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? University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 1 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: King Lear 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. University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 2 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: King Lear 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. University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 3 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: King Lear 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? University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 4 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: King Lear 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. University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 5 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: King Lear 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. University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 6 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: King Lear 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. University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 7 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: King Lear 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