Seite 20 [20]
OCR
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. 36 +18 +
