The English Renaissance in Context: King Lear

Introduction

Here you will find three versions of the story of King Lear and his daughter Cordelia: one from a sixteenth-century history book, Holinshed's Chronicles, and two in plays written by William Shakespeare and Nahum Tate. By comparing these three versions you can see some of the differences in storytelling caused by the difference between history and theater, as well as between theatrical conventions of plays written at separate times, for audiences with different tastes and expectations.

Writing history is very different from writing a play.

? What are some of the different demands put on an historian as opposed to a playwright?

? For example, what kind of "truth" is each expected to tell?

? What is each allowed to, or required to, leave out, or to add?

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To begin: let's explore the history text that Shakespeare might have consulted.

This text and image comes from the 1577 edition of the book called The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. When it was first published, this text was the most impressive British history England had ever seen.

While the book is often referred to as "Holinshed's Chronicles," Raphael Holinshed was not its sole author. An English printer, R. Wolfe, started the project and employed Holinshed to organize the compilation of the history (after Wolfe's death, another set of printers took over the financing of the chronicles).

Holinshed wrote the histories of England and Scotland, William Harrison supplied a description of England and Scotland, and Richard Stanyhurst supplied a description of Ireland.

The text provided a geographical description of each region, and an account of its past, traced back to pre-historical and legendary origins and continuing up through the sixteenth century. The Chronicles' sources are multiple, including old and contemporary histories, eye-witness accounts, documents, and anecdotes. Each history is organized as a sequence of monarchs, including the name of the king or queen and the year of his or her reign.

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A second edition of the Chronicles appeared in 1587 after Holinshed's death in 1580. This text was greatly enlarged and augmented by several contributors, including John Hooker (Vowell), Abraham Fleming, Francis Boteville, and John Stow, while the woodcut illustrations were eliminated.

Shakespeare used this 1587 edition for source material for many of his plays, including the history plays, Macbeth, and King Lear. Aside from the elimination of the woodcuts, the new compilers added and deleted texts and marginal comments; the moralistic comments and marginal Latin tags added by Abraham Fleming, in particular, reveal a later contributor's effort to moralize British history.

In addition to the complete 1587 edition of the Chronicles, available from the Furness English Renaissance Digital Library, the English Renaissance in Context project includes selected scans of the 1577 edition for two reasons: first, because it is held in the University of Pennsylvania's Furness Collection, and second, because it contains the woodcut illustrations.

The Chronicles has traditionally interested scholars because of the Shakespeare connection, but it is also a fascinating record of complex historical consciousness in sixteenth-century England.

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General Questions about History and Performance:

The stories in Holinshed's Chronicles were created in written form from the very start. Unlike Holinshed's Chronicles, Shakespeare's plays were first presented in live performances. If Shakespeare did create his stories in written form first, those stories were likely to be changed in the rehearsal process as actors decided which lines worked and which didn't. Only later were versions of those performances turned into printed books. The versions of the plays that we have are probably different from what Shakespeare originally wrote and also, to some extent, different from what happened in performance.

Think about the following questions:

? What is the difference between seeing a story enacted in front of you (like Shakespeare chose to do) and reading the same story in a book (like Holinshed did)? How do you respond differently? Which senses do you use?

? What kind of person would prefer to see a story performed live? What kind of person would prefer to read it? What kinds of people do you think Holinshed was writing for? What kinds of people do you think Shakespeare was writing for?

? What is the difference between attending a performance of a Shakespeare play and reading the play in book form? To what extent can we accurately imagine what happened in performance based on the book that was published afterwards?

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King Lear

Shakespeare's story of King Lear and his daughters is different in many ways from the account he found in Holinshed's Chronicles.

? What differences do you find most interesting?

? Which ones seem necessitated by the fact that he was adapting a two- page narrative for performance in a five-act play?

? Which ones put a new spin on the story?

Shakespeare used more sources than Holinshed for this story, which is more a legend than it is history. Geoffrey of Monmouth included this story in his list of legendary kings in his Historia Regnum Britanniae (c.1136). Other Tudor versions are included in The Mirror for Magistrates (1574) and William Warner's Albion's England (1586). In all these versions, the dimensions of the story are the same, although the names of the characters and details of the story differ. Shakespeare knew a play called The True Chronicle History of King Leir (first published in 1605), which, like the chronicle versions of the Lear story, ends happily with Cordelia alive and Lear restored to the throne. Shakespeare would have used the 1587 version of Holinshed as a source for his play. We also include here, however, woodcuts from the earlier version of 1577.

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The two significant differences between the 1577 and 1587 version in this section include: the elimination of the woodcuts; and the titling of the section on Cordelia's reign the "gynarchy of Cordelia."

When thinking about the differences between Shakespeare's version of King Lear and the account in Holinshed, you might ask yourself some of the following questions:

? The Chronicles say nothing of any madness in Lear: what difference does it make that Shakespeare's Lear goes mad?

? How does the Chronicles' characterization of Cordelia compare with Shakespeare's?

? Shakespeare deliberately altered all his sources to make Lear and Cordelia die at the end of the play --causing generations of critics to ask: why? What do you think?

One can also focus in more detail on the differences between the account of the opening scene and the three sisters' speeches in Holinshed and King Lear.

? How does Shakespeare introduce and structure this scene differently?

? How does he add characterization of the daughters through their speeches?

? Why does he significantly change Cordelia's speech?

Another way of thinking about the difference between Shakespeare and Holinshed is to think about the image of Cordelia in the woodcut illustration of Holinshed's Chronicles of 1577.

