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THE DRAMATURGICAL AND THEATRICAL HERITAGE
characters like Fansy, “ who actually stays by the addressee’s side when he is
reading the letter and thus influences the way in which it will be interpreted.
In the Chronicle Historie, five stage letters appear, none of which is read aloud
on stage. Nevertheless, they can be divided into two groups, the first of which
contains the three that simply carry messages between characters, especially
the members of the royal family, and arrive safely in the hands of the person to
whom they are addressed. The suitors of the elder sisters visit the royal court in
response to the king’s invitation or, to use Leir’s words, his “letters of contract,”
in which the king offers the King of Cambria and the King of Cornwall his elder
daughters’ hands in marriage. Having married Cordella, the King of Gallia also
sends a letter of invitation to Leir, and the Ambassador delivering the message
rejects both Gonorill’s and Ragan’s falsehearted attempt to read it.'°° The letters
in the second group are not simple messages, but rather are tools of deceit, like
the one in Magnyfycence, which serve the elder daughters’ selfish goal of seizing
their father’s royal power. First, Gonorill bribes a messenger and replaces the
letter written to Leir by her brother-in-law, the King of Cambria, with a forged
letter which provokes strife between her father and Ragan.’ This replacement
becomes significant, because it results in the delivery of a deadly letter ordering
Leir’s execution. When she receives the forged letter, Ragan hires the same
messenger and gives him another letter, in which she orders him to kill her
father. Moreover, she also gives the messenger instructions: “But yet, before
thou prosecute the act, / Shew him the letter, which my sister sent, / There let
him read his owne inditement first, / And then proceed to execution.”’” But
the Messenger gives Leir Ragan’s letter contracting him to kill him,!* and Leir
and Perillus eventually use this letter when they confront her. Although Ragan
rejects the accusation that she and Gonorill were seeking their father’s death
and even tears the forged letter, this object becomes factual evidence to prove
publicly that Ragan is lying.’
King Lear’s audience also witnesses a remarkable abundance of “epistolary
transactions.” In fact, in the Shakespeare oeuvre, King Lear provides the
48 Happé: Allegorical Kings, 79.
19 Anonymous: The True Chronicle, sig. B4v.
Ibid., sig. E4r and sig. G3v.
“Instead of carrying / the Kings letters to my father, carry thou these letters to my / sister,
which contayne matter quite contrary to the other: there / shal she be giuen to vnderstand,
that my father hath detracted / her, giuen out slaundrous speaches against her; and that hee
/ hath most intollerably abused me, set my Lord and me at va/riance, and made mutinyes
amongst the commons. / These things (although it be not so) / Yet thou must affirme them
to be true, / With othes and protestations as will serue, / To driue my sister out of love with
him, / And cause my will accomplished to be.” Ibid., sig. D3v.
Ibid., sig. E3v.
Ibid., sig. F3v-FAr.
Ibid., sig. I3v-IAr.
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