Oldal 19 [19]
INTRODUCTION
THREE PHILOLOGICAL APPROACHES AND THEIR ACADEMIC PRECEDENTS
Exploring both the most recent Shakespeare scholarship and some of the
landmark texts in the reception history of King Lear, the three main chapters of
this book discuss three different layers of the playtext to give insights into the
poetic complexity of Shakespeare’s craft as a playwright. These three aspects
focus on certain poetic issues that, in my view, have received relatively little
attention in academic circles in the case of King Lear. Beyond presenting the
topic-related particularities and the methodological and analytical diversity
of these aspects, it is my overall goal to meet the following three criteria: the
claims and results I make or cite from secondary sources should be historically
valid and philologically accurate, and they should conform to the principle of
objectivity in academic argumentation.
The first chapter takes a macrotextual stand and studies the dramatic
heritage in order to highlight the dramaturgical features that make the 1608
Quarto different from the preceding versions of the Lear story. In the sixteenth
century, the king’s tale appeared in many forms ranging from prose works like
Raphael Holinsed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland or Sir Philip
Sidney’s Arcadia to such pieces of poetry as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen
or John Higgins’ Mirrour for Magistrates.** Yet, none of these are dramatic
sources meant for theatrical performance, and consequently their textual
characteristics are considerably different from those of the 1608 Quarto. For
this reason, I disregard the prose and poetic works mentioned above and limit
my attention to two particular dramatic works, which I juxtapose with the
1608 playtext. One of them is the anonymous True Chronicle History of King
Leir, the supposedly most immediate textual source Shakespeare could have
used, as it has been convincingly proven by scholars, most recently including
Richard Knowles.** The other textual cornerstone of the juxtaposition, John
Skelton’s Magnyfycence, however, has never been subjected to a detailed and
systematic comparison with King Lear. This work is one of the dramatic pieces
of Tudor interludes* that has enjoyed intense scholarly interest in the last two
decades and has been perhaps most salient in the writings of well-established
scholars like David Bevington, Howard B. Norland, Greg Walker, and Peter
Happé. Despite their focus on pre-Shakespearean drama, their academic
works introduce an important theatrical background which frames the craft
of dramaturgy in the Early Modern period, the traces of which can easily be
For a detailed list of sources see Geoffrey Bullough: Narrative and Dramatic Sources of
Shakespeare Vol. VII Major Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, London, Routledge,
1973, 269-308.
® Richard Knowles: How Shakespeare Knew King Leir, Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002), 12-35.
In 1991, Greg Walker defined it referring to a subgenre of morality plays that are clearly
concerned with issues of public affairs and royal governance.
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