A Play-by-Play history of King Lear in Germany, France, and Italy would be a dull thing; but a discussion of the special qualities found in the tragedy at historic theatrical moments can illuminate both the work of art and the cultural and artistic environment in which it was presented.

The German productions offer the best example of the range of possibilities found in Lear in Continental theatre because the play has had there its longest history of production, outside of England.

The opening of Beerbohm Tree's new theatre, Her Majesty's, on April 28, 1897, was a major social event, but hardly a landmark in stage history. Desmond MacCarthy felt that “Her Majesty's … frankly forewent the claim to be the last word in dramatic art” in favour of “the grandly, lavishly popular in that line.” The art critic of the Weekly Sun suggested that it had foregone dramatic art altogether as it had been traditionally understood. “This is the age of the biograph and the cinematograph,” he wrote. “Mr. Tree's object was to give us living pictures which talked.”

In many English villages in the nineteenth century young farmworkers used to perform a traditional play, the origins of which probably stretch back to the centuries before the Conversion. William Barnes, the Dorset dialect poet and friend of Thomas Hardy, has left us this description of the actors in such a play:

When The New York Times on September 16, 1962 changed its official spelling from theatre to theater, it jumped headlong into a controversy actively alive since Shakespeare's day. On the day before, on Sunday, the Drama section showed a single face to the public as it reported and advertised an institution called theatre, but from the next day forward it looked as if the muse wrote in two languages because both spellings were used. The change was made without editorial comment, without a single letter to the editor, without any indication whatsoever that anyone cared. If a few noticed it, they undoubtedly concluded that The Times had fallen victim to an American spelling rule that must have long plagued its copyreaders and thus forgave the change.