Shakespeare's Sources

Comedies and Tragedies

Kenneth Muir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136556845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

First published in 1957. This book finds discovers what the sources to Shakespeare's Comedies and Tragedies really were, considers the dramatic reasons for Shakespeare's departure from them and provides many examples of the way in which he made use of his general reading for particular scenes and speeches. Kenneth Muir shows that Shakespeare frequently uses more than one source and sometimes as many as eight.

{ VI }

Great Tragedies II

( 13 ) King Lear

WE do not know what first gave to Shakespeare the idea of writing a play about King Lear. It is possible that the original inspiration came not from the Lear story at all but from Sidney’s story of the Paphlagonian King in Arcadia.¹ Hemay even have been prompted by the true story of Sir Brian Annesley, who in October 1603, a year before Shakespeare began his play, was reported to be unfit to govern himself or his estate. Two of his daughters tried to get him certified as insane, so that they could obtain his estate; but the youngest daughter, Cordell, appealed to Cecil, and when Annesley died the Court of Chancery upheld his will. Although Cordell afterwards married Sir William Harvey, the step-father of the Earl of Southampton, and although the Fool’s remark ‘Winters not gon yet, if the wild Geese fly that way’ may be an allusion to Annesley’s eldest daughter, Lady Wild-goose, it is unsafe to assume that this topical story was the genesis of the play.²

Years before, when he was writing his history plays, Shakespeare would have come across the Lear story both in Holinshed’s Chronicles and in The Mirror for Magistrates. In 1590 he could have read Spenser’s version in The Faerie Queene. He may have known the version in Gerard Legh’s Accedens of Armoury; and, about the time he was writing the play, Camden was retelling part of the story in his Remaines. There was, finally, the old chronicle play, King Leir, with which the poet was certainly familiar. As this seems not to have been published before 1605, he must either have seen it in manuscript or on the stage. I have elsewhere suggested that he may have acted in it.³ It is true that there is no evidence that the play belonged to Shakespeare’s company. But if it did not, we have to assume either that there was an edition in 1594 when the play was entered in the Stationers’ Register, or else that somehow Shakespeare obtained access to the manuscript. Too little is known about Shakespeare’s early career for us to be certain that he never belonged to the company which owned the play.

I have examined elsewhere⁴ the evidence that Shakespeare was acquainted with all these sources, but it may be as well to summarize it here. We do not have to rely on probabilities. Sir Walter Greg has detailed⁵ some forty parallels between King Lear and the old chronicle play. One of these will be sufficient to show that Shakespeare knew the old play. Perillus upbraids Gonorill with the words:

Nay, peace thou monster, shame vnto thy sexe,

Thou fiend in likenesse of a human creature.

Shortly afterwards, Leir asks Ragan, ‘Knowest thou these letters?’ She snatches them and tears them up. In one scene of King Lear (IV. 2) Albany urges his wife in similar terms:

See thy selfe, diuell:

Proper deformitie shows not in the Fiend

So horrid as in woman.

Thou changed and selfe-couer’d thing, for shame,

Be-monster not thy feature

… howere thou art a fiend,

A womans shape doth shield thee.

In the last scene of the play he says to her:

Shut your mouth Dame,

Or with this paper shall I stople it…

Thou worse than any name, reade thine owne euill!

No tearing, Lady, I perceiue you know it.

… Most monstrous! O,

Know’st thou this paper?

In both plays we have shame and fiend; monster is echoed in be-monster and monstrous, sex in woman, and Knowest thou these letters? in Know’ st thou this paper? The action of tearing is echoed in Albany’s No tearing.

From Holinshed’s Chronicles Shakespeare took the ducal titles of Cornwall and Albany (Albania) and perhaps a hint for Goneril’s first speech:

she loued him more than toong could expresse.

From The Faerie Queene Shakespeare derived the form of Cordelia’s name, and the manner of her death, by hanging.⁶ In Holinshed and The Mirror for Magistrates she stabs herself. From The Mirror for Magistrates Shakespeare took about ten minor details, including the forms Albany and King of France, and there is one significant verbal parallel. The lines describing Cordila’s life in prison—

From sight of princely wights, to place where theues do dwel:

From deinty beddes of downe, to be of strawe ful fayne—

may be compared with Cordelia’s lines—

And wast thou faine (poore Father)

To houell thee with Swine and Rogues forlorne,

In short, and musty straw?

Oddly enough, there is some evidence⁷ that Shakespeare consulted both the 1574 and the 1587 editions of The Mirror for Magistrates, since some of the parallels are only with one edition, and some only with the other. The evidence that Shakespeare consulted Camden’s Remaines, Legh’s Accedens of Armoury, and Geoffrey of Monmouth⁸ is inconclusive.

On the whole it seems likely that the idea of re-dramatizing the Lear story came from Shakespeare’s acquaintance with the old play, though he must have recognized from the first that the plot would have to be considerably modified. The author of King Leir had dramatized only half of the story given by the chroniclers. He ends the play with the restoration of Leir to the throne, and omits the tragic sequel: years later, after the death of the King, Cordelia is deposed by her nephews and cast into prison, where she takes her own life. Shakespeare was faced with a real difficulty. Cordelia’s death takes place so long after the main events of the story that to dramatize it meant a sacrifice of dramatic unity and the introduction of new characters. Even though the death of Cordelia could be represented as the working of nemesis, the despair and suicide of the virtuous heroine could hardly satisfy our sense of poetic justice. On the other hand, to end the play with the restoration of Lear would seem to those who knew the sequel only an interim conclusion.

The dramatic problem confronting Shakespeare was therefore clear. He had to avoid the seven years that elapsed in the chronicle between the restoration of Lear and the death of Cordelia.⁹ He had to make the death of Cordelia a logical result of Lear’s original error and of her refusal to flatter. He had to make Lear pay for his sin by death, a death which is hastened by the killing of the daughter he had wronged. Cordelia could not be allowed to commit suicide, and therefore she must be murdered.

Shakespeare solved the problem by bringing forward the death of Cordelia, so that she dies before her father; and the man who orders her murder does so because he hopes for the throne. This situation can arise only if Cordelia is defeated in battle—in the sources she is successful in this battle and defeated seven years later—not by her nephews but by the armies of Goneril and Regan. If Lear and Cordelia are to die, then the wicked sisters must die too; and, since they are victorious in the battle, they must be killed by the working out of their own evil passions. Shakespeare makes ...