When talking about images in Holinshed, one should always keep in mind the fact that the woodcuts were often reused, and therefore one must be careful in deriving any conclusion from any specific image.

In illustrations for the Lear section of Holinshed , for instance, the image of the portrait of Cordelia appears to be unique, while the suicide of Cordelia is used in a few other contexts and the image of Lear is generic.

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Questions to consider:

? What significant similarities and differences do you see between the images of Lear and Cordelia?

? How did the printer choose to portray Cordelia (e.g, her muscular forearms, her scepter, her breasts)?

? Cordelia is portrayed differently in the head portrait and the suicide scene: what alternative "Cordelias" are we given?

? Why would she be shown committing suicide on a bed?

? How do the images in Holinshed compare with18th- and 19th-century portrayals: Susanna Cibber, Eliza Logan and Clara Rousby.

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Nahum Tate

Shakespeare certainly did not have the last word on the Lear and Cordelia story. When Shakespeare's plays were revived in the theater at the end of the seventeenth century, playwrights adapted his stories to suit new standards and tastes of theatrical form and style (as well as a new political climate). One of the most famous -- or notorious -- of these rewritings is Nahum Tate's adaptation of the story of King Kear and his daughter Cordelia.

Nahum Tate was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1652, and died in London in 1715. He was a well-known poet of his time, and was named poet laureate of England. Today he is remembered in English literary history for his adaptations of Shakespeare, and notably for his History of King Lear, published in 1681. Tate has substantially altered Shakespeare's Lear by removing the Fool, by adding a love plot between Cordelia and Edgar, and by opting to write a happy ending in which the wicked are punished and the good are rewarded.

In his preface, Tate speaks with awe of Shakespeare's "creating fancy", but he confesses that he finds the whole "a heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht; yet so dazling in their Disorder, that I soon perceiv'd I had seiz'd a Treasure."

He continues: ‘Twas my good Fortune to light on one Expedient to rectifie what was wanting the Regularity and Probability of the Tale, which was to run through the whole A Love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia, that never chang'd word with each other in the Original. This renders Cordelia's indifference and her Father's passion in the first scene probable. It likewise give Countenance to Edgar's disguise, making that a generous design that was before a poor Shift to save his life."

On the changing of the ending, Tate comments that adding the Edgar/Cordelia plot

“necessarily threw me on making the Tale conclude in a success to the innocent distrest Persons: Otherwise I must have incumbered the stage with dead Bodies, which conduct makes many Tragedies conclude with unseasonable Jest."

He then quote from John Dryden's preface to his play The Spanish Friar as justification for his own "bold change":

"Neither is it of so Trivial an Understanding to make a Tragedy end happily, for 'tis more difficult to save than 'tis to kill: the Dagger and the Cup of Poyson are alwaies in Readiness; but to bring the Action to the last extremity, and then by probable Means to recover all, will require the Art and Judgement of a Writer and cost him many pangs in performance."

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While many modern critics disparage Tate's rewriting of Lear, it was in fact quite successful in its own time. In fact, tate’s was the only version played on the English stage for some 140 years.

From an 18th century printed edition. Susanna Cibber plays Tate’s Cordelia.

Edmund Kean restored Shakespeare's tragic ending in 1821, and William McCready (left) revived the Fool in his version in 1838.

Tate's preface indeed may give us pause, as we try to understand what audiences of his own time found satisfying in this play. It could also be said that Tate's decision to give his play a "happy ending" brings the story closer to the chronicle sources, in which Cordelia's forces win the war at the end, and she rules thereafter. But Tate's "historical accuracy" comes with a difference, of course!

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General questions for discussion:

? Was Dryden right when he says that it is more difficult to save than it is kill, that is, ending a tragedy in death is the easy way out?

? Should we believe Tate when he said that he changed the ending because he wanted to avoid the spectacle of a heap of dead bodies, which often has the effect of making the audience laugh rather than weep?

? Why should adding a love plot between Edgar and Cordelia make it a more "regular" and "probable" play? What does Tate mean by "regular" and "probable" here? How does it recast the motivations of the characters, and why are their motivations important to a reading of the play? And what does Tate's reworking tell you about the cultural importance of heterosexual love, which in his play becomes a sufficient motivation for such a plot as this?

? If you found Tate's version lying on a table in a bookstore, without any title page, would you be able to tell that it was not written by Shakespeare?

? Is it different enough to rule out being a variant version of the story that Shakespeare wrote at another time (just as some scholars have argued that the Quarto and Folio are two different authorial versions of the play)?

? How would you be able to tell?

Perhaps the most interesting difference is in the end of two versions of the Lear story.

Questions about the ending of the play:

? In Tate's version, the actors play out a scene that is only described in Shakespeare's version of the play: Lear's killing of two on the soldiers that attempt to murder Cordelia. Is this violence "probable"? What difference does it make to act this out?

? The end of Tate's play is full of recognition, on the part of Lear, whereas at the end of Shakespeare's play, he appears not to recognize anyone. What role does recognition play at the end of a tragedy or comedy?

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? The play (through Lear's voice) insistently restores Cordelia as a queen at the end as opposed to killing her off, and Lear keeps on gesturing to her authority. What is Edgar's position at the end with regard to Cordelia? What difference does this make? Is Tate's Lear more or less authoritative than Shakespeare's?

Creative exercises:

? Which of the portraits shown earlier of Cordelia would you use to illustrate an edition of Tate's play? Which of Lear? Which of Edgar? Why?

? Identify the passages in this (Tate’s) final scene that also occur in Shakespeare's version; then write your own --maybe very different -- ending for the play that also includes these lines so they make perfect sense in context.

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