SOURCE: Curran, John E., Jr. “Geoffrey of Monmouth in Renaissance Drama: Imagining Non-History.” Modern Philology 97, no. 1 (1999): 1-20.

[In this essay, Curran reviews the story told in Shakespeare's King Lear as it appears in several chronicle plays, comparing Shakespeare's more poetic treatment of historical events and figures with those of more factual chronicle dramas.]

At the end of King Lear, Shakespeare makes a crucial decision that sheds much light on his intentions for the play: contrary to the story he would have read everywhere else, he has Regan and Goneril die without issue. Geoffrey of Monmouth's version, recounted in his twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae, required that each daughter have a son so that the family feud could live on into the next generation.¹ Shakespeare avoids any suggestion of this futurity, and the results of his drastic innovation are twofold. First, cutting the story off from its chronicle future precludes a correspondence between the play and any historical reality it might purport to imitate.² The play limits itself to its own world. Positioned in no larger, continuing story of British history, Regan and Goneril seem not to be based upon persons conceived as historical. Second, the play's lack of futurity de-emphasizes any political message or lesson that might be extracted from it. Such maxims as “manage the succession well,” or “do not divide the kingdom,” or “avoid civil strife” seem of little use with all the putatively historical characters dead; apocalypse, not politics, prevails.³ Leaving the story truncated from its chronicle future is one decision among many by which Shakespeare clearly differentiates King Lear from a play like Antony and Cleopatra—where his purpose is to imagine what historical figures would have been like and to consider the causes and workings of political actions.

My argument here is that Shakespeare's double escape from history—that is, from having to imagine historical persons and from having to consider exemplarity—makes King Lear unique among the extant Galfridian chronicle plays treating the pre-Roman era of British history. The other surviving plays, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton's Gorboduc and the anonymous plays Locrine, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and Nobody and Somebody (chronicling the story of Elidure, the three-times king), fail to make such an escape; these plays are more seriously committed than Lear to representing a history, and so the non-historicity of their topic creates a constant disruption for them.⁴ These plays, all products of the later sixteenth century, come from a time when belief in the historicity of the Galfridian tradition was unstable and eroding.⁵ Thus, those playwrights who drew upon Galfridian personages for history-play material were unsure both whether they were imagining real people and whether they were generating examples from actual history.

As Judith Anderson has explained, a history play—like Renaissance historiography itself—was expected to take liberties with historical events in order to produce imaginative fictions that were true to what events meant; Shakespeare's Richard III, like Sir Thomas More's, is designed to represent through an exaggerated caricature a historical person conceived as having been genuinely evil.⁶ But what were the parameters in representing historical persons from thousands of years ago, persons about whom so little was known—persons who were probably not historical at all? It is true that treating the ancient British past was widely considered to be the same as treating more recent history. Such writers as William Baldwin, compiler of the first Mirror for Magistrates, and later Thomas Heywood, in his Apology for Actors, cited all British history “from the landing of Brute” as perfect material to teach people history and the wholesome examples attached to it.⁷ But as Arthur B. Ferguson has noted, the problems involved with creating an imaginative interpretation of history—that is, with mixing history and poetry—“naturally increased exponentially” with “inquiry into the prehistoric past.”⁸ In these four prehistorical Galfridian plays, the authors appear unsure of exactly what they are attempting to write. Are they filling in invented details to embellish a core of fact, or are they simply imagining imaginary characters?

Englishmen of the sixteenth century had every reason to feel that the Galfridian legends were important enough to treat as history. Not only had the legends become a conspicuous part of the Tudor myth, but they also carried substantial weight regarding Britain's own ancient past.⁹ They were stories every patriot ought to learn about and learn from. One of the more striking defenses of Geoffrey's historicity, that of Richard Harvey, categorized the Galfridian legends according to the various significances of heroes and events (examples of deceit, examples of intemperance, examples of good government); the implication was that the British History should be deemed true because it looked every bit like a proper history—like a good national story that yielded a wealth of wholesome examples.¹⁰ This attractive utility, however, was undermined by a wave of sixteenth-century criticism of Geoffrey, given voice by Polydore Vergil (1534) and stalwart authority by William Camden (1586).¹¹ Such skepticism, although often fervently rebutted, affected those who would translate Geoffrey's stories into historical dramas. Even Sackville and Norton, writing near midcentury, would have encountered questions about Geoffrey in chronicles of Robert Fabyan and Richard Grafton;¹² certainly, our three anonymous authors would have found serious doubts articulated in Holinshed's chronicles.¹³ These playwrights felt the allure of the stories from their nation's most ancient past but were also exposed to a creeping sense of the inadequacy of those skeletal legends and of the inaccessibility of that past.

I am concerned here with identifying aspects of these four plays which reflect the poets' conflicting senses and consequent uncertainty about whether they are actually recreating history. Invariably, the authors' attempts to translate Geoffrey's stories into history plays are undermined by the non-historicity of the material. The resulting dynamic has three principal manifestations: (1) the playwrights move the plays in and out of historical times, (2) they craft history-play plots but only by altering the historical record to the point of fiction, and (3) they imagine the minds of historical persons but with unhistorical-seeming results. Such features mark the differences between Shakespeare's play and Gorboduc, Locrine, Nobody and Somebody, and Leir. Among the Renaissance Galfridian plays, only King Lear is secure in its status as non-history.

