent productions present Lear's madness as something like dementia, and the play as a story about aging parents, dependence and the strain of caregiving, which makes Goneril and Regan's situation more understandable, though not their cruelty.

Existential. The Polish critic Jan Kott, in an essay first published in Polish in 1961 and later in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (English edition, 1964), compared Lear to Samuel Beckett's absurdist play Endgame: a world without meaning or justice, where people wait and suffer. That reading shaped Peter Brook's bleak 1962 Royal Shakespeare Company production, starring Paul Scofield, which Brook later filmed (1971).

Lear across cultures

• **Akira Kurosawa, Ran (1985): the Japanese director moved the story to 16th-century Japan. An aging warlord divides his domain among three sons**; war and betrayal follow. The change from daughters to sons shifts the story toward power, war and inheritance, and away from performed love.
• National Arts Centre, Ottawa (May 2012): director Peter Hinton staged King Lear with a cast made up entirely of Indigenous actors from across Canada, setting it in 17th-century Canada, at the time of early contact between Indigenous peoples and Europeans. August Schellenberg played Lear, and members of local Indigenous communities appeared as Lear's followers. Moving the play into that history invites an Indigenous-centred reading: a story of land divided, of kinship broken and of a world on the edge of upheaval takes on new meanings in the context of contact and colonization.

Each adaptation is a form of critical reading: it decides what the play is about by choosing what to change.