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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR Let your reciprocall vowes bee remembred, you haue many / opportunities to cut him off, if your will want not, time and place / will be fruitfully offered, there is nothing done, If he returne the / conquerour, then am I the prisoner, and his bed my gayle, from / the lothed warmth whereof deliuer me, and supply the place for / your labour, your wife (so I would say) your affectionate seruant / and for you her owne for Venter, Gonorill.' From a dramaturgical point of view, it is also a deadly letter!“ in every sense of the word, as it urges the Duke of Albany’s murder, yet the reader of the letter, Edgar, gains the object itself by killing Oswald, the carrier of the letter, and eventually he also kills its addressee, Edmund. In the end, the letter arrives in Albany’s hand, and Albany confronts Gonorill about it before Edgar and Edmund start fighting: Alb. Saue him, saue him, Gon. This is meere practise Gloster by the law of armes / Thou art not bound to answere an vnknowne opposite, / Thou art not vanquisht, but cousned and beguild, Alb. Stop your mouth dame, or with this paper shall I stople / it, thou worse then any thing, reade thine owne euill, nay no / tearing Lady, I perceiue you know t. Gon. Say if I do, the lawes are mine not thine, who shal arraine me for’t. Alb. Most monstrous know’st thou this paper? Gon. Aske me not what I know. Exit. Gonorill. It is worth noting that this scene resonates with the ending of King Leir, when Ragan tears the letter she forged, but Shakespeare shifts this familial confrontation scene from the main plot (Leir and his daughter) to the subplot (Albany and Gonorill). This shift supports David Bergeron’s claim that in King Lear, the letters, as a form of indirect, mediated discourse, mostly appear in the subplot, and this suggests that “Shakespeare has placed an extraordinary reliance on letters in the Gloucester story in order to open up another level of discourse, one in contrast to Lear’s.”!6” Mark Taylor has a brilliantly original insight about the poetical significance of Gloster’s character, which could perfectly complement Bergeron’s observation about the differing discourses of the two plotlines. Unlike Lear, who makes his error of judgment based on his daughters’ speech, Gloster’s misinterpretation is based on written texts, which provides a poetically sensible motivation for the implied meaning of his name and his dramaturgical function. As Taylor explains, the word Gloster 165 Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. Klr-v. 166 Bergeron: Deadly Letters, 171. 167 Tbid., 159. + 42 +
