King Leir: General Introduction
Para1Critics since the eighteenth century have generally been unimpressed with The Chronicle History of King Leir (1594?/1605). Often read against Shakespeareʼs King Lear, the anonymous Leir has frequently figured as trivial fluff when compared with the grand tragedy of Shakespeareʼs
play. As a recent scholar sympathetic to Leir sums up this critical tradition,
Leir was called ‘execrableʼ in the eighteenth century, ‘mechanicalʼ in the nineteenth, ‘flawedʼ in the twentieth, and ‘pleasantʼ in the twenty first, always in comparison with Shakespeareʼs play(Ioppolo 165). There have, of course, been a few champions of the play. John Addington Symonds, for instance, found moments of
powerand
pathosin Leir (Symonds 293), and Tolstoy famously preferred Leir to Lear (Tolstoy 63). Despite this occasional recognition of Leirʼs strengths, however, H.H. Furness seems to speak on behalf of the critical majority when arguing that Leir is
a good specimen of the third-rate class of comedies(Furness 378). Even the playʼs editors—a group of readers likely to search for silver linings—have generally cast the play in an unfavorable light. Donald Michie, for instance, argues that the playʼs verse is
wooden and ponderous(Michie 39), that the play seems overly talky, and that its dramatically interesting moments were clearly improved upon when Shakespeare re-wrote them. Sir Sidney Lee, editor of a 1909 edition, generally concurs with Michie:
Apart from its Shakespearian association,he claims,
the drama only deserves attention as a specimen of the humble average fare which commanded itself to the Elizabethan playgoer(Lee xix). Leir, then, has primarily engaged critical attention as a curiosity of literary history: it has seemed interesting only because it is the
clay out of which Shakespeare fashioned the most poignant of all his triumphs in tragic art(Lee x).
Para2While the play may warrant some of the negative evaluations it has borne over the
last few centuries, such critical readings would have seemed strange to the playʼs
earliest audiences; when Leir first appeared on stage, that is, it seems to have offered something more than the
humble average fare.As Lee himself points out, the play was dramatically quite elaborate compared with contemporary plays: it features a substantial props list, including a wide variety of specific costumes and changes, and it offered a relatively complicated soundscape (Lee xiv). Leirʼs dramaturgy, then, if not its
wooden verse,was certainly quite sophisticated. We know, too, that the play was first acted by the historically important and popular Queenʼs Men (or by part of the Queenʼs Men) in tandem with Sussexʼs Men. While the Queenʼs Men were gradually falling out of favor in London as the Lord Chamberlainʼs Men and the Admiralʼs Men gained in popularity there (i.e. as Shakespearean and Marlovian drama became de rigeur in the city), they remained influential in 1594, as they had been for the previous decade. Such evidence suggests that Leir was attractive to a successful company operating under the aegis of the kingdomʼs most powerful patron. The probable success of the play is perhaps most clear, however, in the box office take from the Rose on the two days that it was performed in 1594, on April 6 and April 8. According to the diary and account book of Philip Henslowe—a theatre entrepreneur who owned the theatre at which Leir was first staged—the play took 38s on its first day and 26s on its second (Henslowe 21). These sums are certainly not exorbitant, but they are considerably above average for a first and second performance at Hensloweʼs Rose Theater. We might also recognize the wide popularity of Leir—at least outside of London—from information provided by the title page of the 1605 edition of the play: according to the title page, the been
diuers and sundry times lately acted.While the Queenʼs Men probably never took the play to London again after 1594, the title page suggests that they continued to perform Leir throughout the next decade of their existence, a fact that implies its general success over a fairly long span of time. In light of such evidence, it seems doubtful that early modern audiences (or theatre professionals) thought that the play was, to quote Theobald,
execrable(Theobald 5.217).
Para3The distinction between drama performed inside and outside London might provide one
explanation for the generally negative critical response to Leir. Until recently, theatre historians have provided us with a London-centric story
about the Queenʼs Men and their career: the company was successful until the early
1590s; by the middle of 1590s, they came to seem outmoded, and they were consequently
compelled to leave the city and tour the provinces, performing their second-rate plays
for unsophisticated rubes while sophisticated audiences attended fascinating and avant garde plays in the city (cf. Chambers 3:184 and Pinciss 321). Such a story about the Queenʼs Men recognizes that they were, at their inception,
an all-star company, composed of the best actors from other companies, including Leicesterʼs
Men and Sussexʼs Men. It also recognizes that they were the most important company
in the city and at court throughout the 1580s. After the 1580s, however, we are expected
to recognize that things went downhill for the Queenʼs Men, that they could no longer
compete in Londonʼs burgeoning theatrical marketplace, and that they sold a variety
of playtexts to the printers in order to remain afloat. Contrary to this often-told
story, recent historians have pointed out that such a vision of the Queenʼs Men and
their career misreads the position of the company in early modern England: this tale
of the Queenʼs Menʼs dissipation erroneously presumes, for instance, that they aimed
to be at the centre of Londonʼs theatrical world, that the theatrical world outside
of London was an artistic wasteland, and that one can measure an early modern theatrical
companyʼs success only in relation to their reputation in London and at court. None
of these assumptions stand up to scrutiny. Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean,
for instance, have pointed out that the Queenʼs Men, while not thriving in London
or at court after the 1580s,
were quite simply the best known and most widely travelled professional company in the kingdom from the beginning of their career in 1583 to their final year, 1602–03(McMillin and MacLean 67). More to the point, however, McMillin and MacLean emphasize that the Queenʼs Men, when travelling throughout the nation rather than competing in London, were simply fulfilling the goals for which they were initially constituted. The company was, in part, an agent of Elizabeth Iʼs religious and political ideology, and it was formed under the auspices of the Queen, Sir Francis Walsingham, and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in order to spread this ideology throughout the nation. According to this version of the Queenʼs Menʼs biography, their tours throughout the nation into the seventeenth century are not a sign of failure, but a matter of their clearly defined goal. The plays they performed were suited to the world in which they performed: the company was expected to perform popular and entertaining plays that also espoused or endorsed ideas generally agreeable to the crown. Indeed, it was only by being popular and entertaining—something other than
execrable—that the Queenʼs Men could fulfill at least some of the goals that inspired their formation.
