Mad About Shakespeare: From Classroom to Theatre to Emergency Room
JONATHAN BATE
(WILLIAM COLLINS, 320 PP, £25)
tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064

The power of tragedy rests, in part, upon the secret conviction that everything really could turn out for the best. Julius Caesar could pay heed to the warning of the soothsayer; Macbeth pay none to the witches’ words; Cleopatra might yet, at curtain’s rise, set the asp dancing by the banks of the Nile. King Lear opens in medias res, the play’s background tragedy – age – is already well under way, but an as-of-yet undashed hope perdures in Lear’s one decent daughter, Cordelia (inset, Timothy West as Lear and Rachel Pickup as Cordelia at the Old Vic).

Shakespeare’s frustration of this hope in Cordelia’s death, Jonathan Bate realises in Mad About Shakespeare, makes for an unsettlingly tragic tragedy. For generations of theatregoers, unbearably so: Nahum Tate’s bowdlerised Lear, complete with an uplifting and, of course, entirely fabricated ending, concludes with Cordelia and Edgar riding off into the sunset. It ran for 150 years. Strong medicine, but creative editing was for the Bard’s own good – so conventional wisdom insisted for centuries. Elijah Fenton put it like this: Will’s “mind (the universal mirror of Mankind), Expressed all Images, enriched the stage/ But sometimes stooped to please a barbarous Age”. It was not permissible that Shakespeare’s universal relevance be stymied by mere manuscripts. He was too good not to change.