[In the following essay, Wittreich suggests that King Lear is a veiled commentary on the actions of King James I, especially his attempt to unite England, Scotland, and Wales. The critic also emphasizes the influence of the New Testament's Book of Revelation on the play, particularly the idea of the Apocalypse.]

The darkness at first has shape, but … falls at last into that Chaos in which the world will end … Here … unrolls … the history of a great King … who, through the darkness of the mind, reaches the Night of the Soul (but not that which is known by the Saints)—and, through the Night of the Soul, reaches the light.

—Edith Sitwell

Consider the title page for the 1608 quarto edition of King Lear:

M. William Shak-speare: / HIS / True Chronicle Historie of the life and / death of King LEAR and his three / Daughters. / With the vnfortunate life of Edgar … and his / sullen and assumed humor of / TOM of Bedlam: / As it was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall vpon / S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes. / By his Maiesties seruants …

(Var. Ed., p. 354)

The initial words of this title and the text of the play itself pull against one another, at once joining King Lear to the tradition of chronicle history and disjoining it from all previous renderings of the Lear story, most notably the anonymous dramatized version published in 1605 but perhaps staged as early as 1594, The True Chronicle History of King Leir. The quarto title provided for Shakespeare's play is a nearly exact redaction of this one, but the play is a topsy-turvy version seeming to paganize a Christian story in much the same way that Hamlet had earlier Christianized a pagan story. Through this strategy, as William Elton has observed, Shakespeare blots out “the patent and ubiquitous Christianity”¹ of a source play that occasionally reads like a set of cue cards for Shakespeare's players: “Stand thou up, it is my parte to kneel, / And aske forgiveness for my former faults” (2299-2300). But nowhere in Shakespeare's play is there the sentimentalized and pious Christianity so characteristic of its precursor:

… unto him which doth protect the just,
In him will poore Cordella put her trust.

(331-32)

God forgive both him, and you, and me,
Even as I doe in perfit charity.
I will to Church, and pray unto my Saviour,
That ere I dye, I may obtayne his favour.

(1090-93)

In this anonymous play, man's reach never exceeds his grasp, and everyone submits to God's will; all occurrences are explained in terms of His will. If as F. J. Levy remarks, “The Elizabethan mind … tended to be divided between a pious underpinning and a realistic shell,”² that split expresses itself sharply, stingingly, when the old and the new Lear plays are set side by side.

Deviations from received historical accounts are common in Shakespeare's histories and can be explained as dramatic necessities in the plays where they occur. But the “liberties” of the history plays become “license” in King Lear where “the overwhelming horror of the final scenes becomes immeasurably more significant when we realize,” as F. S. Boas does, “that it did not spring naturally out of the dramatist's materials, but that it is the result of a revolutionary alteration of them.”³ So striking was Shakespeare's revision of history that Nahum Tate altered the ending of the play for performance; and later Dr. Johnson complained that he was “so shocked by Cordelia's death” he could not endure “to read again the last scenes of the play till … [he] undertook to revise them as an editor” (Var. Ed., p. 419).

The common Christian notion that history is tragedy modulating into comedy appears to be turned on end in the cosmos of King Lear, hence the eighteenth-century's revision of the play in accordance with Dryden's suggestion that it is no trivial task to make tragedy end happily. Observing such a dictum, Tate had little more to do than bring Shakespeare's play back into line with its sources. Only Shakespeare can lay claim, as Tate would do, to presenting a “New modelling of this story” (Var. Ed., p. 467). More strikingly perhaps than in any other of his plays, we see in King Lear what Shakespeare would make of a diminished thing. However much that story may have appalled Johnson, it was applauded by Addison: “King Lear is an admirable tragedy … as Shakespeare wrote it; but as it is reformed according to the chimerical notion of poetical justice … it has lost half its beauty” (Var. Ed., p. 477), not to mention much of its meaning. As with the history plays so with King Lear: Shakespeare should be credited with “a moral and a political philosophy which motivated first the choice of story and second the plotting of that story.”⁴ Moreover, the plotting of that story, as we shall see, not only translates solemn comedy into grim tragedy but allows to slip into the consciousness of its audience what it never admits to the cosmos of the play—the comedic perspective of the Christian Apocalypse.

This chapter takes direction—indeed different directions—hinted at by the concerns of the quarto title page. The play's occasion, its performance at Whitehall before King James, opens upon a historical context, implies a secular typology as well as a courtly aesthetic. Not only must James's pet concerns and political attitudes come into play in interpretation, but such contextualization presses James's own conception of history, of apocalyptic history, upon a play-world that seemingly defies it by marking off the modulations of difference between two kings and hence two worlds. The discrepancies between their worlds, in turn, find an analogue in the similar discrepancies that exist between Shakespeare's rendering of the Lear story and its rendering by Shakespeare's sources. Still, however at odds these versions may be, they are always situated within an apocalyptic scheme of thought, and the Apocalypse itself becomes a sanction for Shakespeare's own historical revisionism. The title page, in this instance, affords alternative roads of access to King Lear; yet all such roads lead to a point of convergence: an encounter with apocalypse.

I

Whether or not the title page refers to the play's first performance, it makes clear that King Lear “was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall upon S. Stephans night” during the “Christmas Hollidayes” of 1606. The time—Christmas of 1606—and the reference to St. Stephen are equally significant. The day before the performance of King Lear—on Christmas day—Lancelot Andrewes delivered “A Sermon Preached before the Kings Maiestie, at White-hall.” His text was Isaiah 9.6; his subject, the nature of kingship; and his message, both that prophecies issue forth in times overcast by division and warfare and that in such times kings must bear their burden with patience and long-suffering even as they move, as Christ did, toward the goal of a universal concord.

As David Wilson has argued, “No ideal attracted … [James I] more strongly than that of unity, in the sense of universal agreement and concord”; indeed, the history of his reign in Scotland before 1603, Wilson continues, “gives ample proof that the Union of the Crowns was his constant preoccupation—and that it came as the culmination of many years of thought and effort.”⁵ Well before 1603, James referred to himself as the New Arthur who would reunite the realm; and in 1619, having determined that “the perfection of all things … [is] Peace and Union,” he declared that the time will come when “the Monarchall bodies of many Kingdomes … [would] be mutuall Christendome” and England would be the “gouernment of gouernments.”⁶ James's goal, then, is to create a little world out of the splintered nations and divided kingdoms that had come to mark, and mar, British history. Shakespeare's intention, in turn, may well be to write a play responsive to court interests and reflective, if only obliquely, of the liturgical event with which the play seems to be correlated.

King Lear may have been performed before the occasion of St. Stephen's Day stipulated on its title page; and if so, it should still be remembered, as Alvin Kernan urges, that public playing was “merely rehearsal for courtly performance.”⁷ It is possible certainly, as Charles Creighton long ago proposed, that plays like Othello and Lear, both performed at Whitehall—the first on All Saints' Day, 1604, and the second on St. Stephen's Day, 1606—“were commissioned for those occasions, for there is a certain propriety in their subjects to the respective festivals,” especially in the case of King Lear where “Cordelia, the plain truth, is the first martyr, and shall be the last.”⁸ There is also the plain fact that such correlations between plays and feast days are a way of emphasizing that the historical events, both those depicted and those being referred to, constitute a kind of turning point in history, the emergence of a new historical consciousness.

Within this context, the title page reference to the protomartyr Stephen gathers much of its point, Stephen finding in Shakespeare's play a prefiguration in the legendary characters of Cordelia and Lear and, in English history as related by John Foxe, a post-figuration in such a person as the twelfth-century King Stephen. This Stephen, vexed by wars, managed for a while to achieve peace with David King of Scots, but only for a while, since that peace was later broken by an obstreperous son who sought vengeance through the massacre of children. As if the antitype of both this precursor king and Lear, James would, by intention at least, create a durable peace between England and Scotland that, instead of eventuating in, would evade another catastrophe wherein sons rebel against fathers and perpetuate a massacre of innocents.

Here we should remember, as E. W. Heaton urges, that it is not just what the prophet or poet says that counts but, more important, is “the circumstance in which he says it”: “Because the theology of prophecy is fundamentally a theology of history, it is inescapably ‘situational’.”⁹ While we must postpone a discussion of Shakespeare's paralleling of secular and sacred history and prophecy, we should nonetheless observe that the implicit typological pairing of two kings—the one divisive, the other a restorer of harmony—is indigenous to both traditions. The Book of Merlin provides a secular sanction; and the Book of Revelation, through Joachim of Fiore's influential discussion of a new world-emperor, lends scriptural authority to this strategy.¹⁰

The very notion of typology, of course, derives from biblical exegesis going back to St. Augustine; it was from its inception a device for structuring history through juxtapositions of persons and events and, especially during the Renaissance, became a way of expanding history to include legend and myth. The typological premise is that history is reiterative in design; that the past speaks to, and of, the present and future. Episodes from biblical and, later, from mythological history are thus assumed to have some bearing upon contemporary existence, which they are invoked to explain. The Renaissance is furthermore a crucial period in the history of typology, which now reaches outside of biblical into secular contexts, producing a new order of “abstracted typology” through which poets and dramatists alike could assert a relationship, or at least imply one, between the fictive world and the reality it mirrors.¹¹

Two particular developments affecting typology during the sixteenth century are worth recalling. First, earlier typology may have been devised to authenticate biblical narratives, but it was now being used to validate mythological histories currently under challenge (the very history out of which the Lear story was extrapolated was by some being discredited). Second, as typology took hold in the secular world—and invaded the arts—it proceeded to structure history thematically, not causally, and, in the very act of juxtaposing past and present, legend and reality, intertwined them in order to argue that archetypal fictions possess their own reality and are recreated when the old story has a pointed message for the present moment. Typology becomes a rhetorical, no less than a structural, device. In the case of the Lear story, the message was political, as well as ethical; the very history in which it was embedded, in conjunction with typology, became a political weapon used to advance James to the throne and to sustain his court.