Para4Through this revised story of the Queenʼs Men, we might better understand Leir, and we might better recognize its strengths. Rather than reading Leir as a play that fails because it is different from Shakespeareʼs sublime tragedy,
it seems more reasonable to read the play through the theatrical and professional
traditions in which it originally operated. It makes sense, that is, to follow Grace
Ioppolo here and to recognize the playʼs dramatic energy and vitality, even if the
play fails to reach the philosophical or poetic heights of Lear. Though both plays stage the same historical matter, measuring Leir against Lear seems absurd when one considers the singularity of Lear, and it also seems historically inapposite when one considers the dramatic project
in which the Queenʼs Men were engaged. While Leir is, perhaps, at times melodramatic, it is also dramatically effective, often quite
funny, potentially moving, and filled with characters far more engaging than critics
have tended to allow. When removing it from the shadow of Lear—a play that served vastly different theatrical ends—one can see such qualities clearly.
More specifically, one is suddenly able to recognize that Leir is a play likely to be well received by a variety of audiences throughout the kingdom,
audiences that probably saw it as solid entertainment with fairly orthodox and historically
rich ideas about justice, faith, governance, and loyalty. By re-thinking Leir in terms of the Queenʼs Men, then, one is not necessarily compelled to follow Tolstoy
and to argue that Leir is a better play than Lear, but one will be able to engage with Leir as something other than a bad version of the more famous play it influenced, thus
recognizing its real strengths by way of the tradition in which it was operating,
one that was popular and often dramatically engaging.
Para5Where earlier critics have found the play tedious in its moralism, theatrical experiments
in 2006 in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario, have allowed us to see the play differently.
Rather than reading the play and finding its poetic or philosophical limits, these
performances of the play by The Shakespeare and the Queenʼs Men Project allowed audiences,
scholars, and critics to experience the play on its feet and to witness its real dramatic
strengths which might be lost on the page. Surprisingly effective, for instance, was
Leirʼs still-accessible broad comedy, a comical aspect that richly complemented the otherwise
wearisome didactic moralism that characterizes much of the playʼs dialogue. As Robert
Cushman, a reviewer for The National Post, pointed out, the playʼs highpoint was its
comedy (Cushman), a fact most likely lost to readers who had access only to the playtext, where theatrical
comedy is often lost. Such an observation seems to correspond and expand upon one
of Ioppoloʼs observations about Mumford: she points to the kneeling scene and emphasizes
that his snide, funny asides trouble the sceneʼs overdone rhetoric of familial love
and obligation. What recent audiences recognized throughout Leir was analogous to what Iopollo finds in this single scene: throughout the play, when
staged with good clowns, is a certain comic energy that usefully punctuates the moralistic
seriousness that critics have found so troubling, even if it refuses to undermine
the seriousness entirely. As performance-minded critics have often pointed out, this
sense of light, good-natured ironization is typical of the Queenʼs Menʼs dramatic
practice (Ostovich, Syme, and Griffin 16–23), and it helps us to recognize a certain vitality in a play that audiences experience,
but readers miss.
