Oldal 74 [74]
OCR
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 twentyfirst 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. + 72e
