Tate's Critical Editing of his Source-Text(s) for The History of King Lear

This essay identifies the Quarto edition that Nahum Tate used to prepare his adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear. While this essay concludes that there is too little evidence to identify his Folio source with any of the three Folio editions published prior to the premiere of Tate's The History of King Lear in 1681, it also proves that Tate's "editing" of his source texts anticipated the editorial practice of 'conflation' of the early texts of King Lear generally associated with eighteenth-century editors whose work postdates the rise of the official editorial tradition in 1709.