Adapting King Lear for the Stage by Lynne Bradley (review)

In the four hundred years since it was first played, King Lear has been through a lot. For a century and a half, The Tragedy of King Lear ended as a comedy, the Fool nowhere to be seen. Lear has been Judaized, feminized, and postmodernized; it has been expanded, condensed, revised, subverted, merged with other texts, and teased apart into separate ones. But the title does not give a clear idea of what appears in Ms. Bradley’s series of case studies of revisions, continuations, and adaptations of Shakespeare’s play from the 1660s to the 1980s. The word “stage,” for instance, does not mean the book has much to say about stagecraft; Ms. Bradley’s interest is in dramatic texts, not plays in performance. And though the chronological scope appears to be wide, the bulk of the book is on twentieth-century adaptations. Only one chapter covers “Adaptations before the Twentieth Century,” and it quickly trots through Restoration and eighteenth-century versions.

Anyone with more than a passing interest in eighteenth-century Shakespeareana will find everything in that chapter familiar. More interesting for Scriblerian readers is the first chapter on twentieth-century adaptations: in grounding such adaptations that emerged in the eighteenth century and reached a kind of apotheosis in A. C. Bradley, Ms. Bradley offers an original argument about the role of the literary character in the long history of Shakespearean reception.

Adapting “King Lear” is not as sharply focused as it might be. Much of it is given over to summaries, useful to those unfamiliar with the primary texts but tiresome to those who know them. Ms. Bradley, moreover, is eager to pigeonhole texts, treating them as representatives of the larger literary movements catalogued in textbooks, rather than discussing them on their own terms. She is also dependent on secondary and even tertiary sources for too many of her claims, signaled in the abundant secondhand citations—far too many notes begin “Qtd.”—and the sources she uses are not always the best. Too many facts are wrong: Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio appeared in 1685, not 1655; neither Pope’s nor Rowe’s edition was titled The Collected Works of Shakespeare; Davenant and Killigrew had nothing to do with the Haymarket Theatre. The book is also marred by typos and other carelessness. Not much is at stake in these minor blemishes, but collectively they weaken the reader’s faith in the project.

Notwithstanding its interesting material, Adapting “King Lear” for the Stage is a missed opportunity.