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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. + 26 +
