Play Guide Essay on Shakespeare's Sources for "King Lear"
Shakespeare’s Sources for King Lear
by Thomas Canfield
Popular commentators and academic experts around the world have celebrated Shakespeare’s genius for 400 years. Yet theatre audiences do not often realize that the most esteemed playwright in world history, whom they adore for his great dramatic plots and poetic language, was in fact a very liberal borrower from a variety of sources. A significant portion of Shakespeare’s true greatness does not exist in the originality of his stories, which he typically derived and reconstructed, but rather is due to his artistic transformation–through language and character development–of materials by earlier authors masterfully conscripted for his own use. The Tragedy of King Lear is a perfect example of Shakespeare’s inspired adaptation of sources, and also typifies his skill in employing older elements to create works of dramatic art which completely overshadow their originals in craftsmanship and brilliance.
Numerous early versions of the basic Lear story existed hundreds of years before Shakespeare’s play was written in the early seventeenth century, and this has caused frustration for scholars seeking to answer the sphinx-like riddle of exactly which sources Shakespeare had on hand when composing his work. In King Lear, for example, the general theme of filial ingratitude and the contrast between the treatment of their aged parents by good and selfish children are common features found in ancient tales from Asian tradition. The motif of a love test as a basis for the division of a parent’s property comes from European folklore, several variants developing a tale in which a daughter first tells her father that she loves him as much as salt, and then dissipates his anger by demonstrating that this means he is essential to her life. Scholars have also recognized in Lear’s motif of three sisters, two of whom are evil and one who is good, superficial affinities between the play and the fairy tale of Cinderella. The name “Lear” itself appears to originate in Celtic tradition, with characters called Ler, Leir or Lyr.
The earliest extant written down version of the Lear story–one that Shakespeare could have known–is the Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), a work composed in Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1100-c. 1155), a twelfth-century monk and historian. In this text, a pseudo-historical figure called Leir, eleventh king of the Britons and legendary founder of the city of Leicester, plans to divide his kingdom among his three daughters–Gonorilla, Regau and Cordeilla–who are put to a verbal test and given rule over their father’s land according to their relative professions of affection. The youngest daughter, when she refuses to flatter her father, is disinherited and afterwards marries the king of the Franks. No English translation of this work was available in Shakespeare’s day, but he might have read it in its original Latin or, just as likely, received the story as it was retold by numerous later writers who borrowed from the Historia. For example, Geoffrey’s work forms the basis of two verse romance chronicles which retell the Lear story: the Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut (1155) by Wace–translated into English by William Caxton before Shakespeare’s time–and Brut by Layamon, one of the first major texts written in Middle English.
Three centuries later, the Lear story was again briefly retold by John Hardyng in his Chronicles (1436), but it was a renewed interest in the story by the Tudor chroniclers and versifiers of the next century that gave the tale truly widespread circulation. Obviously, such more contemporary sources have greater probability of having been familiar to Shakespeare. For example, the story of Lear was recounted by Robert Fabyan in his New Chronicles of England and France (1516), and it appears as well in Polydore Vergil’s Anglicae Historiae (1534), a work which introduces Cordilla’s argument for transferring her primary devotion from her father to her husband after marriage–a detail which also appears in Shakespeare’s version. Later, elements from both Hardyng and Fabyan were appropriated by John Stow in his Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles (1563) and Annales (1592).
In the 1574 edition of A Mirror for Magistrates, a verse biography of various figures from English history, John Higgins reiterated the tale of Leire as part of a collection of early legends of Britain. In Higgins’s version, which draws upon Geoffrey of Monmouth as a primary source and contains many similar details, the dead Cordilla provides a first-person narrative account–in the form of a verse complaint–of her disinheritance and the subsequent disgrace inflicted on her father at the hands of her sisters. Eventually, Leire comes to France and requests his estranged daughter’s assistance. Once reconciled, Cordilla aids him in reestablishing his rule for three years and, after Leire dies, she rules the country for five additional years–until the sons of Gonerell and Ragan imprison her in a dungeon, eventually leading her to commit suicide in despair.
Other possible sources for the play are William Warner’s Albion’s England (1586), a long verse chronicle containing a version of the Lear story, as well as the 1587 second edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Wales, a work which Shakespeare clearly used as a staple source not only for King Lear, but also for Macbeth, Cymbeline and several of his English history plays. It was not until 1590, with the publication of two of the most famous English Renaissance poems–Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene and Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia–that plausible antecedents for Shakespeare’s play represent literary and artistic modes rather than historical writing. This is also where it becomes possible that Shakespeare becomes the source for subsequent works dealing with the story, in the view of some scholars.
