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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
The love contest scene gains its poetic significance from the fact that,
among all the versions of the Lear story, only Shakespeare’s play presents
it as a public event, which provides the frame for a sound discussion of the
relevance of the public discourses in the early seventeenth century, discourses
which arguably shape the characters’ diction. Although The True Chronicle
Historie of King Leir and his three daughters also includes a similar scene, in
that version, the conversation between the protagonist and his three daughters
takes place within family circles consisting only of Leir, Gonorill, Ragan,
Cordella, and Perillus, the king’s councilor, on stage,??! whereas in King Lear,
it turns into a ceremonial event witnessed by the whole court. In order to see
how Shakespeare elaborated on this fragment of the story, re-politicizing the
utmost public topic of royal inheritance already staged by a fellow playwright
even if anonymous, it is worth revisiting the two scenes and comparing them
in more detail.
Long before Leir puts his daughters on trial, Skallinger, Leir’s other councilor
informs Ragan and Gonorill, both green with envy of their virtuous sister, that
their father intends to ask them who loves him the most so that he can force
his choice of husband on Cordella. Since the kings of Cambria and Cornwall,
the suitors of the elder sisters, already belong to the royal family, Leir wants
the King of Hibernia to join his youngest daughter in marriage in order to
protect the future of his kingdom by marrying his daughters into the families
of neighboring kings.””? When they hear this news, Ragan and Gonorill agree
that they will flatter their father “as he was ne’re so flattered in his life”???
in order to take revenge on their sister, who does not like her Irish suitor.’
So at the beginning of the love trial, both the assumed audience and every
character on stage except Cordella knows that Leir’s words in fact cover a ploy.
This dramatic context provides the ground for the protagonist’s motivation to
present the love trial as if its only goal were to disperse his doubts:
Deare Gonorill, kind Ragan, sweet Cordella,
Ye florishing branches of a Kingly stocke,
Sprung from a tree that once did flourish greene,
Whose blossomes now are nipt with Winters frost,
And pale grym death doth wayt upon my steps,
And summons me unto his next Assizes.
Anonymous: The True Chronicle, sig. A4v—B2r.
Ibid., sig. Alr.
Ibid., sig. A4r.
As Gonorill explains the logic of their plot: “I smile to think, in what a wofull plight / Cordella
will be, when we answere thus: / For she will rather dye, then give consent / To joyne in
marriage with the Irish King: / So will our father think, she loveth him not, / Because she
will not graunt to his desire, / Which we will aggravate in such bitter termes, / That he will
soone convert his love to hate: / For he, you know, is alwayes in extremes.” Ibid., sig. A4v.
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