SOURCE: Hoeniger, F. D. “The Artist Exploring the Primitive: King Lear.” In Some Facets of “King Lear”: Essays in Prismatic Criticism, edited by Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff, pp. 89-102. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974.

[In the following essay, Hoeniger concentrates on archaic sources and themes associated with nature in King Lear.]

There may once have been a King Lear in ancient Britain after whom the city of Leicester was named, and perhaps he had three daughters. But the story about him which Shakespeare retells, both in the form in which he found it and the form into which he cast it, is highly unreal, utterly remote from any familiar history. King Lear lived, according to Tudor historians, at some vague time during the era of the Kings of Judea. Of the mocking prophecy which the Fool recites at the end of 3.2, he says that it will be made by Merlin, ‘for I live before his time.’ The events of the play are as unreal as its chronology: no king within reliably recorded history, we may be sure, ever performed as Lear does in the opening scene. Nor do we believe that any young sixteenth-century nobleman, cast out by his father, ever disguised himself as Tom of Bedlam—and it is difficult to think of Edgar's encounters with the mad king and his own blinded father as anything that could ‘really’ happen. And what of Gloucester's jump, on the level stage, from what he has been persuaded are the cliffs of Dover, that most improbable episode in any of Shakespeare's tragedies? By comparison with the world and action of King Lear, those of Hamlet and Othello seem very real. All the same, Shakespeare's Lear comes intensely home to us. This we know, as many before us have known it the world over. The utterly unreal becomes profoundly real.

I still remember how when I saw King Lear for the first time on the stage, I was intensely absorbed by it though I certainly did not understand what it was all about. I was fourteen. I had tried to read the play before the production but found it too difficult a task, yet I went to see it because it was, after all, by the great Shakespeare. I remember how overcome I was by an acute sense of strangeness and unreality mixed with awe, the latter no doubt encouraged by the majesty of Lear, by his white beard, and by the astonishing energy of the old man; and I remember feeling keenly that all this was important, that it had bearing on life, on my life, though I could hardly fathom why. To use another term, which I will come back to later, the play seemed to reach down to the very sources of the primitive, and at the same time hold some, however obscure, wisdom for the audience and me in the twentieth century. This sense of the primitive and profound reached its climax in the mad scenes of the third act, with Lear, the Fool, and Edgar, where the strangeness itself was awesome. It must, I think, have been an extraordinarily good production though I remember no details of it, no name of producer or actors. Lear's folly is not balanced by his majesty in every production: he should be ‘royal Lear’ in the first scene and royal still when he casts off his garments. Now, over thirty years later, my need to grapple with the strangeness and primitiveness of the play is as acute as ever. Like all great art, King Lear has a mysterious core beyond explanation which we yet strive to approach and to apprehend more closely. But with King Lear this urge is particularly strong in our time, perhaps because modern man has experienced with a new intensity both the lure and the terror of the primitive. Can it be that the play has become even more vitally relevant to us than it was to previous generations?

In the opening paragraphs I have used the terms ‘unreal’ and ‘primitive,’ and the reader may well wonder in what sense or senses I use the term ‘primitive.’ It is part of this essay's strategy to leave the word's connotations and reverberations to the reader himself; at the moment he may want to involve even moral connotations, though my concluding section clearly points in a different direction. So far, I have suggested that the term fits not only the story of Lear as Shakespeare found it in his sources but also, in far wider connotations, the immense play which Shakespeare developed from it.

As we read the story of King Lear or Leir, apparently first written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1136, whence it reached the authors of A Mirror for Magistrates, Spenser, Holinshed, and the anonymous third-rate dramatist of The Chronicle History of King Leir, we realize that we are not reading history in the modern sense at all, but versions of the same simple story. Whether Holinshed believed his account of Lear to be factually true does not much matter. What is important is that Shakespeare in King Lear is not in the least concerned with history, but with his redramatization and reinterpretation of an old story. In his history plays we know that Shakespeare sometimes took great liberties with historical facts, for instance by making Hal and Hotspur of roughly the same age. Yet essentially 1 Henry IV is a history play, while King Lear is not what the Quarto title suggests, a chronicle-history, but the dramatization of what Ben Jonson called, referring to Pericles, ‘a mouldy tale.’ Some critics have questioned the Shakespearean authorship of the Fool's prophecy in King Lear at the end of 3.2, regarding it as a later actor's interpolation; but while it may make its point with a bluntness that does not suit the subtlety of the Fool's characterization in the rest of the play, his joke about the prophecy that ‘Merlin shall make’ amounts to Shakespeare winking at his audience: ‘we all know by now, don't we, that whatever this play is, it is not a chronicle history.’

