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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
Much of the political rhetoric of Renaissance England seems to suggest that the
perfect sovereign is also the perfect synecdoche: a part of the body politic that
stands for, represents, or almost mystically makes present the whole; and an
embodiment of the whole that will override party and faction and, because of
his or her impartiality, be trusted to take the part of any of that body’s wronged
members. King James was especially concerned to present himself as impartial;
given suspicions that he would be partial in his acts and decrees to the Scotsmen
many English feared would impoverish their own country.?®®
To sum up the findings of this chapter, the juxtaposition of the Quarto text
of King Lear with its most direct dramatic source, The True Chronicle Historie,
reveals that Shakespeare, instead of presenting the love contest as a private
conversation, sets it against the backdrop of a public context and shapes
Lear’s conversation with his daughters according to the contemporaneous
expectations of public speech. Changing the dramaturgical context involves
a change in the characters’ diction, which becomes permeated with the
tropes of contemporaneous public discourses. Even if there is no extrinsic
evidence that would undeniably prove that Shakespeare did read Puttenham’s
handbook, the background knowledge with which this work provides twenty¬
first century readers ultimately furthers a more nuanced understanding of
the playwright’s poetic practice. As the previous analysis of the love contest
scene reflected the seventeenth-century idea of decent public speech, now my
attention turns to the so-called “mock trial” scene, which in my interpretation
challenges the notion of decent courtly behavior as it was described in The
Arte of English Poesie.
288 Jonathan Baldo: Partial to Synecdoche (Ophelia’s Rhetoric) in The Unmasking of Drama,
Contested Representation in Shakespeare's Tragedies, Detroit, Wayne State University Press,
1996, 46.
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