Para6This theatrical experience of Leirʼs broad comedy also helps us to recognize a richness of character that critics often
overlook or ignore. Taking the case of Cordella as exemplary, the playʼs staging opened
up her character, emphasizing a complexity that often disappears in merely reading
her potentially tedious claims about virtue and devotion. For instance, after she
is disowned and set adrift from her family with nothing but the clothes on her back,
Cordella complains about her
father Leirwho
wrongshis child (Sc7 Sp11); she immediately retracts her laments, however, to insist that such suffering
is the pleasure of my Godand that she
willingly embraces the rod(Sc7 Sp11). Taking this speech as an example of her character, we may figure Cordella as a token of piety within a ham-handedly righteous play, but on stage she seems more complicated than this example from the text suggests. Specifically, Cordella participates in the playʼs broad comedy and in its occasionally witty dialogue, as we see in her asides during the love test scene. Here, Cordella seems attractively wry rather than sanctimonious. After Gonorillʼs declaration of love, Leir declares, rather pathetically,
Oh, how thy words revive my dying soul!(Sc3 Sp7); Cordella mockingly and parodically replies,
Oh, how I do abhor this flattery!(Sc3 Sp8). This declarative aside seems, in the playtext that one might read, like bald self-characterization, but when put on a stage, Cordellaʼs repetition of Leirʼs language transforms her line into a charmingly understated jab at her misguided father or her callow sisters. The same effect characterizes Cordellaʼs next aside, when Leir responds to Raganʼs overwrought profession of love with a grating poeticism.
Did never Philomel sing so sweet a note?(Sc3 Sp11), Leir asks, and Cordella replies aside,
Did never flatterer tell so false a tale?(Sc3 Sp7). When Shakespeareʼs Cordelia delivers similar asides during the love-test in Lear, we find in them nothing so engaging:
What shall Cordelia do?Cordelia asks aside after Goneril declares her love for Lear,
Love, and be silent(1.50); similarly, after Ragan makes a love declaration, she takes solace in the fact that she is
sure my loveʼs / More richer than my tongue(1.65-66). Such platitudes are, of course, not what we find in Leir, a play whose Cordella is far wittier than previous critics seem willing to recognize. Such quick and sharp asides remind us, that is, that there is something more to Cordellaʼs character than simple piety, a complexity we see again later in the play when she exchanges bawdy quips with Gallia and Mumford about Mumfordʼs mistresses. Perhaps she remains somewhat
flatas Michie suggests, but she is certainly not wholly one-dimensional, and she is certainly more than a mere cipher in which devotion and daughterly virtue are embodied.
Para7Of course, Leir is not straightforwardly comic, even if its comic elements contribute to its dramatic
success and if they provide a sense of characterological richness. When dealing with
Leir, we deal with a play that also negotiates issues of mourning and loss as these forces
affect decidedly humane figures. The play encourages us, for instance, to read Leir
as a character whose self-indulgence during the love-test is a plausible response
to the recent death of his wife. Leirʼs irrationality in the love-test scene is, in
Leir, not a function of his
type,but is instead an effect of inter- and intrapersonal conflicts. We can recognize this richer version of Leir when he speaks the playʼs first lines, lines that immediately point up the emotional turmoil which will ramify throughout the kingdom over the course of the play. Pointedly, the play begins with the end of a funeral procession, and it opens too on a scene of a husbandʼs mourning:
Thus to our grief, the obsequies performed / Of our—too late—deceased and dearest queen(Sc1 Sp1). From such an opening, the play announces that it is about a set of specific human relationships rather than being—simply—about morality, say, or about flat characterological types who teach lessons in a boringly didactic mode. Also compelling about Leirʼs opening speech is its poetry and its dramatic effect. With a syntax that stutters and turns, often leaving thoughts unfinished, it is a strong piece of dramatic poetry, one that reminds audiences of depth and dynamism while also playing up what Tolstoy calls Leirʼs
simple, natural, and deeply touching character(Tolstoy 63). Indeed, in light of such verse, it seems impossible to find the playʼs characters uniformly or unambiguously flat, a judgment common in the critical tradition. Instead of being merely
flat,these characters are, in a certain sense,
deepor
richin their individuation: they are subject to time and to biography, they respond to and change with their worlds. Ioppolo makes a similar point where she describes the opening speech as
unusually sensitivein its concern
for gender difference and the construction of family life(Ioppolo 172); here, she is right to recognize the power of Leirʼs speech here, its sense of properly humane concern, and its significance with respect to the play as a whole.
Para8Beyond the characterologically compelling aspects of the play, Leir also engages with theological matters that would have seemed topical and engaging
in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Among critics who point to
this theological topicality, James Jones argues that the play seems decidedly Puritan
when its characters declare their faith in providence and when they announce their
abject submission to the authority of an overwhelming, divine force. Characters such
as Cordella, Leir, and Perillus, that is, often point out that God ordains their fates,
and audiences regularly witness Godʼs implausible interventions, as when he appears
in the form of thunder, for instance, in order to protect the virtuous. While historically
and theologically problematic to identify such ideas as specifically Puritan—they
seems broadly Protestant rather than specifically Puritan—James is right to emphasize
that the play explicitly and conspicuously engages historically fraught questions
about the relationship between human lives and divine law, and that the answers it
gives to these questions—answers that would match what an audience heard from the
pulpit—might be characterized as Protestant. Indeed, such a generally Protestant point
of view suits the idea of the Queenʼs Men that McMillin and MacLean suggest when they
argue that the Queenʼs Men were their patronʼs de facto theatrical ambassadors, and it also corresponds with the arguments made by Stephen
Lynch, who finds in the play a broadly
Christiansense of providential retribution, one that recognizes a divine presence in the political and social world. For Lynch, Leir suffers
only a momentary lapse from virtuebefore he quickly repents and is rewarded for his return to spiritual sense (Lynch 165). Such a vision of the religiously endorsed political world would no doubt suit the queen, and it would also be meaningful to the playʼs audienceʼs: as Lynch compellingly points out, Leir ends not with a scene of enthronement, but with a scene of spiritual correction, one with which every member of the audience might identify.
