Oldal 80 [80]
SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
Last but not least, it has also been proposed that since the trial Lear
conducts is in fact an “act of treason,” this scene could allude to the trial of
the participants in the Gunpowder Plot, whose court case was settled in March
1606.%% Regarding the textual instability discussed earlier, we can see that all
three contemporaneous cases mentioned above lost their topicality by the time
the Folio was published, which offers a plausible explanation for why these
lines were cut from the 1623 version.
Obviously, the complex web of topical allusions is nearly impossible to
untangle, yet as far as the dramaturgy is concerned, I would like to argue that
the setting of this scene shows strong correspondence with contemporaneous
descriptions of indecent or unmannerly behavior found in Puttenham’s The
Arte of English Poesie. The third book of this work, which is dedicated to the
poetic use of figurative language, contains a chapter on decent behavior that
seems to diverge from the book’s main line of discussion. However, Puttenham
argues that “the good maker or poet who is in decent speach & good termes
to describe all things and with prayse or dispraise to report euery mans
behauiour, ought to know the comelinesse of an action aswell as of a word."
Despite the allusions to contemporaneous court cases mentioned above,
the whole scene seems much more like a parody of a “trial in absentia”®® at
which the culprits are not present and the judges are singing," so the main
emphasis falls on the weird behavior and diction ofthe people on stage. Based
on conventional presumptions, court trials are supposed to be the epitome
of public speech, yet what happens in this scene is anything but publicly
acceptable. But this mock trial illustrating indecent behavior could have
given Shakespeare an excellent opportunity to entertain his audience and thus
provide some comic relief between two brutal scenes: Lear’s fit of madness in
the storm, which precedes it, and Gloster’s blinding, which follows it. Modern
adaptations very often lack this entertaining feature, yet Puttenham’s book
provides a written record which helps modern readers reconstruct how the
dramaturgy of the action relied on the expectations of the Early Modern
audience. In what follows, it is worth taking a closer look at the characters
participating in Lear’s “mock-trial” and, in particular, at their appearance and
diction, and it is worth contrasting the scene with the relevant passages of
Puttenham’s description of decent courtly behavior.
303 Nina Taunton-Valerie Hart: King Lear, King James and the Gunpowder Treason of 1605,
Renaissance Studies 17 (2003), 709-710.
304 Puttenham: The Arte, 231.
35 Owen Hood Phillips: Trial Scenes, in Owen Hood Phillips: Shakespeare and the Lawyers,
London-New York, Routledge, 2005 [1972], 90.
306 In the appendix, the underlined lines indicate the sentences that were actually sung.
+ 78 +