Where do the climactic storm scenes of King Lear take place?
asks Gwilym Jones. In a recent edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme, In Our Time, three experts and the show’s host, Melvyn Bragg, left the listener in little doubt: Lear is on a heath. This does not come as a surprise. King Lear’s heath is evident in the popular imagination, in the language of theatre professionals, in the published works of academics. But it is not evident in anything written by William Shakespeare. Where, then, does the idea of the heath come from? The editor Nicholas Rowe was the first to include it as a printed stage direction in his 1709 edition of Shakespeare (over 100 years after King Lear was first published), but why? This has been addressed by James Ogden, who argues, convincingly, that Rowe derived the heath from the scenery used in the staging of Nahum Tate’s version of the play – infamous for its happy ending. The same scenery, indeed, was used for Tate’s play The Loyal General, and, as Ogden has shown, ‘There are several similarities between [The Loyal G
