SOURCE: "'Demystifying the Mystery of State': King Lear and the World Upside Down," in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, Vol. 44, 1992, pp. 75-83.

[In the following essay, Heinemann argues that King Lear is a play as much concerned with government and politics as it is with personal, familial issues. The critic stresses that the play should be interpreted in terms of a personal loss of power and as the collapse of social and political structures. Additionally, Heinemann suggests ways in which the political implications of King Lear might be related to the politics of England under King James I.]

King Lear is very much a political play—that is a play concerned with power and government in the state, with public and civil life, and not solely with private relationships and passions. Of course it is not only political; but it seems necessary to restate the point because recent productions so often try to make it a purely personal, familial, and psychological drama (much in the manner of A. C. Bradley, though a Bradley who has read Freud, Laing, and Foucault). However, even if this is intended to render the play acceptable to modern audiences (who are assumed to be very simple-minded), it is still a distortion, and makes much of the action unintelligible. As Peter Brook put it, the fact that the play is called King Lear does not mean that it is primarily the story of one individual¹—or, one may add, of one family. Shakespeare himself, by introducing the Gloucester parallel plot from quite another source, seems concerned to generalize the issues, to show that Lear's personal psychology or 'character' is not the only force at work.

There was a period, of course, when an exclusively timeless, ahistorical way of reading was more or less taken for granted. It was a great illumination for me, then, to read studies like John Danby's Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (1949), and the chapters by Kenneth Muir and Arnold Kettle in Shakespeare in a Changing World (1964), which attempted to read the play in the light of its contemporary historical and political significance, whatever reservations one may now have about some of their particular interpretations. Many years later, when my own highly intelligent and dominating mother reached the age of eighty-six, my sister and I discovered in ourselves marked Goneril and Regan tendencies. In one sense, as Goethe has it, 'an old man is always a King Lear'. The frustrations of old age ('I will do such things / What they are yet I know not, but they shall be / The terrors of the earth!'); the pain of confusion and weakness, are superbly given. The play needs inescapably to be seen both as an individual's loss of power and control and as the breakdown of a social and political system: that is indeed its point.

Why, for instance, some critics ask, does not Cordelia humour her old father, in the opening scene, by telling him what he wants and expects to hear—that she loves him above everything? If he were only her father, that could perhaps be a reputable argument. But he is also the King, he wields absolute power in the state, and for Cordelia to join in the public competition of flattery and cadging would be to collude with the corruption of absolute power—a matter which preoccupied many of James I's most politically thoughtful subjects in 1604-7. This she cannot do, as Kent cannot do it, and we admire their courage, come what will. If we take it only as a personal story (which the legendary history of course does not), it becomes plausible to imagine Cordelia as culpably stubborn, opinionated, self-righteous and selfish, the inherited mirror-image of Lear's personal failings. But one cannot play it like this without destroying the force of the legendary narrative and the interaction in the theatre.

Demystifying the Mystery of State

The main political thrust is not, of course, to propound an ideal, simplified, harmonious solution for conflicts and contradictions that were genuinely insoluble in the society of the time. Shakespeare is not writing Agitprop. School pupils and students who ask: 'What is Shakespeare putting over?' can be given only a negative answer—some things he is clearly not putting over.

The political effect is, rather, sharply to represent the complex conflicts of interest and ideology in his own world; to dramatize them as human conflicts and actions, not ordained by fate; to present images of kings and queens, statesmen and counsellors as simultaneously holders of sacred office and fallible human beings who may be weak, stupid, greedy or cruel (in itself a central contradiction). Hence the drama empowers ordinary people in the audience to think and judge for themselves of matters usually considered 'mysteries of state' in which no one but the 'natural rulers'—the nobility and gentry and professional élites—should be allowed to meddle. Sir Henry Wotton commented after seeing Henry VIII at the Globe that it was 'sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous'. If this was what he thought about Henry VIII, the most spectacular and ceremonious of Shakespeare's history plays, what would he have said of King Lear, which produces this effect in its extremest form?

Reinforcing Dominant Ideology?

