Oldal 46 [46]
OCR
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 « 44 »
