King Lear

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King Lear

THE LITERARY WORK

A tragic play set in ancient Britain around 800 b.c.e.; written c. 1605; first performed in 1606; published in 1608.

SYNOPSIS

An aging king’s decision to abdicate and divide his kingdom among his three daughters leads to tragedy for the entire royal family.

Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place

The Play in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written

For More Information

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was about 41 years old when he wrote King Lear, the tragedy that many deem his greatest. He created the play to be performed for King James, who had assumed the English throne shortly before, in 1603. Featured in the tragedy is a ruler who in some ways diverged sharply from James. James showed a commitment to peace and to preserving the integrity of and even unifying Britain, in contrast to Lear’s fatal division of his kingdom, which prompted bloodshed and war. Shakespeare wrote this tragedy well after the halfway point of his two decade career, at a time when his acting company, the King’s Men, was cementing its position as London’s preeminent theatrical troupe. Shortly thereafter, he would stop writing tragedies altogether. King Lear is therefore one of Shakespeare’s last great statements on the tragic potential in human life. Set in a kingdom of ancient Britain, the play is also one of his wildest, darkest, and most anarchic.

Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place

Layers of time

The exact time period in which King Lear takes place remains imprecise. One of Shakespeare’s sources, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587), places the story of King Lear at around 800 b.c.e., but the play shows few traces of early times. In fact, the handful of historical details that are in the play does not correspond to our understanding of life among the early Britons of the first millennium b.c.e. Anachronisms surface that are characteristic of medieval rather than ancient Britain, the influence perhaps of Holinshed’s source, the Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain, c. 1135) by Geoffrey of Monmouth, which Shakespeare himself may have read. Even more prominent in King Lear are the reflections of social conditions and controversies from Shakespeare’s own age. Perhaps because of its dearth of historical detail, many have “seen the play primarily in relation to the Jacobean age,” that is, the age of King James (Foakes in Shakespeare, p. 13). Given the complication of three chronological layers—ancient, medieval, and Jacobean—the following survey moves from life among the ancient Britons as we understand it today, to the legendary history of King Lear as Shakespeare knew it, to the era of King James as it relates to the play.

Celtic life

Not organized into a single kingdom, the ancient British Celts, or Britons, consisted rather of individual peoples loosely affiliated by language and culture. These peoples immigrated into Britain in successive waves, from the early to the late first thousand years b.c.e., with the last major group appearing sometime before 100 b.c.e., ahead of the Roman arrival in 55 b.c.e. These ancient British Celts are the first group in Britain about whom historians have been able to glean some detailed information.

ANACHRONISTIC HUSBANDS

Among other anachronisms, Cordelia’s suitors are the king of France and the duke of Burgundy, but neither France nor the duchy of Burgundy existed in 800 b.c.e. The region that would become France was known then as Gaul, and pre-Christian Burgundy did not exist as a separate area, but simply as part of Gaul. Likewise, ancient Britain did not have a duke of Cornwall or of Albany—the duchy of Cornwall dates from 1337 and the first duke of Albany from 1458. But the two titles had particular resonance in the court of King James, who had two sons in these very positions: his son Charles had been made duke of Albany in 1600; his son Henry, duke of Cornwall in 1603.

Most of the Celts were settled farmers and herders. Their settlements were small and widely dispersed, with much of the population raising food for sustenance. But they also had a fairly well-developed system of trade and were skilled at working in iron, leather, gold, and clay to create goods for exchange (metal money was not in use by the ancient Celts before they came under the influnce of the Romans). Society esteemed military prowess, especially the young warrior-hero who succeeded in single combat. Also esteemed was intellectual prowess. The people boasted a highly developed oral literature. Heroes were well versed in the traditional knowledge and storytellers transmitted important information—codes of law, genealogies, and epic stories. However, the Britons were pre-literate; the various letters sent in King Lear are among the play’s many anachronisms.

