Sometime long ago, when Britain was still under Roman rule, a local king named Leir, having produced no male heirs, prepared to divide up the kingdom between his daughters. Two of the three got half the kingdom each, with the youngest one shut out because she refused to flatter her father. The two older daughters rebelled and took the entire kingdom from their father – the only one saving him from madness being the youngest. The story of Leir was essentially retold and modernized by Shakespeare’s play, King Lear.

On this day, December 26, in 1606 Shakespeare performed his play before the court of King James I at Whitehall.

For two hundred years, Shakespeare’s version of King Lear was barely known – audiences disliked the heavy tragedy of the title character –  and Nahum Tate’s happier version, with an original ending, was preferred instead. Tate’s version, although omitting certain characters entirely and considerably shortening the tale, still kept many of the Shakespeare’s lines. Tate helped to preserve the original into the 20th century, when it was adapted and updated for modern times by countries and theatre companies on both sides of the Atlantic.