Garrick's King Lear and the English Malady

David Garrick played King Lear ninety times over the course of his career, a figure which qualifies the mad king as the most frequently performed among his tragic roles. Such frequency is not, I think, an accident; nor are the profusion and enthusiasm of contemporary accounts of Garrick in the role the result of chance. In this essay I shall depart both from the previous scholarly treatments of Garrick's Lear which have amassed eyewitness accounts of the performance, letting these speak essentially for themselves, and from those which have treated Garrick's alteration of King Lear as if it referred only to other pre-existent versions of the play.