Further, it is by no means certain that Shakespeare first became acquainted with the Lear tale through his reading. We cannot be certain that he first heard it told over a winter's fire by his mother or a grandam, by a friend or schoolmaster, but this seems to me highly probable, once we associate the following facts and considerations: Geoffrey of Monmouth surely did not invent all or even most of his chronicle history of ancient Britain, but wrote down what had been passed on from mouth to mouth; a ballad based on the Lear story from the seventeenth or eighteenth century has survived; folk tales of the story of a king and his three daughters, in many versions, have been told in many parts of the world for centuries, and are still told today in some parts of Sicily and Latin America; no English folk tale of the Lear story from any age has survived, but if none from the Middle Ages passed down to Elizabethan England, then it is highly probable that the very story so often repeated in chronicles and poems of the time gave rise to oral or folk versions. Is it unreasonable to conjecture that almost every Englishman of Shakespeare's time, whether he read widely or could not read at all, knew the tale of Lear and his three daughters? And if that is granted, then the likelihood is strong that Shakespeare became acquainted with the story early in his life, long before he came to read Holinshed. The first version of the story that Shakespeare heard, it seems probable, was either a folk tale that had been passed from mouth to mouth for generations, or a more recent tale derived from literary sources. In either case, the version would have been a simple, unsophisticated, pure story. If I am right about this, then the significance does not depend on the precise version that Shakespeare may have heard; that may have been quite close to the version in the Mirror for Magistrates or in Holinshed, or it may have taken the moralizing form, directed to children, familiar in many parts of Europe: Cordelia answers her father's question with ‘I love you as much as salt.’ Some time after Lear has been cast out by his elder daughters, he is discovered by Cordelia's soldiers wandering about in rags, is dressed again in royal garments, and is invited to a banquet where magnificent dishes are served, but without salt. And so Lear, and through him the children listening to the story, learn the simple moral. What matters is not whether Shakespeare became first acquainted with that version or one closer to Holinshed's chronicle, but that he thought of the story as an old tale of the folk about primitive Britain.

As his imagination dwelt on it for his play, it penetrated, as I will argue later, into the very origins of the story of the deep past. At present I wish to enlarge on the point previously made: that it is not just the kind of story which Shakespeare chose to dramatize, with its obscure setting in pre-Roman, pre-Christian Britain, that accounts for those elements in the play that seem so ‘primitive’ to us. Shakespeare reinforced those elements in several ways, one of which was by bringing the major characters very close to nature. Take Lear himself: in his most intimate scenes in the first half of the play, Lear is in the company of his natural, his Fool. Near the end of the scene in act 2 with Goneril and Regan, when the propriety of his keeping even a single retainer is questioned, he explains:

Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's.

(2.4.268-9)

We are aware, though, that Lear has not yet learned from nature, that he does not yet know what his own ‘nature’ needs most. We begin to sense the complex intermingling of the meanings of the word ‘nature,’ as Lear rushes out into nature at its most inhospitable, into the storm on the heath. There he meets Edgar, the ‘natural philosopher,’ of whom he asks, among other things, ‘the cause of thunder.’ In these gaunt surroundings, Lear learns slowly and fitfully. It is not the storm in nature that drives him mad, but the storm in his mind, produced by his sense (so frequently commented on by the Fool) that the world has been turned upside-down, and by his awareness of his own folly, of ingratitude and injustice, of the daughters' cruel exercise of power against their own kin. His exposure and suffering teach him his kinship to ‘Poor naked wretches’ and to Edgar-Tom, although his own self-concern makes him believe that only Tom's daughters, never his father, could have brought him to such a pass. Lear learns about ‘unaccommodated man’ whose ‘life is cheap as beast's.’ He learns that he is not ague-proof. When he is later awakened from his madness in Cordelia's presence, his experience has prepared him for this encounter, so that he knows at last that his real need is for love, not for power.