The Britons were not unified under a single ruler. Instead, the basic unit of society was the large or small settlement, and its basic unit was the family. Society consisted of four classes: the king, nobles, free commoners, and the “unfree” (including, among other groups, slaves). While kingship was hereditary, it did not necessarily fall to the eldest son; any male relative of the current king could be designated his successor. In the noble class were druids, priests who intervened between the people and their pagan gods. Most of the free commoners were farmers and craftsmen. A woman did not enjoy the same rights as a man; her powers were limited, though the specific parameters remain unknown.

The Celts did not have the implicitly feudal system of government present in King Lear. Each Celtic clan owned its own land, which could not be withdrawn from the clan, though it could be lost by agreement or sale. In any case, land was not dispensed by a king in exchange for services, as it was under feudalism. The Celts did have another institution, “clientship,” by which a lord would provide a commodity (for example, land, military protection, or some other benefit) to a client in exchange for a service (crops, or military service, or hospitality). But the relationship was more cooperative and less dependent than in feudal society.

The Celts reached their historical pinnacle just before they were conquered by the Romans and then by Germanic tribes. Overrun twice, the Celts of continental Europe receded into the historical background. It was mainly on the British Isles that independent Celtic peoples survived, among groups inhabiting areas of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

From clientship to feudalism

As indicated, the few historical references in King Lear reflect life not in ancient but in medieval England, when society was based on feudalism. The institution first appeared on the island after its invasion by the Normans in 1066. In a feudal system, the king owns all the land and bestows it on tenants-in-chiefs, that is, lesser nobles than himself, in exchange for political and military service. The system came to England about 1070 b.c.e., when William the Conqueror introduced a professional army based on the mounted knight. He peopled this army with the help of his tenants-in-chief, who in exchange for a land grant, provided him with a specific number of armored knights for a certain amount of time each year. To secure the arrangement from generation to generation, society practiced primogeniture, which meant a tenant’s inheritance passed undivided to his eldest son. This preserved continuity in the services owed to the king. If a man had no son, feudal law dictated that his inheritance should be divided among his daughters, a custom that promised them a lower standard of living than the one in which they had been raised.

Legendary history as Shakespeare knew it

Lear is a legendary king, whose existence remains unproven. Holinshed’sChronicles, which documents the legendary history, identifies Lear as a descendant of Brutus, the alleged founder of the first British kingdom. A survivor of the Trojan War, Brutus’s forefather, Aeneas, is said to have gone to Italy, which led to his founding of Rome, and to Brutus’s subsequent trek northward to found a kingdom in Britain. In other words, Britain, like Rome, was the descendant of the doomed city of Troy. According to the Chronicles, Brutus first appeared on the island around 250 years before Lear, conquered a giant people there, established a kingdom, and governed it for 15 years. Before his death, he divided the island among his three sons. His eldest son, Locrine, ruled England next; followed by Locrine’s son Maden, followed by his son Mempricius, and so on through the generations (to Ebranke, Brute Greeneshield, Leill, Ludhurdibr, and then Bladud) until Lear, who became the tenth one to reign.

Described as an especially noble monarch, Lear governed England in great wealth, establishing the town Leicester (then called Caerleir). He had three daughters whom he loved dearly, favoring especially his youngest, Cordelia. In his old age, he seized upon the idea of having the three express their affection for him to determine which of them should be his successor. Cordelia’s answer vexed him so greatly that he married his two eldest daughters to the dukes of Cornwall and Albany, informing them that they could divide all his land between them after his death; half of this inheritance they were to receive immediately. Cordelia, on the other hand, was to receive nothing. Yet a king of Gaul (supposedly ruled by 12 kings at the time) desired her anyway and married her.

Unwilling to bide their time until his death, Cornwall and Albany rose against Lear. They seized the governance of the land from him, granting him an allowance that they reduced over time. Heartbroken, Lear grieved especially over the unkindness of his two daughters, who begrudged him everything. Finally, he fled into Gaul, where before seeing him, Cordelia sent ahead money so that he could attire himself and retain servants as befit his status. Welcoming him at court, she and her husband listened to the wrongs he had suffered, then raised an army to help him reclaim the land. War followed, leading to Cornwall and Albany’s deaths and Lear and Cordelia’s victory. Restored to his kingdom, Lear ruled for two or three more years, then died. Afterwards, Cordelia became queen, ruling Britain honorably for five years, during which her husband passed away. Her sisters’ sons, chafing under the rule of a woman, finally rebelled and imprisoned her, whereupon she committed suicide. So ends the legendary history, which Shakespeare adapts and diverges from in significant ways, complicating the plot with a subplot and with historical elements from his own time.