It has been argued that the dramatists necessarily reinforce the dominant ideology which holds the society together, within which institutions such as the theatre function and provide them with a living, so that on balance criticism is safely 'contained'. In the early seventeenth century, however, it becomes increasingly evident that no single dominant ideology or consensus is capable of holding the society together. The existence of different ideologies and of deep ideological and political conflicts over the nature and limits of monarchic power and prerogative, and the rights and liberties of subjects (however masked by the pervasive censorship), has been clearly demonstrated and documented for the years 1603-40 by younger historians, notably J. P. Sommerville, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake.² The Essex circle, where so many contesting ideological viewpoints were articulated and discussed in the 1590s, was a marvellous seedbed for Shakespeare's multivocal historical and political drama. But that complex clash of ideologies—bastard-feudal, politique, scientific-Machiavellian, republican, radical-Puritan crusading and anti-clerical—ended in the disaster of the Essex revolt. In the drama, optimistic confidence in political and military action to fulfil national destiny gave place to a sense of history as tragedy, and modern English history became for the time being a banned subject.

What the Politics of King Lear Cannot Be

The politics of the play cannot then be the assertion of absolute monarchal power, prerogative, and magnificence against mean-spirited Parliamentary attacks on royal expenditure and pleasures, symbolized allegorically in Goneril and Regan, though this has been seriously argued. The Parliament of 1604 was certainly no flatterer of the monarch. Neither does the play show that any interference with or diminution of the King's absolute power is unnatural and must lead to chaos: for it is Lear's refusal to listen to wise counsel, his insistence on his own will as paramount and absolute, that opens the way to chaos and disintegration. The patriarchalist view of monarchy, that equates kingly power with the power of the father within the family, is strongly present in the play, above all in the mind of Lear himself. Patriarchalism does not, however, necessarily entail an absolutist view of kingly power; the importance of paternal power was supported by many anti-absolutist and even some revolutionary and Leveller political thinkers.³ Yet Cordelia, who challenges her father's use of absolute power, retains the audience's sympathy in so doing. To read the play as unequivocally patriarchalist is to read against the grain.

The assertion of the traditional and necessary rights and privileges of Parliament against government by royal prerogative was not something invented in the 1620s and 1630s, just in time for the Civil War, but goes back to the moment of King Lear and beyond it. James I was confused and annoyed by the institution of Parliament as he found it in his new kingdom, and the loyal Commons tried to explain to him that their right to be consulted and to criticize Crown policies did not imply disloyalty. The 'Apology of the Commons' in 1604 expressed their fears, based on what was happening to elected assemblies elsewhere in Europe:

What cause your poor Commons have to watch over our privileges is manifest in itself to all men. The prerogatives of princes may easily and do daily grow: the privileges of subjects are for the most part at an everlasting stand. They may be by providence and good care preserved, but being once lost are not recovered but with much disquiet.⁴

The Apology itself (never finally passed through parliament or officially presented) was drafted by Sir Edwin Sandys, MP, thereafter a close associate of Shakespeare's former patron the Earl of Southampton, with other surviving Essexians (such as Sir Thomas Ridgway) taking an important part. Sandys himself, one of the foremost exponents of anti-absolutist thinking in Jacobean times, claimed that the King's power had originally been introduced by popular consent; he declared in Parliament that now 'it is come to be almost a tyrannical government in England'.⁵ The tension between King and Parliament was indeed to continue throughout James's reign.

We do not know very much about Shakespeare's later connections with Southampton and his circle, but there is no evidence that they were broken off. Shakespeare apparently celebrated his former patron's release from the Tower with a congratulatory sonnet (No. 107), and continuing links with his circle are demonstrated by G. P. Akrigg.⁶The Tempest, begun around the time when Southampton (with Sandys) helped to found the Virginia Company, shows continuing cross-fertilization, and revolves (though sceptically) the colonialists' dream of creating a juster empire in the New World.⁷

In the context, it seems that Goneril, Regan, and Edmund were likely to be identified by the audience not with the Parliamentary oppositionists, but with what they saw as contemporary flatterers, cadgers, and upstarts at the Jacobean court, who were being rewarded for their obsequiousness with land, monopolies, offices and gifts—people like James's unpopular Scottish favourites. The land and the peasants who live on it are given away by Lear as if they were his private property. The decay of the old social order, with an alternative not yet ready to be born, gives rise to such morbid growths—as Gramsci expresses it.

