Harriman-Smith, James. ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century’. Performing Restoration Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp. 97–117.

Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays continued to appear on English stages throughout the eighteenth century. Like any collection of performances, however, the eighteenth-century performance of Restoration Shakespeare was never static nor homogenous: lines written in the Restoration were cut or altered;‘restorations’ from Shakespeare’s own texts were made; and hundreds of other accommodations and alterations took shape, meeting the daily demands of changing companies, theatres and audience tastes. This chapter focuses on the fate of one piece of Restoration Shakespeare in particular, Nahum Tate’s The History of King Lear, which added a love plot between Edgar and Cordelia, cut the Fool, and concluded with the survival of Lear, Gloucester, and Cordelia.