We should also acknowledge (as Gary Schmidgall insists) the emergence of a new courtly aesthetic in the early years of James's reign (1604-05)—and also the possibility that the earliest and most interesting manifestation of its influence, in Shakespearean drama, is to be found in King Lear. There was, as this critic demonstrates, a widespread feeling that Elizabeth's death would desolate the state and reduce it to utter confusion, thus making England the breeding ground for horrible tragedies. If one assumes that Lear is intended to mirror James's England, it will follow that the play is a representation of that horror. On the other hand, if one assumes a disjunctive relationship between Lear's England, and James's, another conclusion presents itself: that James's peaceful transition proves the lie in that prophecy of desolation and confusion and that, quite pointedly, the Fool's prophecy is a parody of that prophecy and not prophecy generally. If the courtly concerns are represented by James's fascination with genealogy and the age's penchant for regarding him as the harbinger of a new world; if courtly ideas are formulated in terms of a healthy polis, the imperial themes of dynasty, a return to the golden age, deliverance and reconciliation; indeed if as Schmidgall says, “courtly art is the art of fathers and children,”¹² then an essential text through which to examine such an aesthetic, as well as Shakespeare's attitude toward it, is King Lear. Here all the components of that aesthetic appear in curious concatenation, with Shakespeare's play interacting uneasily with those courtly ideals. There is traffic between monarch and this play, but it runs on a two-way street, suggesting that Shakespeare, for a time, was chafing at the bit of totally affirmative attitudes toward authority; that he delivered the Lear story from the institutional structure of its Renaissance sources; and that the play itself exhibits not an accidental but an intentionally antithetical relationship with those sources. Or to put this another way: originally used to prop up a degenerative theory of history, the Lear story, during the Renaissance and especially in the old Leir play, is netted within a providential scheme. This displacement of one ideology by another acts as a precedent for Shakespeare's further displacement of a providential with an evolutionary conception of history.

Allusion within the play suggests that composition commenced in 1603 and continued until at least 1605. King Lear thus belongs to the initial years of James's reign and contains an element of Stuart propaganda suggested by the emendation of the usual “I smell the blood of an Englishman” to “I smell the blood of a British man” (III.iv.187), as well as by the references to “The British powers” (IV.v.21) and, only in the 1608 quarto, to “The British partie” (1.2443;cf. IV.vi.252). When it is remembered that in October of 1604 James had been “proclaim'd King of Great Britain … that the Name of England might be extinct,”¹³ and that Shakespeare emended his sources so that, instead of France defeating England, France is vanquished by Britain, the strong possibility emerges that Shakespeare means to acknowledge James's efforts to unite England and Scotland and so to contrast his Britain with Lear's “scatter'd kingdom” (III.i.31). The troubled and divided court, the afflicted kingdom, the disjointed and destabilized world, Shakespeare implies, will become healthy and whole again under the aegis of James. Like The Faerie Queene, King Lear participates in a studied contrast between the dismal oscillations of past history and the happier circumstances of the present. The Elphin history in Spenser's poem, like the reign of James referred to implicitly by Shakespeare's play, is an idealization against which we are to view earlier history as it is represented by Lear. One of the primary uses of history in Shakespeare's day was to glorify the ruling house and to arouse patriotism, and an essential concern of such writing was the expression of a philosophy of history and the envisioning of a national destiny.

It has been suggested of King Lear—and rather more convincingly demonstrated of Macbeth—that “as the dramatist sat at his desk and wrote, he was conscious of the face of the king looking straight at him, so that his words formed themselves to fit this expected audience.” Whatever its emergent meanings may be, King Lear, like Macbeth, possesses historically determinate meanings, which we are invited to pursue as we are told that “to know when and how the play was written there must be examination of what the people of England and the dramatist and his king and court were doing and thinking about at the time.” We are thereupon invited “to put the play back into harmony with the thought of the king which obtained in the year 1606.” Henry Paul, from whom I am quoting, is speaking specifically of Macbeth, although he includes King Lear within the field of his speculation, claiming what may not in fact be the case with Lear, that there is a perfect harmony between Shakespeare's thinking and the king's. There is, more precisely, ground for agreement between playwright and monarch, with the difference of opinion being registered beneath the surface of this drama. On the one hand, plays like Lear and Macbeth, as Paul would have it, suggest “how closely Shakespearean plays conform to the kind of theater that serves an aristocratic audience by talking about its main interests and supporting its values, mirroring the courtly world in action, taking part in its festivals and great ritual occasions, and providing graceful compliments to its patrons.”¹⁴ On the other hand, as Alvin Kernan insists, “the more interesting question is how the players, and chiefly William Shakespeare, saw themselves in relation to the court.”¹⁵

Questions such as this one have generated a “new occasionalist vogue”¹⁶ in Shakespeare studies; and admittedly that vogue has produced a brand of historicism which, in its lapses, has proved inattentive to history, both cultural and literary. Lear and Gloucester may be portrayed as “hopelessly inept” readers of their children's characters and thus as representatives of “the fatal consequences of an incorrect ‘reading’” of texts;¹⁷ yet so depicting them, Stephen Greenblatt forgets that each character develops in acuity as the play proceeds even as he remains steadfastly inattentive to the shades of difference between the play and its sources. In the legend, though not in the play, the upside-downing of the world is permanent and the world's disintegration apparently irreversible; and any attempt like Greenblatt's to correlate this play with a crisis in Renaissance culture must account for the fact that the Lear story is not Shakespeare's own devising, nor is this story as rendered by Shakespeare simply a reiteration of signals or a redaction of attitudes from its sources. On the other hand, an argument against this new historicism (which rests its case on the fact that other characters in the play do not chastize Lear for abdicating the throne and that James himself would not object to this particular surrendering of royal prerogative) is not compelling either. For the issue focused by the first scene of the play is not abdication of prerogatives but the division of a kingdom, an issue on which James has much to say. If, as Richard Levin argues, abdication “is not relevant to King Lear, for the simple reason that it does not figure in the play,”¹⁸ what are we to say of the act of dividing a kingdom, represented in the initial scene of the play, the consequences of which the present understands in a way that those in the play world could not? What past history countenanced present history abhors. The ills of division, quietly illustrated by the story of Brute, are dramatized by the story of Lear, especially in the fate that, according to the chronicle histories, befalls Cordelia subsequent to her father's death. Shakespeare knew this history and in an unexpected way capitalized upon it—pluralized and punctuated it—by the introduction of the Gloucester plot. Standing squarely behind Shakespeare's play, no less than behind James's advice to his son, is the proposition that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

In 1603, James had urged that British chronicle history be used as a guide to current history, even if sometimes it provides a negative example and functions as a warning prophecy—one issuing in the reminder that, while disunion sows the seeds of woe, unity is all that is wanting to set men free. “I would have you to be well versed in authenticke histories, and in the Chronicles of all Nations; but especialie in our owne histories,” he tells his son; for “by reading of authentick histories & Chronicles, yee shall learne experience by Theoricke, applying the by-past things to the present estate.” This counsel follows upon these words of warning: “… by deuiding your kingdomes, ye shall leaue the seedes of diuision and discord among your posteritie: as befell to this Ile, by the diuision and assignment therof, to the three sonnes of Brutu.”¹⁹

Moreover, as John Draper has demonstrated, between 1604 and 1607, “in speech after speech, … [James] was citing the misfortunes that division brought to early Britain”²⁰ as part of his own effort to establish union in the realm—to join three into one as earlier Brute's survivors, then Lear, had divided one into three. The archetypical division into threes, begun according to Holinshed by the division of the world among the three sons of Noah, would persist through history, as is suggested by the plotting of Mortimer, Glendower, and Hotspur in Act III of Henry IV, Part I, where the kingdom, it appears, would again become fragmented. Brute's death instigated the process of fragmentation that Lear and others continued; indeed, the genealogical line extending from Brute to Lear and ending with Gorboduc is marked by division. In the family, brother kills brother, and a mother her son, and in the realm a civil war erupts and a monarchy becomes a triumvirate and eventually a pentarchy. Within such a context, Lear's own story, magnifying the evils of disunion, could be taken as a prophecy of history's dissolution which would come in Shakespeare's day and, more, as a warning prophecy to those who would fly in the face of providence, surrendering their appointed status in life.

Indeed, Sir Francis Bacon recalls a prophecy he heard in his childhood while Elizabeth was still in her prime: “When hempe is sponne / England's done.” By that prophecy, Bacon explains, “it was generally conceived, that after the princes had reigned which had the principal letters of that word hempe (… Henry, Edward, Mary, Philip, and Elizabeth), England should come to utter confusion; which, thanks be to God, is verified only in the change of the name; for that the King's style is now no more of England but of Britain.”²¹ Recalling the same prophecy, Thomas Rymer gives it another twist, revealing its “hidden Truth”:

When HEMPE is come and also gone,
Scotland and England Shall be all one.
Praise be God alone, for HEMPE is come and gone,
And left is Old Albion, by Peace joined in one.(22)

The hero of this union, the inaugurator of a newly achieved peace, is James I, a point made by Thomas Heywood as he explicates yet another version of this prophecy:

When HEMPE is ripe and ready to pull,
Then Englishman beware thy skull.(23)

Like these prophecies and the Fool's, the Lear story current in Shakespeare's day prognosticates a disaster that James would avert, projects a pattern of history that the new king would reverse. The Lear story was also regularly linked to that of Brute and implicated in Merlin's prophecy of a second Brute who would return and reunite the kingdom.²⁴ That figure is identified as James I by Samuel Daniel, Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday and also by William Herbert who thinks that, with Sidney and Spenser gone, James needs a poet comparable to them. And James finds one of sorts in Herbert who recalls Merlin's prophecy that turmoil abroad and civil war at home will be followed by a new concord: “Disioynted … by her first monarches fall,” Britain will be restored by a king who “Shall three in one, and one in three vnite.” With that king, the golden age will begin anew. James is thereupon heralded apocalyptically, as “Our second Brute like to the morning starre” who binds war in chains and inaugurates a reign of peace.²⁵ Britain, apparently, is to be restored from her fall progressively, with Henry VII uniting the houses of Lancaster and York, with Elizabeth maintaining the union, thereby repairing the halving of the kingdom by the nephews of the legendary Cordelia, and with James now uniting the three kingdoms that Lear, and earlier Brute's survivors, had divided. James says as much in his 1604 Speech in Parliament where, crediting Henry VII with uniting the Houses of Lancaster and York, he contends that this feat is nothing in comparison with the union he now seeks between England, Wales, and Scotland.

