Oldal 28 [28]
SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
the play to its didactic function: “A myrrour incleryd is this interlude / This lyfe
inconstant for to beholde and se: / Sodenly avaunsyd, and sodenly subdude, /
Sodenly ryches, and sodenly poverte, / Sodenly comfort, and sodenly adversyte,
/ Sodenly thus Fortune can bothe smyle and frowne, / Sodenly set up, and
sodenly cast downe.””
In case of The True Chronicle Historie, the “mirror” metaphor also appears,
but not as a reference to the whole play. It becomes a trope embedded in an
overtly moralistic context in which the “good” characters refer to one another
as if they were the embodied reflections of virtues: Perillus describes Leir as
the “myrrour of mild patience;”** Cordella mentions her spouse as “My kingly
husband, myrrour of his time”® and the Gallian king calls her “Myrrour of
vertue, Phoenix of our age!;””° finally, Cordella depicts Perillus, her father’s
loyal counselor as “Myrrour of vertue and true honesty.””
The 1608 King Lear quarto does not contain such direct allusions to mirrors,
yet extratextual evidence relates this play to the “speculum principis” genre.
First, to our present knowledge, one of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic sources
for the story of Lear was the Mirror for Magistrates. Obviously, the word
“mirror” as it appears in the title of the collection of stories related to the
history of the English nation is merely a dead metaphor,” but it nonetheless
perfectly fits certain expectations of an era in which chronicles and historical
writings could also serve the purpose of offering “a political mirror for those
in authority.””® Second, the very fact that the first performance of King Lear
took place in the royal court at Whitehall on Saint Stephen’s Night in 1606 gave
grounds for numerous attempts to assess the play’s contemporaneous political
significance. Even if it seems an unreasonable oversimplification to identify
Lear as a literary representation of James I, Shakespeare’s play abounds with
topical allusions that support such an idea, the summary of which, however,
falls beyond the scope of this chapter.
On the other hand, all three plays involved in this contrastive reading show
some remoteness from their respective contemporaneous settings, as they
present their main characters either as the allegorical figure of the prince
(Magnyfycence) or as a king from pre-Christian British history (Leir and
Lear). As a result of this distancing, the audience finds these characters less
connected to one particular historical person or situation and also sees the
§7 Skelton: Magnyfycence, lines 2517-2523.
Anonymous: The True Chronicle, sig. C3v.
® Ibid., sig. D4v.
7 Ibid., sig. E2v.
71 Ibid., sig. H4v.
7? Herbert Grabes: The Mutable Glass. Mirror-imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and
English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, 19.
Lily Bess Campbell: Poetical Mirrors of History, in Lilly Bess Campbell: Shakespeare’s
“Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy, London—New York, Routledge, 2004 [1947], 106.
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