The Play in Focus

Plot summary

King Lear has a double storyline, involving two sets of characters who interconnect. The main plot features Lear and his daughters; the subplot, the earl of Gloucester and his sons. At the beginning of the play, the earl of Kent, a trusted advisor to Lear, talks with Gloucester about the impending division of Lear’s kingdom among his sons-in-law, the dukes of Albany and Cornwall. Interrupting the conversation, Gloucester’s bastard son, Edmund, appears and meets Kent. Despite his abilities, Edmund will inherit nothing from his father; Gloucester’s estate is slated to go to his eldest and legitimate son, Edgar.

Lear, his daughters, and their retinue enter. The king announces that today he will decide the issue of Cordelia’s marriage: she has two suitors, the duke of Burgundy and the king of France. But first, he will divide the kingdom among his heirs as their dowries, awarding the choicest portion to whichever daughter merits it best and loves him most. Goneril and Regan each claim to love Lear more than life itself, and so are rewarded with large, fertile thirds of the kingdom. Lear then turns to Cordelia, his favorite and the one with whom he hopes to live after abdicating. But she refuses to flatter him, saying only that she loves him “according to my bond, no more nor less” (Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.1.93). Enraged and uncomprehending, Lear instantly disinherits Cordelia. “With my two daughters’ dowers,” he tells Cornwall and Albany, “digest this third” (King Lear, 1.1.129). When trusty Kent attempts to defend the disinherited Cordelia, Lear banishes him too. The duke of Burgundy and the king of France enter, and Lear tells them of this sudden change in Cordelia’s fortune. Burgundy withdraws his proposal, but France accepts Cordelia even without a dowry. Taking leave of her sisters, Cordelia, who knows their true natures, admonishes them to care for their father. Alone, Goneril and Regan discuss Lear’s age and fitful ways; they resolve to form a united front against his capricious temper.

Elsewhere, the bastard Edmund vows to do whatever it takes to win Gloucester’s patrimony, including turning his father against his legitimate son, Edgar. After Gloucester enters, Edmund presents him with a letter—supposedly from Edgar—seeking assistance from Edmund in killing their father. Alarmed, the credulous earl asks Edmund to look into the matter, then leaves. A solitary Edmund rejoices in the success of his plan thus far and, when Edgar enters, tells him their father is murderously angry with him and advises him to flee.

Meanwhile, Lear has been staying with Goneril, who shows exasperation at her father’s supposedly unruly retinue of knights, and at Lear’s continuing exercise of the very rights he gave away. Hoping to anger him into leaving her house, Goneril encourages her servant Oswald to be less attentive and deferential to the king and his company. Elsewhere in the house, the banished Kent, disguised as the servant Caius, applies for a position waiting on Lear. Pleased by the blunt speech and forthright manner of “Caius,” Lear takes the servant on. Kent, as Caius, meets Lear’s outspoken fool, who engages the old king in a set of serious jests that probe into the folly of his giving up his power. The fool’s criticisms of the king’s shortsightedness prove justified when Goneril angrily demands that her father dismiss half of his 100 knights. Furious, Lear storms out of her home, vowing to take refuge with Regan. He is unaware, however, that his elder daughters have discussed the issue, and Regan is likewise prepared to curtail his “privileges.”

Meanwhile, Gloucester, now convinced that Edgar is plotting his death, plans to arrest his son. Edmund warns Edgar to flee, while pretending, for Gloucester’s sake, to attempt his capture. Alarmed, the unsuspecting Edgar obeys. Edmund then wounds himself and presents the injury to Gloucester as proof of Edgar’s murderous intent. Thoroughly taken in, Gloucester vows to make Edmund his heir. Now a fugitive, Edgar disguises himself as Poor Tom o’ Bedlam, a mad beggar.