It may be a coincidence that, like Lear, James had three children when King Lear was written but is probably no coincidence at all that Shakespeare juxtaposes, however implicitly, the reign of a king charged with restoring paradise with that of a king who, by legend, perpetuated the process of division by which paradise had been lost. The very hope for a world-emperor and renovator, says Marjorie Reeves, “contains within it a notion of return to pristine glory which made it possible in the Renaissance period for a Christian idea of renovatio to be married to the concept of the returning Age of Gold.”²⁶ Such a marriage occurs in the newly emerging Stuart myth, which reveals the extent to which such themes are enmeshed in astrological prophecy and become grafted on to apocalyptic prophecy as well. Initially tailored to the interests of the French monarchy or the German empire, such apocalyptic prophecies eventually find a new national identity in England and a point of reference in its monarchs, especially James, about whom imperial legends begin to cluster. Apocalyptic prophecy has once again become politicized, its secular objectives resting upon religious values.²⁷

The linking of biblical with national history, even of scriptural with secular prophecy, was common during James's reign—indeed had been fostered by the influential John Napier. In a sermon preached in 1624 Barten Holyday saw James's idea of the One Nation emanating from the prophetic text of Ezekiel, “I will make them one nation” (37.22), and allowed that, well acquainted with prophecy generally, and the Apocalypse in particular, James was uniquely capable of advancing those prophecies toward fulfillment. But Holyday also correlated British history from Brute to James with a phase of scriptural history extending from Adam to Noah: Adam is responsible for the splintering of nations that continues until, with Noah, those nations contract again into an Ark of Unity. Similarly, Albion divides upon the death of Brute and is marked by subsequent divisions, like those occurring during the reigns of Lear and Cordelia, until “The two Royall Houses of Yorke and Lancester were … vnited, yet not without diuision,” which it then fell upon James to bridge. And Holyday advances as yet another similitude for British history the antagonism between Judah and Israel followed by their union: “by a Nationall Metempsychosis … they are changed into Britanie,” which became divided under Brute and later was reunited by James. A man cannot be divided against himself nor against others, for therein lies the primitive unity that generates all other correspondent unities in the family, the city, the nation, and the One Nation composed of all others. “A kingdome by nature is but an enlarged family,” says Holyday, and the individual but a contracted world.²⁸

The same linkage of biblical with national history is evident in such popular media as almanacs. “One of the most common features of the Stuart almanac,” reports B. S. Capp, “was the ‘chronology’ or brief history of the world.”²⁹ The supposition was that all history could be gathered within a single ballad, or one chronological table, where events from biblical history were typically coupled with events from legendary history (usually drawn from Geoffrey of Monmouth); and both, in turn, were grafted on to known history. The particular topics of these chronologies changed, but not their overall shape and not their theme of progress and innovation in history. The method was fairly constant, too, of evoking the legend of Brute and listing sometimes all the legendary kings of Britain but, more often, figuring them all through representative listings, which regularly included the names of Bladud, Memprick, and King Lear.³⁰ In such accounts, the failures of the past became the gauge by which to judge the successes of the present. Patterns of history, rather than simply repeating themselves, are shown to rhyme: the cycles of history, spiraling in a linear course, can be broken.

It is significant, then, that Shakespeare has Lear scan biblical history “apocalyptically”—in the words of Albert Cook, “in proper sequence and item by item, ‘Jephthah's daughter, who was sacrificed, and of the destruction of Sodom by a brand from heaven, of Samson and the foxes, of Pharoah's dream of the good and bad years’.”³¹ Moreover, Shakespeare retells the Lear story in such a way as to elucidate the political doctrine inherent in it and, in the process, accentuates the prophetic element so that in his retelling the story emerges as a warning prophecy.³² As one popular prophecy dating from the fifteenth century but much in vogue in the last half of the sixteenth century explains, the declaration that the end is at hand, the promise of plagues, wars, disasters of all kinds, “these are but warninges sent us, to mollifie our harde hearts, and to admonishe us from … detestable Pride.”³³ Hidden in most such prophecies lies the promise of a good ruler who will restore his kingdom to union and peace. King Lear participates in this secular millennialism.

Various elements in the play—its interest in magic, demonology, and astrology, together with its supposed distrust, and occasional deprecations, of prophecies and visions—have been cited as evidence of the extent to which plays were now catering to James's pet attitudes and of the extent, too, to which playwrights like Shakespeare were inclined to represent James's interests, especially his opposition to superstitious excesses. James is even said to authorize the “Calvinist-inspired views of the Deity and related conceptions of providence” that darken the Lear universe.³⁴ Surprisingly, though, the extent to which Shakespeare may be recalling, quite deliberately, James's advice to his son has gone unobserved: do not invert the order of nature, measure your love by its recipient's virtue, banish pride and foster humility; remember, too, that “the blessing or curse of the Parents, hath almost euer a Propheticke power ioyned with it”; that you should punish individuals for their offenses “not punishing nor blaming the Father for the Sonne, nor the brother for the brother”; and finally remember that you should be neither vindictive nor wrathful but “triumphing in … commanding your selfe to forgiue.”³⁵ And more than this, the death scenes of Gloucester and Lear speak eloquently to one of James's aphorisms: “It is one of the miseries of Man, that when hee is full of dayes, and neere his end, that then hee should Loue life most.”³⁶

The initial lines of King Lear pose the issues of order and value: “in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most” (I.i.3-5). In what has been called “a politically daring and avant-garde” act, even for the early seventeenth century, and one smacking of the “left-wing Machiavellianism” figured within the play by Edmund,³⁷ Lear will upset the order of things by shaking off all responsibility, divesting himself “of rule, / Interest of territory, cares of state” (49-50), then by bowing to the flattery of Goneril and Regan, dividing his coronet between them, and leaving Cordelia dowerless. Disclaiming Cordelia who is “most rich, being poor; … most lov'd, despis'd” (250-51), he leaves her virtue to be honored by others and only in their reconciliation scene to be acknowledged by himself. The scenes between those in which Lear disowns Cordelia and is reunited with her record the story of a king's banishing pride and discovering humility. They show the power of his and Gloucester's prophetic curses which would have “All the stor'd vengeances of Heaven fall” on their children (II.iv.163), and culminate in Lear's and Gloucester's discovery of the values of love and forgiveness.

Curse is piled upon curse in the play: Cordelia is “dower'd” with Lear's curse (I.i.204), “Blasts and fogs” are called upon to descend upon Goneril (I.iv.308), the “nimble lightnings” are asked to dart their “blinding flames” into Regan's scornful eyes (II.iv.166-67), “all the plagues that in the pendulous air / Hang fated o'er men's faults” are called upon to light upon Lear's daughters (III.iv.67-68)—and they do. At the same time, there is a harsh but equal distribution of justice in the play; and where there is a triumph of spirit, most notably in the reunion of Lear and Cordelia, it is attended by the revoking of a curse and the rejoicing in love manifesting itself in forgiveness. In this way, Shakespeare reveals his protagonists, in the words of Kenneth Muir, “groping their way towards a recognition of the values traditional in his society” and most precious to his king.³⁸ Christianity, thrust on to the margins of the play world by its title page but never silenced, reasserts itself as an ethical nucleus in the play's coda where we are brought to the recognition, so finely formulated in The Tempest, that “The rarer action is / In virtue then in vengeance” (V.i.27-28).

However striking such parallels may be, what is more important still is that like James the Shakespeare of King Lear uses history polemically, subordinating it, much as the Tudor chroniclers had done, to a scheme, albeit different from theirs, the keys for which were nevertheless to be found in the Book of Revelation. If only Scripture were properly expounded, history could at last be understood, but that exposition and understanding were also dependent upon a decoding of Revelation. Such a project was undertaken by James himself; and largely because of the attention he accorded it, the Apocalypse acquired a new political identity in the early years of the seventeenth century—now was regularly read as a metaphor for British history.

Questions concerning the book's authenticity and canonicity had already been settled so that, for James, all that remained was to dispel the lingering doubts about the interpretability of a work “so obscure and allegorique.”³⁹ The book obsessed James and was an obsession in England during his reign, in large part because commentators were stressing so insistently the political dimension of the Apocalypse, a dimension that, however muted, was construed as evidence of both St. John's interest in contemporary affairs and of the bearing of his prophecy on the current affairs of England. Of all the scriptural books, the Book of Revelation, for James, held the most meaning for “this our last aage, as a Prophesie of the latter times.”⁴⁰ The apocalyptic myth, from its very inception, seemed to offer a perspective on contemporary history, suggesting ways of assuming a posture toward it; early Christian apocalyptic, furthermore, seemed to sanction the tendency of supporting the establishment in times of crisis.

The Apocalypse, it has been said, “was written in a time of crisis for a time of crisis about some time of crisis”;⁴¹ in this way events of the remote past, legendary and mythological, could be seen impinging upon and informing the present. Once seen as a retrospective prophecy, the Apocalypse was now being read as a prospective one that also had important bearing on the present which would make that projected future possible. Although it had not yet been incorporated into the Book of Common Prayer (except for a few select fragments), it was thought to possess the same rhythms as the prayerbook's liturgical calendar, full of a sense of national emergency and deliverance and expressing an urge for religious and political unity in a nation whose sovereign would secure and hold that unity. Unity is thus an apocalyptic idealism pressed upon a shattered and fragmented world that, as in the Fool's prophecy, seems to be tottering to its ruin.

In various plays during the sixteenth century, monarchs of England had become implicated, both to their credit and discredit, in the apocalyptic myth. In 1586, Ralph Durdeen predicted the downfall of the Tudor monarchy, which he identified as the Beast of Revelation, though more often Queen Elizabeth had been cast in the role of an apocalyptic angel. As early as 1593, James himself had become enveloped in the apocalyptic myth. John Napier, in a commentary issued six times between 1593 and 1607, explained that, by dedicating his book to James VI of Scotland, he is breaking with the prophetic tradition of “direct[ing] … admonitions generally to Kings, princes, and governors.” In this instance, Napier allows, the head of state is a good man, has had ennobling effects on his nation, and hence obliges today's interpreters “to encourage and inanimate Princes, … as also to exhort them generally, to remove all such impediments in their Cuntries and commonwealths, as may hinder that work, and procure Gods plagues.”⁴² In 1599, George Gifford argued that “while the Kings of England … in times past were once horns of the beast, and gave their power to him,” recent rulers “have pulled him downe … They have … made the whore desolate and naked.”⁴³ James's own meditations on the Apocalypse, first published in 1588, were issued again in 1603; and by way of wrapping himself in the cloak of the Apocalypse, the king repeatedly set forth his desire of reunifying a divided kingdom, of consolidating the broken world of which the Lear story had become an emblem. Moreover, a prefatory note, intent upon enveloping James in such a myth, celebrated him for exposing the Whore and binding the Beast. Within two years, William Symonds would proclaim that, though the apocalypse may lie in the future, the first resurrection, a prelude to it, commences now.⁴⁴