Para9While the play might be spiritually edifying, Leir also treats monarchical politics and just rulership as central thematic concerns.
In this engagement with discussions of regal rule and court life—its concerns with
succession, say, or with the threat of flatterers—the play participates in a long
tradition of humanistic drama, a tradition that attempted to edify not only a general
audience, but also a
princely,or at least a politically powerful, audience. Considering that Leir was written under the aegis of the monarch, and that it was written with a plausible expectation of performance before the queen, this humanistic aspect of the play has gone surprisingly unglossed in the critical tradition. While critics such as Iopollo have pointed out that Leir deals with questions of succession at a historical moment when such questions were politically volatile (Iopollo 171), it seems important to recognize that such questions and such topicality are also central to a well established tradition of humanist drama that informs many of the playʼs intellectual problematics. An early example of this tradition in England can be found in the Thomas Nortonʼs Gorboduc, potentially the first
modernEnglish tragedy, performed for Elizabeth in 1562. Like Leir, Gorboduc treats large political questions about succession and the integrity of kingdom, and also like Leir it warns princes about
false-flattery—a topic that the genre often engages. The theatrical focus on such topics ultimately grows from a long tradition of political advice literature that circulated at the universities, including most significantly Erasmusʼ 1516 Institutio principis Christiani, or The Education of a Christian Prince. It is within this long tradition of advice to princes and the powerful that we might read Leir, and that we might make sense of Skalligerʼs short soliloquy in which he identifies himself as a
villain that, to curry favor, / Have given the daughter counsel ʼgainst the father. / But us the world this experience give / That he that cannot flatter cannot live(Sc9 Sp4). Locating Leir in this tradition might also explain the long laments Perillus offers about court life, or the conspicuous interjections about flattery that Cordella offers during the love-test scene, or the reappearance of the word
flatteryand its cognates sixteen times. Similarly, we might recognize that the engagement with these issues is a sign of its generic obligations and didactic ends which compel the playʼs dialogue in certain, perhaps boring, wooden, or baffling directions. By reiterating these traditional topoi in admittedly hackneyed ways, Leirʼs generic participation in a long tradition might help to explain the critical concerns with its tepid didacticism.
Para10If Leir is something more than a straightforwardly facile romance, the play is also clearly
structured as a romance, and stages a variety of decidedly romantic conventions as
well. At the end of Leir we find that the world is put right, that evil has been eliminated from the world
or the kingdom, and that the rightful king has returned home: typical of romance,
then,
banishment, exile, and separation are followed by reunion, restoration, and the avenging of all wrongs(Michie 35). Such a conclusion is fitting to a play in which audiences find characteristically romantic moments, as when the virtuous Cordella accidentally stumbles across a disguised and equally regal lover, or when a long lost king might be discovered and rescued, at the verge of starvation, by his disguised, estranged, and overwhelmingly virtuous daughter. While the complete implausibility of such scenarios might be troubling to modern audiences more sympathetic to the values of realism in their plots, this romantic conventionality seems fairly sophisticated where it corresponds with the playʼs theological and ideological program, the sort of program that Lynch and Jones discuss. In this sense, the playʼs moments of
simpleor even
simplisticromantic pleasure—where its disguised figures stumble across one another at the crucial moment, say—support, and are intellectually supported by, the historically specific providential logics that the play wrestles with in theological terms. If we find a romance here, we find not only a facile and trivial romance, but also a romance that embodies a set of explicitly conceived philosophical coordinates. This is the sort of world in which a reigning queen might find herself happily ensconced, the sort of world in which audiences know that monarchs are monarchs not only in this situation is dramatically enjoyable, but also because God has intervened to put each monarch on his or her throne.