Not finding Regan at home, Lear and his followers continue on to Gloucester’s castle. Regan and Cornwall have arrived there ahead of him, ostensibly to seek advice from the old earl. Kent, whom the king has sent before him with a message for Regan, encounters Goneril’s servant Oswald, and they quarrel. In the midst of the altercation, Regan and her husband Cornwall enter; displeased by Kent’s rough manner, they have him put in the stocks as punishment.

Lear arrives at Gloucester’s castle to find his servant Caius (really Kent) in the stocks, and Regan and Cornwall unwilling to see the king. At this point, Lear loses his temper. Regan and Goneril appear together and form a united front against him, demanding that he give up his entire retinue and submit to their authority. Heart-broken and defiant, Lear curses them and storms out of the castle with his fool as a storm approaches. Gloucester releases Kent from the stocks and offers to help him find the missing king. Later, Kent informs a trustworthy knight that a power struggle between Cornwall and Albany is imminent and sends a message with him to Cordelia in France, informing her of the new developments.

Out in the storm, Lear begins to go mad—“My wits begin to turn” (King Lear, 3.2.68). He exhorts the forces of nature to rise up and destroy his ungrateful daughters for their mistreatment of him. The fool sensibly notes that only those out of doors, meaning themselves, are going to be harmed by the rain. Kent, as Caius, enters, and leads them to shelter, a lean-to against the castle walls. There, Lear and the fool discover Edgar, half-naked and gibbering in his own disguise as Poor Tom. The deranged Lear quickly enters into a bizarre colloquy with Poor Tom, seeing in the supposed beggar’s condition a reflection of his own woes: “Didst thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to this?” (King Lear, 3.4.50-51). Edgar maintains his masquerade, claiming to have once been “a servingman, proud in heart and mind, that curled my hair, wore gloves in my cap, served the lust of my mistress’ heart, and did the act of darkness with her” (King Lear, 3.4.83-86). As Poor Tom, he raves about the demons that now torment him.

Meanwhile, Gloucester informs Edmund that a French army has landed at Dover, intending to restore Lear to power. Even though this is treason to England’s new rulers, the loyal Gloucester ventures forth to send Lear on to his rescuers at Dover. Edmund betrays his father to Cornwall for his own advancement. Unaware of this latest treachery, Gloucester locates the disguised Kent on the heath and arranges for him to take Lear to Cordelia’s forces at Dover. Returning home, Gloucester is ambushed by an enraged Regan and Cornwall, who bind him, accuse him of treason, and gouge out his eyes. Horrified by the monstrous act, a servant tries to stop Cornwall, losing his life but mortally wounding Cornwall in the process. Conscious now of Edmund’s betrayal, the blinded Gloucester is thrown outdoors. He encounters Edgar, still disguised as Poor Tom, who, stricken by his father’s injuries, leads the despairing earl to Dover.

Cornwall’s death inaugurates the disintegration of Goneril and Regan’s power. Disillusioned by his wife’s cruelty to her father, Albany turns against Goneril, who has anyway settled her affections elsewhere. Goneril falls in love with Edmund and secretly plans to eliminate the mild mannered Albany. Regan too falls in love with Edmund.

Meanwhile, at Dover, Cordelia prepares for war and searches for her father, who has escaped his keepers and is running madly through the fields. Edgar and Gloucester reach Dover, where Edgar cures his father’s suicidal despair by pretending to lead him to the cliffs, then letting him “jump” and informing him of his “miraculous” survival. Unaware of the ruse, Gloucester resigns himself to life for the time being. Just then, a deranged Lear, decked in weeds, enters. Still teetering between sanity and madness, Lear recognizes Gloucester, and they have a brief, poignant reunion before madness overtakes the king once more. Finally, some of Cordelia’s attendants enter and lead Lear to safety. Journeying onward, Gloucester and Edgar encounter Oswald, sent to kill the blinded earl, but Edgar slays the steward instead, finding on his body a letter from Goneril asking Edmund to kill Albany.

