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CONCLUSION
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It is my hope with this book to have offered answers to the question of
what makes the 1608 Quarto edition of William Shakespeare’s King Lear an
outstanding and exceptional work of art. Both its cover page and the record
from the Stationer’s Register support the idea that it was written for a special
occasion for the audience of the Whitehall. In order to entertain this courtly
audience, Shakespeare adopted the well-known story of King Lear and his
three daughters, which could have been available to him in many versions.
But as opposed to the assumedly most immediate source, the anonymous
True Chronicle Historie of King Leir, a play very popular during the reign of
Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare completely changed the dramaturgical
context of the story. The first chapter examined the macrostructural layer of
the text and showed that the 1608 King Lear Quarto strongly relies on the
Tudor interlude tradition as it is exemplified in the case of John Skelton’s
Magnyfycence. It thus contains many elements deriving from the literary
convention of the genre “speculum principiis.” The second chapter focused
on the microstructural layer of the text, drawing attention to the rhetorical
features which reveal that, at least in the case of the love contest and mock trial
scenes, the characters’ diction is loaded with tropes from contemporaneous
public discourses. Of the various topical references, the third chapter has
targeted the body-related image cluster of the play, pointing out that it
corresponds to the rhetoric of the Jacobean royal discourse based on the trope
of the body politic. The interpretations offered in these chapters support the
idea that the 1608 King Lear Quarto could be read as a dramatic response to
official royal propaganda and thus as a play which holds a mirror of governance
to the royal court, including the King, who supposedly was present at the
Whitehall performance.