Oldal 30 [30]
SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
in this sense: “the wheele is come full circled I am heere.”” Thus in line with
Sidney’s and Cicero’s description of the function of tragic stories about princes,
I claim that the plays epitomize the theatrical understanding of “mirrors of
governance,” a term which in this case is not used as a generic label but rather
as a metaphor describing an assumed Early Modern interpretive attitude which
promoted theoretical thinking.
Through the lens of character criticism, which studies literary characters “as
individuals worthy of close scrutiny and strong feelings of identification,”* one
might argue that the protagonists of all three plays develop by having similar
experiences. Because they fall for the flattery of morally evil characters, these
monarchs lose their royal dignity and wealth and end up as beggars, only to
realize their own folly. After they recognize their failures, some sort of recovery
takes place, which means the full restoration to power in Magnyfycence and
The Chronicle Historie but only a temporary improvement in the mental state
of the monarch in the case of Shakespeare’s King Lear. In this respect, the
most significant difference between the three characters is that the stories of
Magnyfycence and Leir have a happy outcome, whereas Lear dies in the end.
This feature makes King Lear a tragic work in the Early Modern sense, because
it tells a story of an illustrious person whose fate turned from prosperity to
misfortune, which finally leads to his death, or in Puttenham’s wording, it sets
forth “the dolefull falles of infortunate & afflicted Princes.”*!
Nevertheless, in all the three plays, the main reason for the change in the
monarchs’ fortunes is that they are taken in by flattery. In Aristotelian terms,
this tragic mistake is called “hamartia” (Poetics 1453a10/15) or the “tragic
error,” meaning “a wrong action committed in ignorance of its nature, effect
etc., which is the starting point of causally connected train of events ending
in disaster.”®? However, the three plays differ significantly in the manner in
which they present the various forms of flattery ultimately leading to the
protagonist’s fall from power.
In Magnyfycence, the first example of the deceptive force of flattery comes
just after the entrance of the allegorical figure of Fansy, who in the guise
of Largess overtly praises the monarch’s nobility®* and gains entrance into
the royal palace as a sign of having been taken into his Magnyfycence’s
good graces. Then Crafty Conveyance overtly reveals his intentions to the
audience by saying, “Full moche flatery and falsehode I hyde / And by crafty
” Ibid., sig. L2r.
#0 Christy Desmet: Character Criticism, in Stanley Wells — Lena Cowen Orlin (eds.): Shakespeare.
An Oxford Guide, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 2003, 351.
81 Puttenham: The Arte, 20.
Jan Marteen Bremer’s explanation of the term is quoted in Derek N.C. Wood: Aristotle and
Milton’s Poetics, in Heinrich F. Plett (ed.): Renaissance—Poetik, Berlin—New York, Walter de
Gruyter, 1994, 369.
8 Skelton: Magnyfycence, lines 375-384.
+ 28 +