Any survey, however summary, of the stage-fortunes of our play must include its adaptation by Nahum Tate, which displaced the original as the basis of all productions for a century and a half. So popular was it that the eighteenth-century performances far outnumber those of any other period; and in the nineteenth century such outstanding critics as Lamb, Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt never saw the original staged.

Of pre-Restoration productions only two records are known. The entry of Shakespeare's Lear in the Stationers' Register of 26 November 1607, mentions a performance before the King at Whitehall on the night of St Stephen's Day (26 December) 1606, ‘by his maiesties servantes playinge vsually at the Globe’; and the ‘Pied Bull’ quarto (Q 1) of 1608 repeats the information on its title-page. The other notice tells the story of a group of Yorkshire players from Egton who at Candlemas (2 February) 1610 acted the play at Sir John York's mansion, Gowthwaite Hall in Nidderdale, when Christopher Simpson, who originally gathered together these strolling players, probably acted the king. They used ‘printed books’, which for this play must have been copies of Q I. After the Restoration at least two revivals preceded the disappearance of Shakespeare's Lear from the stage. John Downes in his Roscius Anglicanus (1708) names it in a list of the plays presented by Davenant's company (‘the Duke's’) at Lincoln's Inn Fields, ‘between 1662 and 1665’, Betterton playing Lear; while in June 1675, it is said to have been seen by Nell Gwyn.