Nature of the Political Interest

The heart of the political interest is not in the division of the kingdom or the issue of unification with Scotland, though there may well be allusions to this. The division as such does not in fact cause the war and barbarity that we see. The sole rule of Goneril, the eldest, would scarcely make for peace and harmony, and the single rule of Cordelia could only be secured if primogeniture were ignored. The causes of disaster lie deeper than that. The central focus is on the horror of a society divided between extremes of rich and poor, greed and starvation, the powerful and the powerless, robes and rags, and the impossibility of real justice and security in such a world. Lear himself, like the faithful Gloucester, discovers this only when his own world is turned upside down, when he himself is destitute and mad, and at last sees authority with the eyes of the dispossessed. Central to the language as well as the stage images is the opposition between 'looped and window'd raggedness', utter poverty, and the 'robes and furred gowns' that hide nakedness and crimes. All the difference lies in clothes and ceremony: 'a dog's obeyed in office'.

This crazy world is directly the responsibility of the King and of the rich and powerful in general, and the verse continually underlines this: 'You houseless poverty', cries Lear on the heath,

O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

(3.4.32-6)

And Gloucester, blind and helpless, echoes this conclusion:

Heavens deal so still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly.
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.

(4.1.60-5)

This is a note not struck in the earlier Histories, and certainly not in the other 'deposition play', Richard II.

The indictment is still, for us, very direct and near the bone. Audiences going to the South Bank to see in 1990 King Lear at the National Theatre passed by Cardboard City, the modern equivalent of Edgar's hovel, where the homeless shelter in cardboard boxes on the pavement. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, visiting London, said on television that she had seen such sights in the Third World, but in a rich country like Britain she could not understand it. Many of those sleeping rough are the mentally disturbed and the old, made homeless by the closing of mental hospitals and old people's homes, the cuts in home helps, the lack of funds for care in the community. Lear bitterly tells Goneril, 'Age is unnecessary'. It still is.⁸

This interest, and the rôle-reversal of riches and poverty, power and powerlessness, is stressed in Quarto and Folio alike, despite the many alterations. Nor is it just our modern prejudice that leads us to focus on this as a central concern. It is surely significant that so many of what are now widely believed to be Shakespeare's own revisions relate to this aspect of the play—the inverted world, the counterposing of king and clown, wisdom and madness, insight and fooling. Clearly he was particularly anxious to get this right. He has two goes at presenting the 'upside-down' view of monarchy and absolute power. Once this appears as a powerful stage image, the 'mock-trial' of the Quarto text, in which the very possibility of securing justice in such an anjust and unequal society is parodied and mocked. This scene can be much more effective on the stage than it looks on the page (pace Roger Warren),⁹ since the parallel with Lear dispensing 'justice' from his throne in the opening scene can be made visually much sharper and more shocking.

In the Folio text the upside-down view of justice is presented purely in language, in the extended speech of Lear to Gloucester, which, after the brilliant images (already in Quarto) of the dog obeyed in office and the beadle lashing the whore he lusts for, adds the explicit general moral:

Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pygmy's straw does pierce it.
None does offend, none, I say none. I'll able 'em.
Take that of me, my friend, who have the power
To seal th'accuser's lips.

(4.5.161-6)

The 'upside-downness' is emphasized and made more explicit verbally in Folio—extended from Quarto but not amended. 'None does offend' suggests that no one has the right to accuse or judge since all are sinners, or that no one will dare to accuse if the king opposes it and has the power to silence the accusers and pardon the offenders. But there may also be an echo of antinomian discourse, implying that our categories of right and wrong, sin and righteousness, are meaningless and evil. The dreams of persecuted underground Familist groups at the time when King Lear was written surface again in the revolutionary years in the antinomian vision of Abiezer Coppe:

Sin and transgression is finished and ended . . . Be no longer so horribly, hellishly, impudently, arrogantly wicked, as to judge what is sin, what not.¹⁰

Although I understand Roger Warren's point about the difficulty of staging the 'mock-trial', which may have prompted the revision, it has (as he concedes) been successfully done, for example in our time by Peter Brook, and it is difficult to accept that by cutting it Shakespeare made a better play. For the 'mocktrial' vividly makes the case not against a particular legal injustice or the corruption of individual judges (as Middleton does in, say, The Phoenix), but against the whole intrinsically ridiculous pretence of justice in an unjust society.