Para11That the play ends happily—in a romantic mode—might also be a function of its historiographical
integrity rather than a function of its generic and theological investments. Against
the Leir story that the playʼs writer or writers inherited—a history discussed more thoroughly
below—the plot of Leir is an embellished (and felicitously foreshortened) version of what passed as the
truth at the end of the sixteenth century. According to the historiographers and poets
whose texts have been included with this edition—Holinshed, Spenser, Grafton, Higgins,
and Warner– the story that Leir stages is fairly accurate, even if it has been fleshed out with conventional romance
matter. At the end of the inherited Leir story, Leir reclaims the throne from his usurpers. The record suggests that his daughters
may have been given the kingdoms that they reigned, or they may have overtaken the
king who planned to pass them on at his death, but in all versions prior to Shakespeareʼs,
Leir happily reclaims his throne with the help of Cordella and her Gallian or French
husband. It is only after the playʼs conclusion that the historical record disagrees
in considerable ways with the story that Leir offers. As one finds in accounts of Higgins, say, or Spenser, or Holinshed, Leir
returns to the throne for three years before his death, after which time Cordella
takes control of the kingdom. The ideal romantic ending is ultimately scuttled by
historical records, however, when Cordella subsequently commits suicide after her
nephews (Cundah and Morgan, according to Spenser) lay claim to the territory that
their parents—Gonorill, Ragan, Cornwall and Albany (or Cambria, depending on the writer)—had
ruled during the interruption of Leirʼs reign. Such an intervention may seem ideologically
convenient—it serves to support the playʼs conspicuously thematized theological arguments,
say—but it seems also like the sort of intervention that one might reasonably make
when attempting to stage a compelling play, one that operates as a coherent narrative
with a clear beginning, crisis, and end. In this sense, Leir is best read, as McMillin and MacLean suggest, as
the sort of entertainment English people could be drawn to see in crowds without abjuring the combination of God, queen, Protestant church, and nation which the government depended on(McMillin and MacLean 166). The play might make a fairly strong claim to historical accuracy—at least considering the requirements of the theatre and according to the tradition that it inherited—but historical truth seems to be a secondary consideration.
Para12When engaging with the history of the Leir story in England, itʼs necessary to start with Geoffrey of Monmouthʼs 1135 Historia Regum Britannia which contains the earliest extant version of the story of Leir and his three daughters.
As Wilfrid Perrettʼs still seminal 1904 study of the Leir story argues, it was Geoffreyʼs version of the story that spawned all subsequent
English versions. Even though Geoffrey serves as the earliest extant source, however,
it is doubtful that one could ever pin down the ultimate source of the Leir, even if Geoffreyʼs missing chronicles came to light. As Perrett and other scholars
have clearly shown, the
historyof Leir bears a surprising similarity various folktales, suggesting that even the original version of the story is founded on a tale somewhat less than historically precise. As Lee points out,
the fable of an aged father who divides his property among his three daughters in reward for their profession of love, and then suffers a cruel disillusionment from a misinterpretation of their assurances, is a folk-story of great antiquity and wide distribution(Lee xxiii). Working more systematically to parse the ambiguous folktale origins of the Leir story, Alan R. Young has used the Aarne-Thompson classification system to identify folktales 510A and 923 as the potential folk source of Geoffreyʼs history: the first is the Cinderella story, where a princess is persecuted by female family members, and the second is the Leir story at its most general, where a father misunderstands his daughterʼs declaration of love. More provocatively, Young suggests that Leir was more closely related to this folk tradition than critics have previously recognized. Young points out that Galliaʼs courtship of Cordella in Leir is undertaken while Gallia is disguised; from this observation, he points out that disguised courtship is absent from any historical records of the Leir story, and that it is central to folktale type 510. From this evidence, he suggests that the roots of Leir are closely bound to a folk tradition as well as to literary and historiorgraphical versions of the story. Though provocative and potentially accurate, the argument seems beyond provability, primarily because there are more likely sources for the disguised courtship plot that Young points out. Indeed, one could simply look to the early modern English theatre and find the popular disguised-duke tradition in which a ruler often determines the virtue of a future bride while in disguise, though Leir seems to antedate the heyday of this tradition by several years. Regardless, Young is correct to suggest folktales 510 and 923 are analogs for the story in Leir, and that they might have served as seeds for the story that would become the play.
Para13While Leir is somehow related to an amorphous folktale tradition that is difficult to parse
and excavate, the playʼs roots in early modern historiography and literature are far
clearer. As Perrettʼs exhaustive study proves, the Leir story had been written and rewritten at least fifty times between Geoffreyʼs Historia and Leir, and it had been written at least eight times in the three decades before 1594 when
Leir was first staged. Despite this enormous field of historical scholarship from which
Leir might be drawn, however, critics agree that the play is most clearly indebted to
three specific sources: Edmund Spenserʼs The Faerie Queene, William Warnerʼs Albionʼs England, and John Higginsʼ 1587 edition of Mirror for Magistrates (see Supplementary Materials) To determine this literary-historical indebtedness and provenance, critics have
generally followed a straightforward method: they have outlined the general shape
of the Leir story, they have found various exceptions to this story throughout the tradition,
and they have found which singular aberrations Leir includes. If Leir includes a detail or plot point that is found in only a single text within the preceding
history of writing on Leir, then that text is generally considered a source for the play. Such a method is imperfect
because it suggests that the writer or writers of Leir could not have made the same innovation (or mistake) that a previous writer had also
made. This method also ignores the possibility of a lost source that both Leir and the presumed source might have shared. Regardless of such potential methodological
problems, the general conclusions that have been made by appeal to this method seem
compelling. The Faerie Queene, for instance, is a likely source for Leir because Spenserʼs Leir is the first king in the tradition to abdicate peacefully as soon as the love-test
is completed. In earlier versions of the story, because the love-test helps Leir determine
how he will distribute his kingdom after his death, The Faerie Queene seems like a probably source for the play. From Albionʼs England, Leir seems to draw the idea that Gonorill and Regan,
sick of fatherʼs health,attempted to kill him. Earlier editions suggest that the sisters maintain their fatherʼs life after winning a battle during which they usurped his kingdom. Finally, it seems that the Higginsʼ 1574 edition of Mirror for Magistrates introduced to the story both the jealousy that the sisters feel when faced with Cordellaʼs
virtue and graceand the assistance offered to Leir by his former subjects when he returns from Gaul to re-claim his crown.