I

Chronological situatedness is a prime characteristic of the history play: plays experienced as imitating a historical reality tend to be invested with a sense of where the action is on the time line. Thus Shakespeare's Richard II makes many references to the time of Edward III; the characters have a past life. Shakespeare's King Lear, on the other hand, makes no reference at all to a previous era. Of what has happened before, we have no idea, as the playwright cuts off his version of the Leir story from both chronicle past and chronicle future. In the four other plays on Galfridian subjects, however, this is not the case. Like Shakespeare's own Cymbeline—which takes place within the bounds of history and not prehistory, being of the Roman era—these four plays make mention of the past and call attention to chronological matters. But while Shakespeare injects chronological details such as the reigns of past kings Cassivellaunus, Tenantius, and Dunwallo into Cymbeline with chronological precision, he injects them into a story wholly of his own invention; he is merely using these details to decorate a fiction which has no pretensions of imagining historical persons. The four plays I am interested in do not share this detachment; in each of them, chronological references can be found in a firmly Galfridian plot. But although chronology is suggested in the plays, it is always disrupted. Time is inconstant.

We encounter, for example, an ambiguous historicity in the odd treatment of what would constitute recent history for characters. In Locrine, recent history occupies a great portion of the first scene as the dying Brutus, eponymous founder of Britain, recounts to his three sons—Locrine, Camber, and Albanact—his great deeds and their significance; as the great-grandson of Aeneas, he is the rescuer of the Trojan name. The playwright evidently intends that we consider a Brutus who has actually lived through the events he describes. But toward the end of the speech when Brutus recalls his extermination of the giants he says that they “come of Albion's race, / With Gogmagog, son of Samotheus” as their “captain” (1.2.118-20). A historical Brutus would have had no way of knowing about Albion, a legendary figure associated with a time long before the Trojans' arrival in Britain; and “Samotheus” was no giant at all, but the supposed founder of a civilization which predated Albion himself. For the orthodox chronology, the playwright could have gone to Holinshed;¹⁴ but he chose instead to proffer his own muddled version. Whatever his reason for this innovation, its result is clear: we no longer sense that Brutus's speech represents the memories of an actual person. “Samotheus” and “Albion” seem like names drawn haphazardly from the chronicles for mere decoration, and they make the rest of the speech appear more fictional. Does this Brutus exist in time or not?

Nobody and Somebody and Gorboduc exhibit similar contradictions when dealing with their characters' recent history. In the first scene of Nobody and Somebody, Cornwell, the wise old counselor, notes that he has served four kings (1.54). Although he is an invented figure, Cornwell's memory is sound; since the reigns of the three previous monarchs total some twenty-six years in Holinshed, Cornwell has not violated the time line and actually helps cement it by making a remark suited to the historical context. Later, however, the humble King Elidure pleads with the nobles to let him abdicate and reinstate his deposed brother Archigallo, and he appeals to Cornwell, “As thou didst love our father, let his son / Be righted” (5.998-99). Such a reference imagines for Elidure and Cornwell a shared past they both understand. But, according to the chronicles, the king before Archigallo was Elidure's eldest brother, Gorbonian, not their father, while their father, king before Gorbonian, was the mercilessly cruel Morindus, whom no one would have recalled with love.¹⁵ Hence the remark undermines the seriousness of the very time frame it suggests: where is Elidure in time and what does he remember about his predecessors? In Gorboduc, Philander, the second of King Gorboduc's three counselors on the succession issue, suggests that Britain has been quiet since the civil war in which the ambitious King Morgan (Leir's grandson) was slain by his cousin (1.2.161-65). This remark does much to establish a historical time scheme; a counselor in a historical Gorboduc's court doubtless would comment on the nation's most recent episode of civil strife and characterize it as happening a fairly long time ago, since six reigns intervene between Morgan and Gorboduc.¹⁶ The next mention of the recent past, however, is imprecise. Gorboduc's best counselor, Eubulus, urges him to remember how Brute, Britain's first king, inaugurated the practice of dividing the realm among sons, which resulted in “much British blood” being lost (1.2.269-81). Although recent British history is full of civil strife, none is associated with Brutus's particular bequest; his sons were content in their several kingdoms and cooperated with one another against common enemies. Like Elidure, Eubulus miscites a history he should know very well. In these instances, the authors concentrate on the argument at hand but not consistently on what a person in this particular historical circumstance would be likely to remember or say. In both plays, a time continuum is suggested and then relaxed.

King Leir makes no direct reference to previous reigns or chronicle events, but we are given insubstantial intimations of the previous years of Leir's own reign. Impressed by Leir's attempt to manage the succession by marrying off all three daughters to British kings who could protect Britain from foreign invasion, the good counselor Perillus declares to Leir that for his “care” of the nation he “deserves an everlasting memory / To be enroll'd in chronicles of fame” (1.67, 69-70). There is a hint here that Perillus's praise encompasses more than Leir's latest efforts to care for the kingdom; “care” that deserves everlasting fame suggests that Perillus recalls an entire career, of which the present “care” is only a culmination. But the author can offer no more than a hint of this previous record of care because the chronicles tell him nothing of Leir's long reign except his building of Leicester.¹⁷ Perillus reflects both the playwright's eagerness to praise Leir and his inability to find anything to praise Leir for. The “chronicles of fame,” in fact, have not remembered Leir for anything except these incidents of his late reign. The King's dwelling on the absence of his late queen has the same effect. We are told that she was a guiding hand to him, that she educated their daughters virtuously, and that he feels adrift without her (1.1-18). Our playwright feels free to suggest an imagined past family life, yet constricted enough to tell us essentially nothing. We have only a nameless queen and a vague account of her influence—no mention of anything Leir himself did. The play proposes to add needed color to the chronicle material but also aims to avoid a concocted history. What happened during Leir's reign? The author must offer something, or his people will appear unhistorical, characters with no memory; but he cannot embroider Geoffrey's account very much, or his Leir will appear equally unhistorical. Thus we remain uncertain about Leir's situatedness in historical time. Does Leir have a past?