Cordelia and a remorseful, now lucid Lear finally reunite at Dover, while Goneril and Regan muster their army for battle against the French forces. By now, Edmund has captivated the widowed Regan as well as Goneril. He tries to decide which sister he wants and, as a commander

THE WISDOM OF FOOLS

Lear’s fool would have been a familiar figure to Shakespeare’s audiences. Indeed, the figure of the court fool dates back to ancient times, and their absurd antics while in the service of their masters have been recorded in history. Tradition taught that fools were touched by God, because some had a physical or mental impairment, and therefore deserved privileges. However, the vast majority of professional fools had no handicap at all, but were skillful masters of a repertoire of bawdy songs, acrobatics, repartee, and/or clever jests. From medieval times, fools were often employed to provide entertainment for noble and royal houses. They were expected to gibe at and question, as well as amuse, their masters, the way Lear’s fool does in the play. In Shakespeare’s day, King James himself had a fool, Archie Armstrong, who was treated indulgently and enjoyed great license.

of the sisters’ army, makes his own plans to kill Lear and Cordelia, even though Albany has promised to spare them.

The battle is joined, and the French are defeated. Lear and Cordelia suffer capture and imprisonment, but try to take comfort in each other’s presence. Fearing the sympathy his prisoners will evoke in the people, Edmund charges a captain to sneak into Lear and Cordelia’s cell and kill them. Meanwhile, dissension erupts in the victors’ camp: Regan and Goneril quarrel over Edmund, whom Albany summarily accuses of treason. Astonished, Edmund demands to know who has laid this charge. Edgar appears, his identity still hidden, and challenges Edmund to single combat. Invoking the “rule of knighthood,” Edmund accepts the challenge and they fight (King Lear, 5.3.143). Edmund is mortally wounded, whereupon Edgar reveals his true identity and informs his half-brother of their father’s recent death. Acknowledging his crimes, Edmund resigns himself to death. More tumult follows as Kent arrives on the scene and messengers announce that Goneril has poisoned Regan and stabbed herself on witnessing Edmund’s defeat. Their bodies are brought forth and laid beside the dying Edmund, who at the last moment admits his plot to kill Lear and Cordelia. But even as Albany dispatches a messenger to countermand Edmund’s order, Lear enters, bearing the dead Cordelia in his arms. Having lost his tenuous hold on sanity again, the broken-hearted king does not seem to notice Goneril and Regan’s corpses or the now undisguised Kent’s presence. Lamenting the death of his beloved Cordelia, Lear expires over her body. Left to tend the realm under the shadow of this apocalypse are two battered survivors, Edgar and Albany: “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young/Shall never see so much, nor live so long” (King Lear, 5.3.332-33).

Changing world views

The “late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us,” observes Gloucester, blaming the heavens for earthly discord and showing a pagan fear of supernatural forces that he does not understand (King Lear, 1.2.103-104). Out of earshot, his son Edmund disagrees:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars … I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
(King Lear, 1.2.124-32)

The two attitudes reflect the view Shakespeare’s world held of earlier, pagan society, as well as religious controversies of Shakespeare’s own era. Society in his day regarded pagans as superstitious and fearful, or atheistic, or saved by a commitment to truth and similar virtues (Elton, p. 115). In the above instance, Gloucester embodies the superstitious; Edmund, the atheistic. Aside from this difference, the two also reflect an emerging skepticism in Shakespeare’s day in relation, for example, to how the Bible explained creation. “Nothing can be made out of nothing,” says Lear in the play (King Lear, 1.4.130). Clearly a pagan, Lear invokes various gods in the play, but he also utters a line that might have easily been voiced by Renaissance skeptics, such as Thomas Harriot (1560-1621) who questioned God’s creation of the world out of nothing. A mathematician, Harriot “did not like … the old storie of the Creation of the world. He could not beleeve the old position” (Aubrey in Elton, p. 187).

Other debates in Shakespeare’s day concerned astrology (whose validity the general public first began to doubt in the early seventeenth century), the existence of miracles, and possession by evil spirits. Through Edgar’s character in King Lear, “demonic possession and “miracles” are shown to be frauds” (Elton, p. 93). As Poor Tom, Edgar raves about demonic possession. But he is an avowed dissembler; the audience knows he is faking it. He likewise dissembles about the so-called miracle of his father’s survival when he fools the old man into thinking he has jumped from the cliffs at Dover. “Thy life’s a miracle,” says Edgar, knowing full well that it is a miracle he manufactured (King Lear, 4.6.55). In his own writings, King James condemned belief in miracles and other superstitions, so that by addressing them in the play, Shakespeare spoke directly to the monarch’s concerns.

