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RHETORICAL AND POETICAL CONVENTIONS
very often reflect a particular director’s idea, Puttenham helps philologists
reconstruct an assumed Early Modern “horizon of expectations”*” against
which the validity of historical readings of Shakespearean drama can be
plausibly tested. Therefore, a close reading of the mock trial scene of the 1608
King Lear Quarto and The Arte of English Poesy seems to reveal many distinctly
contemporaneous and, in this case, even entertaining features of Shakespeare’s
text creation, an understanding of which could enhance twenty-first century
readings of the play.
The two scenes discussed in this chapter offer clear examples of the Early
Modern idea of mannerly public behavior, since one of them, the love contest
scene, stages a royal ceremony and the other, the mock trial scene, imitates
the setting of a court trial. An examination of the relationships between
these scenes and contemporaneous standards of courtly behavior reveals
that the Shakespearean text challenges the ideas of the assumed audience
concerning acceptable public speech and behavior as presented in the relevant
chapters of Puttenham’s work. From a poetical point of view, this chapter
has also drawn attention to Shakespeare’s knowledge of and familiarity with
the characteristics of figurative speech as described in The Arte of English
Poesie. Since this work lists various tropes and figures of speech that were
widely known in the Early Modern period, their use alone would not prove
that he was familiar with this book. But the textual connection between
King Lear and The Arte of English Poesie is primarily perceivable through the
complementary nature of the tropes used in the Shakespearean text and
their non-conventional explanation in Puttenham’s book, for instance in the
case of hyperbole. This connection could also be traced by pointing out the
similarities between the phrasing used by the two authors, which are quite
striking, especially when the mock trial scene is juxtaposed with Puttenham’s
chapter describing decent behavior. Furthermore, my examination of
the microtextual layers of the play reveals that the characters’ diction is
permeated with topical references, and some of the tropes used in the text,
for instance the heart and the hand, echo the language of contemporaneous
public speeches. Of the many aspects of figurative language, the next chapter
will focus on the corporeal images of the 1608 Quarto and their relationship
to Jacobean public discourses discussing various topical matters concerning
governance of the Early Modern body politic.
322 This term is meant in the Jaussian sense to describe the criteria that modern readers can
assume in order to judge a piece of writing deriving from a certain period other than that of
the reader’s age. Cf. Hans Robert Jauss: Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,
in Hans Robert Jauss: Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1982, 23.
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