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RHETORICAL AND POETICAL CONVENTIONS
The Participants in the Trial
Even a twenty-first century audience can feel that there is something
extraordinary about the combination of characters when King Lear, the old
man of royal origin, appears with Edgar, who is obviously much younger than
he is even if he has disguised himself as a beggar, and with the professional Fool,
who converses with Lear in riddles from the beginning of the play. Nevertheless,
this strange assortment of characters constituted an even sharper shock for the
expectations of Early Modern courtly society, as Puttenham asserts:
And in the choise of a mans delights & maner of his life, there is a decencie, and
so we say th’old man generally is no fit companion for the young man, nor the rich
for the poore, nor the wise for the foolish. Yet in some respects and by discretion
it may be otherwise, as when the old man hath the gouernment of the young, the
wise teaches the foolish, the rich is wayted on by the poore for their reliefe, in which
regard the conuersation is not indecent.*””
Thus, it seems that the characters themselves provide the first example of
indecency as this notion was understood in the seventeenth century. Even
if one argues that from a dramaturgical point of view this part of the play
should be considered a “play-within-the-play”°® and the characters are
actually imitating a court trial, Edgar and the Fool’s songs still challenge the
expectations regarding proper manners. To recall Puttenham again, “[...] after
the same rate euery sort and maner of businesse or affaire or action hath his
decencie and vndecencie, either for the time or place or person or some other
circumstaunce, as [...] a Iudge to be incorrupted, solitarie and vnacquainted
with Courtiers or Courtly entertainements.”?®
Based on Puttenham’s description, the presence of the Fool, who is the
emblem of courtly entertainment, and the songs they are singing intensify the
impression that, even for a trial scene, this passage of the textplay is indecently
written.
Although we have little reliable evidence concerning the costumes the actors
might have been wearing in 1606, Puttenham states the contemporaneous
presumption that people’s identity should be clearly determined by their
appearance on the basis of the contemporaneous “dress code:” “And in the
vse of apparell there is no litle decency and vndecencie to be perceiued, as
well for the fashion as the stuffe, for it is comely that euery estate and vocation
should be knowen by the differences of their habit: a clarke from a lay man: a
307 Puttenham: The Arte, 234.
308 Taylor-Warren: The Division, 89.
309 Puttenham: The Arte, 245.
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