Page 63 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

lviii KING LEAR
Virtue shall at last succeed'. As to the Fool, Tate prob-
ably thought of him as the mere stage buffoon; Garrick
1
and most eighteenth-century readers did the same, and
not till 1838 was he again seen on the stage. Besides thus
remoulding the play, Tate reminted numerous lines and
even whole passages in his own debased poetic currency. 3
Protests from men of letters were heard from time to
time against what a pamphlet of 1747 called an 'exe-
crable alteration'. Thus as early as 1711 Addison in the
Spectator, no 40, declared that the play as thus 're-
formed according to the chimerical notion of poetical
justice...has lost half its beauty'; Lamb in 1811, and
Hazlitt in 1817, quoting Lamb in extenso, pronounced
emphatic condemnation of the 'happy ending'.3 But
1
For Garrick, who once thought of restoring the Fool,
but feared to 'hazard so bold an attempt', see Thomas
Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies (1783), 11, 267; cf. D.
Nichol Smith, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (1928),
p. 21; and for Column's view in 1768, ibid. p. 23. Even
Leigh Hunt in an Examiner article of May 1808 approved
Tate's excision of the Fool as 'now out of date' (see L. H.
and C. W. Houtchen's Leigh Hunt's Dramatic Criticism
(1950), pp. i5-2o)._
2
Tate's version is in Montague Summers's Shakespeare
Adaptations (1922); a useful analysis is in C. B. Hogan's
Shakespeare in the Theatre, 1701-1800: London, ijoi-50
(1952), p. 244; and an excellent short criticism in Nichol
Smith, op. cit. pp. 20-2. See also Genest, Some Account of
the English Stage, 1660-1830 (1832), V, 194-200; H. H.
Furness's New Variorum Shakespeare ed. of Lear (1882),
pp. 466-77; G. C. D. Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to
Irving (1921), r, 53-6; Hazelton Spencer, op. cit. pp. 242-9.
3 See Genest, iv, 475-6 (for the pamphlet); Lamb, On
the Tragedies of Shakespeare with Reference to their Fitness
for Stage Representation (from the Reflector, No. IV, 1811),
in Lamb's Miscellaneous Prose, ed. E. V. Lucas, 1912,
pp. 124-5; Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays
(Works, edited Waller and Glover, 1, 270-1, 1902).