PREFACE
For
more than twelve years I have felt much like the little boy in Andersen's
"The Emperor's New Clothes" must have felt. For him it was obvious
that the Emperor was naked, while everyone else was ready to say what a fine
suit of clothes the Emperor wore. For these past twelve years I have enjoyed a
reading of Shakespeare's King Lear in
which Cordelia does not go to France, but remains behind in England and serves
her father disguised as his Fool. Too often when I have presented my idea to
people who have a measure of interest in the play I have met an embarrassing
silence or a downright prejudiced rejection.
Of
course I'm not unaware of the amount of intellectual ink that my reading of the
play contradicts. However, I've discovered that I'm not the first to put
forward the idea. Several have proposed it before me, but I have found, in
chasing up their work, that it is all but buried in the mountain of criticism
that has been written on Lear.
"The question of Cordelia and her father Requires a fitter place."
(5.3.58)
Over
the years it has been a purpose of mine to investigate the matter as thoroughly
as I could with a view to eventually presenting what evidence I could bring
together to establish the interpretation once and for all. To my delight,
almost everywhere I have turned in literature contemporary to Lear I have found evidence which
supports my reading. This book then, is the sending forth, although somewhat
reluctantly, of my findings. I say somewhat reluctantly for two reasons:
firstly, I have wanted to present as much evidence as I could, but I'm now at
the point of realizing that much more evidence will come to light if others
will take up the interpretation and run with it; and secondly, I'm reluctant
because I expect that some of the arguments I make will be refuted by this one
or that. In my enthusiasm I'm sure that I have sometimes seen too far and for
some it will "mar what's well." (1.4.344). At the outset I would only
ask you to consider that even though I might be wrong on some points, yet I
have presented a great deal of evidence which ought not simply be dismissed.
The sheer volume of evidence ought to say something.
This
book presents a radically different approach to King Lear when considered in terms of the way we have traditionally
come to view the play. But it is not, I suggest, radically different from the
way we have come to view most of Shakespeare's plays, nor those of his
contemporaries. In fact, I believe it is much more in harmony with these than
the traditional approach is.
My
arguments are based on what we know about King James I before whom
Shakespeare's King Lear was
originally performed, on earlier versions of the tale, on issues that were
topical in Shakespeare's day, and on speech prefixes in Jacobean plays,
including King Lear, and I have to
ask you the reader to be "the pattern of all patience" and hear me
out. I have tried to present my material in an order that I believe would
appeal to most, but your questions may not be answered up front, and I only get
one shot. For your sake I don't want to miss!
I
am also very much aware that the average reader does not have easy access to
copies of earlier versions of the tale of this legendary king, so I have
included several that I consider to be important so that the reader can get a
feel for the background that Shakespeare's patrons brought to his performance.
This, I maintain, we cannot overlook. Ideally, the reader will become familiar
with the extract from The Mirror For
Magistrates, and the texts of The
True Chronicle History of King Leir, and King James I's Basilikon Doron in the appendices.
I
have also included in this volume a text of Lear,
which I am calling Cordelia:
Shakespeare’s King Lear. This is a conflation of the original texts, as are
all modem texts of Lear. This text
differs in just three ways from most modem texts of the play. Firstly, it
follows all texts for the first one hundred years of the play's history in not
including a listing of characters at the beginning of the play; secondly, it
incorporates the speech prefixes of Bastard for Edmund, and the
Gentleman/Oswald/Steward prefixes for Oswald followed by the modem prefix in
brackets; and thirdly, it incorporates additional italicised speech prefixes in
brackets after some normal speech prefixes indicating my conviction that
Cordelia and the King of France are in fact disguised as the Fool and the
Servant/Knight/Gentleman in the middle of the play when they have traditionally
been thought to have been in France. In no other way is the text changed than in
these three.
I
would have liked to have been able to include the whole text of Arthur
Golding's 1578 translation of Seneca's On
Benefyting. There are probably many more points that could be made if we
had before us the whole of this work which shares with Lear a major theme of filial ingratitude. Unfortunately Golding's
work has not been published since Shakespeare's day and I was only able to
examine it on microfilm. Of course, we don't know whether Shakespeare read
Seneca in English or Latin. We do know however that he read Seneca. I can only
point the reader to a modern translation of the work in the Loch Classical
Library.
At
the end of the day some might not feel that I have proved my thesis to them.
Some might wonder that such a different reading should be admitted after so
much time has passed by, and so many performances of the play have occurred. If
I'm wrong about all this, and the average of the diverse and fragmented
interpretations of Lear today is in
fact Shakespeare's Lear, then I
respectfully suggest that Shakespeare didn't do a very good job and that he
would have done much better if he had presented it my way. Of course, there is
no doubt in my mind that the way I would present King Lear is the way Shakespeare did. I believe he had a hand to
write it and "a heart and a brain to breed it in" (1.2.55) and it’s
wonderful.
Return to King Lear Notes
Back to Home page