Return to Chapter Index
Return to King Lear Notes
Back to Home page
CORDELIA, KING LEAR AND HIS FOOL.
CHAPTER I
A PLAY FOR KING
JAMES I.
When was the last time you rented one of the
several videos of King Lear for your family to watch at Christmas time?
Although this story of an abused daughter who is hanged when she tries to help
rescue her crazed father from the power of her evil sisters has a great
fascination to us, it's not the kind of play you would choose to watch during
the festive season, unless you had had a bad year! And yet it was during the
festive season of 1606 that Shakespeare first performed King Lear before
King James I and possibly his family. Had King James had a bad year, and
Shakespeare too?
We
may be sure that when James and the then Dukes of Cornwall and Albany[1]
sat down to watch Shakespeare's production of King Lear, they were
already very familiar with the rich folklore surrounding this legendary king of
England who was supposed to have lived some 800 years BC. It is perhaps hard
for us to conceive that the tale was then already a hundred or more years older
than Shakespeare's version is today, and was probably as well known to Jacobean
audiences as the cognate tale Cinderella is to us today. A number of
seemingly competing versions of the tale were in circulation.
It
was less than thirty years since John Higgins had given his account of the
tragic end of Cordila in The Mirror For Magistrates (1578). In this
work, which closes with a stern warning against suicide, Cordila takes her own
life in prison after failing to gain the throne of England from her evil
sisters' sons. We will see that it is evident from the text of King Lear
that Shakespeare was familiar with Higgins' work.
More
immediate to Shakespeare's production was an anonymous dramatic version:
THE
True Chronicle History of King LEIR, and
his
three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella.[2]
Published in 1605, it reversed the fortunes of Cordella
who with the help of the King of France restores her father to the English
throne and a happy ending. According to the title page of this version it had
recently been acted in different places at different times. Whether James had
seen or read this version and commanded a performance of the tale by
Shakespeare's troupe, or whether Shakespeare had been looking out for a
suitable play to perform before his majesty during the festive season, we do
not know.[3]
But we do know that Shakespeare, adapting the many versions of the story and
other legendary material, fashioned his own version for performance before King
James[4].
At
a later date, I believe, Shakespeare modified the presentation that he had made
before King James for subsequent presentation to the general public at the
Globe[5].
Then in 1608, perhaps after public performances had been running at the Globe
for some time, the play, as it had been performed before James, was published
in the Quarto (single play) edition under the title:
M.
William Shake-speare, HIS True Chronicle History of the life and death of King
Lear, and his three Daughters. With the vnfortunate life of EDGAR, sonne and
heire to the Earle of Glocester, and his sullen and assumed humour of TOM of
Bedlam.[6]
Whether or not Shakespeare had a hand in the
contents of the title page of the Quarto edition of his play, the similarity of
the 1605 and 1608 titles suggests that Shakespeare's production was thought of
as a contrast with the earlier work both claiming to be the true account. A
consideration of the contents of both plays leaves the reader in no doubt that
Shakespeare was very familiar with the earlier work, and that he expected his
audience would have been familiar with it too.
The
title page of Shakespeare's Quarto edition also differs from the 1605 Leir
in that it specifies the performance before King James I:
As
it was plaid before the Kings Majesty at White‑Hall, vpon S. Stephens night,
in Christmas Hollidayes. By his Majesties Seruants, playing vsually at the
Globe on the Banck‑side.
This seems to suggest that Shakespeare's Quarto
edition was not only a contrast with the 1605 production, but that it also
differed from current performances at the Globe. The text of King Lear
published in the 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare's collected plays differs in
a number of important ways from the performance given before James.
Had
the 1606 production been acted before other audiences in addition to James, the
details of performances might have followed the style of performance details in
the 1602 Quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor which reads:
As
it hath bene divers times Acted by the right Honorable my Lord Chamerlaines
servants. Both before her Majestie, and else‑where,
and thus read something like: 'As it was played
before the Kings Majesty at White‑Hall, vpon S. Stephens night, in
Christmas Hollidaies, and since then at the Globe, by his Majesties Seruants.'