In these plays, chronology is destabilized not only by a fluctuating sense of the characters' recent past but also by the confused relationship between their world and the realm of myth as it was known in the authors' own day. Since the stories of Locrine (eleventh century b.c.), Leir (ninth century b.c.), Gorboduc (sixth to fifth century b.c.), and Elidure (third century b.c.) all date within the millennium after the Trojan war (twelfth century b.c.), a historic recreation of the worlds in these stories would represent that cataclysmic event as part of the people's cultural currency.¹⁸ They are Trojans; the Trojan war is etched in their national consciousness. In Shakespeare's unhistorical version of the Leir story, the matter of Troy is not much in evidence; Ajax is mentioned once, briefly and proverbially (2.2.125). In Gorboduc, Locrine, and Leir, by contrast, Troy gets noticeable mention, and some emphasis is placed on the characters' identification with it: this emphasis, however, is in some cases offset by a sense that Troy is merely a proverbial name for ancient misfortune.

The authors of Gorboduc are careful to remind us of the Troy connection. Philander, charged now with advising Porrex, expresses his fears that the escalating tension between the prince and his brother Ferrex will wipe out the Trojan line of Brutus: the gods are “since mighty Ilion's fall not yet appeased / With these poor remnants of the Trojan name” (2.2.76-77). Gorboduc himself soon echoes Philander on the wrath of the gods unsatisfied with the fall of Troy, invoking the Simois stained with blood, the Phrygian fields strewn with corpses, and the “slaughter of unhappy Priam's race”: “continued rage / pursues our lives and from the farthest seas / Doth chase the issues of destroyed Troy” (3.1.1-10). Gorboduc and Philander see themselves as continuators of the Iliad story, the carriers of Troy's legacy, and the guardians of its destiny. Although this reference to Troy is strongly contextualized, the next one appears slightly less so. Gorboduc identifies himself with Hecuba and Priam who were once happy and became miserable (3.1.11-18). Gorboduc might be envisioning his forebears here, but Priam and Hecuba seem more like stock examples, a warning applicable to any complacent “happy wight.” The king and queen of Troy appear less as revered ancestors and more as vague myth figures used generally “to make a mirror of,” as Gorboduc puts it.

Locrine and Leir reveal a greater disparity between the characters' own historical consciousness and a language which figures a Troy myth as universal currency. In Locrine, Brutus is considered the last upholder of the name of Troy (1.2.100; 1.2.262), and the invader Humber has heard of the Britons as Trojans (2.2.9; 2.7.4); the Britons' situation as transplanted Trojans is salient in their minds and those of foreign enemies. But when the author uses similes to decorate the story, the matter of Troy can combine with any hackneyed story from the classics. For example, when Locrine compares his grief for Albanact's death with that of Priam, and Gwendoline compares hers with that of Hecuba, Camber then compares his sorrow with that of Niobe (3.2.43-57). That is to say, Niobe, a shadowy, mythical figure, occupies the same category here as do two figures from the speakers' own historical past. In other similes (2.2.89-93; 2.4.32-34; 5.6.7-11), Troy seems indistinguishable from any other mythology as characters resort to conventional hyperbole and do not really consider their relationship to the persons and situations they name. When Leir greets his sons-in-law by telling them they are as welcome “as ever Priam's children were to him” (6.52-53), it seems plausible that he is thinking about his people's past. But then Gonorill greets her husband, Cornwall, by saying he's as welcome as Leander was to Hero, or Aeneas to Dido (6.65-67). As with Niobe in Camber's speech, here the imaginary Leander is given the same status as a Trojan figure, Aeneas, who should not be imaginary for the speaker. The historical merges with the proverbial, the characters' past with the Elizabethan present.

We might expect the most obvious indication of the authors' chronological inconsistencies to be their blatant and frequent anachronism, but this is not the case. The clocks in Julius Caesar do not produce doubts about Shakespeare's commitment to historicity because they do not obscure the sense of where the characters think they are within the historical continuum: Caesar understands his own history and situation. That Cheapside and Fleet Street get mentioned in Nobody and Somebody or that the ancient Britons of King Leir are Christians need not imply the authors' disbelief that they were representing historical persons. More telling are moments such as the mention of Billingsgate in Leir (12.78), where a structure which one of Leir's own descendants, Belinus, famously founded is made a feature of Leir's world.¹⁹ Such a reference, like the ones we have examined so far, at once reminds us of Galfridian time and violates it. These authors' dedication to Galfridian time is both serious and sporadic; they seem caught between an imagined time in history and an imaginary, timeless fiction.

II

Since history plays are known for elaborating on truth with fiction, we can expect to find many invented characters and situations. But when a playwright changes the basic Galfridian storyline, he takes a major step. While imagined characters like Falstaff appear in 1 Henry IV, they serve to further the view of historical truth Shakespeare is trying to convey—the story of the maturation of England's hero-king. By contrast, Shakespeare's reworking of the end of the Leir story, turning triumph into defeat and continuation into apocalypse, reflects an entirely different approach to the material. Translating the story of Holinshed's Henry V into a dramatic plot was not the same procedure as translating the story of his Leir. Because any given Galfridian story is very sparse in its details, painting its portraits only in brief, broad strokes, any alteration of that story constitutes a drastic revision of history and calls into question the degree to which it can be taken seriously. Shakespeare, disregarding historicity in King Lear, felt free enough to take measures comparable to having Henry V lose at Agincourt. Although the four non-Shakespearean plays are more faithful to Geoffrey than King Lear is—as we have noted, they all follow Geoffrey's outline with comparable strictness—they do make some striking alterations to their source. The difference between their alterations and Shakespeare's is that the former use unhistorical alterations for historical purposes. To draw a proper history play from Geoffrey's details, these playwrights must invent their own details and adjust Geoffrey's basic storyline. Attempting seriously to treat Geoffrey's stories as history—as true stories which treat people who actually lived and which therefore provide useful lessons of statecraft and patriotism—necessitates violating the historicity of Geoffrey's account. All four plays exhibit tensions between history play and historicity that arise from the difficulties of imagining what actually happened in Galfridian time.