In strikingly particular ways, the Apocalypse seemed to speak to, and of, England with the result that it was appropriated by the king and converted into a national history. Remarking on James's Paraphrase on Revelation, Isaiah Winton makes the point elaborately:

GOD hath giuen him an vnderstanding Heart in the Interpretation of that BOOKE, beyond the measure of other men … Anciently Kings drempt dreames, and saw visions; and Prophets expounded them: So with King Pharoah and Joseph in Egypt; so with Nabuchodonosor and Daniel in Babylon. In this aage, Prophets have written Visions, and Kings have expounded them … God hath in this aage stirred up Kings to deliuer his People from a Scriptural Egypt and Babylon …

… though all the people of GOD are to lay hold on the promises of that Glorious Kingdome described in that Booke [of Revelation]; yet few are able to understand the Prophecies therein contained, comprehending in them a perfect History and State of the Church, euen from the destruction of Ierusalem, till the consummation of the whole world. Yet this I thinke, I may safely say; That Kings have a kinde of interest in that Booke beyond any other: for as the execution of the Prophecies of that Booke is committed vnto them; So it may be, that the Interpretation of it, may more happily be made by them: And since they are the principall Instruments, that God hath described in that Booke to destroy the Kingdome of Antichrist, to consume his State and Citie; I see not, but it may stand with the Wisdome of GOD, to inspire their hearts to expound it; into whose hands hee hath put it to execute, vntill the LORD shall consume both him and it with the Spirit of his mouth, and shall abolish it with the brightness of his comming: For from the day that S. John writ the Booke to this present houre; I doe not thinke that euer any King tooke such paines, or was so perfect in the Reuelation, as his Maiestie is …⁴⁵

Promoting the Book of Revelation though two separate commentaries, James not only gave unprecedented official sanction to John's prophecy but used that prophecy as a test of loyalty to him. Enthusiasm for the king might be measured, then, by the extent to which one was engaged with the Apocalypse; and antipathy to him, by a desire “to assert the limitations—or impropriety—of appropriating apocalyptic terms to the politics of either of the two kingdoms of ‘Britain’.”⁴⁶ James himself spoke of what would be “Tragedie to the Traitors, but Tragicomedie to the King and all his trew Subjects,”⁴⁷ thereby deploying apocalyptic rhetoric as a political weapon and simultaneously emphasizing that history, conceived in terms of the Apocalypse, is at once tragic and tragicomic. The period of James witnesses a great explosion in apocalyptic interpretation and simultaneously exposes discrete strands of apocalyptic thinking, with the king at once instigating much of the eschatological excitement and representing the mainstream of interpretative activity. Given his preoccupations, men everywhere were lending their ears to what has been called “the whispers and roars of the Apocalypse—to its shattered worlds and terrible predictions”; as Paul Christianson observes, “no wonder his subjects turned with zest to unravel the mysteries of Revelation!”⁴⁸

The attention Shakespeare fastens upon the apocalyptic drama in King Lear has its political aspect, then, and so may be construed as a part of the compliment the playwright pays to the king. Yet the play, like Napier's popular commentary, contains an anti-apocalyptic component as well or, better, it defines apocalypse in terms less of sovereigns than of subjects and in terms less of the history of the world than of the spiritual history of individual men. Shakespeare seems to be saying that a prophecy that held no significance for the pre-Incarnational world of King Lear holds great sway over and has vast implications for the world of King James and his subjects. Yet Shakespeare also withholds from the king the sort of idolatrous flattery that was currently enveloping him in the apocalyptic myth. In King Lear, values are acquired and a new vision attained by a king's putting off his social identity and moving beyond the traditional structures of his society. The implication is that the capacity for seeing and for both individual and societal renovation may be thwarted by such structures and the role-playing they encourage. This is a play, after all, in which a king becomes truly a king only after he has become first, and daringly, a man. Shakespeare seems, furthermore, to cast a dubious eye on apocalyptics and perhaps even on James's declaration that the Book of Revelation pertains to “this our last aage … in very short space it will be fulfilled.”⁴⁹ Indeed, if apocalypse is viewed as a declaration of hope in man's darkest hour, as a proclamation that God rules history and will bring out of it, independent of human participation, a glorious future, then Shakespeare may be seen resisting apocalypse by withdrawing such promises. King Lear is much closer to the psychological focus of prophecy, which places responsibility on the present for a conditionally open future.⁵⁰

The apocalyptic element in King Lear is understood best in terms of what Frank Kermode describes as a “readjustment of expectations in regard to an end which is so notable a feature of naive apocalyptic”—the brand of apocalypticism dominant in Shakespeare's own day.⁵¹ The apocalyptic vision of St. John contains both optimistic and pessimistic elements, although historically one or the other has prevailed often to the extent that one element obscures the other. In the sixteenth century, the bleak vision of the Apocalypse was on the ascendancy until 1588 when there was a great surge of optimism about England's future, an optimism that heightened during the early years of James's reign, and was fostered by both the king and his supporters. Shakespeare's play moves against this tide not to obliterate that optimism but clearly to moderate it. Apocalypse may be foregrounded at the conclusion of Shakespeare's play, but only to be subdued within a prophetic perspective. A deeply pessimistic reading of the Apocalypse holds that there is no hope for improving man's lot until the end of the world. While Shakespeare's play is not replete with optimism, it does have the effect of tempering such gloom by representing that which has been without canceling out dreams of what ought to be, or of what one day may be.

For all the suggestions of end-time that are to be found in King Lear, the play does not produce the promised end—defiantly resisting, instead, the expectations built by its apocalyptic reference, no less than those fostered by its historical sources. The play may appear to be organizing itself around the apocalyptic paradigm: “the abdication of temporal order, followed by chaos and the reign of Antichrist, culminating in [A]rmageddon and the foundation of a new order, temporal and spiritual”;⁵² but the last phase of such a pattern is withheld—the new order does not materialize within a play that aggressively denies us what we want. Yet even here Shakespeare is very much in keeping with a new tendency of his times; for “the excitement and disillusionment of the 1590's,” Richard Bauckham reports, “produced for the first time … voices which urged that … the End was not to be expected yet. When William Perkins … deliberately played down the concept of apocalyptic imminence he was breaking new ground.”⁵³ So too was Shakespeare in King Lear—and in precisely the same way.

Shakespeare's strategy is to use apocalypse against itself, not to deny it as a possibility but to advance the consummation of history into the future. In King Lear apocalypse is not a certainty, nor even a likelihood, but only a perhaps—dependent not upon a divine hand to alter the course of history but upon individual men to transform themselves and then perhaps history. James may be seen as an agent in the reformation paving the way for eventual apocalypse, but he is no herald of the apocalypse itself; for that event and the transformation it implies depend not on what kings like James may do for their nations but on what people may do for themselves. The whole process of salvation involves an apocalypse of mind wherein man, instead of transcending his nature, improves himself through spiritual evolution. King Lear thus reflects something of the process discovered in it by Christopher Caudwell, “withdrawal from the Court … into oneself,” but without the corollary that the Court, “once the source of health, is now the source of infection.”⁵⁴ It is that in Shakespeare's play but presumably not that in Shakespeare's England, James being a measure of how far men and civilizations have evolved and of how far they have yet to go. The quarto text stresses the former point, while the folio text advances the latter one. Once acknowledgement is made of the shifting accents in different texts, it still must be allowed that from the very beginning criticism of James, however finely measured, hides in the compliment Shakespeare pays to him.

II

The apocalypse in King Lear is a mind-transforming event that culminates in a king's redemption. As Napier had argued, even kings require renovation, and with them as with everyman apocalypse begins in the “inward minde.”⁵⁵ “The weight of this sad time” (V.iii.323) allows for no apocalypse in the present. The play incorporates no messianic vision but does utilize the Lear story in altered form. This fact should remind us that “much of our difficulty with King Lear comes from having read about Shakespeare's sources, instead of having read Shakespeare's sources,” or from reading extracts from a source, a habit that “entirely perverts its drift.”⁵⁶ In the very act of printing extracts from sources, editors and commentators have restricted attention to the detail of the Lear story and have thereby occasioned many false surmises about Shakespeare's management of his sources and even his interpretation of them.

Unlike the old Leir play, Shakespeare's drama telescopes the entire story while providing for it a new mythological shape. Shakespeare, that is, seems to give priority not to the content of the story but to the rhythm of history captured in it. And what holds true for the Lear story is equally true for the story of Gloucester derived, presumably, from Sidney's Arcadia account of the Paphlagonian king. The nineteenth century articulated a truth about this play that the twentieth century has affirmed: either of these stories “has scope enough for a great tragedy by itself”; yet here they are woven so closely together “in organic reciprocity and interdependence, as to be hardly distinguishable, and not at all separable; we can scarce think of them apart, or perceive when one goes out, and the other comes in.”⁵⁷ Shakespeare is particularly cunning in his weaving of various strands of the Gloucester story into that of Lear: the storm and the retreat therefrom, the dignity of those reduced to misery, their precipitous spiritual fall and shame, the king's giving away everything except the name of king, the loyalty of a single child, the tears of both joy and grief, and the coronation of the kind son as well as the reunion with his bastard brother. Like Lear's story, this one is telescoped so that events such as the reunion of the brothers, which otherwise would lie outside the confines of the play, are included within its boundaries. But more cunning still is the manner in which Shakespeare has refashioned the Lear and Gloucester stories, both according to the same revisionist pattern. Both stories restored to the context provided by their respective sources show what happens when kings become prey to flatterers and how excesses and vices of individuals produce rebellion and disruption in the state. In both stories, a fragmented self separates families, divides nations, and produces a broken world. Superficial resolutions in each inherited story—the successive reigns of Lear and Cordelia, the reunion of the sons of the Paphlagonian king—are the prologues to renewed conflict with still more devastating repercussions: the sons of Goneril and Regan incarcerate Cordelia and later war for dominion; the sons of the Paphlagonian king achieve a false truce that when broken wreaks havoc in the world. By killing off Edmund and also Goneril and Regan, Shakespeare redeems history from this further tragedy. By excising this ultimate disaster from both stories, Shakespeare alters the whole pattern of history of which those stories were a reflection. Shakespeare's objective, very simply, is to wring from these stories, and from previously chronicled history, a higher truth. He plays with fictions as the child of truth.

