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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
detected in the Shakespearean text. Ultimately, the novelty of my approach
lies in the assumption that these two playtexts provide a double contrast to
the 1608 Quarto and that mapping the resemblances and differences between
them contributes to amore complex understanding ofthe global dramaturgical
structure and theatrical heritage of the play.
The second chapter focuses on the microstructural layer of the text and
looks at the playwright’s relationship to Early Modern knowledge of formal
rhetoric and poetics, which entered Shakespeare scholarship as a distinct field
of study only in the second half of the twentieth century. Still, even the most
outstanding scholars, including Brian Vickers, Arthur Kinney, and Heinrich
F. Plett, have rarely studied Shakespeare’s relationship to contemporaneous
rhetorical manuals. The method I apply resembles the close reading critical
strategy of New Criticism, but instead of taking a modern interpretive stand,
I use the terminology of a contemporaneous handbook, George Puttenham’s
The Arte of English Poesie.** The chapter focuses on the poetic strategies that
determine the use of language in two momentous scenes, “the love contest” and
“the mock trial,” which exemplify the relationship of the Shakespearean text to
the standards of decent public speech and behavior in Early Modern England.
These two scenes stage public events during which the use of rhetorical tropes
is most likely to conform to contemporaneous expectations for public speech,
and thus they reveal the embedding of the characters’ diction in the public
discourses of the early seventeenth century." I assume that the characters’
diction in King Lear is closely related to contemporaneous discourses, which
can be traced even from the distance of 400 years. Indirectly, this method may
also add new insights to a more classical type of philological research, which
aims to explore the most likely sources of William Shakespeare’s rhetorical
knowledge.
The third chapter has a more theoretical stand and examines the ways in
which the Quarto reflects contemporaneous ideas on governance and, thus,
Shakespeare’s craft, which mediates them in a theatrical manner. More
precisely, the chapter combines the study of tropes with the study of certain
societal concepts, and it presents my claim that the corporeal image cluster
that permeates the playtext figuratively recalls the Early Modern governance
theories on the “body politic.” By corporeal images, I mean the body-related
metaphoric expressions that refer to the Early Modern social structure using
body parts as signifiers of various social functions, an analogy that has been
35 Although Kenneth Muir hinted at the assumed textual connection between the Folio version
of King Lear and Puttenham’s book in 1951, the question has not been thoroughly studied.
I understand the term “diction” as it refers to the use of language that is specific to a dramatic
character and that determines that character’s personality traits. The term “discourse,” on
the other hand, signifies the use of language on a societal level in a given historic period
predominantly exercised and thus determined by the institutions of authority and power,
quite independently from the theater.
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