Riverside Shakespeare Company
In 1985 the Riverside Shakespeare Company presented the New York premiere of "The History of King Lear", adapted with a happy ending by 18th-century English Poet Laureate, Nahum Tate, from William Shakespeare's "King Lear". The production was directed by W. Stuart McDowell, produced by Andrew B. Harris, who had joined Riverside as its executive director at the beginning of the season.
The History of King Lear
Although Shakespeare's entire text did not reappear on stage for over a century and a half, this does not mean that it was always completely replaced by Tate's version. Tate's version was itself subject to adaptation. It is known that Garrick used Tate's complete text in his performances in 1742, but playbills advertising performances at Lincoln's Inn Fields the following year (with an anonymous "Gentleman" playing Lear) mentioned "restorations from Shakespeare". Garrick prepared a new adaptation of Tate's version for performances given from 1756, with considerable restoration from the earlier parts of the play, although Tate's happy ending was retained, and the Fool was still omitted. Garrick's rival Spranger Barry also played Tate's Lear the same year, in a performance which, according to the poet and playwright Frances Brooke, moved the whole house to tears, though Brooke marvelled that Spranger and Garrick should both have given Tate's work "the preference to "Shakespeare"'s excellent original", and that Garrick, in particular, should "prefer the adulterated cup of "Tate" to the pure genuine draught offered him by the master he avows to serve with such fervency of devotion."