The language of criticism requires a precision unavailable in formulations that refer to King Lear as “a fairy tale!”—or even to the story as it is rendered in previous accounts as “a simple old fairy tale” by Shakespeare “transmuted.”⁵⁸ Similarly, it requires a precision lost in references to the Gloucester story as simply a derivation from pastoral romance. When analogies cease to be analogies, the language of criticism becomes debased and its perceptions disfigured. The Lear story and the Gloucester story undergo a sea change, to be sure; yet more than simply substituting an unhappy for a happy ending, or vice versa, Shakespeare's revisionism replots the whole course of imagined history, with earlier versions of the Lear and Gloucester stories serving here as only a base and point of reference for Shakespeare's symbolic expression.

Indeed, considerable confusion derives from the very notion that the Lear story, in its sources, is possessed of a happy ending eliminated by the necessity of Shakespeare's tragic form and by his concomitant “establishment of a relationship between the story and the world in general” and hence inclusion of a set of “political implications” allegedly absent from those sources.⁵⁹ The relationship of the story to history and its political implications for history are emphatically a concern of all the sources especially when the Lear story is restored to their larger perspectives. The nonlinear construction of Shakespeare's new Lear story, its relative plotlessness, has the effect of turning attention away from the action of the story to Shakespeare's mythic shaping, or reshaping, of history and of simultaneously reminding us that “there is a difference between Shakespeare and the people who write Lear differently, saving Cordelia and making only consistent statements about the gods and justice.”⁶⁰

Shakespeare's abstraction of history is different from that of the earlier chronicles: his strategy is to ambiguate history by complicating its patterns and by multiplying perspectives on it. What is new here is not the fact that the Lear story is invested with a political and historical significance, but the fact that the significance now attributed to the story is different from that ascribed to it in Shakespeare's sources. This holds true for both the Lear and Gloucester stories and serves as a reminder that one task of the artistic imagination is to re-form misshapen myths and legends. Wherever they may appear—in historical narratives sacred or secular, or embedded in poems and plays, myths and legends represent individual efforts to apprehend the truth of history, to compel ideas about history into their most nearly perfect shape. Earl Wasserman is speaking of Shelley but it could just as easily be of the Shakespeare of King Lear when he writes, “Such a conception of myth and of the function of the imagination entails an especially ambiguous relation between the traditional form of a legend or myth and the poet's use of it, and demands of the reader an equally ambiguous frame of mind.”⁶¹

From the beginning, the Lear story figured prominently in historical narratives—was illustrative of a view of history. In the Renaissance, that story, whether recalled by historians or poets, by Holinshed or Spenser, is an embedment in history. In King Lear, the situation is altered: history is now an embedment in the play. That history, though, is rife with political implications; and however often both have escaped the eye of criticism they remain very much within the eye of the play. The sources for that play are a rendering of history, and of a particular sense of history, that Lear itself revises and thereby questions. Here both the content of history and its form are modified, which should remind us of two propositions: first, that “every historical drama … calls upon our knowledge of some particular historical pattern against which the action can be read”; and second, that to qualify as history “an event must be susceptible to at least two narrations of its occurrence. Unless at least two versions of the same set of events can be imagined,” Hayden White explains, “there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened. The authority of the [new] historical narrative is the authority of reality itself.”⁶² History, Shakespeare seems to be saying, begs for a deliverance best achieved, first by rescuing it from the false shapings and flattening simplifications of Tudor historians, and then by returning it to the ambience of ambiguity and paradox, complexity and contradiction, where the true shape of history can be glimpsed.

King Lear thus presents history within a new literary structure, Shakespeare implying that elements in the play not found in tradition, or in the chronicles, may nevertheless belong to history. Cordelia may not have hanged herself; her alleged hanging may be only a public explanation and concealment of another's crime, a contrivance for obliterating what actually happened in history. Shakespeare knew as well as anyone that old narratives generate new ones; and in the Renaissance histories he may have read, he certainly witnessed the old chronicles being shaped into new histories by the intrusion of theology and ideology. Shakespeare's King Lear comes at the end of a tradition of progressive interpretation of the Lear story—comes out of a tradition “heavily censored … but also heavily interpreted” and should be accorded the status of what Frank Kermode calls an “interpretive fiction.”⁶³ Such fictions, such fables can stand on the same footing as history, can be as moving as history, can even be in various ways more successful than history, because of the ideas they raise. Moreover, where there are silences in history there are often suspicions of censoring, and when interpretive choices have obviously been made there are opportunities, just as obviously, for reinterpretation—for historical revisionism.

The point is made neatly by Nahum Tate in the prologue to his History of King Lear where, having already described Shakespeare's play as “a Heap of Jewels, unstrung, and unpolisht, yet … dazling in their Disorder” (Var. Ed., p. 468), he represents himself not only as ordering the disorder of Shakespeare's play but as moralizing its history and as bringing out from concealment what was implicit in Shakespeare's story: “Why should these scenes lie hid” (I. 17)? Tate's Lear, interestingly, strikes the same relationship with Shakespeare's play as Shakespeare's Lear strikes with the anonymous Leir and, indeed, with the entire inherited tradition. When history is seen (as Shakespeare clearly sees it in Leir) as captive to the truth of a foolish world, history must be rewritten. Leir thus necessitates the writing of Lear where, as Artaud might say, history is immolated in the name of the future; where a new history is made in order to release mankind from the grip of a counterfeit past and stir him into new life and creation.

The Lear story, in its original telling by Geoffrey of Monmouth, is fixed between the reign of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, Isaiah and Hosea and, later by Holinshed, is particularized to the times of Joas, King of Judah. The latter detail takes on significance in terms of the foregoing discussion when we remember that Joas, “a descendant of David and a prefiguration of Christ, could provide the means for the restoration of the true line of kings.”⁶⁴ That is, the implicit contrast between Lear and James lies in Shakespeare's Renaissance sources, in the paralleling of Lear's reign and Joas's. In Geoffrey's account, moreover, the Lear story involves the perpetuation of a pattern of division and dissolution commencing with the fragmentation of Albion and culminating in Albion's ruin. What Shakespeare's sources, medieval and Renaissance, delineate is an archetypal pattern: of families sparring, of kingdoms dividing, of factions warring, of history dissolving; what Shakespeare injects into the process, through his revision of those sources and by virtue of his own play's historical moment, is the possibility—and only the possibility—of the world's reconstituting itself and becoming whole again. There may even be a cunning irony in the implied contrast between Joas apostatizing and Lear now experiencing a personal redemption.

King Lear may not be principally a political play, nor even be organized around the details of the Darnley murder as Lilian Winstanley suggests. But it was then a habit of mind, as well as of writing, to think typologically, to observe correspondences and in them differences. Thus, commenting on Revelation 22.14, Thomas Adams can link kings with the heavenly company, proclaiming that “Heauen is the great White Hall, the court of the high King”;⁶⁵ and chroniclers can regularly read out of the division of Lear's kingdom the stories of nations sparring, of families fragmenting—can read of commotions in the cosmos and in the human psyche itself. Winstanley locates not the sense, but a sense of King Lear when she finds in the play a “symbolic mythology” wherein “nations themselves are protagonists and in which ungrateful children mean the factions of a civil war, tearing their fatherland to pieces.”⁶⁶ Even such critical reductionism, sometimes ludicrous in the extreme, makes a point about the play that must be accommodated by less preposterous historical readings.

Shakespeare's play begins with the theme of division—with Lear's unveiling his “darker purpose” to crawl “Unburthen'd” toward death (I.i.36-41). Calculated to prevent all future strife, Lear's act of division ensures ironically that strife will continue and culminate in war. The initial scenes of each of the first three acts, part of a reiterative pattern in the play, hint at division becoming warfare. Thus Curan asks Edmund, “Have you heard of no likely wars toward, 'twixt the Dukes of Cornwall and Albany?” (II.i.11-12); Kent tells the Gentleman, “There is division … 'twixt Albany and Cornwall” (III.i.19-21); Gloucester reports to Edmund, “There is division between the Dukes” (III.iii.8-9)—all this seeming to emanate from the play's opening scene where Lear divides his kingdom, setting his children at odds. Moreover, these portents of civil war open upon “a worse matter” (III.iii.9): France's invasion of Britain. By the end of the third act, the invading troops have already set foot on British soil; in Act IV, “the British pow'rs are marching hitherward” (IV.ii.4; IV.iv.21; IV.vi.215-19). War breaks out in Act V and by its last scene, in a notable revision of Shakespeare's sources, is won by the forces of Britain. Lear's divided self has divided the world. One can speak of the “brilliant conflation of personal, social, and political crises that … ‘rocket the mind’ in King Lear”;⁶⁷ yet these conflations, appropriated by Shakespeare, are very much a part of the history of Albion as it is related by Geoffrey of Monmouth and later by Holinshed. Juxtaposed in a causal relationship by Geoffrey, division and warfare, in harness again, provide the overarching structure for Shakespeare's play where, as Alfred Harbage notices, the fissures in the legend and in history “widen infinitely” so that we see Lear at the center of a turbulence that wreaks havoc “in minds, in families, in nations, in the heavens themselves, interacting in dreadful concatenation.”⁶⁸ We are not allowed to forget the biblical adage that every kingdom divided against itself shall become desolate.

On the other hand, in keeping with the political as well as religious content of the play, but also in violation of the detail provided by the sources, Shakespeare allows another structure, organized around the theme of unity, to rise up against and subdue the surface structure of division. The bonding between Lear and his Fool, Gloucester and Poor Tom anticipates the reunions of Lear and his “poor fool” (V.iii.305) Cordelia, of Gloucester and his son Edgar. If a divided self brings about division within and between kingdoms, a mended self effects reconciliation between warring parties both in the kingdom and in the world. Like the two contending structures of the play, the triumph of Britain in the war with France, whatever its historical veracity, makes an important symbolic point and, further, reinforces the typological play between two kings, two separate moments of history, while reminding us that typology itself was a popular way of writing history in the Renaissance—a way of abolishing past history except as a type-source for new history.⁶⁹

Even if as in Geoffrey and the Elizabethan chronicles Lear has his kingdom restored to him and Cordelia later governs, that interval is but a calm before the storm wherein the sons of Goneril and Regan harass and later incarcerate Cordelia who thereupon slays herself. As R. W. Chambers was quick to recognize, “Cordeillia's suicide … contradicts painfully the promise to the children who honour their father and their mother, that their days may be long in the land”;⁷⁰ and subsequent events scarcely encourage, much less authorize, the view that, whatever tragedy history may contain, it finally releases a comedic pattern. For following Cordelia's death, her portion of the kingdom is divided among the children who war for dominion. The fortunes of individuals, in the chronicles, are subordinated to a view of history that is cyclical and degenerative: history keeps repeating itself as it moves steadily toward dissolution; or as Gloucester puts it, “O ruin'd piece of Nature! This great world / Shall so wear out to naught” (IV.vi.136-37).