Para14Though critics tend to agree that The Faerie Queene, Albionʼs England, and the 1587 Mirror for Magistrates were sources for Leir, Holinshedʼs influence on Leir has often been debated. It seems probable to us, however, that the Chronicles served as a source for the play. Considering the popularity of Holinshedʼs book and
the relative prestige of his Chronicles in the early 1590s, it would be curious for anyone working on the Leir story to ignore Holinshedʼs history completely. Refusing to make a similar assumption
based on the popularity and availability of the Chronicles, Michie follows Perrett, and he argues that
if the playwright used Holinshed at all he borrowed only the bare outline of the plot from that source(Michie 19). Michieʼs argument here seems, perhaps, to rely on exceedingly stringent criteria: it assumes, first, that borrowing the plot is a small borrowing, and, second, that all of Leirʼs borrowing from Holinshed would be readily visible. If the playwright used Holinshed as a source, and if he only borrowed from Holinshed details that Holinshed shared with other writers of the Leir story, then the borrowing would be invisible, or at least impossible to trace. Indeed, as Lee points out, whenever the playwright is
at variancewith Geoffrey, he
echoes the notes of Holinshed or one of the three Elizabethan poets Spenser, Warner, or Higgins(Lee xxx). Such an observation reminds us that Holinshed could be reasonably considered as a source for Leir, especially when there are few conditions besides post-dating the play that would rule-out a source. More provocatively, Lee points out that Leir does, in fact, follow Holinshed on a detail unique to the Chronicles: in both Leir and the Chronicles, the
old dramatist adopts Holinshedʼs suggestion as far as Goneril is concerned, and bestows her hand in marriage on the King of Cornwallrather than the king of Albany (Lee xxx). In light of this evidence, it seems prudent to read the Chronicles as a source for Leir, and so Holinshedʼs version of the story is also appended to this edition for readersʼ reference.
Para15Considering the large number of writers who dealt with the story of Leir in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, it is also quite possible
that Leir is somehow drawn from sources that are invisible to modern readers, at least according
to the methods that we have at our disposal for detecting influence. With this fairly
catholic sense of possibility in mind, we have also included as appendices to this
edition a variety of potential sources, even if there is no certain intratextual or
extratextual evidence to support an argument for their inclusion. We have included,
for instance, an excerpt from Robert Fabyanʼs Chronicle where Fabyan offers the Leir story. It seems reasonable to suggest that Leir might be influenced by Fabyan because Fabyanʼs Chronicle was quite popular throughout the sixteenth century, reprinted in 1533, 1542, and
1559. Fabyanʼs popularity among early modern dramatists also encourages the assumption
that his Chronicle was a source for Leir: the Chronicle was a likely source for Shakespeare (see Kastan 169), and it was also a likely source for another Queenʼs Menʼs play, The Famous Victories of Henry V (see Oberer 173). Though critics have yet to demonstrate that Fabyan was a source for Leir, and though we are also unable to prove the point, we have included Fabyanʼs treatment
of Leir as an appendix to this edition because such an assumption is plausible considering
the intellectual-historical world in which the play was written. For the same reason,
we have included here an excerpt from Graftonʼs Chronicle where he treats the story of Leir. Again, it seems impossible to demonstrate an immediate indebtedness, but Grafton
was widely read in early modern England, and was widely read by dramatists, so his
inclusion here seems prudent, even if a link between the two texts remains obscure.
Para16Among the possible sources that we have chosen not to include as a potential source
for Leir is a source that Samuel Johnson might have suggested,
The Ballad of King Lear and his Three Daughters.In his Plays of Shakespeare (1771), Johnson argues that the ballad probably antedated Shakespeareʼs play, and, thus, that it might have antedated Leir as well. According to Johnson, the
story of Lear, except the episode of Edmund, which is derived, I think, from Sidney, is taken originally from Geoffrey of Monmouth, whom Hollingshead generally copied; but perhaps immediately from an old historical ballad My reason for believing that the play was posteriour to the ballad rather than the ballad to the play, is, that the ballad has nothing of Shakespeareʼs nocturnal tempest, which is too striking to have been omitted, and that it follows the chronicle; it has the rudiments of the play, but none of its amplifications: it first hinted Learʼs madness, but did not array it in circumstances. The writer of the ballad added something to the history, which is a proof that he would have added more, if more had occurred to his mind, and more must have occurred if he had seen Shakespeare. (Johnson 5:107)
Para17Johnsonʼs speculations here are as beautifully impressionistic as they are untenable.
