Oldal 46 [46]
SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
Magnyfycence: And is this credence that I gave to the letter?
Fansy: Why, coulde not your wyt serve you no better?
Magnyfycence: Why, who wolde have thought in you suche gyle?
Fansy: What? Yes, by the rode, syr; it was I all this wyle
That you trustyd, and Fansy is my name,
And Foly, my broder, that made you moche game.'”
The second failure of the prince is that he does not pay careful attention to
the clothes of the characters he chooses as the members of his household,
even though clothes have a symbolic function. Although Clokyd Colusyon
remarks that the fashionable dress worn by Courtly Abusyon has a stale
odor, Magnyfycence disregards the comment and accepts Courtly Abusyon
into his domestic circles. As John Scattergood argues, the fact that he trusts
these characters about whom he hardly knows anything makes his behavior
“unintelligent and uncircumspect [...] without due regard for his financial
well-being, status, and repute.”!7?
In the anonymous play, disguises serve the personal purpose of the Gallian
king, as he and his attendant put on palmers’ costumes to find a wife, but their
camouflage does not directly endanger either the person of the king or his
country. Their choice to disguise themselves as pilgrims also shows their good
intentions, and when they meet Cordella and the Gallian king falls in love with
her, he immediately reveals himself and the purpose of his visit: “Ah, deare
Cordella, cordiall to my heart, / 1 am no Palmer, as I seeme to be, / But hither
come in this unknowne disguise, / To view th’admired beauty of those eyes.”!”
As in the case of letters as a dramatic tool, Shakepeare makes more complex
use of disguises. Edmund, for instance, is a character whose disguise is marked
not visually, but verbally, and it is only the rhetorical construct of his diction
through which his intentions are delicately revealed from the beginning of the
play. As Brian Vickers concludes in his careful study of Shakespeare’s prose,
“Edmund’s changes from verse to prose resemble Iago’s, for in the scene where
he deceives father and brother he begins and ends in verse soliloquies frankly
admitting his guile and cynicism to us, while his dissembling intrigue is
conducted in prose.”!”> Thus, his diction resembles the language of Lear’s elder
daughters, who were deceiving their father with the help of cunning rhetorical
structures, which makes them similar to the vice characters of Magnyfycence,
even if in King Lear this deceit is not accompanied by costume change.
172 Tbid., lines 1865-1870.
3 Scattergood: Dressing the Part, 71.
4 Anonymous: The True Chronicle, sig. C3v.
Brian Vickers: Tragic Prose: Clowns, Villains, Madmen, in Brian Vickers: The Artistry of
Shakespeare’s Prose, London, Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1968, 351.
175
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