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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR other, the origin of which is ascribed to Renaissance political historians like Machiavelli, claims that royal power is rooted in the construction of the state and the means whereby the monarch had obtained the crown in his “personal appropriateness.” Early Modern drama offers a large variety of characters who embody these principles, and King Lear is an excellent example of this. It has become a commonplace in Shakespearean criticism to say that Lear represents a medieval monarch whose rule is based on the divine right of kingship, whereas Edmund, as a stage Machiavel,°” stands for the stereotype of the politician who seeks power through merit instead of inheritance. Significantly, in the stage directions of the 1608 Quarto, Edmund is always mentioned as “Bastard,” which strengthens the impression that he is a social misfit in the hierarchical system of the kingdom. This is the position from which he intends to move, confessing to the audience, “Let me if not by birth, haue lands by wit, / All with me’s meete, that I can fashion fit.”*?” His insatiable lust for power drives him to commit adultery with Lear’s elder daughters in order to establish a kingdom to his own liking, and in the end, he almost takes the monarch’s position. Commenting on whether Lear and Cordelia should receive Albany’s mercy, his diction resembles that of a king: “The battaile done, and they within our power / Shall neuer see his pardon, for my state / stands on me to defend, not to debate.”?”8 Since this chapter investigates poetic matters, more precisely the representation of the Early Modern body politic and its relationship to the corporeal images of the 1608 Quarto of King Lear, a line of thought focusing on the assumed influence of Nicolo Machiavelli’s writings on dramatic characters would constitute a digression from the main subject. Therefore, this chapter returns to the claim discussed in the previous one, namely that certain rhetorical tropes of the ceremonial scene at the beginning of the play figuratively relate to the idea of the Early Modern body politic, especially in the case of Cordelia and Kent. Prominent scholars*”’ have noticed that the outstanding feature of the plays imagery is the dominance of references to the human body as a whole and also 26 The stock character of the stage Machiavel is not directly based on Nicolo Machiavelli’s writings but rather embodies all the preconceptions of him that were circulating in Early Modern England. It was only in 1637 that his Discourses and then in 1610 that his Prince were translated and published in English. Before these dates, his books were available only in the editions that were circulating on the continent. For a detailed discussion of his reception history in England see Victoria Kahn: English Machiavellism, in Victoria Kahn: Machiavellian Rhetoric from the Counter-reformation to Milton, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1994, 85-166. Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. C3r. Ibid., sig. K3v. Caroline Spurgeon and most recently David Hillman have studied and pointed out the significance of corporeal images in King Lear, but others, like John Erskine Hankins, also examined the figurative use of the body in general in Shakespeare’s plays. Caroline F. E. Spurgeon: Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, Cambridge, Cambridge University 327 32 ® 32 o + 88 +
