‘Enter Kent, Gloster, and Bastard’: Beginning King Lear and the Choice of the Audience

The title page of the first quarto of Shakespeare’s 1608 King Lear foregrounds many things: Shakespeare’s name in the largest font used, an emphasis that this King Lear is “HIS”, the fascination with Edgar as “Tom of Bedlam” and the fact that this is the play “As it was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall upon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes”. The particularity of that moment and its complex implications has been explored before, of course, but there are new ways to rethink that moment when the play met a particular gathering of spectators in a particular room on that day in the Christmas holidays. And, from that interaction, this article moves on to consider other performances that define such purposive positionings of the play. It is one thing to, say, perform King Lear in the repertory of the RSC and something very different to perform it, for example, to an audience of carers for the elderly as part of Theatre of War’s King Lear Project. As Kent and Gloucester begin the play, so King Lear negotiates with its audiences, usually made up of play-goers who have chosen the play and sometimes those who have been chosen by the play.