Chronicles of England

From Richard Grafton, Chronicles of England (London: Richard Tottell, 1564)

Para1Leyr the son of Bladud, or Baldud, after the death of his father, was made ruler over the Britons. This Leyr was of noble conditions,1 and guided his land and subjects in great wealth and quietness.2 He made3 the Town of Caerleir now called Leicester. And albeit that4 this man reigned long over Britain, yet is there no notable thing worthy of memory written of him, except as Geoffrey sayth, that he had by his wife three daughters and no son, and the daughters were named Gonorilla, Ragan, and Cordeilla, the which he loved much, but most specially he loved the youngest, Cordeilla by name.
Para2When this Leyr, or Leyth, after5 some writers, was fallen into competent6 age, being desirous to know the mind of his three daughters, he first demanded of Gonorilla, the eldest, how well she loved him, the which calling her gods to record, said, she loved him more than her own soul. With this answer, the father being well contented, demanded of Ragan the second daughter, how well she loved him? To whom she answered, and affirming with great oaths, said, that she could not with her tongue express the great love she bore to him, and added further that she loved him above all creatures. After these pleasant answers had of those two daughters, he called before him Cordeilla, the youngest, who understanding the dissimulation of her two sisters and intending to prove7 her father, said, “Most reverend father, where my two sisters have dissimulated with8 thee, and uttered their pleasant words fruitless,9 I knowing the great love and fatherly zeal, that thou ever hast borne toward me (for the which I may not speak unto thee otherwise than my conscience leadeth me), therefore I say to thee father, I have ever loved thee as my father, and shall continually while I live, love thee as my natural father. And if thou wilt be further inquisitive10 of the love that I bear thee: As thy riches and substance11 is, so much art thou worth, and so much and no more do I love thee.”
Para3The father with this answer being discontent, married his two elder daughters,12 the one unto the Duke of Cornwall, and the other unto the Duke of Albany, or Scotland, and divided with them two in marriage his land of Britain after his death, and the one half in hand13 during his natural life. And for his third daughter Cordeilla he reserved nothing.
Para4It so fortuned after, that Aganippus, which the English Chronicle named Aganip, king of France, heard of the beauty and womanhood of Cordeilla, he sent unto her father and asked her in marriage. To whom it was answered, that the king would gladly give unto him his daughter, but for dower, he would not depart with, for he had promised all unto his other two daughters.
Para5Aganippus, by his messengers being thus informed, remembering the virtues of the aforenamed Cordeilla, did without promise of dower, take the said Cordeilla to his wife.
Para6But here is to be noted, that where this Aganippus, or Aganip, is called in divers chronicles the king of France, it cannot agree with other histories, nor with the chronicles of France, for it is testified by Reynulph of Chester and by Peter Pictaviens, by Robert Gagwyne, by Bishop Anthony, and many other chronicles, that long after this time there was no king of France, neither was it long after called France, but at this day the inhabitants thereof were called Galli, and afterwards were tributaries to Rome without having any king, till the time of Valentinianus Emperor of Rome, as hereafter in this work shall be plainly showed.
Para7The story of the Britons sayeth that in the time that Leyr reigned in Britain, the land of France was under twelve kings, of the which Aganippus should be one. The which saying is full unlike to be true, and the same may be proved many ways, but I pass over, for that it is not my purpose to use any special discourse of the kings of France.
Para8Then it followeth in the history, when Leyr was fallen into age,14 the aforesaid two dukes, thinking15 long before the lordship of Britain fell into their hands, arose against their father (as Geoffrey sayeth) and spoiled16 him of the governance thereof upon certain conditions to be continued for term of life, the which in process of time were minished,17 as well by Maglanus as by Henninus husbands of the aforenamed Gonorild and Ragan. But that most displeased Leyr, was the unkindness of this two daughters considering their words to him before spoken and sworn, and now found and proved them all contrary.
Para9For the which he being by necessity constrained, fled his land, and sailed into Gallia for to be comforted of his youngest daughter Cordeilla. Whereof she having knowledge of natural kindness comforted him, and after showing18 all the matter to her husband, by his agreement, received him and his19 to her lordʼs court, where he was cherished after her best manner.20
Para10Long it were21 to show unto you the circumstance of the utterance of the unkindness of his two daughters, and of the words of comfort given to him by Aganippus and Cordeilla, or of the counsel or purveyance22 made by the said Aganippus and his Lords, for the restoring again of Leyr to his dominion. But finally, he was by the help of the said Aganippus restored again to the government of the realm of Britain, and possessed and ruled the same as governor thereof, by the space of three years after, in which season died Aganippus. And when this Leyr had ruled this land by the term of forty years,23 as diverse do affirm, he died and was buried at his own town, Caerleyr, or Leicester, leaving after him to inherit the land, his daughter Cordeilla.

Notes

1.Noble state or nature.↑
2.Compare with Lear’s admission that he has not taken good care of his subjects.↑
3.Founded.↑
4.Although.↑
5.According to.↑
6.Sufficient, appropriate.↑
7.Test.↑
8.Deceived.↑
9.Sterile.↑
10.Enquiring.↑
11.Wealth.↑
12.I.e., caused them to be married.↑
13.I.e., keeping half for himself.↑
14.Shakespeare’s Lear is Fourscore and upward (Lr 21.59), i.e., eighty or more.↑
15.I.e., plotting.↑
16.Stripped.↑
17.Diminished.↑
18.Revealing.↑
19.I.e., his followers.↑
20.Shakespeare’s Cordelia returns to England rather than Lear fleeing to France.↑
21.It would take a long time.↑
22.Preparation.↑
23.I.e., a total of forty years including the final three after his restoration.↑

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

Eric Rasmussen

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.

James D. Mardock

James Mardock is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Associate General Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and a dramaturge for the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Reno Little Theater. In addition to editing quarto and folio Henry V for the ISE, he has published essays on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Renaissance literature in The Seventeenth Century, Ben Jonson Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and contributed to the collections Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (Routledge 2010) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (Cambridge 2013). His book Our Scene is London (Routledge 2008) examines Jonsonʼs representation of urban space as an element in his strategy of self-definition. With Kathryn McPherson, he edited Stages of Engagement (Duquesne 2013), a collection of essays on drama in post-Reformation England, and he is currently at work on a monograph on Calvinism and metatheatrical awareness in early modern English drama.

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.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He is the Founding Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions, of which he was the Coordinating Editor until 2017. In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

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.

Richard Grafton

Sarah Milligan

Sarah Milligan completed her MA at the University of Victoria in 2012 on the invalid persona in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. She was a research assistant with the Map of Early Modern London 2012-2014 and subsequently a research associate with the Internet Shakespeare Editions and with Dr. Alison Chapman on the Victorian Poetry Network, compiling an index of Victorian periodical poetry.

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.

William Shakespeare

Bibliography

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.

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 Chronicles of England
Type of text Primary Source
Short title Leir: Grafton
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 Edited according to the ISE Editorial Guidelines
Edition Released with Queenʼs Men Editions 2.0
Sponsor(s)

Queenʼs Men Editions

The 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 editors, Andrew Griffin, Michael Best, and Sarah Milligan. The critical paratexts, including these Chronicles of England, 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.