Sources and literary context

Shakespeare drew on the drama as well as the history of his day for sources, most notably the anonymous play The True Chronicle History of King Leir (c. 1590). He also, as indicated, drew on Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587), which took its account of Lear from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1135). Apart from these sources, Shakespeare’s main plot may have been partly inspired by a contemporary event. In the early 1600s, Brian Annesley, a former courtier of Queen Elizabeth, suffered a “distemperature of mind and memory,” and the eldest of his three daughters, Grace, planned to have him declared insane and “altogether unfit to govern himself or his estate” (Wildegos in Bullough, p. 309). Annesley’s youngest daughter, Cordell, intervened, writing to one of King James’s chief ministers, Lord Cecil, on her father’s behalf. Cecil came to the rescue, and Annesley lived out his days in the care of a friend (Sir James Croft). Annesley died in 1604, willing most of his possessions to Cordell. From this real-life incident, Shakespeare may have derived the idea of Lear’s madness, which has no precedent in the earlier plays or histories.

The subplot of Gloucester is adapted from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590), a knightly romance that was among the most popular of Renaissance England. In the second book of Arcadia, the heroes encounter a young man named Leonatus leading his blind father. This father had been king of Paphlagonia until he was tricked, deposed, and blinded by his bastard son Plexirtus. Left to wander, the former king encounters Leonatus, the legitimate son he had abandoned. The parallel with the Gloucester plot is clear, although Leonatus is not disguised. Again, a real-life incident may have been influential. In 1604-1605, Sir Robert Dudley, the bastard son of a favorite in Queen Elizabeth’s court, tried to certify his legitimacy in court. His father had not admitted marriage to his mother so as not to anger the queen. The case, which Dudley lost, created a stir in England. Finally, Edgar’s masquerade as Tom o’Bedlam in the play was Shakespeare’s invention, although he drew on Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures (1603) to furnish details of Tom’s professed punishment by demons.

Events in History at the Time the Play Was Written

England’s poor

At the time King Lear was written, almost half of England’s population consisted of the poor. There were the visible poor (maimed soldiers, the sick, survivors of natural disasters like fire, and households overburdened with children), and there were the invisible poor—average, humble families who labored for an insufficient pittance. “When they have worke,” said a 1638 report on the laboring poor in Hertfordshire, “the wages given them is so small that it hardly sufficeth to buy the poore man and his familye breed,” and so people starved (Bridenbaugh, p. 376). The result was intense suffering, an escalating problem since the 1590s, aggravated by depressions and crop failures. In the cloth trade, unemployed spinners would take to the road, wandering through town and country, begging for scraps. On farms, crop failures led to food shortages that, in turn, led to starvation and sometimes death for children. This kind of suffering had become widespread by Shakespeare’s day and “must be understood entirely apart from the better-known problem of the visible poor” (Bridenbaugh, p. 377).

The growing population, along with other developments, exacerbated the situation from the sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries, causing consternation among government authorities and churchmen alike. To stop people from starving—and rioting—poor laws were passed in 1598 and 1601. Each parish, according to the poor laws, had to take responsibility for its own poor. The laws authorized the parish to levy rates on parish dwellers for relief of the destitute, the amount depending on the value of each property, in accord with the Anglican tenet that everyone is responsible for almsgiving according to his or her ability. Attempts were made to contain the number of poor in a parish, using methods like

BEDLAM BEGGARS

The origin of the Bedlam beggar harks back to c. 1247 when the priory of Saint Mary of Bethlehem was first built in London. By 1402, the priory was being used as a hospital for the insane, and the institution came to be called “Bedlam,” a corruption of “Bethlehem.” By Shakespeare’s day, the term referred not only to discharged mental patients licensed to beg, but also to those who feigned madness and prior institutionalization. they “commonly walked ‘bare-legged and barearmed,’ and called themselves Poor Tom” (Foakes in Shakespeare, p. 238). In King Lear, Edgar, in his disguise as Poor Tom, professes possession by demons—Flibbertigibbet, Modo, Mahu, Frateretto, and Hoppedance are fiends who prey upon him. The image plays on a superstitious belief that an addled person was possessed by evil spirits.

the census to limit the number of recipients on poor relief. Vagrants and recent arrivals in a community would be sent back to their home parishes.

