1715 Although an accomplished translator, satirist and dramatist (he helped Dryden with the second part of Absalom and Achitophel and wrote the libretto for Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas), Nahum Tate is best remembered for his weird adaptations of Shakespeare. His version of Richard II, rewritten as The Sicilian Usurper (1681), made all references to both the person and institution of majesty respectful, even though the king was being deposed. In the same year he reworked Coriolanus as The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth so as to ‘Recommend Submission and Adherence to Establisht Lawful Power’. With all such submission gone, the unruly Roman plebs (meant to parallel Tate’s contemporary Whigs) ensure that the play ends in a melodramatic explosion of violence, with Aufidius, Young Martius and Virgilia dead by the end, and Volumnia gone mad.
But it was on King Lear that Tate really went to town – in that same annus mirabilis of 1681. The mouthy Fool is cut out altogether, no doubt because he would simply confuse the new simplicities. The wicked are punished. Gloucester survives. Cordelia is spared the makeshift hanging and lives to marry Edgar. Lear is restored to his throne, and all live happily ever after. Edgar speaks the postscript:
Our drooping Country now erects her Head,
Peace spreads her balmy Wings, and Plenty Blooms.
Divine Cordelia, all the Gods can witness
How much thy Love to Empire I prefer!
Thy bright Example shall convince the World
(Whatever Storms of Fortune are decreed)
That Truth and Vertue shall at last succeed.
Coming after even what horrors are left in Tate’s version, these rhyming decasyllabics sound neat to the point of absurdity, but it’s worth recalling what one of the greatest English critics, Samuel Johnson, wrote about King Lear in the notes to his great 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s plays. What he called ‘the extrusion of Gloucester’s eyes’ he found ‘an act too horrid to be endured in dramatick exhibition’. Moreover, Shakespeare ‘suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause,contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of the chronicles’.
‘A play in which the wicked prosper’, he continued, ‘and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be … a just representation of the common events of human life; but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse.’
Aristotle would agree. His Poetics (ca. 335 BC) argues that the crucial distinction between art and real life, mimesis or imitation, plays out in the audience response. If you witness a murder on the street corner, you are terrified, disgusted. In a play or an epic poem, set in the logic of moral cause and effect, the act becomes more true than horrifying.
And it’s true that the sacrifice of Cordelia takes King Lear a step beyond the customary dénouement of tragedy. Albany starts the sort of usual winding-up speech used to conclude the earlier tragedies, saying to Kent and Edgar, ‘you twain / Rule in this realm and the gored state sustain’, but Kent knows he is about to die, while Edgar thinks that (for once at the end of a tragedy) we should: ‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’