Warren criticizes the scene as ineffective on the grounds that the Fool and Edgar as Poor Tom, seated on the farmhouse bench alongside Lear, fail to keep to the legal-satirical point, though Lear himself does so.¹¹ But this is surely the essence. The entire set up is absurd—the rich and respectable are no more qualified to dispense justice than the whores and thieves, or the fools and madmen. To make this strike home and shake our complacency, the speech of madness and folly at this moment needs to sound truly mad, wild and disorganized, not the coherently composed discourse of a satirist in disguise. The image flashes on us as a moment of dreadful insight—enough, one might say, to drive the beholder mad.

Christopher Hill perceptively notes that many prophets of the upside-down world in the seventeenth century were thought by contemporaries to be mad, and some probably were—the vision was too much for their sanity.¹² But in some cases madness was a useful protection for the expression of opinions dangerous to the social order. There can be no doubt that the Ranter Thomas Webbe was being prudent when he called himself Mad Tom in a pamphlet foretelling the downfall of Charles II in 1660.¹³

This reversal of degree finds no easy resolution in the play. Edgar's final speech provides no strongly felt reassurance that the world is now once more firmly the right way up. It is deliberately quiet and bleak.

Resistance Upside Down

The resistance to evil too has an 'upside-down' dimension, coming first from the weak, the oppressed lower orders, the peasants and servants. This is highlighted in the first violent check to tyranny, when the Nazi-type brute Cornwall, about to put out the other eye of Gloucester, is defied and wounded by his own servant. In the few lines he speaks this unnamed man declares himself a lifelong servant of the Duke, not a casual hireling; but the bonds of feudal loyalty and rank cannot hold in face of such dishonourable cruelty:

I have served you ever since I was a child, But better service have I never done you Than now to bid you hold.

(3.7.71-3)

This echoes Kent's justification of his insubordination to Lear. A 'villein' of Cornwall's draws on his lord as an equal, and Regan screams out the indignation of the 'natural rulers':

A peasant stand up thus!

(3.7.77)

She kills him, running at him from behind. But the resistance has started, and Cornwall will not be there to help crush it.

For the audience, this action—quite unprepared—by one of the stage 'extras' is startling, and evidently meant to be so. It is followed, in Quarto, by the sympathy and indignation of the horrified servants, who despite their terror do their best to help Gloucester and bandage his wounds. This first tentative rallying of humane forces against the tyrants was cut in the Folio text, and also in a famous production by Peter Brook, who said he wished to prevent reassurance being given to the audience. One wonders why. The reassurance provided in these depths of agony hardly seems excessive. Was the suggestion of a justified popular rising against despotic power perhaps felt to be going too far? However that may be, Edgar when he kills Oswald is disguised as a peasant, wearing the 'best 'parel' provided by the honest old man, Gloucester's tenant, and talking stage country dialect. His peasant cudgel beats down the gentleman's sword and his fancy fencing:

I's' try whether your costard or my baton be the harder . . .' Chill pick your teeth, sir. Come, no matter vor your foins.

(4.5.240-4)

Ordinary countrymen were of course forbidden to wear a sword, which was the exclusive privilege of gentlemen.¹⁴ Hence this victory must register in the theatre as symbolic of the common people defeating the hangers-on of court and wealth, though since Edgar is really a nobleman in disguise, and the audience knows this, the effect is less subversive than it might be. However, if we compare this fight with the concluding duels between Hamlet and Laertes, Prince Hal and Hotspur, or Coriolanus and Aufidius, this image is strikingly a contest of social unequals, in which the plain but righteous man wins against the odds. It may also have suggested a further symbolic meaning for some in the audience. The Surrey group of Familists, whose pacifist principles forbade them to bear arms, found that this made them too conspicuous, and therefore compromised by carrying staves (cudgels).¹⁵

Lear's Fool is of course the most obvious source of upside-downness in both texts, speaking wisdom in the proverbial idiom of the people, often coarsely, in contrast to the hypocrisy and folly of formal and ceremonial utterance by the great. (The distinction that has been suggested between a 'natural' Fool in Quarto and an 'artificial', skilful courtier-Fool in Folio has to my mind been greatly overstated.) The Fool's jokes and aphorisms are consistently in the irreverent upside-down style, often literally so, and some as old as Aesop:

e'er since thou madest thy daughters thy mothers . . .

and puttest down thine own breeches . . .

