Page 66 [66]
SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
of Fine Devices, which enjoyed widespread popularity in London around the
time when King Lear was written.”°* Accordingly, Cordelia’s answer could be
paraphrased non-figuratively, as she is not saying anything, because that would
make her a hypocrite, a flatterer, or a traitor.
There is another source that records similar conventions of Early Modern
representations of insincerity. Joseph Hall’s Characters of Virtues and Vices
(1608), the first English example of a genre that describes various social types,
gives the following account of a hypocrite:
An hypocrite is the worst kind of player, by so much as he acts the better part: which
hath always two faces; ofttimes two hearts: that can compose his forehead to sadness
and gravity, while he bids his heart be wanton and careless within; and in the mean
time laughs within himself to think how smoothly he hath cozened the beholder: in
whose silent face are written the characters of religion, which his tongue and gestures
pronounce, but his hands recant: that hath a clean face and garment, with a foul soul:
whose mouth belies his heart, and his fingers belie his mouth.”
Significantly enough, this description applies the same body parts as the
iconographic representations used in the emblem books of the period. Moreover,
the same book also contains a passage on the flatterer, which perfectly illustrates
the interrelated nature of the notions of hypocrisy and flattery:
Flattery is nothing, but false friendship, fawning hypocrisy, dishonest civility, base
merchandise of words, a plausible discord of the heart and lips. The flatterer is
blear-eyed to ill, and cannot see vices; and his tongue walks ever in one track of
unjust praises, and can no more tell how to discommend than to speak true. His
speeches are full of wondering interjections, and all his titles are superlative; and
both of them seldom ever but in presence. His base mind is well matched with a
mercenary tongue, which is a willing slave to another man’s ear; neither regardeth
he how true, but how pleasing.?%6
254 Thomas Combe’s The Theatre of Fine Devices is in fact the English translation of a French emblem
book, Guillaume de la Perriére’s Theatre des bons engins. For helping me clearly understand the
meaning of the Middle French text of the emblem, I owe a debt of gratitude to Mihaly Bende.
As figures 2 and 3 clearly show, it is rather an adaptation or reworking of the original as both
the picture and the text of the emblem diverge from the source material and vulgarize the
topic of courtly flattery. Although the only copy of Thomas Combe’s work still available today
is the 1614 edition, which, similarly to Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie, was published by
Richard Field, yet it gained wide-spread popularity in England twenty years earlier when its first
edition was published. See Peter M. Daly: The Case for the 1593 Edition of Thomas Combe’s
Theater of Fine Devices, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986), 255-257.
Joseph Hall: Characters of Vertues and Vices in two Books, London, printed by Melch. Bradwood,
1608, http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/hallch.htm, (accessed 11 January
2010).
256 Tbid., npn.
25:
a
° 64 ¢