In the play, Lear begins by taking it for granted that his power is absolute—which means not merely that he can do anything he wishes in his state, but that he can control even love and nature. I need not comment here on his illusion that love is subject to power, but only on his illusion, which persists until the middle of the play, that he has power over nature. When thwarted in his plan by Cordelia in act 1, he swears:

For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate and the night,
By all the operation of the orbs
From whom we do exist and cease to be,
Here I disclaim—

(1.1.109-13)

all sorts of things, including propinquity and property of blood, with the ironic conclusion that ‘The barbarous Scythian, / Or he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite’ (1.1.116-18) shall be as close to him as his ‘sometime daughter.’ It is not its cannibalism alone, but the sheer, crude assertion of power, that makes this speech so fundamentally primitive. One might object that the speech is merely naïve, that very soon we will see Lear powerless and beginning to face his folly, and that blind assertions of power are not confined to primitive men. But we must perceive that one of the basic causes of Lear's blindness is that as king he assumes that he is also a magician: that not only his subjects but also the sun and the orbs, ‘The mysteries of Hecate and the night,’ will follow his bidding.

Later in act 1, after his experience with Goneril, Lear invokes the goddess Nature:

Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful!
Into her womb convey sterility!

(1.4.285-7)

Nowadays when a man tries to exercise such power, he does not invoke ‘Goddess Nature,’ he applies it directly—the difference, really, between an age of black magic and an age of black science. In 3.2, on the heath, Lear still believes that he can command the thunder, even to ‘Crack Nature's moulds.’ But as Lear is brought closer to nature itself, this attitude gradually disappears. The primitivism of his mind has started a series of reactions, culminating in Lear's reduction to a totally primitive state of body and mind, where he must learn painfully what nature and human nature are really like.

For this aspect of the theme of nature, Shakespeare found hardly a hint in his sources, and it is pertinent that this view of nature informs the subplot of Gloucester, Edmund, and Edgar as much as it does the main plot. It is often said that the subplot, with its parallel action to the main plot, helps us accept the Lear plot because its characters are closer to average experience; that Lear and his daughters belong in ancient Britain, while Gloucester and his sons are somehow Elizabethan. This may be so, up to a point, but, as I stressed at the very opening of this essay, improbabilities dictate the action of the subplot characters quite as much as those of the main plot. Moreover what I have called ‘the primitive’ involves them deeply, too. Gloucester has a primitive's superstition, as is clear from his speech on ‘These late eclipses,’ as well as from his ready acceptance of Edgar's contrived miracle at Dover—that a fiend lured him to commit suicide but that ‘the clearest Gods’ (note the plural) preserved him. Edmund is, like Lear, a worshipper of power; significantly enough, he too is given a speech on goddess Nature:

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound.

(1.2.1-2)

What is that law? It is a law that frees him from what he calls ‘the plague of custom’ and ‘The curiosity of nations,’ by which others are bound. ‘Custom’ amounts to the laws of human society. ‘Curiosity of nations’ Kittredge has glossed as ‘The nice distinctions which the laws of nations make in defiance of nature and common sense’—by which he meant Edmund's interpretation of nature and Edmund's view of common sense. He himself was created, Edmund says, ‘in the lusty stealth of nature,’ and he asks the gods (for Nature is only one of the gods in his world, as in Lear's) to ‘stand up for bastards.’ More, he asks ‘the gods’ to allow him to triumph by his wits and his strength. In other words, Edmund's goddess Nature presides over the jungle where only the strong and crafty can survive. Edmund will apply the laws of the lion and the fox, exercising thereby absolute power for himself alone. What this amounts to is a variation on Lear's blind worship of power, one equally primitive but, paradoxically, also more obviously modern. I say ‘more obviously modern,’ since Edmund is a representative of the new man in the Jacobean age whose descendants flourish among us, but we have also seen men in our century whose blind trust in their absolute power reminds us more of Lear. In our age of power acquired with the help of machines devised by science, magic has made itself felt by entering through the back door. Drugs have magic attributes by which they can even transform human nature.