(1.4.153-4)

May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse?

(1.4.206)

When thou clovest thy crown i'th' middle and gavest away both parts, thou borest thine ass o'th' back o'er the dirt.

(1.4.142-4)

This echoes the images of the topsy-turvy world in scores of songs and broadsides,¹⁶ such as the popular ballad, 'Who's the fool now', favoured by James's own provocative Fool Archy Armstrong (and still in use at folksong festivals to this day). Textual revision has not substantially changed this effect. The King himself reduced to a fool is a key image in both texts. The main difference may be in the greater emphasis given to it in the Quarto:

LEAR Dost thou call me fool, boy?

FOOL All thy other titles thou hast given away. That thou wast born with.

(Q.4.143-5)

And one may note also the obviousness of the topical application in Quarto, which it is suggested the censor may have jibbed at.¹⁷ Among the lines excised is the Fool's jingle:

That lord that counselled thee
To give away thy land,
Come, place him here by me;
Do thou for him stand.
The sweet and bitter fool

Will presently appear,
The one in motley here,
The other found out there.

(Q.4.135-142)

So too is the Fool's complaint that he has failed to secure a monopoly of folly, because:

lords and great men will not let me. If I had a monopoly out, they would have part on't, and ladies too, they will not let me have all the fool to myself—they'll be snatching.

(Q.4.147-50)

There is indeed a double topical reference here (1) to the land given away by the King to his favourites, and (2) to anti-monopoly pressure by the Commons, culminating in the Apology of 1604.

The Fool stands in a direct theatrical tradition from Tarlton, appearing as Simplicity in the 'medley' plays of the 1580s. Even his jokes are traditional.¹⁸ The clown as prophet appears in The Cobbler's Prophecy (printed 1594) where the poor cobbler, endowed with prophetic gifts by the gods, denounces the rich and foresees the world turned upside down at the Day of Judgement, when widows and starving children will be avenged. The most direct analogy, however, is with Rowley's comic-historical presentation in 1605 of Henry VIII and his famous jester Will Summers, who in this rendering is an iconoclastic, egalitarian, anti-Popish clown and a champion of the poor. It would be better, he says, if Henry had their prayers rather than the Pope's, for the Pope is at best St Peter's deputy, 'but the poor present Christ, and so should be something better regarded'—an old anti-clerical aphovism traceable back to the Lollards.¹⁹

Not Only 'Carnivalesque'

The upside-down discourse here is not simply 'carnivalesque', if by that we mean providing a recognized safety-valve for the release of tensions in a repressive society—a temporary holiday from hierarchy which enables it to be reimposed more effectively afterwards, as we see in the Feast of Fools, the Lords of Misrule, or the iconoclastic Christmas entertainments customary to this day in the London teaching hospitals.

The deriding of accepted categories of sin, adultery, property and officially enforced law echoes Utopian ideas which survived in a serious and organized form, more or less underground, in late-Elizabethan and Jacobean times, among radical religious sects such as the Family of Love, and were to surface again forty to fifty years later in the revolutionary years, first with the Levellers, and after their defeat with Ranters and Seekers. A Presbyterian divine, denouncing the sect under Elizabeth, had emphasized the 'topsy-turvy' aspect of Henry Niclaes' teaching as especially subversive of order:

To be brief in this matter of doctrine, H.N. turneth religion upside down, and buildeth heaven here upon earth: maketh God, man; and man, God; heaven, hell; and hell, heaven.²⁰

