Reading from the Margin: Examining Nahum Tate’s vs. Shakespeare’s King Lear as Cultural Products

Abstract

Nahum Tate’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear was so successful in Restoration theatre. Modern critics, however, regard Tate’s work as a second class drama which deserves mockery and dismiss it from master narratives of the history of English theatre. Therefore, we examine the ‘fields of cultural production’ of Shakespeare’s and Nahum Tate’s King Lear from Shakespeare’s time to the present to find out how each period values a certain work of literature. In the discussion, we would like to argue that the shifting ‘fields of cultural production’ determines the acceptance and rejection of Nahum Tate’s King Lear. By analyzing the ‘fields of cultural productions’ of both plays, we show that Tate’s has been excluded from the canonization within modern field of production’s discourses because of shifting circles of belief.

Keywords

• cultural production
• drama
• theatre
• Restoration
• Elizabethan
• circle of belief
• traditional
• modern