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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR To summarize, the significance of the rhetorical figures that dominate Cordelia’s diction comes from the fact that they reinterpret the definitions oflove set by Gonorill and Regan and shift the meaning of this notion from a private, interpersonal relation into a public and communal context.” Thus, her figurative speech, which is intended both to please the ears and to move the mind, fulfills the requirements Puttenham had for figures that in his view are “[...] the instruments of ornament in euery language, so be they also in a sort abuses or rather trespasses in speach, because they passe the ordinary limits of common vtterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceiue the eare and also the minde, drawing it from plainnesse and simplicitie to a certain doublenesse.”?*° Still, Cordelia is not the only one whose diction in Shakespeare’s King Lear becomes more rhetoricized as compared to the anonymous Chronicle Historie. Although Perillus, the king’s councilor, is also present during the love contest scene, similarly to Kent, he keeps silent while listening to Leir’s conversation with his daughters, and he speaks his mind to the audience only when the royal family has left the stage and expresses his regret that Leir has fallen for his elder daughters’ adulation: “Oh, how I grieve, to see my Lord thus fond, / To dote so much upon vayne flattering words. / Ah, if he but with good advice had weyghed, / The hidden tenure of her humble speech, / Reason to rage should not have given place, / Nor poore Cordella suffer such disgrace.”?*! When he learns that Lear has turned his royal authority over to his elder daughters and has disinherited Cordelia, Shakespeare’s Kent commits an act much bolder than Perillus and rather indecently confronts Lear with his mistake, addressing him as a man and not as a king: “Be Kent vnmannerly when Lear is man, / When wilt thou doe ould man, think’st thou that dutie / Shall haue dread to speake, when power to flatterie bowes, / To plainness honour bound when Maiesty stoops to folly.””* As Kent’s rude behavior, expressed by his non-figurative and disrespectful utterance, is anything but acceptable from a royal subject,”** Lear yells at him to get out of his sight, yet Kent, reluctant to leave, warns the King again, but at the same time, he also 279 Cordelia’s reference to love as Christian charity is foreshadowed in the short scene that stages the conversation between Gloster, Kent, and Edmund before the royal ceremony of love contest takes place. Being introduced to Edmund, Kent greets him saying, “I must loue you, and sue to know you better.” Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. Blv. 280 Puttenham: The Arte, 128. Anonymous: The True Chronicle, sig. B2r—B2v. Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. B3r. As James Shapiro explains, “calling Lear ‘old man’ is insulting enough to modern ears, but Kent addressing his king as ‘thou’ would have struck contemporaries as even more 28: S 283 extraordinary and foolhardy. In Jacobean England ‘thou’ and ‘you’ were used with precision and purpose. At the risk of oversimplifying usage that could be even more nuanced or ironic: superiors (or members ofthe upper class speaking to each other) were addressed as ‘you’ inferiors as ‘thou’ [...] As these examples suggest, Shakespeare was alert to how the + 70 +
