Shakespeare (71 page)

The Porter is indeed an image of the Hell Porter in the mystery plays, and it has been well observed that the banqueting scene in the play is related to the scene of feasting in that part of the mystery cycle entitled “The Death of Herod.” The death and doom of the ancient plays survive in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, as another layer of darkness and supernatural fear. Shakespeare is much more concerned with the ancient forces of the earth than with the omens of the sky.
Macbeth
is a poem of the night. Yet, in any discussion of Macbeth himself, the concept of darkness is not required. He is the most vital and energetic character within the play, a natural force, surpassing any conventional notion of good and evil. He partakes of the sublime. Like many of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, he seems actively to seek out his fate.

Since the play is mentioned in a production by the Children of St. Paul’s in early July 1606, it must have been performed at the Globe before that date. So
Macbeth
was played during the season that ran from Easter on 21 April until the middle of July, when once more the playhouses were closed as a result of the plague. The King’s Men remained in the neighbourhood of London for a short period, however, in order to entertain King Christian of Denmark, who was the brother-in-law of James; he remained in England from 15 July to 11 August, and Heminges was paid for “three playes before his Majestie and the kinge of Denmarke at Greenwich and Hampton Court.” It has plausibly been asserted that one of these plays was
Macbeth
, performed before the royal parties in the early days of August.

It is not at all clear, however, that King Christian and his hosts attended to the great drama. The Danish king was a heavy drinker, who on one
evening was carried out of the entertainments in a state of insensibility. Everyone seemed to follow his example, according to Sir John Harington, and the English nobles “wallow in beastly delights” while their ladies “roll in intoxication.” He added that “I ne’er did see such lack of good order, discretion and sobriety. The Gunpowder fright is got out of all our heads …”
⁵
The men fell down and the women were sick, an apt token of the change that had taken place since the days of Elizabeth. If it was a new society, it was not necessarily a more decorous one.

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
.

T
here 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.

He also read an account of some spiritual malpractice by Jesuit priests in Samuel Harsnett’s
A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures
. It was an account that had some resonance after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, but for Shakespeare it had a specific interest. Among the Jesuit priests, who were accused of feigning ceremonies of exorcism on some impressionable chambermaids, were Thomas Cottam and Robert Debdale. Cottam was the brother of the Stratford schoolmaster, John Cottam, to whom, many years before, Shakespeare probably owed his introduction to the Lancastrian recusant families of Hoghton Tower and Rufford Hall. Robert Debdale had been a neighbour of the Hathaways at Shottery and, being of an age with Shakespeare, may well have attended the Stratford school with him. So it is likely
that Shakespeare turned to Harsnett’s account for news of his contemporaries, and only by accident or indirection discovered material that would be of use in
King Lear
.

We may picture his mind and imagination as a vast assimilator, picking up trifles that were later polished until they glowed. He incorporates so many disparate elements, and conflates so many inconsistent sources, that it is impossible to gauge what attitude he takes towards the unfolding drama of King Lear. He is so absorbed by the matter to hand that there is neither opportunity nor occasion to dispense judgement except of the most blatant theatrical kind. The drama has no ultimate “meaning.” In a play filled with rage and death, this may be the hardest lesson of all. Yet it may contain redemption. To watch
King Lear
is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning to life and that there are limits to human understanding. So we lay down a heavy burden and are made humble. That is what Shakespearian tragedy accomplishes for us.

We glimpse here the insistent and instinctive patterns of his imagination that have nothing to do with homilies or sermons. He moved forward quickly with chiming words and themes, parallel phrases and situations, contrasting characters and events, working out their destinies. He improvised; he was surprised by his characters. He picked material from anywhere and everywhere. The feigning of madness by “poor Tom,” for example, is amplified by allusions to Samuel Harsnett’s account of apparent diabolic possession; in front of large crowds the Jesuit priests summoned forth various unclean spirits from the bodies of the women. Shakespeare uses the names of the devils that were invoked on this occasion. He also borrows the language of possession. It was a way of intimating that Tom’s madness is feigned, just as the Jesuit priests are engaged in what Harsnett describes as “the feat of juggling and deluding the people by counterfeit miracles.” But is there not some deeper connection between the theatre and these rites of exorcism, in front of an awed and astonished crowd? It is as if the “mimic superstition” of the papists was somehow replicated or complemented by the illusions of the playhouse. The invocation of Roman Catholic superstition, far from lancing Tom’s folly, somehow increases the sacredness of Lear’s terror. It may also have led Shakespeare to contemplate the nature of illusion itself. Even when the powers of the Jesuit priests are feigned, they seem to be effective.