The rationale behind his dating of the ballad is based on the heroically bardolatrous
assumption that the balladʼs writer, having seen Shakespeareʼs play, would simply
be unable to write a ballad that refused to steal all of the playʼs best parts. If
the ballad excludes all of the playʼs best parts, then it must antedate the play,
or it must have been written by someone who had never heard of the play. This rationale
also means that if Learʼs madness was novel to the Leir tradition (which it wasnʼt), then Shakespeare must have borrowed from the ballad.
While Johnsonʼs argument is hardly rigorous, the possibility of the playʼs
posteriourityto Lear, and possibly to Leir, was debated into the 19th century, as Stanley Wells has pointed out in his edition of Lear (Wells 278). Such suggestions were ultimately dismissed by editors and critics later in the nineteenth century, including H.H. Furness and James Halliwell-Phillips, and they were convincingly put to rest by Perrett, who concludes that the ballad writer only saw Shakespeareʼs play performed before consulting with another text, possibly Holinshed or Warner (Perrett 139). Perrett helpfully published the entire ballad in The Story of King Lear (Perrett 129–134), which is available in its full text through Google Books.
Prosopography
Andrew Griffin
Andrew Griffin is an associate professor in the department of English and an affiliate
professor in the department of Theater and Dance at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. He is general editor (text) of Queen’s Men Editions. He studies early
modern drama and early modern historiography while serving as the lead editor at the
EMC Imprint. He has co-edited with Helen Ostovich and Holger Schott Syme Locating the Queen’s Men (2009) and has co-edited The Making of a Broadside Ballad (2016) with Patricia Fumerton and Carl Stahmer. His monograph, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, History, Catastrophe, was published with the University of Toronto Press in 2019. He is editor of the
anonymous The Chronicle History of King Leir (Queen’s Men Editions, 2011). He can be contacted at griffin@english.ucsb.edu.
Anonymous
Helen Ostovich
Helen Ostovich, professor emerita of English at McMaster University, is the founder
and general editor of Queen’s Men Editions. She is a general editor of The Revels Plays (Manchester University Press); Series
Editor of Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama (Ashgate, now Routledge),
and series co-editor of Late Tudor and Stuart Drama (MIP); play-editor of several
works by Ben Jonson, in Four Comedies: Ben Jonson (1997); Every Man Out of his Humour (Revels 2001); and The Magnetic Lady (Cambridge 2012). She has also edited the Norton Shakespeare 3 The Merry Wives of Windsor Q1602 and F1623 (2015); The Late Lancashire Witches and A Jovial Crew for Richard Brome Online, revised for a 4-volume set from OUP 2021; The Ball, for the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley (2021); The Merry Wives of Windsor for Internet Shakespeare Editions, and The Dutch Courtesan (with Erin Julian) for the Complete Works of John Marston, OUP 2022. She has published
many articles and book chapters on Jonson, Shakespeare, and others, and several book
collections, most recently Magical Transformations of the Early Modern English Stage with Lisa Hopkins (2014), and the equivalent to book website, Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: The Three Ladies of London in Context containing scripts, glossary, almost fifty conference papers edited and updated to
essays; video; link to Queenʼs Mens Ediitons and YouTube: http://threeladiesoflondon.mcmaster.ca/contexts/index.htm, 2015. Recently, she was guest editor of Strangers and Aliens in London ca 1605,
Special Issue on Marston, Early Theatre 23.1 (June 2020). She can be contacted at ostovich@mcmaster.ca.
Janelle Jenstad
Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of
Victoria, Director of The Map
of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama
Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she
co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old
Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s
A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML
and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice
(with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not
Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in
Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern
Literary Studies, Shakespeare
Bulletin, Renaissance and
Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval
and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives
(MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern
England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and
the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in
Early Modern England (Ashgate); New
Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter);
Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating
Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and
Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking
Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital
Technologies (Routledge); and Civic
Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern
London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.
Kate LeBere
Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator
and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English
at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History
Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management
in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth
and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet
during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University
of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.
Mahayla Galliford
Research assistant, remediator, encoder, 2021–present. Mahayla Galliford is a fourth-year
student in the English Honours and Humanities Scholars programs at the University
of Victoria. She researches early modern drama and her Jamie Cassels Undergraduate
Research Award project focused on approaches to encoding early modern stage directions.
Martin Holmes
Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the
UVicʼs Humanities Computing and Media Centre for
over two decades, and has been involved with dozens
of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on
the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of
the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as
lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on
the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.
Navarra Houldin
Project manager 2022-present. Textual remediator 2021-present. Navarra Houldin (they/them)
completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During
their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs
Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and
sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.
Peter Cockett
Peter Cockett is an associate professor in the Theatre and Film Studies at McMaster
University. He is the general editor (performance), and technical co-ordinating editor
of Queen’s Men Editions. He was the stage director for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM),
directing King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006) and he is the performance editor for our editions of those plays. The process
behind those productions is documented in depth on his website Performing the Queen’s Men. Also featured on this site are his PAR productions of Clyomon and Clamydes (2009) and Three Ladies of London (2014). For the PLS, the University of Toronto’s Medieval and Renaissance Players,
he has directed the Digby Mary Magdalene (2003) and the double bill of George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale and the Chester Antichrist (2004). He also directed An Experiment in Elizabethan Comedy (2005) for the SQM project and Inside Out: The Persistence of Allegory (2008) in collaboration with Alan Dessen. Peter is a professional actor and director
with numerous stage and screen credits. He can be contacted at cockett@mcmaster.ca.