But Shakespeare's most interesting treatment of nature and the primitive in the subplot involves Edmund's first victim, his brother Edgar. With Gloucester's help, Edmund's actions reduce Edgar to a primitive condition; and as if this were of itself not enough, Edgar grotesquely selects his shape and place in society as a disguised outcast from that society in such a way as to make his condition seem even more primitive than it objectively is. The disguise he chooses for himself is that of Bedlam beggar, that is to say, he presents himself not only as self-deprived of all human possessions, but also as a natural, a man not in thorough control of his wits but innocent enough, like the Fool, to be allowed his freedom. Here is a response to injustice and tyranny that is remarkably unfamiliar in this present-day world, in the West at least, whatever the Edgar-like garments donned by youngsters of rich families on our main streets. The place to which Edgar retires as Tom is barren nature, the heath. There, as he says in his monologue, he will

                    take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury, in contempt of man,
Brought near to beast.

(2.3.7-9)

This ‘baseness’ that Edgar assumes is in counterpoint to Edmund's reaction to the ‘baseness’ of his bastardy, and it prefigures as well the condition to which Lear is brought. As Edgar says, he will ‘with presented nakedness outface / The winds and persecutions of the sky’ (2.3.11-12), and will strike in his ‘numb'd and mortified bare arms / Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary’ (15-16). Later, in a terrifying emblem of these words, Lear will seek for reassurance that the world to which he awakes in Cordelia's presence is real: ‘let's see; / I feel this pin prick’ (4.7.55-6).

Important as all this is to interlink the various disparate parts of the play, it is not all there is to Edgar's adopted role. On the heath, he pretends to believe that the foul fiend follows and possesses him, and he performs his possession-act so convincingly that the Fool runs from him, shouting ‘here's a spirit. / Help me! help me!’ (3.4.39-40). Nor is the Fool the only one in the play to believe in fiends: when Edgar changes his role after Gloucester's imagined fall at Dover, he persuades him that ‘poor Tom’ was none other than a fiend.

As I stood here below methought his eyes
Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses,
Horns whelk'd and wav'd like the enridged sea:
It was some fiend.

(4.6.69-72)

But this is all an act: we know very well, just as Edgar does, who are the real fiends in this play.

In giving Edgar the role of enforced primitive and natural, Shakespeare made him react in an extreme but entirely logical way to the blows he must endure from the differently primitive world about him. It is only one step from Gloucester's gods and from Lear's and Edmund's goddess Nature, both linked to the exercise of bare unmitigated power, to the belief that a man can be possessed by fiends. Driven into a barren nature, Lear too becomes a natural, a madman. Edgar, the other outcast, goes of his own will into the same inhospitable nature, there to take on the role of a natural haunted by fiends. It is a measure of Lear's growing insight that he sees through that mime of possession, and turns to Edgar for counsel as his ‘natural philosopher,’ for Edgar's insights into both man and nature have by then begun to make him indeed the play's ‘philosopher.’