The existence of such ideas was topical knowledge about the time when King Lear was first produced. In Basilikon Doron King James had particularly attacked Familists as an example of dangerous Puritanism:

their humours . . . agreeing with the general rule of all Anabaptists, in the contempt of the civil magistrate, and in leaning to their own dreams and revelations.²¹

The Familists, replying to this, petitioned King James for toleration, disavowing any intent to overthrow the magistrate and place themselves in his seat: an appeal almost certainly drafted by Robert Seale, one of a group of Familists in the royal Guard.²² They, did not obtain the toleration they sought. In 1606 a confutation of their Supplication was printed (together with the text) and thereafter little is known about the sect as such. The ideas, however, were in the air, and theatre people could have picked up their acquaintance with them around the court as well as in artisan circles (often no doubt in distorted form).

Not Mad From the Beginning.

The 'world upside down' effect in the play is easily destroyed, though, if the King is played (as has happened in some recent productions) as deranged, undignified and in senile dementia from his first entrance. Dramatically, no fall or reversal is then possible, and 'Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!' loses all its agonizing force. No moral or political point can then be made, except perhaps that kings ought to be retired early, so that they can be replaced by sane people like Goneril and Regan.

It is not a question of the sacred untouchability of the text. As Brecht once said, 'I think we can alter Shakespeare if we can alter him'; but wrong alterations will 'mobilise all Shakespeare's excellences against us'. This particular one seems to me the kind of alteration that distorts the original to the point where the chemistry of the play no longer works. A successful production has to convince us that a King, however grand and mighty he has been, is a fool anyway, and mortal anyway. Lear's fearful experience makes him and the audience aware of this. Hence the need of any king for wise and courageous advisers prepared to tell him the truth and set limits to his power—the role played by Kent here, and in the contemporary political context, unevenly but increasingly, in their own mind at least, by some opposition elements in Parliament.

Censorship and the Reception of the Play

Direct censorship (as distinct from cautious self-censorship) has been argued as possibly accounting for some of the differences between the two texts—notably the omission of several of the Fool's speeches in Scene 4. It was a tricky moment to write in this tone about a British Court and Crown, even if legendary ones. But it may just have been that the bitter jokes against royalty did not please, and some were therefore cut by the dramatist and the players in a revised acting version. That, however, may not have been enough. No London revival of Lear after 1606, which might have used a revised text, is actually known, though there were many repeats, at court and elsewhere, of Othello, Hamlet, Richard II, and the late romances. The chances are that this play, directly representing a King as foolish, the rich as culpable, and the poor as victims, may have been felt as altogether too disturbing and subversive.

There is indeed evidence that the company was in political trouble with the Court around this time. The King's Men had, it seems, displeased James by a play performed 'in their theatre' reported to him as containing many 'galls', 'dark sentences / Pleasing to factious brains,' with 'every otherwhere a jest / Whose high abuse shall more torment than blows'. The company made their peace with a Court performance of the old romantic-heroic popular favourite Mucedorus, including a specially rewritten Epilogue, in which the characters appealed on their knees to the 'glorious and wise Arch-Caesar on this earth' to pardon 'our unwitting error'.²³ The references to the offending play in this Epilogue (attributed by several scholars to Shakespeare) sound more appropriate to King Lear than to anything else recently performed by the King's Men. However that may be, the company had certainly been warned; and the marked change of tone in Shakespeare's later plays—Pericles and Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and Tempest—may in part reflect this.

Notes

¹ Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London, 1968), p. 91.

² See in particular the chapters by these authors in Conflict in Early Stuart England, ed. R. Cust and A. Hughes (London, 1989); and J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (London, 1989).

³ Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, pp. 28-32.

⁴ From 'A Form of Apology and Satisfaction', drawn up at the end of the 1604 session by a Committee of the House. Cited Conrad Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments (London, 1971), p. 270.

⁵ Cited Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict in England 1603-1648 (London, 1986), p. 117.

⁶ G. P. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (London, 1968), pp. 264ff.