That is why many scholars have deemed
King Lear
to be a mystery play in all but name, an echo of Catholic ritual satisfying the liturgical and iconographic hunger of those who professed the old religion. The desire for ceremony
mony outlives the faith that first employed it. In fact there may be grace and redemption in the ceremony itself. It is certainly true that in 1609 and 1610 a group of Catholic actors performed
King Lear
in various sympathetic houses in Yorkshire. It would be absurd to suggest that this was a deliberate strategy on Shakespeare’s part. It is more likely that the forces of his nature comprehended sacred, as well as secular, realities and that this reversion to old imagery was wholly instinctive.

There is another possible “source” for the play. An old courtier and “Gentleman Pensioner,” Brian Annesley, was suffering from senility. Two of his daughters wished him to be declared insane, and thus “altogether unfit to govern himself or his estate.”
¹
But a third daughter, by the name of Cordell or Cordelia, pleaded on her father’s behalf to Lord Cecil. After her father’s death in the summer of 1604, in fact, Cordell inherited most of his property. Cordell Annesley then went on to marry Sir William Harvey, Southampton’s stepfather. The case was well known, even beyond the Southampton circle, and indeed it may have prompted the revival of the old version of
King Leir
in 1605. It was a common enough occurrence for a contemporary sensation to be staged in the playhouses. It could have been performed by the Queen’s Men at the Red Bull, for example, a playhouse that had been built in 1605 for just such popular or populist drama with what Thomas Dekker called its “unlettered” audience “of porters and carters.”
²

But
King Lear
leaves its sources far behind. Shakespeare removes the Christian allusions of the earlier drama, and gives it a thoroughly pagan atmosphere. This is a play in which the gods have turned silent. Shakespeare also strips away the romance elements, and fashions his plot out of disloyalty and ingratitude. The happy finale of the original
King Leir
, for example, is abandoned here for the numinous and tragic end of the protagonists. He invented the death of Cordelia cradled in her father’s arms, a scene not to be found in any of the sources. The unremitting horror of that conclusion has prompted one eminent critic, Frank Kermode, to postulate the play’s “unsparing cruelty” and “an almost sadistic attitude to the spectator.”
³
Certainly the death of Cordelia would have come as an unhappy surprise to anyone acquainted only with the old play.
King Lear
is deeper and darker than any presumed original, with the forces of transcendence somewhere at work within it.

There are images throughout the play of the human body being wracked and tortured, as if Shakespeare were invoking the image of the Divine Human torn and dismembered. By slow degrees the wheel is turned, and all is
thrown into agony and confusion. The play also elicits some of Shakespeare’s most enduring preoccupations, particularly that of the father and daughter. The family, and conflict within the family, are the bases of the play itself. Indeed the family is at the centre of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy; more than any other contemporary dramatist he is concerned with familial conflict. The action of
King Lear
itself exists only within the context of domestic hostility and rage. Lear and Cordelia are reunited, if not necessarily reconciled, and anticipate the family reunions of the later plays where in particular father and daughter achieve a living harmony—whether it be Pericles and Marina, Leontes and Perdita, Prospero and Miranda, Cymbeline and Imogen. The Latinate sonority of the daughters’ names suggests, too, that they are in part formal or primal figures of filial love. In the earlier plays, by contrast, fathers and daughters are at odds—Capulet and Juliet, Shylock and Jessica, Leonato and Hero, Brabantio and Desdemona, Egeus and Hermia, Baptista and Katherina, are the most prominent examples. It is a pattern too persistent to be altogether neglected. In the late plays, when Shakespeare himself was reaching the end of his life, an ageing father is reunited with a long-absent daughter; there may be feelings of guilt and shame associated with this absence, but all is forgiven. There are rarely mothers and daughters in Shakespeare’s plays. The essential bond is father and daughter. It may not be the pattern of his life, but it is clearly the pattern of his imagination.