Oldal 102 [102]
OCR
SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR Shakespeare could have accessed this fable from different sources,*” according to Kenneth Muir, the most probable source was William Camden’s Remaines, the traces of which scholars have detected in King Lear.*” But even before 1605, Shakespearean drama abounds with examples of images based on the organic analogy of the state. For instance, King Henry V summons his parliament with the following words: “Now call we our high court of parliament, / And let us choose such limbs of noble counsel / That the great body of our state may go / In equal rank with the best govern’d nation.”*”° Or Laertes’ wording may also be significant when he says of Hamlet, “on his choice depends / The sanity and health of this whole state. / And therefore must his choice be circumscribd / Unto the voice and yielding of that body / Whereof he is the head.”*”” The image of the diseased body of the state which needs to be cured appears in King Henry IV’s diction too: “Then you perceive the body of our kingdom / How foul it is, what rank diseases grow; / And with what danger, near the heart of it"?" as well as in Warwick’s aswer to him: “It is but as a body yet distemper’d, / Which to his former strength may be restor’d / With good advice and little medicine.”*” The number of various corporeal images referring to the state in a context other than Menenius Agrippa’s fable seems to suggest that Shakespeare may have also come across the anthropomorphic analogy of the state in other sources, in addition to William Camden’s work. For philological reasons, it would be challenging to determine with any degree of certainty whether Shakespeare knew the whole organic conception of the state as it was presented by John of Salisbury, yet there is some evidence that even Shakespeare’s contemporaries could have had direct access to the text of Policraticus, either in English or in Latin or both. As for written records still available today, various devotional works which were printed in England in the first decade of the seventeenth century contain direct references to John of Salisbury’s book, even if their authors were members of various ranks of the Anglican clergy. For instance, a marginal note in William Averell’s pamphlet A Dyall for dainty Darlings, rockt in the 374 TW. Baldwin argues that it was included in a schoolbook entitled Fabellae Aesopicae (1573) by Camerarius (Shakespeare’s Small Latin, 622), while Geoffrey Bullough traces it back to The Romane Historie of T. Livy (1600), which was translated into English by Philemon Holland (Narrative, 496-497). 375 See Kenneth Muir’s comments in the 1997 Arden Shakespeare edition. William Shakespeare: King Lear, ed. Reginald Armstrong Foakes, The Arden Shakespeare. Third series, London, Thomson Learning, 1997. 376 King Henry V. 5.2.134-137. Shakespeare: The Arden Shakespeare, 2000, 423. 37 Hamlet, 1.3.20-24. Ibid., 297. 378 King Henry IV, Part 2. 3.1.38-40. Ibid., 409. 379 Thid., 3.1.41-43. + 100 +
