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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
In the case of the anonymous Chronicle Historie, the reason for a close
comparison seems rather obvious, even ifShakespeare scholarship has differing
opinions as to the extent to which the playwright could have known about or
had access to the 1605 playtext. Ihe Leir play was most probably performed
on stage in the last decade of Queen Elizabeth’s reign by the Queen’s Men,”
which makes it even more fascinating to explore what made Shakespeare’s
own adaptation of an already renowned play so unique and distinctive. After a
detailed study of both primary and secondary sources, Knowles concludes that,
regardless of the “generic, emotional, philosophical, stylistic and substantive”
differences*® between the two plays, the sheer number of similarities that
Shakespeare’s version shares with the anonymous play but not with any other
of his possible sources “persuades even the most skeptical that Shakespeare’s
knowledge of the old play was neither casual nor remote but recent and
detailed.”** A meticulous discussion of Knowles’ arguments would definitely
form a digression from the main thread of thought in this present chapter,
nevertheless, it seems reasonable to demonstrate with a few examples the kinds
of differences and similarities he traced.
Starting with the differences, perhaps the most obvious one is that the two
works belong to different genres as we understand this literary term today: the
anonymous play is a romance whereas Shakespeare’s work is a tragedy." From
a structural point of view, King Lear contains the Gloster subplot and a few
important scenes, e.g. the king’s fit of madness, which are missing from the
The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir.** Stylistically, Leir manifests “regular
verse and plain style,” while King Lear displays a “chiaroscuro intensity and vast
range and variety of Lear’s language.”” On the other hand, there are hundreds
of elements in the plot that cannot be found in any other sources but only in
these two Lear plays. One of them is the scene in which the king accuses his
youngest daughter of pride. Another is in the scene in which Leir/Lear, having
been rejected by his eldest daughters, wanders with his counselor, Perillus/
Kent.** Even if Shakespeare did not borrow any passages word for word from his
assumed source, there are certain outstanding verbal resemblances between
the two texts. For instance, in the anonymous play Leir addresses Perillus as
“Cease, good Perillus, for to call me Lord / And think me but the shaddow of my
selfe,”? and in Shakespeare’s work Lear poses a series of rhetorical questions to
42
Ioppolo: A Jointure, 168.
Knowles: How Shakespeare, 13.
* Ibid., 14.
15 Ibid., 13.
16 Ibid., 13.
* Ibid., 16.
18 For amore detailed list see ibid., 14-15.
® Anonymous: The True Chronicle, sig. D4v.
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