In King Leir, the author has determined to render a certain type of Leir conductive to exemplarity, as shown in the representation of Leir handing down the kingdom. Except for his rash misassessment of Cordella, the Leir of this play is totally blameless, and mild, patient, and penitent in his suffering—a man, as he says, “in true peace with all the world” (19.161). He is a Christian saint-king, and the play is a species of hagiography. Giving away his power helps establish this view of him: “here I do freely dispossess my self” (6.84), he says, making the transaction a mark of his contented mind and selflessness. The playwright stresses the ingratitude of the children toward this benevolent and generous monarch-father. The basic Galfridian story is that of a king who loses a throne and gets it back; the playwright adapts this story so that we learn what a good, meek king is like and how good subjects should treat him. In contrast to Shakespeare's turbulent Lear who functions in no such capacity and who is conducive to no neat message, this Leir evokes the feeling that details have been manipulated in order to yield a view of the past which makes sense of it. Leir is christianized and made a saint in order to imagine him as having been, historically, a good king; he is made to relinquish his crown voluntarily in order to prove him the type of king who deserved to reign once more. This attempt to stamp a coherent interpretation, an agreeable example, on Geoffrey's account suggests that the playwright is trying to treat the story as history.

The problem is, however, that the king's voluntary abdication of all the reins of government to his sons-in-law marks a major alteration of the chronicle material. Since this situation is so familiar from King Lear, we may overlook its important departure from the chronicles which Shakespeare inherits from the older play. In the Galfridian story, Leir's bequeathing of power to the husbands of Goneril and Regan is to take effect only after his death; this deferral of possession prompts his sons-in-law to rebel against him and snatch it by force.²⁰ In revising this traditional account of the Leir story, the playwright was probably drawing on Spenser, whose “Briton Moniments” reports that Leir retired after the apportionment, “eased of his crowne”; but although Spenser was a reputable enough source, he himself had almost no precedent for this change and probably made it for brevity's sake.²¹ The author of King Leir was therefore indeed making an innovative change to the Galfridian account. The standard storyline was evidently unacceptable to the playwright as a narrative of conflict at odds with the saint-king he was striving to imagine; engaging Leir in this armed power struggle with his sons-in-law might make him appear grasping, tenacious, or combative. But, as a consequence, the author's historically imagined Leir conflicts with the “historical” record.

Gorboduc, too, has much to do with dividing the kingdom among children; as in Leir, the partition story in Gorboduc tries to forge a suitable history play from Geoffrey's bare outline. From Geoffrey's implication that Gorboduc is alive at the outbreak of his sons' civil war, the authors infer an active, causal role for him to play in it: the war ensues from Gorboduc's failure to heed Eubulus's counsel against divesting himself of the throne and allowing his sons, Ferrex and Porrex, equal shares of power. Events have thus emanated from a decision by Gorboduc himself; given agency, he is imagined as having been a king who actually did something with important historical ramifications. This plot affords the opportunity to meditate on what Gorboduc should have done and where he went wrong; it gives the authors the chance to turn history to its proper role of instruction: rule until you die, and make sure you leave an intact kingdom to a clear successor. The authors enhance this message by imagining that Ferrex and Porrex have already been crowned as a result of the partition. While a succession war among princes would signify only evil ambition and disastrous fratricide, a war between reigning kings can demonstrate the impossibility of peaceful coexistence between two kings in one realm—Britain must be unified. That the authors structured their plot to yield these political examples indicates that they were trying to conceive their own drama as a history play, an illumination of truth with fiction.

But in Gorboduc, as in Leir, a history play has been crafted by making changes only fiction could permit. In fact, the premise that Gorboduc himself was determined to divide his kingdom between his sons seems to be the authors' invention. In Geoffrey's account, we are given no clues about what Gorboduc's role might be in the civil war; we learn only that when he grew old, the princes began to quarrel about who should succeed, and that the younger brother, Porrex, was the more grasping of the two.²² Giving Gorboduc any agency amounts to inventing a new story. Fabyan and Grafton give even less cause to ascribe any action to Gorboduc, for they tell us that the king is dead before his sons begin their joint reign.²³ Moreover, while the authors perhaps draw on Fabyan and Grafton for the representation of Ferrex and Porrex as crowned kings instead of warring princes, such a borrowing does not invest the play with chronicle authority; instead, the disagreement among chronicles over the most basic details and the patchwork quality of the play itself become clearer. Sackville and Norton mix Geoffrey with Fabyan and Grafton, adding their own device of Gorboduc's decision to divide the kingdom. This amalgam results in a suitable history-play plot, but at a cost: the authors have manufactured their own peculiar story.

The same tension between history play and “history” is evident in Nobody and Somebody and Locrine: to pursue one history-play goal of providing negative examples of kingship, the authors must reach beyond the chronicles to refashion kings into tyrants. In scene 10 of Nobody and Somebody, Peridure and Vigenius, Elidure's two younger brothers, first join forces to usurp him and then fight a war with each other—a war which the playwright has invented. The usurpers need to usurp each other to underscore the play's warning about ambition and to establish Elidure as a prototypically unambitious, humble monarch; only with a moral attitude such as his can a king survive and end the cycle of civil strife. But this handy message requires a serious departure from the chronicle record, the invention of a major event.²⁴ Similarly, Locrine has its title figure turn from dutiful hero to tyrant as soon as he sees the captured Princess Estrild. Here, to produce a history-play message, the playwright elaborates the traditional idea of the king as falling after committing adultery and fashions a Locrine who undergoes a sudden and total personality change. The author evidently feels compelled to translate Locrine's personal vices into political ones; the history-play lesson of his fall is not complete unless he can be shown wicked in his kingship, his lust rendering him paranoid and tyrannical. To fashion this wicked king, however, the author invents his own Locrine, perhaps even contradicts history's.²⁵ Again, the pursuit of historical ends necessitates unhistorical means.