For the most part, society frowned on vagrants like King Lear’s Poor Tom, believing that idlness drove them to “seek their meate … with Begging, Filching, and Stealing’ when they should be laboring” (Bridenbaugh, p. 385). In fact, vagrancy was an offense whose perpetrators suffered punishments such as branding (with a V) and ear-boring, two penalties prescribed by laws in 1572 and 1604. There was widespread fear in society of the criminal vagrant, which made people reluctant to give alms to any vagrant. The general perception was that vagrants were shiftless, despite the reality that many of them did not avoid labor but were itinerant laborers or temporary workers. At the same time, a growing faction of society showed genuine concern for the poor, and sought reform. Homilies, or sermons of the era, exhorted worshippers to “open their hand unto their brethern that were pore” and admonished those who “have great plentie of meats and drinkes, great store of moth-eaten apparel,” but will not “part with any peece of your super-fluities to helpe and succor the poore, hungry, & naked” (homilies in Elton, p. 227). There were people who heeded the homilies, and attempted to improve conditions. Some communities established almshouses, but such efforts were mostly directed at the visible poor. Still, the countryside remained riddled with unidentified impoverished, respectable persons whom neither the poor laws nor the reformers ever detected. In sum, a large share of the era’s misery “passed unnoticed,” which brings to mind King Lear’s self-recrimination for the poverty he never knew existed until he himself experienced it (Bridenbaugh, p. 376):

… Oh, I have ta’en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
     (King Lear, 3.4.34-38)

Addled parents and defiant children

From about the 1580s, England began to take a heightened interest in suicide, the insane, and milder mental and emotional disturbances such as melancholy. Bethlehem (also spelled Bethlem) Hospital became infamous for its inmates, thanks in no small part to Jacobean playwrights. In reality, it was far less imposing than its image suggested. The asylum, called Bedlam in the popular vernacular, was actually a small structure housing fewer than 30 inmates, who “languished there for years, living in squalid conditions without adequate medical treatment” (MacDonald, p. 2).

Courts were fairly scrupulous about who was declared mentally deranged. They usually appointed relatives or friends to care for an insane landowner. And before the insane man’s property could be turned over to a guardian, a jury had to declare that the man was too deranged to manage his estate and had been for a year or longer. King James himself took special interest in the insane, instructing the courts to make sure such unfortunates were “freely committed to their best and nearest friends, that can receive no benefit by their death” and that committees be “bound to answer for … the very just value of their estates … for the benefit of such lunatic (if he recover) or of the next heir” (James in MacDonald, p. 5). As suggested by this edict, insanity was considered a temporary state, a perception that sheds light on Lear’s moments of lucidity in Shakespeare’s play. When a madman recovered, taught the law, his property ought to be restored to him, minus the amount expended on his care. Paupers who were mad received attention too. By the time King Lear was written, the government had ordered parishes to consider the impoverished insane as part of the so-called deserving poor, who, like the physically disabled, could not work through no fault of their own.

What was thought to cause lunacy in early 1600s England? Exhibiting superstitions of the age, people pointed to witchcraft, possession by the devil, and astrology. Physicians invoked more rational explanations, tracing mental disorders to emotional disturbances, which they, in turn, traced to family issues—unrequited love, marital disharmony, the death of a child, perhaps even “filial ingratitude” (King Lear, 3.4.12-15).

“It is the duty of the child,” taught Alexander Nowell, dean of St. Paul’s in London, “to frame their life according to the will of their father” (Nowell in Greaves, p. 282). Catholic and Protestant families alike raised children to revere and obey their elders, and to relieve parents in times of economic or physical distress. Of course, there were exceptions—uncaring children who shirked their duties to elderly or infirm parents, as Lear’s daughters do. But generally children fulfilled their obligations to parents, which must have made Goneril and Regan’s spurning of Lear seem particularly egregious to the audience in Shakespeare’s day.