In the received legend, the good may prevail for a time but are eventually defeated, not so much by death as by the forces of evil in a world where death becomes a consolation. The Lear story was advanced not only as an example for, but as a prophecy of, the future when Britain would be hopelessly divided and engulfed by discord. At such a time the mind would become darkened, the place desolate; the end would be at hand. Contrary to the view of some critics, not King Lear but the legend behind it suggested that direction and purpose in history are lost; that history, wheeling backwards, will culminate in the triumph of evil. “This great decay” (V.iii.297) as Albany calls Lear and thereby represents his world, or the vision of the world implied in Edmund's lines, “The younger rises when the old doth fall” (III.iii.27)—such degenerative and cyclical conceptions of history are both deeply embedded in the Lear legend, yet are precisely the conceptions that Shakespeare's play, even while representing them, would overthrow.

Less overtly than Geoffrey of Monmouth but far more imaginatively, Shakespeare aligns the Lear story with scriptural history and, in a parallel move signalled by the allusion to Merlin in the Fool's prophecy, aligns secular with scriptural prophecy. Joining apocalypse to prophecy, Merlin had converted the tragedy of history into tragicomedy, using the Lear story and its view of history as a backdrop against which to place an alternative prophecy and a contrary vision of history. More than idle speculation, Merlin's prophecies—one of which promised a nameless king who would restore the shattered world to unity—were thought to have a distinct political and nationalistic hue and so to hold a special pertinence for the British kings. This is the way in which Geoffrey of Monmouth represents Merlin's prophecies and the way, too, in which he plots history moving out of tragedy into comedy. Indeed, Merlin's prophecies were instrumental in shifting the scene of history to England, making that nation not just a concern but the center of new historical accounts. Within this scheme, England emerges as a privileged nation with God bestowing a special light that “the British people should [not] lose their way utterly in the darkness of that dreadful night.”⁷¹ For Geoffrey, the Incarnation is the great divide between two phases of history, one set within the context of Old Testament prophecy and the other situated within the apocalyptic framework afforded by the New Testament. Its performance at Whitehall on St. Stephen's Day places King Lear within the orbit of the Incarnation, hinting at a liturgical context for the play; but Shakespeare is more tentative than Geoffrey had been—in the words of Paul Siegel, “leav[ing] unresolved whether the darkness of the time will gradually give place to light, as did the darkness of ancient Britain, or whether it will steadily deepen … [into] total darkness … [and] the extinction of humanity.”⁷² Nevertheless, hesitancy about a better future does not deny the possibility.

Such a context clarifies Shakespeare's strategies in King Lear: he alters a received legend so as to allow for the intrusion of an apocalyptic view of history which his play, designated by its title as “True Chronicle Historie,” will thereupon examine. If Dr. Johnson thought that King Lear ran “contrary to the natural ideas of justice … and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles” (Var. Ed., p. 419), Shakespeare, we may surmise, thought that the Lear story as reported in the chronicles ran contrary to history itself. The story was always, and preeminently, a mirror upon history, a reflection of its course, and so to modify the story was to alter the course of history itself. One of Shakespeare's revisions—his making England rather than France triumphant—if necessitated by the spirit of the age, still implies some flirting with the idea of England as elect nation. Another of his revisions, and one far more crucial to the play—his allowing Lear and Cordelia to die—has been the crux in a criticism concerned with the fate of individuals and not of nations, with the contours of a legend but not the history it recounted.

Shakespeare's new conception deepens the personal tragedy even as it lessens the burden of tragedy for history. The very fact that Shakespeare substantially alters chronicle history makes a point that has been lost upon his critics. Those alterations cannot be accounted for solely on aesthetic grounds; rather, they are so far-reaching as to affect the deep structure of the story and the view of history it had previously supported. Strict adherence to the chronicles is part and parcel of the tragedian's commitment to representing the sad realities of history; substantive revision of such received accounts exhibits an urge to deliver mankind from his own history—and history from its grimmer realities. Shakespeare's reshaping of the Lear story, then, is intended as a challenge to thought and can be explained further by a tendency, evident among Tudor historians certainly, to scrap an older version of a story for a remodeled one. This tendency is also evident in Shakespeare's Henry VIII, whose alternate title seems to invite a skeptical scrutiny of the history to which the play alludes. For Matthew Wikander, “The heart of Henry VIII's challenge to conventional expectations about historical plays lies in its subtitle, All is True,” a declaration that causes Wikander to wonder with Howard Felperin, “whether Shakespeare is not ironically hinting that we revise our conventional notions of historical truth, even of mimetic truth itself.”⁷³

Joyce Carol Oates speaks for many readers of King Lear when she proposes that “Shakespeare deliberately alters the ending of the Lear story in order to defeat the very salvation that this work, from the inside, requires.”⁷⁴ Shakespeare's revisionism, nonetheless, is open to another construction. Viewed in terms of its protagonists, the received story of King Lear is a conventional tragicomedy wherein disaster is averted by the reunion of Lear and Cordelia and the restoration of their kingdom; but viewed in terms of its true protagonist who is History, the story is a dark tragedy wherein the forces of evil, for a while restrained, are unleashed again and accomplish the annihilation of all good. The whole world is upset and eventually disintegrates.

As Shakespeare retells the story, the personal tragedy is accentuated by irony—there is a reunion without a restoration; but the tragedy of history is alleviated, the possibility for history as a tragicomedy is allowed for in a play where evil is self-consuming and goodness triumphant in the calm, if not secured, order at its end. Mythologies of history tend to be founded upon cyclical or linear patterns, the one pessimistic, the other optimistic. Shakespeare's remodeling of the Lear story shifts the shape of history which can now cast the beam of its light upon futurity. As in Antony and Cleopatra, there is “High order in this solemnity” (V.ii.364).

In King Lear, majesty may fall to folly; but the foolish king, though persisting in his folly, by the end of the play becomes wise. There is a resurrection; and even if there is death, death is a deliverance from the horrors of this life, is an escape not from truth but from despair, and, as the Doctor tells Cordelia, has the power of “clos[ing] the eye of anguish” on this world (IV.iv.15). In the world of King Lear, all of the evil perish, along with some of the good; but some of them survive and, under their aegis, history continues. It is in this sense that we may say with C. J. Sisson: King Lear contains “a happy ending of deeper truth than Tate's.”⁷⁵ The play builds up the missing connective tissue between mythology and history: now mythology can become history, and prophecy masking itself as history can be fulfilled.

Shakespeare's reorganization of history thus fulfills a fundamental condition of prophecy: it makes plain what previously was dark and hidden and by omissions confused. It also makes plain that the Shakespeare of King Lear is like the Shakespeare of the history plays: as Robert Ornstein observes, “not … content to serve as the spokesman for an official version of history” and thus intent upon presenting “a personal mythic interpretation of England's history.”⁷⁶ And yet, even more emphatically than in the history plays, Shakespeare seems now to be acknowledging that myths and legends require liberation from their reductionist past where their history is one of truncation and where abridgement substitutes for precision. When the myth or legend is liberated, as Shakespeare would do in King Lear, its jagged facets are restored: it is shown to be stubbornly irreducible, its contexts become an integral part of its meaning, and its narrative events are now seen as replete with social and political, psychological and religious significance.

In the Middle Ages, and up to Shakespeare's own day, existence was conceived as a cosmic drama, composed around a central theme and according to a master plan; and man was expected to accept the drama as written since he was powerless to alter it. A problem arose, though, when discrete and usually cohesive traditions of prophecy, sacred and secular, were at odds, and in such instances the former took precedence over the latter, becoming the instrument through which the two traditions could be made to mesh. It is not that Shakespeare chooses the occasion of King Lear to join a band of prophets; rather, through prophecy and apocalypse he converts legend into myth. Into his new myth, or countermyth, Shakespeare weaves images, ideas, and themes of apocalypse in such a way as to suggest that his play is as much a revision of secular as of sacred history.

It has been said by way of contrasting the old Leir play with Shakespeare's, first that “the most striking difference between the source-play and other versions of the story is that it is studded with religious references and biblical allusions,” and second that, while both plays are illuminated by biblical light, Leir has a predominantly Old Testament and Lear an emphatically New Testament emphasis.⁷⁷ Both these observations require adjustment: what distinguishes the old Leir play, both from earlier sources and from Shakespeare's rendering of the story, is that it alone employs conspicuous biblical quotation and citation, while the sources, along with Shakespeare's play, employ strategies of biblical correlation and analogy. In King Lear, moreover, the emphasis is not only New Testament but, more precisely, apocalyptic. The Book of Revelation, itself a mythic history, provides the biblical counterpart, the apt analogy, for Shakespeare's play.

There is a particular propriety in Shakespeare's joining secular to sacred history through the Book of Revelation; for apocalypticism, whether pessimistic or optimistic, was not only “Western Christendom's habitual response to historical crisis,” but, as Richard Bauckham has documented, in Shakespeare's day it was thought that “the whole history of the world could be understood if … [the Apocalypse] were read alongside the chronicles.”⁷⁸ Texts, sacred and secular, were thus bound together on the understanding that Revelation is a light to the chronicles and the chronicles a light to it; Revelation provides the framework for a prophetic understanding of history and, says Katharine Firth, was regarded as the book through which the English chronicles could be put in their “right shape.”⁷⁹ In this, the heyday of prophetic history, “the whole structure rested on the conviction that prophecy was the most certain of all sources of historical information and that it could provide an assured framework for the whole course of history.”⁸⁰ On suppositions like these, it appears, Shakespeare introduces prophetic and apocalyptic elements to his play and allows them to authorize his astonishing revision of a received tradition whose view of history is grimly pessimistic—indeed to legitimate the claim that King Lear is a presentation of “True Chronicle History” (my italics).