Unlike Shakespeare, the authors of the other Galfridian plays demonstrably attempt to treat Geoffrey's plotlines as history—moments from the nation's ancient past that, properly presented, could be instructive for the present. But as we have seen, this proper presentation entailed key distortions in those plotlines beyond the point where the authors' imaginings could cohere with a core of presumptive truth. Inconsistent with chronology, the authors are also inconsistent with their Galfridian storylines; Geoffrey is both historical foundation and malleable fiction.

III

The behavior of the characters in King Lear continually defies rational explanations. Why does Lear suddenly become so angry with Cordelia? What do Goneril and Regan have against Cordelia? And is it possible to account for Cordelia's utter goodness? Shakespeare proceeds as if his characters can be driven to extremes without addressing their motivations. And yet, somehow the play sustains its verisimilitude, for people often tend to be inexplicable.²⁶

A history play, however, cannot refrain from examining motivation. While it will not completely invent what happened, it must attempt imaginatively to portray how people felt. To draw examples from the past, the history play must make sense of the past, which means the history play must render the causes of events. In the Renaissance, these causes—apart from the first cause, providence—were often identified with the hidden motivations in people's minds.²⁷ To fulfill its purpose, the history play must make plain the psychology of its characters. Since the rashness of Hotspur's rebellion offered a major lesson, Shakespeare imagines a rash Hotspur; historical actions are put into perspective by virtue of an appropriately imagined personality. Shakespeare is able all at once to reconstruct true history (as he would have understood it), to attend to exemplarity, and to develop a vivid, realistic characterization. In the non-Shakespearean plays on Galfridian materials, this synthesis between historical truth, exemplarity, and realism proves impossible. The mind of Hotspur, a figure from fairly recent history, was not so hard to imagine, and even legendary figures from other traditions, like Jupiter or David, had characters that were relatively well delineated and understood.²⁸ But the minds of Gorboduc, Locrine, Elidure, and Leir were simply too remote. The imagination had to transcend tremendous gaps in time and in known details, as well as, ultimately, in believability; what is more, these imaginative leaps had to be made without appearing to have created one's own, nonhistorical characters. Thus when the plays on Galfridian materials purport to look into the minds of the characters and produce explanations for the causes of events, their imagined motivations seem both artificial and noncommittal—limited by the impossible project of treating the figures in Geoffrey's meager legends as historical persons. Paradoxically, the more the authors respect their “historical” sources and their history-play agendas—the more they attend to truth and exemplarity—the less realistic and historical-looking their characters can become.

In Gorboduc, the authors are especially interested in motivating the scant sequence of events in the chronicles. Geoffrey does not explain why two brothers should begin to fight one another; Ferrex and Porrex, both desiring to reign, have a war, and that is all we know. For the playwrights this fratricide requires explanation. We can hardly expect to derive any political lessons from a merely gratuitous clash, and British princes should not be imagined as attacking one another without reason. Hence the authors of Gorboduc render the princes' war more understandable. Because of Gorboduc's ill-advised decision to divide the realm between them, both sons feel slighted. Spurred by this antagonism which their father's poor judgment fostered, and urged on by bad advisors in an atmosphere of mounting tension, the brothers are no mere incarnations of evil ambition. Viewed partly as victims and pawns, they are made more forgivable and the disaster less random. British princes must be imagined as having some good in them, and the disaster as not primarily the brothers' doing but the consequence of the original bad decision to divide the kingdom.

Yet, while the play does develop this perspective on the motivations of Ferrex and Porrex, there is still a sense of how impenetrable their minds are. Ferrex, for one, is given little to say. In act 1, scene 1, next to his ardent mother, Videna, he appears flat, lacking any substantial thoughts. In act 2, scene 1, he has far fewer lines than the counselors around him and he absorbs their counsel like a veritable sponge. He says the minimum of what the plot requires him to say and then disappears. Although Porrex is perhaps more sharply portrayed, he ultimately seems as opaque as Ferrex because we get such contradictory impressions of him. For example, does Porrex's heartfelt plea for forgiveness in act 4, scene 2 merely carry out a plan, mentioned earlier (2.2.64-66), to appease his father? Are we to take his appeal to Gorboduc as premeditated and deceitful? When he cites in his own defense attempts by Ferrex on his life, is Porrex lying? Before either we or Gorboduc can evaluate his speeches, Porrex has been slain and Lady Marcella is praising him as the very image of the chivalric prince (4.2.228-56). What type of men were Ferrex and Porrex? What motivated them?

This and other questions that we might ask about the “historical” figures of the play go unanswered, and the gaps cannot be attributed merely to inept playmaking. Sackville's contributions to the Mirror reveal that he, at least, was capable of imagining colorfully the minds of historical figures.²⁹ But in Gorboduc he and Norton are trying to handle non-historical characters with some historical care, and the result is that their creations seem unlike people who might actually have lived. Like his sons, Gorboduc says little and reveals little about himself before being murdered offstage by a mob. The playwrights invent a death for him which fits the history-play message (i.e., the admonition against rebellion), but which also permits them to imagine as little as possible. By killing Gorboduc offstage, they manage to avoid overtly contradicting anything Geoffrey indicates about the man. It is thus not surprising that the most clearly drawn of the play's Galfridian figures is Videna. The playwrights can make her a striking, Medea-like figure because Geoffrey reports something about her mind: she loved her son Ferrex, and she hated Porrex for killing him.³⁰ But after these emotions have been depicted, Videna, too, is banished from our sight, killed offstage with her husband. Ironically, the play's Galfridian figures seem less like real, historical people because of the authors' effort to assume that they were real, historical people.

