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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
at the peril of those within. Wealthy individuals who participated in the spirit of
the day took pride in having an estate on St. Stephen’s filled with as many guests as
the “howse wolld holld.”!*
Third, this period also meant a break during the parliamentary session, which
in that year was primarily concerned with the legitimacy of the monarch,
whose person established the union between England and Scotland.’
Nevertheless, it is impossible to prove whether the king was present at the
performance of King Lear or not. A year earlier, for instance, King James excused
himself from attending this traditional form of courtly entertainment so that
he could go hunting instead, and only the queen and her two sons attended
the performances." Still, when preparing for the occasion, Shakespeare and
the company definitely had to bear in mind the assumed audience of the royal
court, which must have been a decisive factor during the artistic process of
creating the playscript.
KING LEAR HISTORICIZED: THE JACOBEAN CONTEXT
Summarizing the history of the critical literature on King Lear in his book
Hamlet versus King Lear, Reginald Armstrong Foakes discusses the latest
period under the heading of “historicism.”!” He uses this term to describe a
certain tendency among critics who regard the play as a mirror of the political
concerns that the monarchs of England faced around 1600 or as a document
of history that sheds light on the social and political background of the era.”*
From this point of view, King Lear is concerned with “power relations” and the
“concept of the crown,” which also implies that the character of Lear represents
the monarch and the difficulties he faces as a father, a role that is subordinate to
his royal character. Having examined the available contemporaneous sources,
but first and foremost King James I’s writings, researchers like Annabel M.
14 Leah S. Marcus: Retrospective: King Lear on St. Stephen’s Night, 1606, in Leah S. Marcus:
Puzzling Shakespeare. Local Reading and its Discontents, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London,
University of California Press, 1988, 154.
James Shapiro devotes a whole book to the events of 1606 in Shakespeare’s life in which the
chapter “Division of the Kingdoms” summarizes the current views in Shakespeare scholarship
on the public discourses on this union. See Shapiro: The Year, 33-46.
16 Ibid., 31.
Reginald Armstrong Foakes: Hamlet versus Lear. Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, 77.
Although this terminology might easily recall the main principles of New Historical criticism,
which is connected to John Drakakis, Stephen Greenblatt, and Leonard Tennehouse, similarly
to Reginald Armstrong Foakes, I also understand it in a more general sense, including
any study that regards the interpretation of King Lear as primarily the discussion of the
corresponding philosophical, theological, and political ideas of the times when it was written.
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