I have said that in seeking refuge as a victim of power, Edgar's instinct makes him assume a role and a place which anticipate Lear's role and place after he flees from his daughters, that is, a madman's, exposed to barren nature and its fierce storm. Judging by the naïveté with which he falls into Edmund's trap early in the play, Edgar like Lear has much to learn about the world he inhabits. His experience during his stay in primitive nature is, in at least three ways, different from Lear's. First, though he is like Lear in being one of power's victims, he is a young man who has never exercised power, as Lear has. Second, Edgar only acts the role of natural or madman, though in doing so he shows an extraordinary understanding of the madman's mind, while in direct touch with the Fool and with Lear himself, then going mad. Third, far more acutely than Lear, Edgar is distracted from his personal suffering by experiencing the havoc which suffering has played with others—and knows these others to be no ordinary men, but his king and his father. Edgar recognizes the plight of others; it is an important part of Lear's experience, too, that he becomes aware of the suffering, first of his Fool, then of poor naked wretches like the Tom he meets on the heath, then of what ‘his daughters’ have done to Tom-Edgar, and, later, of what blindness, lust, and the brutality of others have done to Gloucester. Since his mind is far too preoccupied with himself, Lear's outgoing sympathy toward them comes only in brief snatches. Sleep, medicine, music, and Cordelia's love are needed to rescue Lear from his descent into the primitive world of chaos which we recognize as both his own disordered mind and his recognition of the disorder about him. Edgar, on the other hand, first learns how to endure ‘worse,’ then the worst—by which he is roused to action. He rescues his father from despair; he casts off his role of poor Tom, the natural; he slays the villainous Oswald: but all these deeds he does still in disguise. Only after successfully asserting the integrity of his name in his challenge to Edmund does he reveal himself.

Now, as Edgar is shown to undergo these stages of development and to realize himself through action, we in the audience experience a like uplift, for we are more and more drawn to identify ourselves with Edgar. Not with Edgar only, of course, for we have come to identify with Lear as well, as he endures and changes, in the process never entirely losing his royal integrity. How important a part of Lear's need that integrity is, Cordelia well knows. In the scene of their reunion she enquires: ‘How does my royal Lord? How fares your Majesty?’ (4.7.44). Shortly before his end, with Cordelia dead in his arms, Lear still exclaims:

A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!
I might have sav'd her …
I kill'd the slave that was a-hanging thee.

(5.3.269-70, 274)

Upon acknowledgment by the officer, he says,

                                                  Did I not, fellow?
I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion
I would have made them skip.

(5.3.275-7)

With Edgar, we endure the worst that the world of King Lear has in store. We rise with Edgar from the descent into nature and the primitive, and we reach with him, as we do with Lear, a new sense and assertion of integrity. The ending of the play departs sharply from that of the folk tale; the world at the end of the play is no longer primitive. After Lear departs, Edgar (at least in the more reliable Folio text) is fittingly given the last speech.

Basically what I have so far tried to show is first that the story which reached Shakespeare was not only primitive in its setting but also primitive in origin; second, that in transforming the simple story into a complex and powerful drama, he explored the primitive in all its depths and terror, as the story in the form it reached him certainly did not, but leaves us in the end (again quite unlike the story) with Edgar, Kent, and Albany as the civilized witnesses to the conclusion of a stark tragedy. The heath in the storm with its hovel; Lear, the Fool, and Edgar as outcasts enduring it by probing the deepest recesses of their minds, even to madness; interrupted by scenes of crazy power leading up to the episode of the gouging out of Gloucester's eyes by Cornwall: that is a primitive world entirely of Shakespeare's creation.

Creation certainly, but, amazingly enough, also recreation. So at least I will argue in the concluding section of this essay. The sense of story rather than history in the play seldom leaves us, as I said earlier, and the hypothesis that will now be developed is reconcilable with Maynard Mack's interesting suggestion that the play has many archetypal elements of a folktale—the play as it is, not merely its source.¹

About forty years ago, the Italian ethnologist Giuseppe Cocchiara collected versions of the Lear folktale from many different countries; in his book² (which hardly any Shakespeare scholar seems to have looked at), after narrating many versions, Cocchiara developed a thesis of the primitive origins and meanings of the tale. He argues that the Lear story is related to other stories of fathers and banished children, sometimes daughters, sometimes sons, and that these stories all have their ultimate origin in tribal initiation rites. The book is written in Italian, and copies of it are hard to find; I came upon one by accident in the Widener Library at Harvard. Cocchiara was no Shakespearean scholar and only barely mentions the existence of the play, and his subject, initiation rites, is calculated to make most Shakespeareans say, ‘oh, that nonsense again.’ But as a student of Shakespeare reads his book, he cannot help noticing features in some of Cocchiara's retellings common to those folk tales and King Lear; even when the parallels are not precise, they suggest things in the play which are not found in any of Shakespeare's known literary sources.