Book II of Spenser’s unfinished epic allegory celebrates the virtue of Temperance in the character of a knight named Sir Guyon. In Canto X, Sir Guyon reads a “chronicle of Briton kings” while sojourning at the House of Alma. This seven-stanza section of the lengthy epic is notable especially for the mode of Cordelia’s death; it is in Spenser that, for the first time known, the manner of her death is specified as being through hanging, by her own hand. Sidney’s work is also notable for being a primary source for the secondary Gloucester plot in King Lear. One episode in Book II is set in “a certain hollow rocke” where the two main characters are compelled to take shelter from the hail and wind of a “tempests furie.” There, they encounter a king who has been alienated from his legitimate son by the false accusation of his bastard son–who has usurped his father’s title and blinded him. Subsequently, the rightful son, described as “poorely arayed” and “extreamely weather-beaten,” rescues his father and prevents him from committing suicide by leaping from a cliff.
The single most important and immediate source for the main plot of Shakespeare’s tragedy, however, is The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and his Three Daughters: Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella, a chronicle play (author unknown) published in 1605 (although there is evidence that it was performed by the Queen’s Men before 1594). Because this play draws upon many of the same historical sources that Shakespeare may have used independently for his own work, the problem of scholarly attribution is tangled. There is no doubt that Shakespeare freely adapted some language and plot details of the earlier play to his own ends, making it superior. However, unlike Shakespeare’s play, King Leir features a prevalent Christian emphasis. Another major difference is the fact that the king and Cordella do not die in Lear but survive and live happily. The king goes off with his companions at the conclusion, leaving Cordella to reign in his place. Her two sisters–called Gonorill and Ragan–also do not die, but instead become fugitives. Two important features in Shakespeare’s play, the parallel plot of Gloucester and the character of the Fool, do not appear in Leir.
For the mad verbiage Edgar employs when disguised as Poor Tom O’Bedlam, Shakespeare may have been indebted to a work published in 1603 by Samuel Harsnett (1561-1631). Harsnett was Chaplain to the Bishop of London, later becoming Archdeacon of Essex and subsequently Archbishop of York. His tract A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures is a detailed account of several heretical exorcisms conducted by Roman Catholic priests in England during 1585-86. In Shakespearean Negotiations, Stephen Greenblatt notes that Shakespeare appropriated from Harsnett “the names of the foul fiends by whom Edgar . . . claims to be possessed” as well as “some of the language of madness, several of the attributes of hell and a number of colorful adjectives.”
In the same year that Harsnett’s work was published, two other possible sources for Shakespeare’s play also emerged, namely John Florio’s translation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais and an account of the highly publicized court case in October involving Sir Brian Annesley. Scholars have noted that more than one hundred words from Florio’s translation do not appear anywhere in Shakespeare’s writing before King Lear, and that two of Montaigne's famous essays, “Of Solitariness” and “An Apology for Raymond Sebonde,” apparently refer to themes similar to those which Shakespeare's deals with in Lear. In the lawsuit involving Annesley, an ex-servant of Queen Elizabeth I who owned a valuable estate in Kent, the eldest of his three daughters, Lady Grace Wildgoose, attempted to have her father certified as incompetent so that she and her husband could take over the management of his affairs. Although the role played by Annesley’s second daughter in the affair is unknown, his youngest daughter, Cordell, opposed the malevolent designs of her elder sisters by appealing to Sir Robert Cecil.
The Annesley case, moreover, does not stand alone as a possible legal history source of themes expressed by Shakespeare’s play. Another case involved Sir William Allen, Lord Mayor of London from 1571-72. Growing old and frail, Allen decided to divide his estates and wealth between his three married daughters, arranging to stay with each in turn. The trio eventually resented the charge of his upkeep and argued that Allen was rude to their servants. After cursing his daughters for their mistreatment of him, Allen died in misery.
Yet one more literary and dramatic source for King Lear may be the work of John Marston (1576-1634), the English poet, playwright and satirist. Some scholars have identified the mad speeches of Lear as being influenced by Marston’s book of satires, The Scourge of Villanie (1598), but more importantly they have seen his play The Malcontent (1604) as a source for the saturnine personality and psychology of Edmund. The malcontent, a character type which frequently appears in Renaissance drama, stands apart from the society surrounding him, usually having separated himself by choice. A discontented observer, the malcontent is often a melancholic anti-hero with a dark, sarcastic view of life. In Edmund’s case, it should be noted in fairness, this separation is not only by nature but also due to illegitimate birth.
While the quest to unearth Shakespeare’s sources provides much interesting material for study and research, it is often a difficult and inconclusive endeavor resulting in more questions than solutions. The same evidence can point to opposing interpretations. King Lear is by no means an exception to the typical problem of identifying the originals of Shakespeare’s work, and is perhaps an indication of the playwright’s genius by showing how he combined elements from a wide variety of previous authors. Ultimately, for the true lover of dramatic art, the products of Shakespeare’s craft usually soar above any of his historical or literary sources, and their excellence far surpasses the quality of the raw materials the playwright exploited for their composition.
