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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. + ]7 «+