The statement, on the Quarto's title page, "By his Majesties Seruants,
playing vsually at the Globe on the Banck‑side", does not
necessarily imply that his Majesty's Servants were playing this version of the
play at the Globe. It might simply be saying that they usually perform at the
Globe. Public interest in the way the production of the play the public saw
differed from the performance given before King James might have prompted the
publication of the 1608 text. But whether the title page of the Quarto edition
was meant to signify an exclusive performance of the Quarto play before King
James, as the title page of the Quarto edition of Love's Labor's Lost[7] would
seem to suggest an exclusive presentation before Elizabeth of an unaugmented Love's
Labor's Lost several Christmases earlier, or whether the Quarto edition of Lear
was also being performed before the public in 1608, is not necessarily of great
significance to our understanding of the play.
We
would do well, however, to note the definite association of the Quarto edition
of Lear with King James I at the performance in 1606 and on the title
page in 1608. The fact that there are significant changes to the Quarto edition
in the Folio text, might reflect particular associations with King James which
could be made in his presence and perhaps before public audiences in 1606 and
1608, but which might have been lost on later public audiences. Or the changes
might reflect differences in public taste between the two. That which was
acceptable in 1606 and 1608 may not have been so acceptable in the public
theatre later.
Both the 1608 and the 1623 editions of Lear differ from the 1605 Leir in that they add the Gloucester sub‑plot, and the Fool. It is worth noting that despite the introduction of the Fool, normally a comic character, and other comic devices, the general tone of Lear, at least as it is usually understood today, is much more sombre
than Leir, finishing with the failure of
the French forces to reinstate Lear as King of Britain, the seemingly untimely
execution of Cordelia and the subsequent death of Lear. Many readers of Lear
have been so shocked by the ending Shakespeare has given to the tale that, like
Samuel Johnson, they have not wanted to approach the play again. Nahum Tate,
who saw the play as "a heap of jewels, unstrung"[8],
reacted against the unhappy ending introducing an adaptation of the play in
1681 with a happy ending and ironically no Fool. Tate's version held the stage
until the 1830s when the influence of Lamb, Hazlitt and others finally
culminated in the 1838 production by Macready, who reinstated Shakespeare's
original ending and restored the Fool. There have been any number of critics
who have found Shakespeare's play a poor one. Thackeray wrote after seeing a
performance,
We all found the play a bore....It is
almost blasphemy to say that a play of Shakespeare's is bad; but I can't help
it, if I think so.[9]
More recently G.K. Hunter complains of Lear
having a defective plot
The
first thing that we must notice about the plot of King Lear is its
defectiveness by ordinary standards.[10]
Russell Fraser writes of resolving "at
least a corner of the mystery which is the play."[11]
Indeed the response of many readers of Lear is as though they
"smell a fault" (1.1.15).[12]
They seem to be saying "the text is foolish" (4.2.37).[13] But we are not prepared to "wish the
fault of it undone, the issue of it being so proper" (1.1.16) - we all
agree that what Tate calls "jewels" are indeed precious.
Although
no one seems to have explained Bradley's[14]
list of gross improbabilities and other things in Lear of which he
complains, Lear is nevertheless frequently heralded as the greatest
piece of literature in the English language[15].
Perhaps it is an uncertainty or ambiguity about the play for some, that adds to
the depth of despair and has drawn people to it down through the years. For despite the horror of it all there is
something that draws some people with Keats to sit down and read King Lear
again:
...once
again, the fierce dispute
Betwixt
damnation and impassion'd clay
Must
I burn through; once more humbly assay
The
bitter‑sweet of this Shakespearean fruit.[16]
G. K. Hunter points out that the "modern
popularity of the play among readers has its obvious counterpart in the theatrical
movement which stresses the theatre's social role to shock and distress."[17] One wonders, however, how King James would
have responded to the performance that Christmas season in 1606. Would
Shakespeare have had the nerve to give the king, and perhaps the Queen and
their children, entertainment from which they might recoil in horror and
distress during that festive season, especially if the king and his family were
familiar with the earlier versions of the story and expecting a happy ending?