The first striking point is that Cocchiara insists upon a close family resemblance between versions of the Lear story and folk tales that deal with fathers and their good and evil sons;³ for Shakespeare chose to combine two such stories in King Lear. The kinship between these two kinds of folk tales is supported by the existence of occasional versions of the Lear tale with both daughters and a son, as Cocchiara points out. The majority of the Lear-type tales collected in this volume include the moral point about the value of salt, mentioned earlier. But what are we to make of the version from Corsica which Cocchiara narrates as follows?

The demand the father makes of his daughters to know how much they love him is changed. And so the heroine replies: ‘Only as much as a devoted daughter can and should love her father.’ Banished from the house, taking with her only her embroidered clothes, the heroine encounters on the road a dead ass whose skin she takes, and thus disguised, she is employed in the home of a nobleman. One day, nostalgia for her own home overtakes her; she guides her flock into a secluded place and dresses herself in her old garments. Suddenly she is discovered by the king's son, but she flees, leaving behind a shoe that fits only her. [On being caught,] she is asked to marry [the prince] but will not consent without first seeing her father again. Messengers sent to the other kingdoms find that his remaining children have imprisoned him in an underground cell, into which no one can penetrate and where he is almost mad. His throne regained and the other children, a male and a female, banished, the king takes part in the marriage of the heroine, whose care restores him to his reason.⁴

For the Shakespearean, the most remarkable aspect of this tale is that it dwells on the king's madness and that the heroine's care ‘gives him back his reason.’ A second element, which the story shares only with Shakespeare's play and not with his acknowledged sources, is the motif of disguise assumed by the banished person, although Shakespeare of course applies it to Kent and Edgar, not to Cordelia. Much less, I think, should be made of the fact that the heroine's disguise in the tale is an ass's skin, although this detail suggests folly and the Fool, and animal and garment imagery plays such an important part in King Lear. The themes of madness and disguise are encountered in the Corsican tale and in Shakespeare, but in no literary version that Shakespeare knew, unless Mack is right in hinting that Shakespeare knew a version of the story of King Robert of Sicily. As he points out, this story includes the theme of madness and ‘in the finest of all the retellings of this archetype, the repudiated king is not driven out but made the court Fool and compelled to take his food with the palace dogs.’⁵

No other Lear-type story retold by Cocchiara is of quite the same interest as this one, but two other versions deserve mention. In one, from Cosenza, about a king of Turkey and his three daughters, the king is abandoned by the elder daughters and left to wander about without companions, ‘blind, nothing remaining of him’. We note the parallel to the story of the Paphlagonian king in Sidney's Arcadia, the source of Shakespeare's subplot, where the king is similarly treated by his bastard son; but also how in Shakespeare's play the two elder daughters are directly implicated in Gloucester's blinding; it is Goneril who first suggests it—‘Pluck out his eyes’ (3.7.5); and ironically, Gloucester, when forced to explain to Regan why he sent Lear to Dover, answers: ‘Because I would not see thy cruel nails / Pluck out his poor old eyes.’ (3.7.55-6). In the other tale, from Calabria, the abandoned king is thus described: ‘the poor king, torn, with bleeding feet, his skin scratched by thorns, is reduced to sleeping in haystacks or in stalls with animals, or in shepherds' hovels made with branches.’ Even though it is the motifs rather than their exact relation that strike us, we cannot help recalling Edgar's lines:

Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills …

(2.3.15-18)

as well as Lear in 4.6, ‘fantastically dressed with wild flowers,’ his speech on the ‘Poor naked wretches,’ the hovel and the heath, and the beast imagery of the mad scenes.

