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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR DECENCY OF COURTLY BEHAVIOR: THE MOCK TRIAL SCENE In the so-called mock trial scene, Gloster and Kent escort Lear and his companions, the Fool and Edgar in the guise of poor Tom, to a hovel in order to protect them from the storm and console Lear after his highly intense fit of madness. As the second of Lear’s three mad scenes, this part bears special significance, since it also stages the last appearance of the Fool, who, to borrow Ioppolo’s wording, is the king’s “court jester, and surrogate son, but more importantly his uninhibited alter ego and conscience.”??? As for the reception history of King Lear, the mock trial has long been in the focus of scholarly attention, mainly for two reasons. First, it proved an excellent passage with which to demonstrate the textual ambiguities of the play, as the 1608 Pied Bull Quarto edition contains thirty lines and Edgar’s soliloquy, which are missing from the 1623 Folio; whereas in the Folio, there are two utterances made by the Fool which are unique additions to the Quarto text. In order to visualize the textual ambiguities, in the appendix I conflated the Quarto and Folio texts and marked their special qualities with different colors. The portion of the text that both the Quarto and the Folio share appears in black; the passages that only the Pied Bull Quarto contains are highlighted in green; and the lines in red indicate passages that appear only in the Folio version. Many questions have been raised and many hypotheses have been formulated about whether the earlier version of the text was changed to conform to the constraints of censorship, as for instance Annabel Patterson or Paul Hammond claim,” or the playwright himself introduced these changes in the text for dramaturgical reasons.”** Regardless of the reasons for the textual revision, even at first sight it is obvious that the Folio version is shorter, it shifts attention to Lear’s madness and his accusation of Regan, and it completely lacks the extraordinary trial of Gonorill’s case. 22 Toppolo (ed).: A Routledge, 123. 293 Patterson: “Betweene,” 58—73. Ina recent article, Paul Hammond also proposes that the Fools lines might contain covert references to King James’ sexual preferences, and that may explain why they were omitted. Cf.: Paul Hammond: James I’s Homosexuality and the Revision of the Folio Text of King Lear, Notes and Queries 44:1 (1997), 62-64. Even if one does not find Hammond’s arguments convincing, the publication of his article shows that scholars still regard this question as worthy of discussion. 294 As Roger Warren argues, the parts which were omitted from the Quarto shift attention to the meeting of the mad Lear with the blind Gloster in act 4, scene 6, and thus help speed up the action. These omissions contain details that are later treated in a more detailed manner. Roger Warren: The Folio Omission of the Mock Trial. Motives and Consequences, in Roger Warren: The Division of the Kingdoms. Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear, Oxford, Calderon Press, 1983, 49. .76 +