Would he have presented them with something that would only bore them? Or could
it be that there was something operating in the performance which James and his
contemporaries saw, but which we have failed to see? Was there something going
on in the play that rescued it from the depths of despair or boredom for them?
The
various stories of this legendary king of England held interest for King James
and others at the end of the Sixteenth Century and the beginning of the
Seventeenth, but the rich variety of English tradition, which Perrett[18]
shows goes back to the Twelfth Century, has given way entirely to Shakespeare's
Lear so that today's readers' only approach to the legend is through it.
Since we know that Shakespeare was not operating in a theatrical and literary
vacuum, it might help our understanding of Lear if we became somewhat
familiar with the immediate sources Shakespeare counterpoints.
Perrett
explores the great variety in tales of this early legendary king of Britain,
and related legends of kings of other lands and sometimes fathers who were not
kings, who divided their lands between their children, sometimes sons, and not
always three in number. Perrett summarises these legends with these words:
But
if we take an average by retaining details common to a majority, we get the
following outline:‑ A king asks his three daughters how much they love
him. The first two give pleasing answers, the third displeases by saying that
she loves him like salt. She is driven forth, but obtains aid, a disguise, and menial
employment. A prince falls in love with her and marries her. The father learns
the value of salt through having saltless food set before him, and is
reconciled.[19]
It is granted that Shakespeare's version differs
in a major way in that no reference is made to salt. This was because he was
following contemporary English versions which said nothing of salt. And even
though Shakespeare is not averse to departing from his source material,[20]
yet it does seem remarkable to me that Shakespeare departs from the
"average" of the Leir stories, including the English versions, which
portray the abused child disguised and engaged in menial employment. This is
particularly remarkable because Shakespeare adds to the Leir legend such an
emphasis on disguised service ‑ Kent's and Edgar's. Why would he
introduce so much new disguise, and yet eliminate the disguised service by the
principal character?
In
more recent years there has been a persistent belief among a majority of
critics that the boy actor who played the part of Cordelia in Shakespeare's
production also doubled as Lear's Fool. Many productions of Lear now use
the same female actor for both parts. This doubling of the parts played by the
boy actor was suggested by Alios Brandl in 1894, and further explored by Thomas
B. Stroup in Shakespeare Quarterly,
Volume 12, 1961.[21]
Writing about the reappearance of Cordelia, Stroup admits:
and
yet, if the two were played by the same actor, the audience must dissociate the
person now appearing as Cordelia from the person recently appearing as Fool.[22]
This would have been harder for Shakespeare's
audiences to do than Stroup seems to have realised, for at the time there was a
stage practice of dressing people of high rank in the fool's motley. Marsden's
Antonio in Antonio's Revenge, published in 1602, is an example of this.
We will look at more examples later.
In
his essay Stroup refers to an article, published in 1897 in The American
Shakespeare Magazine[23],
in which Arthur J. Stringer, of Oxford University, basing his argument on the
notion that "a particular conception of a dramatic character...which
increases the human sympathy of the reader, and enriches the dramatic value,
must be an acceptable one", went on to state:
It
is for this reason that I have adopted what was a desirable hypothesis with me
at one time, but is now an unhesitatingly accepted belief; that is, that the
Fool in Shakespeare's King Lear is none other than Cordelia herself.[24]
Stringer's article is more an expression of
personal feelings about the play than an examination of the text, but he makes
some interesting points. He is doing what the ending of the play calls on us
all to do ‑ "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say."
However, the weakness of his argument is that he does not indicate what became
of the king's original Fool, the one Lear calls for at the opening of the play,
the one whose place he believes Cordelia took.
H.N.
Anshutz, in his article "Cordelia and the Fool" published in 1964[25],
also proposes that the Fool was actually Cordelia, and he suggests that perhaps
the real Fool had died leaving an opening for Cordelia. As we will see, there
is no need to postulate the death of the original Fool for he appears in the
text out of his disguise. His name, as we will show, is Oswald. Anshutz asks
whether Shakespeare intended to "mislead the audience", and then
allow them to participate with Lear in the "perceptual revelation" at
the end of the play, or whether Shakespeare's original audiences,
"accustomed to his constant use of disguises and possessing as common
knowledge facts unknown to later spectators" were "able to see what
critics and viewers since have been unable to see".