Locrine, too, conveys the impression that some liberties have been taken with the characters in order to imagine their minds and satisfy the conditions of a history play; in Locrine, likewise, regard for history results in vague characterizations. The best example is Estrild, the princess who came with Humber and who after his defeat became Locrine's concubine. The mind of Estrild was a complete mystery. Taken by Humber as booty, had she become attached to him? Was his fall a calamity for her? Did she go willingly with Locrine or did he force her? Did she feel guilty about being hidden away as his concubine, did she defy such considerations, or did she feel she was his rightful wife? Did his death mean the loss of a man she loved? Was she twice a victim of rape, twice an opportunistic whore, or twice a grieving widow? These unanswerable “historical” questions attracted the interest of at least two other writers, John Higgins in his additions to the Mirror and Thomas Lodge in his “Complaint of Estred.” Both joined the playwright of Locrine in attempting to imagine this woman's mind. But the three depictions of Estrild suffer under the same difficulty of simultaneously embroidering on and remaining faithful to history. All three works fashion an Estrild who had freely accompanied Humber and was grief stricken at his death; they then decide that she loved Locrine as passionately, his loss being a disaster that redoubles Humber's loss.³¹ This convenient solution added to Geoffrey's details without contradicting them and served the purpose of exemplarity. An Estrild in love with and mourning both men was able to express lamentations which taught the fickleness of fortune; twice bereft of a glorious lover, she was qualified to lecture against excessive love of worldly pomp, and she does so in all three works. But such a solution made for an inhuman-seeming character. What woman would twice respond so favorably to a captor and to a situation into which she had been forced? Of the three portrayals, only Locrine even hints at this problem, lending Estrild a few lines of misgiving about her second lover (4.2.126-44, 5.2.90-93). But these moments are fleeting, absorbed into the Estrild who suddenly loves each king in succession with all her heart. A more complicated Estrild might require adding too much to Geoffrey's account; it would certainly complicate the fine exemplum that the pat solution provides. We are given a history-play woman, but one whose erotic history seems not to correspond to that of anyone who lived such a life.

If it was difficult to recreate the mind of the Estrild who lived through Geoffrey's story, it was equally daunting to imagine the mind of his Elidure. Noted for the improbable feat of being thrice crowned king, this figure, like Estrild, endured the same fate repeated times; as with Estrild, the question of what such a person must have been like appeared intractable. Geoffrey calls him “pius” for his lack of ambition in abdicating in favor of his deposed brother Archigallo, who in Elidure's estimation remained the lawful king.³² But did this “pius” concern for brotherhood and law reflect a noble heart or an acquiescent one? Did Elidure make a sacrifice to reinstate his brother, or did he relinquish a crown he cared nothing for? In Nobody and Somebody, the need to adhere to Geoffrey and to exemplarity results in the most simple Elidure imaginable. Elidure, one of Geoffrey's better kings, was a model of justice, humility, and altruism; hence the play is careful in various places to imagine an Elidure who tallies with this standard impression. But as with Estrild in Locrine, with Elidure the simple, history-play solution yields an unreal and inconsistent character. Could a historical person who behaved like Elidure avoid appearing weak and irresponsible, neglectful of his people's wishes? It takes an invented character, the comically ambitious Lady Elidure, to signal Elidure's questionable actions, which she takes to be lapses in duty. In surrendering his throne to his grasping younger brothers, he is permitting his wife to suffer, and she tells him so (10.1438-42). Her frustration might be ours: who is this Elidure? In adapting the Elidure story as a history play, Nobody and Somebody proves unable to answer this question.

While King Leir appears to imagine the minds of its characters with greater freedom than the other three plays, it too emerges as constrained by history, for this imagining tends not merely to add color but also to account for and rationalize the characters' behavior.³³ Such rationalization leads me to infer that the author aims at a history play—for this is just the strategy he would use if he wanted to produce one. We need understandable motivations to produce explanations of actions and political examples; we also need them to envision what these people must have been like. For example, the playwright chooses to imagine the events preceding Leir's disinheriting of Cordella so that we might understand why he would do such a thing. Here the love contest is not arbitrary, but part of the king's plan to marry off his daughters suitably and ensure the long-term safety of Britain (1.54-89). Cordella's famously truthful answer is thereby given added significance: it is a declaration that she will not marry according to his wishes. His anger at her is made more comprehensible because her reply represents, in his eyes, a refusal to obey his will and to consider her duty to the kingdom (3.86-100). The episode is made to concern statecraft and to resemble the type of decision an actual king might have made. As for the cause of her sisters' hatred of Cordella, the play imagines this explanation: Gonorill and Ragan detest their younger sister because “all the court” holds her above them and because she is likely to gain a better husband than they (2.1-29). They hate Cordella because they have cause to perceive her as a threat to their aspirations; Geoffrey's account of their hatred becomes rationalized. We are given to understand that their hatred is wrapped up in court politics and that their hatred was an emotion which historical people would have been capable of feeling; we get the sense that some such persons could have lived. Thus the imagined motivations in Leir, like those in the other plays, are very often controlled by the history-play demands of exemplarity and historical reconstruction.

