The History of King Lear
The History of King Lear is an adaptation by Nahum Tate of William Shakespeare's "King Lear". It first appeared in 1681, some seventy-five years after Shakespeare's version, and is believed to have replaced Shakespeare's version on the English stage in whole or in part until 1838.
Happy ending
The presence of a happy ending is one of the key points that distinguish melodrama from tragedy. In certain periods, the endings of traditional tragedies such as "Macbeth" or "Oedipus Rex", in which most of the major characters end up dead, disfigured, or discountenanced, have been actively disliked. In the Seventeenth Century, the Irish author Nahum Tate sought to improve William Shakespeare's "King Lear" in his own heavily modified version in which Lear survives and Cordelia marries Edgar. Tate's version dominated performances for a century and a half, Shakespeare's original nearly forgotten. Both David Garrick and John Philip Kemble, while taking up some of Shakespeare's original text, kept Tate's happy ending. Edmund Kean played "King Lear" with its tragic ending in 1823, but failed and reverted to Tate's crowd-pleaser after only three performances. Only in 1838 did William Macready at Covent Garden successfully restore Shakespeare's original tragic end – Helen Faucit's final appearance as Cordelia, dead in her father's arms, became one of the most iconic of Victorian images and the play's tragic end was finally accepted by the general public. Most subsequent critics have not found Tate's amendments an improvement, and welcomed the restoration of Shakespeare's original. Happy endings have also been fastened – equally, with no lasting success – to "Romeo and Juliet" and "Othello".