The play, we have seen, has its typological elements which, we should be reminded, are an aspect of prophecy and exist, as John Evans notes, “only in a universe in which the progress of events follows a discernible and meaningful pattern, in which prophecies come true and types are fulfilled.”⁸¹ Within the play, as the implicit Lear-James typology makes clear, there is also a conflict, characteristic of much secular prophecy according to Marjorie Reeves, wherein “the desire for a human triumph in history” is seen “struggling with the conviction that only divine intervention can overcome the inherent evil in man. From this conflict of ideas,” Reeves concludes, “emerges the figure of a human saviour … who achieves a partial triumph before the final onset of evil and the final spiritual intervention.”⁸² Yet, from this conflict of ideas in King Lear comes something more unsettling: the whole idea of a world-emperor seems finally scuttled and with it the notion of providential intervention. Even as the play accommodates secular history to the apocalyptic drama, it revises the very assumptions that had usually fostered that accommodation and, in the process, counters then current views of history, many of which were founded upon John's New Testament prophecy. King Lear is an emendation of history as it was related by both Renaissance chroniclers and scriptural commentators.

But more than allowing us to explain certain poetic strategies in King Lear, the Book of Revelation provides Shakespeare with both a perfect analogue to the problem of his play and an exact generic model for it. Lear confronts head-on the problem that the Book of Revelation was said to address: the horrors that characterize human existence when the wicked reign and the godly are oppressed. Shakespeare seems less certain than King James that, although God “suffereth the wicked to runne on while their cup be full: yet in the end he striketh them”—Judgment Day will follow this time of persecution and disaster.⁸³ Gloucester direly questions this view of the cosmos in his declaration, “As flies to wanton boys, are we to th' Gods; / They kill us for their sport” (IV.i.36-37). And that declaration may seem far truer to the experience of the play than Albany's later proclamation, “This shows you are above, / You justicers, that these our nether crimes / So speedily can venge!” (IV.ii.78-80); or than Edgar's insistence, “The Gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us” (V.iii.170-71). What renders all such perspectives inadequate to the play is the realization, finally, that while not being denied a place in the cosmos God is being written out of the world of King Lear. Its tragedy emanates from man's small faults and large ones which turn the world into a hell. As Lear states the case: “… to the girdle do the Gods inherit, / Beneath is all the fiend's: there's hell, there's darkness, / There is the sulphurous pit—burning, scalding” (IV.vi.128-30).

The world of the Apocalypse—the world “beneath”—is replicated in King Lear where “All's cheerless, dark, and deadly” (V.iii.290) and where, as Lear remarks, those “with best meaning, have incurr'd the worst” (V.iii.4). The world of the play is “a rack: a scene of suffering,” including within itself “a standing potentiality for progressive transformation into chaos”;⁸⁴ yet the play never lets us forget, either, that Revelation's metaphor of purgation, of suffering to obtain purification and renewal, epitomizes its own idea of transformation, of man's metamorphosis in this life. The Apocalypse is an exhilarating book but not until its last chapters, pertaining to end-time, a joyful one; it is not a shield from but an encounter with the nightmare world of human history. There is consolation in it, but only for those who live through the horror and who thereupon can awaken into another reality. The Book of Revelation, then, authorizes in very specific ways the admixture of tragedy and comedy within history and allows for that history to be perceived as prophecy and to be plotted as an apocalypse.

Notes

1. “King Lear” and the Gods (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1966), p. 71.

2. Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1966), p. 241. Rene Fortin comments similarly: “Shakespeare carefully excises every overt trace of Christianity from an originally Christian story” (“Problem of Transcendence,” Shakespeare Studies 7 [1974], p. 316).

3. On the liberties Shakespeare has taken in his history plays, see Peter Saccio, Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), p. 14; and on the license he takes with chronicle history in King Lear, see Boas's remarks as quoted by R. W. Chambers, “King Lear” (Glasgow: Jackson and Son, 1940), p. 11. Whether or not Shakespeare “began the play as a comedy, or … a romance,” the fact remains that King Lear is “the only case … where he changes a happy into an unhappy ending” (Janet Spens, An Essay on Shakespeare's Relation to Tradition [Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1961], pp. 50-51).

4. Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Histories (1947; repr., London: Methuen, 1964), p. 16. Irving Ribner makes the same point specifically of Lear: “As a good historian, Shakespeare read the account [of Lear] in every source he knew of, and retold the story … with a full awareness of the political doctrine inherent in it”; and later: “Shakespeare drastically changed the story … which he found in his sources. He made changes both to effect better his purposes of tragedy, and, in the orthodox tradition of Renaissance historiography, to effect better the political purposes of history” (The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957], pp. 248-49, 251). For an interpretation of Shakespeare's revisionism in some ways complementary to the one I offer in subsequent pages, in other ways divergent from it, see Thomas P. Roche, Jr., “‘Nothing Almost Sees Miracles’: Tragic Knowledge in King Lear,” in On “King Lear,” ed. Lawrence Danson (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), esp. pp. 149-57. It is, of course, noteworthy that, as Jefferson Humphries remarks, “Johnson locates the exhaustion of his capacity to endure unpleasantness at precisely that point at which the play parts from the ‘facts’ on which it purports to be based” (“Seeing through Lear's Blindness: Blanchot, Freud, Saussure and Derrida,” Mosaic, 16 [1983], p. 29).

5. “King James I and Anglo-Scottish Unity,” in Conflict in Stuart England, ed. William A. Aiken and Basil D. Henning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960), pp. 43, 46. For Andrewes' sermon, see XCLI Sermons (London, 1629), pp. 11 ff. In “King Lear” and the Gods, Elton reports that “on August 27, 1605, at Oxford, with Shakespeare possibly present, Dr. Matthew Gwinn recited some Latin verses to James: ‘Hail thou whom Britain, now united though formerly divided, cherishes’” (p. 244). Elton also cites two titles that are pertinent here (pp. 244-45): Anthony Munday's The Triumphes of Re-united Britania (1605) and John Thornborough's A Discourse … Proving the … Necessitie of the … Union of … England and Scotland (1604).

6. The Peace-Maker: Or, Great Brittaines Blessing (London, 1619), sig. A3, B^v.

7. Alvin B. Kernan, “Courtly Servants and Public Players: Shakespeare's Image of Theater in the Court at Elsinore and Whitehall,” in Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance, ed. Maynard Mack and George Lord (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), p. 106.

8. An Allegory of “King Lear” (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1913), p. 19.

9. The Old Testament Prophets (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977), p. 105.

10. See both Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1911), pp. 42-47, and Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study of Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 311.

11. See Paul Korshin, Typologies in England: 1650-1820 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 101-132, and Leslie Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake's Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 94-100.

12. Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 79.

13. A portion of the proclamation is reprinted by John W. Draper, “The Occasion of King Lear,” Studies in Philology 34 (1937), p. 177. Draper asks, “could any well-informed person at that time have seen King Lear and not considered it as an exemplum most aptly fitted to the current situation” (p. 180); but then he leaves open the question of whether Lear was written “as a direct propaganda to develop public sentiment in favor of the union,” or rather more simply “as a courtly compliment to Shakespeare's patron” (p. 185). George Ian Duthie cities commentators from Malone onward who believe that Shakespeare wrote British man not because Lear lived in pre-Anglo-Saxon times and hence was king of Britain but because James was now king of Britain (Shakespeare's “King Lear”: A Critical Edition [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949], pp. 151-59). There are still other anachronisms in the play, such as the Fool's “I'd drive ye cackling home to Camelot” (II.ii.85; my italics), which tend to confirm such speculations.

14. The Royal Play of “Macbeth” (New York: Macmillan, 1950), pp. 401, 25, 181.

15. “Courtly Servants and Public Players,” in Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance, ed. Mack and Lord, p. 106.

16. New Readings vs Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 171.

17. “The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs,” Raritan 2 (1982), p. 98.

18. New Readings vs Old Plays, p. 150. Levin's argument, of course, must skid by contrary evidence such as Kent's advice: “Reserve thy state; / … check / This hideous rashness” (I.i.149-51). This moment in the first scene of the play is balanced by another in its last scene where Albany declares, “we will resign, / During the life of this old Majesty, / To him our absolute power” (V.iii.298-300).

19. Basilikon Doron. Or His Maiesties Instructions to His Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince (London, 1603), pp. 66, 73-74.

20. “The Occasion of King Lear,” p. 179.

21. “Of Prophecies,” in Francis Bacon: Selected Writings, ed. Hugh G. Dick (New York: Modern Library, 1955), pp. 96-97.

22. See The Whole Prophecies of Scotland, England, Ireland, and Denmark (Edinburgh, 1718), p. 1. Rymer's prophecy was published in 1603 and 1615.

23. Merlins Prophecies and Predictions (London, 1651), p. 361; see also pp. 362-63.

24. See Glynne Wickham, “From Tragedy to Tragi-Comedy: King Lear as Prologue,” Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973), p. 35.

25. A Prophesie of Cadwallader, Last King of the Britaines (London, 1604), sig. B2^v, H-H^v. Though Richard Bauckham probably underplays the involvement of Queen Elizabeth in the apocalyptic myth, his remarks nonetheless accentuate the extent to which James I, much more than Elizabeth, comes to be wrapped up in that myth: “the restraint with which specifically apocalyptic images were applied to her is significant … Even in Elizabethan art apocalyptic imagery is used only occasionally to depict her in this role … The commentaries, the tracts, for the most part even the sermons on apocalyptic themes ignore her” (Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth-Century Apocalypticism, Millennarianism and the English Reformation [Appleford, G.B.: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1978], pp. 128-29). John Bale, of course, provides some sanction for identifying English monarchs with the protecting angels of the Apocalypse, identifying Elizabeth with the angel of Rev. 7.2. The tendency to make such identifications persists into the seventeenth century. Arise Evans, for example, maintains that with prophecy as his guide Henry VII “united York and Lancaster, redeemed Wales, and was the means to bring England and Scotland under one head” (A Rule from Heaven [London, 1659], p. 15). From the vantage point of King James, however, Henry VII merely commences the process that James himself compels to fulfillment. Looking backward over England's history, political and literary, Evans maintains that her “Bards”—including the Bard of Avon presumably—“were guided by prophesie” (p. 17).

26. The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages, p. 506.

27. See Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1979), p. 246.

28. Three Sermons … Preached at Oxford (London, 1626), pp. 6, 31.

29. English Almanacs, 1500-1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), p. 215.

30. Ibid., pp. 216-17.

31. Shakespeare's Enactment: The Dynamics of Renaissance Theatre (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1976), p. 37.