Yet despite all such attempts to make serviceable history-play figures from Geoffrey's personages, the sense of who they were or of their connectedness to people who actually lived remains fairly weak. While certainly evil, Gonorill and Ragan, for example, are marked in Leir by a kind of intermittent conscience, a fitful concern for what others think. Next to their Shakespearean counterparts, the portrayals of Gonorill and Ragan appear inconsistent and watered down, illustrations of just how little access the playwright has to these characters' minds. The best example of all is Cordella. Here, as always, Cordella is without blemish; but to make her more accessible to the audience, the author resorts, as he did with Leir, to using religious commonplaces to establish this goodness. Although happily invested as queen of France (13.1-32), Cordella still pines for her father and hopes to regain his love; these pious feelings find articulation in a long speech replete with references to prayer, church, fasting, pilgrimage, sackcloth, charity, and the “Saviour.” Her sister calls her a “puritan” for her brand of piety (29.96). Yet such anachronisms sustain rather than violate the author's sense of historicity. How could this remote figure, known only for her superhuman goodness, be imagined? By letting her display her goodness and by associating it with that of familiar figures like monks and puritans, Geoffrey's woman is made to seem possible. Perhaps we are now meant to grasp why she acted as she did. But the result is a Cordella whose self seems smothered by these conventional tags of “goodness.” She becomes “everygoodwoman.” What was she like? Who was she? As in the other plays, the attempt to imagine historically the minds of Geoffrey's characters only confirms the difficulty of doing so.

Shakespeare's version, striving neither to recreate history nor to make sense of it, achieves its realism by avoiding rationalization. When Lear marvels at the cruelty of his two elder daughters and asks, “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” (3.6.77-78), we are aware that no answer can be given. And Cordelia, unlike Cordella, has no opportunity to explain the nature of her love for her father. It is simply there. When at last called upon by her father to account for this love, she replies: “No cause, no cause” (4.7.75). Cordelia's love is not made comprehensible to us, nor are we invited to imagine that Cordelia represents a historical person who loved this way. And yet Shakespeare's Cordelia rings humanly true.

I have argued that the disparity between King Lear and the other plays on pre-Roman Galfridian material traces not only to differences in dramatic skill but also to differences in attitude toward the source material. In Renaissance drama, the historical often mixes with the fantastical, and in many cases historical elements provide mere decoration. But some plays are clearly more concerned than others with representing historical events and people; and, as I have tried to demonstrate, many of the peculiarities of the four non-Shakespearean plays derive more from their attention to “history” than from their dismissal of it. In attempting to use Geoffrey of Monmouth's prehistorical Britain as history-play material, the dramatist was bound to encounter certain conceptual problems. How should he situate the Galfridian stories in time? Or were they in time? How should he rework the “historical” narrative to provide good examples? Or did the extent of his reworking itself expose a lack of historicity in that narrative? Finally, how should he portray the minds of the persons as motivating their actions? Or were these minds closed to him by their remoteness or, perhaps, their fictiveness? Shakespeare was able to avoid these questions. In accepting Geoffrey as non-history, he was able to produce a play that took another reality as its subject, one entailing no explanations—no cause.

Notes

1. The standard story was that the sons of Goneril and Regan, Marganus and Cunedagius, joined forces to overthrow Cordelia, and thereafter, unable to share the kingship, fought a civil war won by Marganus. See, for example, the account in Raphael Holinshed's Historie of England (in his Chronicles [London, 1587], pp. 13-14).

2. On evaluating a history play in terms of the “reality it purports to imitate,” see Herbert Lindenberger, Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality (Chicago, 1975), p. 3.

3. For critics who do consider Lear a history play because of its political content, see Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, N.J., 1957), pp. 247-53; Eric Sterling, The Movement towards Subversion: The English History Play from Skelton to Shakespeare (Lanham, Md., 1996), pp. xiii, 43. A great many critics prefer not to treat Lear as a history play but to view it instead as a “poetic fable” commenting on Shakespeare's own day. Some examples include Alvin B. Kernan, “King Lear and the Shakespearean Pageant of History,” in On King Lear, ed. Lawrence Danson (Princeton, N.J., 1981), pp. 7-24; Joseph Wittreich, Image of That Horror: History, Prophecy, and Apocalypse in King Lear (San Marino, Calif., 1984), pp. 33-38; Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (Brighton, 1984), pp. 189-203; Richard Dutton, “King Lear, ‘The Triumphs of Reunited Britannia,’ and ‘The Matter of Britain,’” Literature and History 12 (1986): 137-51; and John Turner, “King Lear,” in Shakespeare: The Play of History, ed. Graham Holderness, Nick Potter, and John Turner (Iowa City, 1988), pp. 85-118. “Poetic fable” is Kernan's term. For Lear as emphasizing tragedy over history, see Richard H. Perkinson, “Shakespeare's Revision of the Lear Story and the Structure of King Lear,” Philological Quarterly 22 (1943): 315-29; Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), pp. 51, 84-85. For Lear and the obscurity of pre-Roman Britain, see Jodi Mikalachki, The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (London, 1998), pp. 68-95.

4. Several other prehistoric Galfridian plays are recorded in Philip Henslowe but do not survive, including plays on Brute, Lud, Dunwallo, and Brute Greenshield. See Geoffrey Bullough, “Pre-Conquest Historical Themes in Elizabethan Drama,” in Medieval Literature and Civilization: Studies in Memory of G. N. Garmonsway, ed. D. A. Pearsall and R. A. Waldon (London, 1969), pp. 289-321.

5. Gorboduc was written in 1561 and published first in 1565, and then in an authorized version in 1570; see Norman Rabkin's introduction to his edition of the play in Drama of the English Renaissance I: The Tudor Period, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York, 1976), p. 81. (References to this edition are to act, scene, and line.) Locrine was published in 1595 and draws upon the first installment of Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590), but it seems to have been first written during the 1580s and then reworked; see Jane Lytton Gooch's introduction to her edition of the play, The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine (New York, 1981), pp. 4-10. (References to this edition are to act, scene, and line.) The True Chronicle History of King Leir was published in 1605, but a publishing license of 1594 probably refers to this play; see Donald M. Michie's introduction to his edition of the play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella (New York, 1991), pp. 4-5. (References to this edition are to scene and line.) Nobody and Somebody was published in 1606, but scholars have argued convincingly for an initial composition date of circa 1592, with subsequent revisions; see David L. Hay's introduction to his edition of the play, Nobody and Somebody (New York, 1980), pp. 63-66. (References to this edition are to scene and line.) All references to King Lear are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston, 1974).