Tracey El Hajj
Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD
from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science
and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched
Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on
Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life.Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.
Bibliography
Anonymous. A Critical
Edition of the True Chronicle History of King Leir
and His Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and
Cordella. Ed. Donald
Michie. New York:
Garland,
1991.
Anonymous. The Chronicle
History of King Leir. Ed. Sidney
Lee. London:
Chatto & Windus,
1909.
Chambers, E.K.
The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols.
Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1923; rpt.
1967.
Cushman, Robert.
2014 is the Year of King Lear.National Post. 26 May 2014.
Henslowe, Philip. Henslowe’s Diary. Ed. R.A.
Foakes. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,
1961.
Ioppolo, Grace.
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 17 (2005): 165–179.A Jointure more or less: Re-measuring The True Chroncicle History of King Leir and his three daughters.
Jones, James H.
Leir and Lear: Matthew 5:33–37, The Turning Point and Rescue Theme.Comparative Drama 4.2 (1970): 125–131.
Jowett, John, ed. King Lear and his Three Daughters.
By William Shakespeare. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed.
Gary Taylor, John
Jowett, Terri Bourus, and
Gabriel Egan.
Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016.
2351–2433. WSB aaag2304.
Kastan, David Scott, ed.
A Companion to Shakespeare.
Oxford:
Blackwell,
1999.
Lynch, Stephen J.
Sin Suffering, and Redemption in Leir and Lear.Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986): 161–174.
McMillin, Scott, and
Sally-Beth MacLean. The Queen’s Men and Their Plays.
Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998. WSB
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Oberer, Karen.
Appropriations of the Popular Tradition in The Famous Victories of Henry V and The Troublesome Reign of King John.Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing. Ed. Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin. Ashgate: Farnham, 2009, 171–182. WSB aay90.
Ostovich, Helen,
Holger Schott Syme, and
Andrew Griffin, eds. Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603:
Material Practices and Conditions of
Playing. Surrey:
Ashgate, 2009.
WSB aay90.
Perrett, Wilfrid. The Story of King Lear from Geoffrey of
Monmouth to Shakespeare. Mayer
& Müller, 1904.
Pinciss, Gerald.
Thomas Creede and the Repertory of the Queen’s Men 1583–1592.Modern Philology 67.4 (1970): 321–330.
Shakespeare,
William. King
Lear. Ed. H.H. Furness.
London: J.B.
Lippincott & Co.,
1880.
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works: Compact
Edition. Ed. Stanley Wells,
Gary Taylor, John
Jowett, and William
Montgomery. Oxford:
Clarendon Press,
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Symonds, John Addington.
Shakespeareʼs Predecessors in the
English Drama. London:
Smith, Elder, and Co.,
1884.
Theobald, Lewis, ed.
The works of Shakespeare: in seven volumes.
Collated with the oldest copies, and corrected; with
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Tolstoy, Leo. Tolstoy on Shakespeare: A Critical Essay on
Shakespeare. Trans. V. Tchertkoff and I.M.F.. New
York: Funk and
Wagnalls, 1906.
Orgography
LEMDO Team (LEMD1)
The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project
director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators,
encoders, and remediating editors.
QME Editorial Board (QMEB1)
The QME Editorial Board consists of Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text), with the support of an Advisory Board.
Queenʼs Men Editions (QME1)
The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter
Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text).
University of Victoria (UVIC1)
https://www.uvic.ca/Metadata
Authority title | King Leir: General Introduction |
Type of text | Critical |
Short title | Leir: Gen Intro |
Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
Series | Queenʼs Men Editions |
Source |
Born-digital, peer-reviewed document written by Andrew Griffin. First published in the QME 1.0 anthology on the ISE platform. Converted to TEI-XML
and remediated by the LEMDO Team for republication in the QME 2.0 anthology on the LEMDO platform.
|
Editorial declaration | n/a |
Edition | Released with Queenʼs Men Editions 2.0 |
Sponsor(s) |
Queenʼs Men EditionsThe Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter
Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text).
|
Encoding description | Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines |
Document status | published, peer-reviewed |
Licence/availability | Intellectual copyright in this edition is held by the editor, Andrew Griffin. The critical paratexts, including this General Introduction, are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that they are freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the editor, QME, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and/or data; (2) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (3) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of QME, the editor, and LEMDO. This license allows for pedagogical use of the critical paratexts in the classroom. Production photographs and videos on this site may not be downloaded. They appear freely on this site with the permission of the actors and the ACTRA union. They may be used within the context of university courses, within the classroom, and for reference within research contexts, including conferences, when credit is given to the producing company and to the actors. Commercial use of videos and photographs is forbidden. |