Aside from family strife, emotional disturbances were seen as the consequence of old age. The aged, it was thought, became children again, difficult to please, easily angered, given to talking to themselves. When Goneril speaks of her father’s “unruly waywardness,” which “infirm and choleric years bring with them,” she invokes this perception of the elderly (King Lear, 1.1.299-300). Interestingly, children like Goneril who challenged parental authority were considered delusional themselves. People actually spoke of the defiant child as being “brainsick” (MacDonald, p. 165).

From disunity to the promise of unity

In contrast to the divisiveness featured in King Lear, King James stressed the importance of unity in Britain. Referring back to the legendary first British kingdom and the friction that ensued after Brutus divided it among his heirs, James admonished his son, Prince Henry, to refrain from dividing it further:

And in case it please God to prouide you to all these three Kingdomes, make your eldest son Isaac, leauing him all your kingdomes; and prouide the rest with priuate possessions: Otherwayes by deuiding your kingdomes, yee shall leaue the see of diuision and discord among your posteritie; as befell to this He, by the diuision and assignement thereof, to the three sones of Brutus.…
(James in Shakespeare, p. 15)

James even tried to repair this initial division, proposing that Scotland and England unite into one kingdom. The goal would not be reached in his lifetime; it would take another hundred years before Scotland joined with England in the Act of Union (1707). Still, James acquired an image as unifier. Among other indications of this image was a show performed in London in 1605. Called The Triumphs of Reunited Britannia, the show celebrated the inauguration of London’s new mayor (Sir Leonard Holliday). It also suggested that the separate crowns of England and Scotland had merged in King James. Recalling the legendary history of King Brutus (or “Brute”), it recapitulated how his division of Britain among his three sons had led to disharmony and war. From this retrospective, the show telescoped forward to 1605, at which point its legendary characters “step out of time to celebrate the fact that the chaos they created has been reduced to order by the ‘new Brute’, King James” (Dutton, p. 133). Thus, in dealing with the division of a kingdom, King Lear addresses a topic of discussion in early seventeenth-century England.

Reception

King Lear is recorded as having been performed at the court of King James in 1606. The earliest surviving critical commentary on the play, however, does not appear until 1681, when Nahum Tate, an Irish playwright, explained, in a letter to a friend, his reasons for revising Shakespeare’s tragedy for the seventeenth-century stage:

I found the whole [of King Lear] to answer your Account of it, a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht; yet so dazling in their Disorder, that I soon perceiv’d I had seiz’d a Treasure. ‘Twas my good fortune to light on one Expedient to rectifie what is wanting in 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.
(Tate in Harris and Scott, p. 93)

Tate’s revisions included “making the Tale conclude in a Success to the innocent distrest persons: Otherwise I must have incumbred the Stage with dead Bodies” (Tate in Harris and Scott, p. 93). Surprisingly, Tate’s changes were so successful that for the next 150 years his version of King Lear was performed far more frequently than Shakespeare’s.

Joseph Addison, the eighteenth-century essayist, disagreed with Tate’s changes. Tate’s version of King Lear had, in Addison’s view, “lost half its beauty” (Addison in Harris and Scott, p. 94). Nineteenth-century intellectuals concurred, expressing a strong preference for Shakespeare’s original, for which William Hazlitt expressed awe and wonder:

It is then the best of Shakespear’s plays, for it is the one in which he is most in earnest.… This depth of nature, this force of passion, this tug and war of the elements of our being, this firm faith in filial piety, and the giddy anarchy and whirling tumult of the thoughts at finding this prop failing it, the contrast between the fixed, immoveable basis of natural affection, and the rapid, irregular starts of imagination, suddenly wrenched from all its accustomed holds and resting places in the soul, this is what Shakespear has given, and what nobody else but he could give.
(Hazlitt in Harris and Scott, p. 108)

—Jacob Littleton and Joyce Moss