6. Judith H. Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven, Conn., 1984), pp. 110-23.

7. See William Baldwin's second preface, “Baldwin to the Reader,” in the 1559 edition of Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (New York, 1960), pp. 69-70; and Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), fol. 3. The quotation is Heywood's.

8. Arthur B. Ferguson, Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance England (Durham, N.C., 1993), p. 118.

9. On the Tudor/Stuart uses of Geoffrey of Monmouth, see Edwin Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser's Historical Allegory (Baltimore, 1932); Charles Bowie Millican, Spenser and the Table Round (Cambridge, Mass., 1932); and Roberta Florence Brinkley, Arthurian Literature in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1967).

10. Richard Harvey, Philadelphus, or a Defense of Brutes, and the Brutans History (London, 1593), pp. 17-57.

11. For Polydore, Camden, and the discrediting of Geoffrey of Monmouth, see T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950); and Ferguson, pp. 85-105. For an analysis of Shakespeare's subversion of the British Troy myth in response to antiquarian scholarship, see Heather James, Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 20-33, 85-118.

12. Gorboduc has been assumed to take either Robert Fabyan's chronicle or Richard Grafton's, or both, as its source. I choose to take Fabyan as the principal source, for Grafton's Abridgement of the Chronicles of England did not first appear until 1562, and Grafton tends to follow Fabyan slavishly in any case. Scholars warn us, however, that the authors probably drew upon a number of sources. See James Swart, Thomas Sackville: A Study in Sixteenth Century Poetry (Gronigen, 1948), pp. 68-70; and Paul Bacquet, Thomas Sackville: The Man and His Work (Geneva, 1966), pp. 218-23. Perusing Fabyan, the authors would have encountered a number of remarks about the oddities in Geoffrey's account. An example would be Fabyan's observation that Geoffrey's mention of France in the Leir story would have been an anachronism (The Chronicle of Robert Fabyan [London, 1542], pp. 15-16). Of course, Sackville and Norton could also have been familiar with the criticisms of Geoffrey made by Polydore Vergil.

13. Although each of them draws upon a number of sources, including perhaps Geoffrey of Monmouth himself, all three of these plays are probably heavily influenced by Holinshed; see Felix E. Schelling, The English Chronicle Play (New York, 1902), pp. 187-88. Holinshed's strategy of all-inclusiveness led him to incorporate into his chronicles Polydore's criticisms of Geoffrey, and he himself at times questions the British History. When he reaches the story of Caesar's invasion, Holinshed remarks that thenceforth he will have access to more accurate sources; see Holinshed (n. 1 above), pp. 23-24.

14. Holinshed, pp. 1-6.

15. Ibid., pp. 20-21.

16. Fabyan, pp. 16-19.

17. Holinshed, p. 12.

18. I rely on Holinshed for these dates, but Fabyan, who is quite interested in chronology, comes close enough to Holinshed in all four cases.

19. Compare Holinshed, p. 19.

20. Ibid., p. 13. Sterling believes that Leir is made to choose to hand down the kingdom so that blame can be transferred onto him (p. 168). I disagree because Leir's decision to divide the kingdom is not condemned in the play.

21. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London, 1977), pp. 258, 263 (2.9.59.6, 2.10.29.6). See Carrie Anna Harper, The Sources of the British Chronicle History in Spenser's “Faerie Queene” (Philadelphia, 1910), p. 80. I have found only one possible precedent that Spenser may have been following for Leir's donation of the entire kingdom within his own lifetime: John Rastell, The Pastyme of People (London, 1530), sig. Aiii.

22. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Acton Griscom (London, 1929), p. 272 (hereafter cited as Geoffrey).

23. Fabyan (n. 12 above), p. 19; Grafton (n. 12 above), fol. 4.

24. The standard account has Peridure peacefully coexisting with his brother until the latter's death and then serving as an effective king until his own. Geoffrey indicates that Peridure was more highly esteemed even than Elidure (Geoffrey, p. 299); for the debate on whether Peridure was a tyrant, see Holinshed (n. 1 above), p. 21.

25. While Spenser's version could imply a connection between private vice and public negligence (FQ 2.10.17), I can find no explicit account of Locrine as a tyrant, and in Caxton's chronicle he is even counted as a good king, “wonder wel beloued” (Chronicles of England [1480], chap. 5).

26. See Mack (n. 3 above), pp. 91-98.

27. See, for example, the statements on cause by Thomas Blundeville, The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories (1574), ed. Hans Peter Heinrich (Frankfurt, 1986), pp. 9-14, and Sir Walter Raleigh, History of the World, in The Works of Sir Walter Raleigh, 8 vols. (New York, 1964), 4:612-17. Sir Philip Sidney indicates that the heightened ability to analyze cause by imagining far-off historical persons was a special advantage of poetry over history (A Defense of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten [Oxford, 1966], p. 36).

28. I am thinking specifically of the portrayal of David in George Peele's David and Bethsabe and of Jupiter in Thomas Heywood's Golden Age and Silver Age. Both characters are rendered with confidence because traditional accounts of them made it easy to grasp their basic personalities. In both plays, the authors almost certainly thought they were embroidering upon fact with fiction or fantasy.

29. See especially Sackville's tragedy on the Duke of Buckingham in Campbell, ed., Mirror for Magistrates (n. 7 above), pp. 318-45.

30. Geoffrey, p. 273.

31. John Higgins, “Elstride,” in Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, 1946), pp. 87-100; and Thomas Lodge, “The Complaint of Estred,” in The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, 4 vols. (New York, 1963), 2:59-84.

32. Geoffrey, p. 296. For Holinshed he was Elidure the “godlie and vertuous” (p. 21).

33. On this point, see Perkinson (n. 3 above), p. 316.