The
truth of the situation was probably a combination of both of these
possibilities. Those who did not see Cordelia disguised as the Fool along the
way had it revealed to them at the conclusion when Lear is holding his dead
Cordelia and exclaims while looking at her face:
And
my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!
...Thou'lt
come no more,
Never,
never, never, never, never!
Pray
you, undo this button: thank you, Sir. (5.3.304)[26]
Then Lear, looking on the dead Cordelia/Fool's
face, in the Folio edition of the play, attempts to make the fact of Cordelia's
service as the Fool known with:
Do
you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look
there, look there!
but he does not get through to those with whom
he shares the last moments of his life, and so they do not make the connection,
as is evident from the closing words of Edgar:
The
oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall
never see so much, nor live so long.
The reason for this failure will become evident
later.
This
interpretation of the play would be impossible if the persistent belief that the
boy actor who played the part of Cordelia also doubled as Lear's Fool were in
fact untenable. That such a doubling was made has had its detractors. A. Thaler
argues that the doubling would not have been physically possible:
the
difficulties in the way of this case of supposed doubling - the changes in
make-up, dress, bearing, and voice, required to metamorphose the tempest-tost
Fool into the Queen seem insuperable.[27]
But his arguments are refuted by the modern
practice of casting the same actress in both roles.
Other
critics have insisted that the part of Fool was played by Robert Armin who did
have a greater than usual interest in real-life idiots, observing them, and
acting their part in plays even before he joined Shakespeare's troupe. In his
exhaustive work on Shakespeare's fools, David Wiles suggests:
King
Lear provided Armin with his last straight 'fool' role. It was a classic climax
for Armin inasmuch as the historical English setting allowed him, for the first
time in the extant repertoire, to don the traditional motley and cockscomb of
medieval tradition. Armin's researches and observations of real-life idiots had
hitherto led him away from the old emblematic stage tradition. With Lear's
fool, Armin's cycle of fool roles came full circle. Afterwards followed a
cluster of variations or inversions. Armin abandoned a fool's uniform in order
to play opposite a designated 'fool' who served as his mirthless stooge.[28]
From what we know of Armin's deformed physique
it would be hard to have him play both Cordelia and the Fool. But it is pure
conjecture on Wiles' part that Armin played the Fool in Lear. He
introduces no evidence that would lead us to that conclusion, for there is
none. It is pure presumption.[29]
It is interesting however that he supposes that Lear was the last time
that Armin donned the Fool's motley thereafter playing opposite the designated
fool who served as his mirthless stooge. Why could not Armin have put off the
motley before he played in Lear, and played the part there of one who had
been in the habit of coming before the King as his Fool, but who abandons this
role when Lear turns the crown over to his daughters, the part, as we propose,
opposite the Fool Cordelia, namely Oswald?
The
possibility of a woman of high class donning a humble disguise was already well
established by the time of King Lear. Some who have taken exception to
Cordelia's playing the part of the Fool have argued that it could not have been
possible for Lear not to have noticed a change in his Fool, nor his daughter in
her disguise. To us it does seem incredible, but the well established tradition
of disguise easily allowed this, and Lear allows it - Lear does not
recognise his servant Kent, nor his godson Edgar, nor does Gloucester recognise
his son Edgar. Further, in Leir there is a lengthy scene in France where
Leir converses with his daughter Cordella, who, along with the King of France,
is "disguised like Country folke" (line 2091).
And
what became of the King of France? Would he have gone off and left his new
found Queen unprotected? We will show that he never did return to France after
accepting Cordelia as his Queen, but stayed behind and served Lear in disguise
along with Cordelia.
Return to King Lear Notes
Back to Home page
This page's WebCounter says that you
are visitor number 
.
Come back!