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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
Lisak does not extend her attention to King Lear, however, and she only
briefly refers to Kenneth Muir’s observation in the 1977 Arden Shakespeare
critical edition of King Lear according to which the passage known as the
Merlin prophesy in the Folio version of the play is “a parody of some pseudo¬
Chaucerian verses to be found in Puttenham.”’” Gary Taylor repeats the same
idea in the 1980s, but he is interested in this passage and the Puttenham¬
Shakespeare connection only as far as it helps him prove that the Folio version
was edited at the same time as Shakespeare was working on The Winter’s Tale
and, thus, “whoever wrote that addition had been influenced by Puttenham —
as Shakespeare had been between 1609 and 1611.”?!8
Given the distance of four hundred years, it is almost impossible to provide
undeniable proof that would support the claim that Shakespeare read The Arte
of English Poesie, although there is some evidence in support of this assumption.
First, as the signature on the inside cover testifies, the original owner of the
copy of The Arte of English Poesie in the possession of the British Museum today
was Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s fellow dramatist and close friend.? Second,
Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Puttenham’s handbook were published
by Richard Field, with whom Shakespeare most certainly had established both
business and family ties.*’° Third, it has recently been proposed that the main
reason why Shakespeare’s plays reflect such a remarkable parallelism with
The Arte of English Poesy is that Puttenham might have been Shakespeare’s
teacher."
Working as a poet and playwright whose works were performed even on
the stage of the royal court, Shakespeare must have taken a natural interest
in both the description of the norms of courtly rhetoric and, even more,
in contemporaneous debates concerning the craft of poetry. Moreover,
considering the famous line of Ben Jonson’s eulogy published in the 1623 Folio,
in which Johnson claimed that the Bard had “small Latine and lesse Greek,”?
An Essay in Comparison: Shakespeare’s «Technical Inventiveness» in the Light of George
Puttenham’s Arte, in Shakespeare and Ses Contemporains. Société Française Shakespeare, Actes
du Congrès de 2002, 2002, 132-133.
Cf.: William Shakespeare: The Arden Edition ofthe Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Kenneth
Muir, London-New York, Routledge, 1977, 104.
Gary Taylor: The Date and Authorship of the Folio Version, in Gary Taylor-Michael Warren
(eds.): The Division of the Kingdoms. Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear, Oxford, Calderon
Press, 1983, 385.
24 See “Note.” Puttenham: The Arte, npn.
215 Gillespie: Shakespeare’s Books, 439.
26 Charles Murray Willis: The Printing of Ihe Arte of English Poesie and the Earl of Oxford, in
Richard Malim (ed.): Great Oxford: essays on the life and work of Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of
Oxford, 1550-1604, London, Parapress Limited, 2004, 38-44.
217 Ben Jonson: To the memory of my beloued, the Avthor Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he
hath left vs, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, histories & tragedies, published according
to the true originall copies, London, printed by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, http://
internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/book/SLNSW_F1/, (accessed 1 March 2009).
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