So far we seem to be on fairly safe ground, but Cocchiara takes a further step in his seventh chapter, where a mere literary critic untrained in ethnology fears to tread with him. Having found in many versions of this tale of an old king or father whose youngest daughter or son is banished the common theme of apparent death and rediscovery or revival, Cocchiara traces them back to initiation ritual among primitive tribes, specifically a ritual of puberty. In some of these initiation rites, boys are made to believe that they will either be swallowed up or otherwise killed by a phantom or demonic spirit, and afterward brought back to life. In others (for example from the west of Ceram), the ceremony itself takes place around a hovel in the depth of the forest. When the boys to be initiated have gathered in front of the hovel, the chief priest calls loudly to all the demons, and immediately a terrible uproar is heard from inside the hovel, made by men with bamboo trumpets who have secretly entered from behind. The women and children believe that demons are present, and are full of terror. The priest then enters the hovel, followed by each boy in turn; as soon as a boy has disappeared into the enclosure, a frightful cry is heard and a lance, dripping with blood, is thrown across the roof of the hovel. This causes the onlookers to believe that the boy's head, which the demon wants to carry into the subterranean world and transform, has been cut off. Can we help recalling Edgar in the hovel, haunted by the fiend, and the Fool's calling him ‘a spirit,’ when he finds Edgar inside?

To invoke initiation rites of primitive tribes in an essay on King Lear may seem preposterous, but let us look at Edgar's lines at the very end of the third scene on the heath:

Child Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still: Fie, foh, and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man.

(3.4.186-8)

In the Arden edition, Kenneth Muir warns us not to associate Rowland, who comes from a well-known ballad about Charlemagne's nephew, with the giant who cries ‘fee, fie, foh, fum’ in the story of Jack the Giant-Killer, for the giant's words are intentionally incongruous with the heroic Childe Rowland. Incongruous they are, of course; still, Harry Levin points to a more profound link between them: ‘As the pair enters the hovel, Edgar's snatches of balladry and fairy-tale transform it into a legendary dark tower, where a young squire is undergoing a ritual of knightly initiation while nameless giants objurgate: “Fie, foh, and fum.”’⁶ There is a great distance between Levin's ritual of knightly initiation and Cocchiara's primitive rites, but both rites fundamentally involve initiation, and the one is clearly the origin of the other; furthermore, Edgar does become a knight. The squire is in a dark tower, the primitive boy at puberty in a hovel in a dark forest, and by his words, Edgar associates the two, metaphorically transforming the hovel into a dark tower.

The critical reader will find much to question in this material. But even if he rejects parts, the data point to some amazing correspondence between Shakespeare's play and folk tales and the rituals from which they may derive, correspondences which could hardly have been known to Shakespeare, even if he heard a version of this tale in his youth.⁷ We have noted the parallels to the hovel in the wilderness and to fiends and giants, the hints in some versions of madness and blindness, the allusion to garments and animals, the use of disguise by a banished person, and the links between stories about fathers and a banished young man and those with a banished daughter. Because several of these motifs are very common, a single such correspondence might be dismissed as accidental; indeed hovels, madness, beasts, disguise, are all met in several other folk tales which may have influenced local versions of the Lear tale. Cumulatively, though, they suggest nothing less than that Shakespeare's imagination, dwelling on the significance of the Lear story and reshaping it into a play of profound dramatic impact, recaptured elements from the primitive past that at some time were a fundamental part of its shape and meaning.⁸ Of course he not only recaptured, he transformed as well, to make of primitive horror and brutality the highest kind of art. To us in an age fearful that primitive forces might utterly overwhelm us, King Lear should be a work of very special meaning and some comfort.

Notes

1. ‘King Lear’ in Our Time (Berkeley 1965) 49-51.

2. La Leggenda di re Lear (Studi di etnologia e folklore 1) (Torino 1932). I wish to acknowledge assistance from Miss Peggy Bridgland for reading a microfilm of Cocchiara and translating passages from Italian.

3. But Maynard Mack refers to a story of a king and his two brothers who, when the king travels to them seeking assistance, fail to recognize him (49, n4).

4. Translated from Cocchiara, who found the tale in J. B. Ortoli Les contes populaires de l'ile de Corse (Paris 1883).

5. See note 1, above.

6. In his lecture on ‘The Heights and the Depth: A Scene from King Lear’ in More Talking of Shakespeare ed. John Garrett (New York 1959) 87-103.

7. Though, again, see Maynard Mack.

8. I think we can safely say this even though we have no evidence that a folk tale of Lear as such existed long before Shakespeare's time.