Shakespeare

After their royal performances the King’s Men began a season of touring in Kent, where they played at Dover, Maidstone and Faversham. They also journeyed to Saffron Walden, Leicester, Oxford, and Marlborough. It is tempting to believe that Shakespeare was with them when they visited Dover, at the beginning of October, if only because of the important presence of that town in his next play. But such explicit connections are dangerous. There is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare travelled with them, and every reason to believe that he was engaged elsewhere. In the course of this year, after all, he completed the writing of King Lear.

CHAPTER 79. Oh You Go farre

There is ample evidence for the first performance of King Lear at the court on 26 December 1606. On the title page of the first quarto publication, it is announced that “yt was played before the Kinges Maiestie at Whitehall vppon St. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes.” The title page is also singular for the name of “Mr. William Shakspeare” blazoned across the top in type larger than the rest. It is a clear sign of his eminence and what a later age would call “name recognition.” It was also a way of distinguishing this play from the old King Leir published in 1605.

There were clear associations with Macbeth, the play composed immediately before it. Both dramas were concerned with what might be called the mythological history of Britain, but both have some contemporary import. The folly of Lear’s division of his kingdom had been amply demonstrated, in a period when King James was intent upon unifying the separate kingdoms of Scotland and England into the one realm of Great Britain. In the third act the word “English” had been substituted by “Brittish.” King James had warned his son, in Basilikon Doron, that “by deuiding your kingdoms, yee shall leaue the seed of diuision and discord among your posteritie.”King Lear might be described as a meditation upon that theme. A political decision is once more lent a theatrical and even mythological dimension. In Lear, as in Macbeth, there are invocations of the medieval mystery cycle. Lear becomes the sacred figure who is mocked and buffeted. The use of British mythology once more prompted Shakespeare into calling up the powers of ancient drama. He was aiming for a total theatrical effect. If the regality of Lear was emphasised upon the stage, perhaps by the wearing of a crown, then his innate authority would have been sustained by James’s own assertion of divine right. It renders Lear’s decline and fall all the more fearful for a contemporaneous audience. The spectator must be thoroughly possessed by the idea of sacred kingship fully to appreciate the play.

The casting can in part be reconstructed. Richard Burbage excelled as Lear, and indeed it was reported that the old king “lived in him.” Robert Armin played the Fool, and perhaps Cordelia. It seems to be a strange “doubling” but it would explain the fact that the Fool mysteriously disappears at the end of the third act, at which point Cordelia emerges. The idea of Cordelia played by a comic actor, however, does not suit modern taste. It is easier to imagine a boy in the part. We may also envisage Burbage and Armin upon the stage, contesting against the storm – or, rather, fighting to be heard against the noise of kettle-drums, squibs, and cannon balls being rolled in metal trays.

The young Shakespeare may have acted in an early production of the old play of King Leir. It has been suggested that the first King Leir was part of his own juvenile work, but it is more probable that he recalled his youthful involvement in it and then completely rewrote it for the King’s Men. In preparation he read Holinshed and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. He must also have been reading Florio’s translation of Montaigne, since one hundred new words in that volume re-emerge in King Lear. He was immensely susceptible to the sound and rhythm of words, to the extent that after first encountering them he could effortlessly reduplicate them.