⁷ Other links with Parliamentarian circles can be traced through the Digges brothers, who are connected in various ways with Shakespeare and later with anti-absolutist opposition trends. Their stepfather, Thomas Russell, was overseer of Shakespeare's will. Leonard Digges published eulogies of Shakespeare in 1623 and 1640. (Shakespeare, Complete Works (Oxford, 1986), pp. xlvi and xlviii). Dudley Digges, who is believed to have shown Strachey's confidential report on the state of Virginia to Shakespeare (see The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London, 1964), pp. xxvii-xxviii) was a prominent anti-absolutist MP, and in 1629 drafted the Petition of Right.

⁸ During the year to October 1990 London local au thorities had to place over 31,000 families in temporary accommodation (a new high), and 8,000 in bed and breakfast accommodation. (Chairman of Association of Local Authorities Housing Committee, the Guardian, 12 October 1990). Even in prosperous Cambridge, 307 homeless families had to be rehoused in the year 1990-1, an increase of 44 on the previous year and the highest number on record. For England as a whole official statistics show homeless households have increased by 131 per cent in 1979-89 to a total of 122,680: recent research (by Professor John Greve) shows that in 1990 some 170,000 households were accepted as homeless by Local Authorities, amounting to about half a million people. Estimates of single homeless (who are not entitled to be rehoused) in London vary between 65,000 and 125,000: according to the housing charity Shelter, about 3,000 are currently sleeping rough in London.

⁹ Roger Warren, 'The Folio Omission of the Mock Trial: Motives and Consequences', in Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms (Oxford, 1983), pp. 45ff.

¹⁰ Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll, pt 1, ch. 8 (London, 1649).

¹¹ R. Warren, p. 46.

¹² Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London, 1972), p. 224. The whole chapter 'The Island of Great Bedlam' is illuminating on the relation between lower-class prophecy and accusations of madness.

¹³ Hill, p. 227.

¹⁴ Oswald, as Kent points out earlier, while technically allowed to wear a sword, is too dishonourable to have a right to it.

¹⁵ See Janet E. Halley, 'The Case of the English Family of Love', in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (London, 1988), pp. 319-20. See also John Rogers, The displaying of an horrible sect of gross and wicked heretics (London, 1578).

¹⁶ See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), especially the illustrated broadsides of the mice burning the cat; the woman with the gun and the man with the distaff; and the peasant riding on the nobleman's back (between pp. 98 and 99).

¹⁷ See Gary Taylor in The Division of the Kingdoms, pp. 104-9.

¹⁸ The Fool's joke about the cockney's brother who, 'in pure kindness to his horse, buttered his hay' (Lear 2.4) is anticipated by Tarlton's story about the inn where they greased the horses' teeth to prevent them eating, and so saved the cost of the fodder (Three Ladies of London, Dodsley's Old Plays (London, 1874), vol. 6, p. 255).

¹⁹ Samuel Rowley, When You See Me You Know Me (London, 1605) (Malone Society Reprint, 1952, line 1568).

²⁰ John Knewstub, A Confutation of Monstrous and Horrible Heresies (London, 1579). Preface.

²¹ Cited by Halley.

²² Seale was briefly imprisoned on suspicion of Familism in 1580, but was still in a position of trust at court as clerk of the Cheque of the Guard in 1599, a position which he continued to hold in 1606. In the reply confuting the Familists' Supplication (which includes their text) the editor refers (p. 18) to leading Familists 'receiving yearly both countenance and maintenance from her princely coffers, being her household servants': and on p. 28 states that the Elizabethan Familists are 'yet living and in Court', with 'their children in right ancient place about his majesty'. The Familists included both an educated élite and an organized popular following, mainly of artisans, in such areas as Wisbech, Surrey, Suffolk, and Cambridge. See Alastair Hamilton, The Family of Love (1981), especially Chapter 6 on the Family in England.

²³ I am grateful to Richard Proudfoot for drawing my attention to the Mucedorus Epilogue and its significance. The revised Epilogue, first printed in the 1610 edition, is included in The Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed. C. Tucker Brooke (1908), from which all the above phrases are quoted. The matter is discussed in The Comedy of Mucedorus, ed. K. Warnke and Ludwig Proeschold (1878); and by R. Simpson in Academy, (29 April 1876). The play is described in the Epilogue as a 'comedy' but this does not rule out a reference to Lear: Hamlet, after all, referred to The Murder of Gonzago as a 'comedy'.