32. See Ribner's observation quoted in n. 4 above. Similarly, Grigori Kozintsev confides, “I wanted to see Lear in the midst of … the world of politics” (“King Lear”: The Space of Tragedy, trans. Mary Mackintosh [London: Heinemann, 1977], p. 39). More generally, Robert Heilman argues, “Political subject matter is everywhere in Shakespeare's tragedies and histories” (see “Shakespearean Comedy and Tragedy: Implicit Political Analogies,” in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, ed. John Alvis and Thomas G. West [Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1981], p. 27). This volume, however, makes only passing reference to Lear. What Lily Campbell says of the history plays generally would seem to have considerable bearing on King Lear: “Shakespeare chose for his histories kings who had already been accepted as archetypes and …, like all other writers who used history to teach politics to the present, … alter[ed] the historical fact … with current political situations in mind” (Shakespeare's Histories, p. 125). King Lear at once qualifies the notion that Shakespeare's plays are neither polemical nor ideological and confirms the proposition that they are deeply concerned with both political and historical issues.

    The prophetic element in Lear has been discerned and described eccentrically, even perversely, by Abraham Schechter, “King Lear”: Warning or Prophecy (New York: privately printed, 1956), and quite aptly by both Benjamin T. Spencer, “King Lear: A Prophetic Tragedy,” College English 5 (1944), pp. 302-08, and A. C. Harwood, Shakespeare's Prophetic Mind (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1964). See also G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare's Tragedies Including the Roman Plays (1931; repr. London: Methuen, 1965), p. 361; and Edwin Muir, The Politics of “King Lear” (Glasgow: Jackson and Son, 1947). Muir sees Lear as a play filled with “inchoate, semi-prophetic dreams” (p. 7), and more recently John Kerrigan has described Lear as a play “preoccupied with prophecy” (“Revision, Adaptation, and the Fool in King Lear,” in The Divisions of the Kingdom: Shakespeare's Two Versions of “King Lear,” ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983], p. 224).

33. See Eyriak Schlichtenberger, A Prophecy Uttered by the Daughter of an Honest Man (London, 1580), no sigs. Or as Capp observes of Certain Wonderfull Predictions (1604) by Himbert de Belly, these prophecies “offered gloomy vistas of wars, disasters, rebellions and royal mortalities but contained on almost every page a reassurance that they might be averted” (English Almanacs, p. 30). Believing that the Epistles to the Seven Churches of Asia in the Book of Revelation are a model for such warning prophecy, Sampson Price describes the times of backsliding and slumber during which it flourishes and also the conditions under which it is issued: “He [God] sendeth Watchmen to blowe the Trumpet and warne the people; but if they take not warning … he taketh away the Candlesticke” (Ephesvs Warning Before Her Woe [London, 1616], pp. 2-3).

34. Elton, “King Lear” and the Gods, p. 35.

35. Basilikon Doron, pp. 57-57^v, 75, 103. Thomas McFarland comments suggestively in “The Image of the Family in King Lear,” in On “King Lear,” ed. Danson, pp. 100-01; and David Bevington sets forth this broad principle for interpretation: “Shakespeare probably read Basilikon Doron and set its theories into practice as homage to a new hero” (Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968], p. 24).

36. Flores Regij. Or, Proverbes and Aphorismes, Divine and Morall (London, 1627), p. 5.

37. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 11.

38. From the introduction to “King Lear,” ed. Kenneth Muir, Arden Shakespeare (1952; repr., New York: Random House, 1964), p. lvii.

39. A Paraphrase upon the Revelation of the Apostle S. John, in Works (London, 1616), p. 4.

40. Ibid., p. 73.

41. H. S. Bellamy, The Book of Revelation Is History (London: Faber and Faber, 1942), p. 12 (my italics).

42. A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of Saint John (Edinburgh, 1593), sig. A3.

43. Sermons upon the Whole Booke of the Revelation (London, 1599), p. 339.

44. Pisgah Evangelica (London, 1606), p. 208.

45. Works, sigs. d3^v-d4.

46. Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI: The Apocalypse, the Union and the Shaping of Scotland's Public Culture (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1979), p. 94.

47. A Discourse of the Powder-Treason, in Works, p. 245. In the early years of the seventeenth century, it was common to use these generic labels to designate political, as well as religious, allies and opponents. In his 1605 preface, entitled “To the Christian Reader,” Gabriel Powel, implying that the Apocalypse is a tragicomedy, says that the Catholics “play all the parts in this Tragedie” while the Protestants, it seems, are the protagonists in this comedy (see Symonds, Pisgah Evangelica, no sigs.).

48. See E. Lampert, The Apocalypse of History: Problems of Providence and Human Destiny (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), p. 11; and for Christianson's remark, see Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 97. Cf. Walter B. Stone, “Shakespeare and the Sad Augurs,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 52 (1953), p. 467, who contends that, after 1583, “eschatological writings shrank to almost nothing; only in the broad sea of the popular mind, where preconceptions and prejudices shift slowly, is there evidence of a continuing devotion to the old ideas.” As evidence, Stone cites Henry Howard's A Defensatiue against the Poyson of Supposed Prophesies (London, 1583); however, the citations in Part I of the bibliography appended to the present volume would seem to tell another story.

49. A Fruitefull Meditation; Containing a Plaine and Easie Exposition … of the 7, 8, 9, 10. Verses of the 20. Chap. of the Revelation (London, 1603), no sigs. According to James, the Book of Revelation is “a Prophesie of the latter times”—the Day of Judgment is near; see A Paraphrase upon the Revelation, in Works, pp. 7, 73.

50. For a useful distinction between prophecy and apocalypse, see John F. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism During the English Civil War Years (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 198-99. Shakespeare is also prophetic rather than apocalyptic according to the terms set forth by Stanley Brice Frost, whose entire discussion of the mythologizing of history and the historicizing of mythology is relevant here (see “Apocalyptic and History,” in The Bible in Modern Scholarship, ed. J. Philip Hyatt [New York: Abingdon Press, 1965], pp. 98-113).

51. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 18.

52. This is the view of Gary Taylor, “The War in King Lear,” Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980), p. 27.

53. Tudor Apocalypse, p. 171.

54. Caudwell (Christopher St. John Sprigg), Romance and Realism: A Study in English Bourgeois Literature, ed. Samuel Hynes (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 43-44.

55. A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation, p. 4. James H. Jones comments pertinently: “The tragedy's religious meaning consists mainly in what happens inside the protagonist, not in what Providence does outside him” (“Leir and Lear: Matthew 5:33-37, the Turning Point, and the Rescue Theme,” Comparative Drama 4 [1970], p. 130).

56. Chambers, “King Lear,” pp. 10-11.

57. John M. Lothian, “King Lear”: A Tragic Reading of Life (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1949), pp. 3-4.

58. Barbara Heliodora Carneiro de Mendonça, “The Influence of Gorboduc on King Lear,” Shakespeare Survey 13 (1960), p. 42.

59. H.N. Hudson, ed., The Works of Shakespeare, IX (Boston: James Munroe, 1851-56), p. 398.

60. Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 176 (my italics). See also Alvin B. Kernan, “Shakespeare and the Abstraction of History,” in Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1978), p. 133.

61. Shelley: A Critical Reading (1971; repr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), p. 272.

62. Herbert Lindenberger, Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature to Reality (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 138.

63. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 109, 118. Harvey Cox comments pertinently, explaining that “‘History’ is the name we … give to the horizon of consciousness within which we live” and that fictive histories involve an “attempt to liberate Western man from the ‘tyranny of the historical consciousness.’ Such literature insists that it is only by disenthralling human intelligence from the sense of history that men will be able to confront creatively the problems of the present” (The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy [1969; repr. New York: Harper and Row, 1970], pp. 28, 33).

64. Lindenberger, Historical Drama, p. 62, and White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry, 7 (1980), p. 23.

65. “Heaven-Gate; Or, the Passage to Paradise,” in The Workes … Being the Summe of His Sermons (London, 1629), p. 658.

66. “Macbeth,” “King Lear” and Contemporary History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1922), p. 145. Winstanley's historicizing of King Lear, as William Empson remarks, “tells you a lot about the mental background of the first night audience, but not about the play” (The Structure of Complex Words, 3d ed. [London: Chatto and Windus, 1979], p. 126).

67. John Reibetanz, The Lear World: A Study of “King Lear” in Its Dramatic Context (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 55.

68. “Introduction,” “King Lear,” ed. Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 24.

69. See Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy, p. 107.

70. “King Lear,” p. 13.

71. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, tr. Sebastian Evans, rev. tr. Charles W. Dunn (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), p. 93. On the Merlin tradition and its bearing on King Lear, see Roland M. Smith, “King Lear and the Merlin Tradition,” Modern Language Quarterly 7 (1946), pp. 153-74, and Donna B. Hamilton, “Some Romance Sources for King Lear,” Studies in Philology, 71 (1974), pp. 173-91. See also the anon. Prophetia Anglicana, Merlini Abrosii Britanni (Frankfurt, 1603; another ed. 1608), and Heywood, Merlins Prophecies and Predictions.

72. Shakespearean Tragedy and the Elizabethan Compromise (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1957), p. 188.

73. See Wikander's “English Historical Drama in the Seventeenth Century,” Genre, 9 (1976) p. 196; and Felperin's “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: History as Myth,” Studies in English Literature, 6 (1966), p. 227.

74. “‘Is This the Promised End?’: The Tragedy of King Lear,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33 (1974) p. 23.

75. Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, p. 172.

76. “Justice in King Lear,” in Shakespeare: “King Lear,” ed. Frank Kermode (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 235.

77. Jones, “Leir and Lear,” p. 126.

78. Tudor Apocalypse, pp. 71, 233.

79. The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, p. 60; see also Christianson, Reformers and Babylon, pp. 15-16. Explaining that history is subordinated to some general scheme and thereupon becomes polemical, Levy contends: “The key to that scheme was to be found in the book of Revelation: the mysteries of the text were illustrated by the chronicles, though the chronicles did not supply explanations.” Levy then concludes that, for one, John Bale believed that “‘the text [of Revelation] is a light to the chronicles’” and not vice versa (Tudor Historical Thought, p. 89).

80. Southern, “Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 72 (1972), p. 159. Bale's The Image of Both Churches and Foxe's Actes and Monuments are among the age's principal efforts at integrating history and prophecy. Bauckham comments importantly: “In these learned works of the last decade of the sixteenth century the principle of interrelating history and prophecy … reached a peak from which it was not to decline but to advance in the following centuries” (Tudor Apocalypse, p. 140). James I was instrumental in furthering this sort of apocalyptic interpretation; and King Lear, participating in the spirit of the times, contributes in significant ways to that effort.

81. “Paradise Lost” and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 99.

82. The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages, p. 299.

83. A Fruitefull Meditation, no sigs.

84. John Holloway, The Story of the Night: Studies in Shakespeare's Major Tragedies (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1961), pp. 77, 90.