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THE DRAMATURGICAL AND THEATRICAL HERITAGE
this latter figure is significant with regards to the preconceptions it might
have called to the mind of a rhetorically well-trained Early Modern audience.
In his Arte of English Poesie, a manual which scholars agree Shakespeare must
have known,” Puttenham calls this figure the “lowd lyer” and defines it as a
false utterance which everybody recognizes as untrue, and he cites an occasion
when a speaker at a public event started enumerating Henry VIII’s virtues
by applying the figure of hyperbole beyond measure, but a “graue and wise
Counsellour made the speaker to be accompted a grosse flattering foole.”!°
Thus, the hyperbole in the elder daughters’ professions of love carries the
optionally subliminal message to the contemporaneous audience that an act
of flattery is being performed even before Kent calls it by this name in the
following sentence: “Think’st thou that dutie / Shall haue dread to speake, when
power to flatterie bowes.”! All in all, what makes Shakespeare’s handling of
flattery outstanding and more subtle than his predecessors’ is that in King Lear
false adulation cannot only be traced by the characters’ deeds and wording but
also by the rhetorical implications of their diction.
THE DISTRIBUTION OF CHARACTERS:
THE GOOD AND THE BAD, AND THE ROLE OF JESTERS
As far as the moral quality of characters other than the protagonist is
concerned, King Lear resembles Skelton’s Magnyfycence more than The Chronicle
Historie, since the dramatis personae can be divided into two distinct, sharply
contrasting groups. One of them comprises “the good,” or, to recall Bradley’s
wording, the representatives of “unselfish and devoted love,” and the other
is the evil circle of “the hard self-seeking.”’” In the interlude, the group of
the prince’s friends or supporters includes Felicity, Measure, Circumspection,
Goodhope, Redress, and Perseverance, whereas the forces against him consist
of Fansy and his brother Folly, the four court vices (Counterfeit Countenance,
Crafty Conveyance, Cloaked Collusion, and Courtly Abusion), and after the
monarch realizes his error of judgment, Adversity, Poverty, Despair, and
Mischief also join the latter group. In Shakespeare’s play, Lear’s royal dignity
is attacked by Regan, Gonorill, Cornwall, Edmund, and Oswald, but Cordelia,
Kent, Gloster, the Fool, Edgar, and his train of knights protect him. Yet in both
Skeleton’s and Shakespeare’s play, there is an exception to this bipolar division.
In the interlude, Liberty takes different sides based on the circumstances:
99 Stuart Gillespie: Shakespeare’s Books, Athlone Shakespeare Dictionary Series, London—New
Brunswick, NJ, Athlone, 2001, 438-440.
100 Puttenham: The Arte, 160.
11 Anonymous: The True Chronicle, sig. B3r.
1 Bradley: Shakespearean Tragedy, 226.
+ 31°