[In the following essay, Knowles examines Cordelia's unexplained return to England in King Lear, suggesting that Shakespeare purposefully left the matter ambiguous in order to enhance the play's dramatic impact.]

I wish to consider a particular textual and structural problem in King Lear, concerning an event that happens offstage, out of the audience's sight or hearing, and yet upon which the whole outcome of the play depends. As everyone knows, in Act 1 King Lear's favorite daughter Cordelia is suddenly disowned by her father, scorned and dismissed by her sisters, and deprived of any claim to British land or power. Then, just as suddenly, her fortunes are reversed: she is taken to wife by a noble and loving man, is thereby made queen of the great country of France, and is forthwith moved safely away from her father's wrath and her sisters' malice. Why then should she return so soon, almost instantly, to her native country, now alien and hostile to her, only to lose everything, including her life? The tragic genre requires it, of course; she must return in order to die and in order for her death to overwhelm Lear. History also required it: in all of Shakespeare's apparent sources she returns—though more happily, restoring Lear to his throne for several years and then succeeding him. In Shakespeare's play, however, her personal motive for this most crucial of decisions is anything but clear. Like much else in the play, it happens offstage and can be understood, if at all, only from occasional passing hints. Even to attempt to comprehend it, as many critics have done, raises basic critical questions: Should we be able to understand her action? If so, does Shakespeare give us the means to do so? If he does not, why does his play differ so radically from all of his sources, where the motive for the French invasion is always made perfectly explicit? If audiences watching a performance do not much worry about such questions, should anyone else? Is our critical attention to such offstage events mere perversity, an attempt to play omniscient author and convert a dramatic action into a novelistic fiction? Or can it tell us anything of Shakespeare's dramatic art, about his intentions and his degree of success in realizing them?

There is in the sources no mystery about the motive or circumstances of the French invasion. In Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain, which is the origin of the Lear story and source of all later versions, after Lear has been forcibly bereft by Albania and Cornwall of the half of his kingdom he had retained, he goes to Gaul and asks Cordeilla and the king of the Franks to help him recover his dominions. They do so out of sympathy. This is essentially the series of events in Holinshed's Historie of England, John Higgins's Mirour for Magistrates, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and William Warner's Albion's England. In the anonymous play The History of King Leir, Leir's complaint is graver—after he has dispossessed himself, two daughters order him murdered—but here, as in all of the other sources, righteous moral outrage on the part of Cordelia and France motivates an armed invasion to restore Lear to his throne.¹

What motivates France and Cordelia in Shakespeare's play is much more obscure. We are not given a scene, such as is presented or recounted in all the sources, in which we watch them decide upon a course of action. Instead we hear, repeatedly, vague hints that a French invasion is developing, but we are not explicitly told for what reason. By the middle of Act 4 Cordelia appears onstage with French soldiers and English sympathizers in a scene set on English soil near Dover, but up to this point the objective of the invasion has been wrapped in mystery. A great deal hangs on our understanding of these events: a French invasion is no small matter, and France and Cordelia's intentions determine how much sympathy an English audience can have for them and their enterprise. Many commentators have therefore attempted to reconstruct from the text a sequence of imagined offstage events leading up to the appearance of French troops in 4.4. The great variety of these narratives reveals a remarkable degree of confusion and disagreement about this crucial action. I begin by surveying them.

I

The oldest narrative asserts that, as in the sources, Cordelia is motivated by distress at Goneril's and Regan's mistreatment of Lear. This theory depends mainly on some lines added to 3.1 in the Folio text of 1623; they replace lines in the Quarto text of 1608 and were apparently added by a theatrical reviser, perhaps Shakespeare, perhaps someone else. At this point in the Quarto, Kent is sending a Gentleman with messages to Cordelia at Dover; in the added Folio lines he informs this messenger that Albany and Cornwall have household servants “Which are to France the Spies and Speculations / Intelligent of our State.” He then continues, in a convoluted and incomplete sentence,

                                                                                                    What hath bin seene,
Either in snuffes, and packings of the Dukes,
Or the hard Reine which both of them hath borne
Against the old kinde King; or something deeper,
Whereof (perchance) these are but furnishings.

(3.1.25-29)²

As it stands in the Folio and is incorporated in all modern editions, this sentence fragment seems to imply that these spies have reported to France “What hath bin seene”—namely, friction between the dukes, their mistreatment of Lear, or “something deeper,” whatever that is. So says George Steevens in his edition of 1778: “What follows, are the circumstances in the state of the kingdom, of which he supposes the spies gave France the intelligence.”³ It is easy to go one step further and infer that the French invasion is somehow in response to the spies' intelligence. Thus Lewis Theobald in his edition of 1733, justifying his attempt to combine these Folio lines with those in the Quarto: “The [F] Lines seem absolutely necessary to clear up the Motives, upon which France prepar'd his Invasion”; and thus Edward Capell, the greatest eighteenth-century editor of Shakespeare's text: “From [them], we learn the motives of France's invasion.”⁴ Similarly in this century, George Lyman Kittredge takes Kent's meaning to be that “the French are invading Britain—whether because of what spies have informed them about the quarrels and plots of the Dukes or about their harsh treatment of the King, or, perhaps, for some purpose that the invaders conceal, using these things as pretexts.”⁵ Less equivocally, Steven Urkowitz states flatly that in the Folio “The French already know of Lear's troubles with the dukes. Reports from their own spies on this subject were a major reason for their intervention.”⁶

The only thing wrong with this narrative—that Cordelia invades because she and France learn of Lear's mistreatment—is that it is impossible. The first hint that she plans to do anything at all, for whatever reason, occurs at the end of 2.2. Kent, sitting in the stocks where Cornwall has put him, in the darkness before dawn, invokes the sun in order to read a letter recently received from her:

Approach thou Beacon to this vnder Globe,
That by thy comfortable Beames I may
Peruse this Letter. Nothing almost sees miracles
But miserie. I know 'tis from Cordelia,
Who hath most fortunately beene inform'd
Of my obscured course. And shall finde time
From this enormous State, seeking to giue
Losses their remedies.

(2.2.163-70)⁷

Kent's word “fortunately” may be misleading. He himself must somehow have informed Cordelia of his disguise, since no one else knows of it until the end of the play. His “fortunately” therefore means happily, not accidentally. As for the miraculous letter from Cordelia, she must have had available to her some unmiraculous means of communicating from France to her friends in England, perhaps through a network hurriedly arranged—who knows? the play tells us nothing—when she left England for France. Kent most probably has just gotten the letter from someone in Gloucester's household, where he has recently arrived; “I know 'tis from Cordelia” clearly indicates that he has not yet read it, as he would have had ample time to do if he had received it at Goneril's house on the previous day. If a realistic explanation can be imagined, the letter must have been sent first to Goneril's house, where Cordelia expected Lear and Kent to be, and it (or a duplicate) must have followed him to Regan's or Gloucester's house. How, we do not know, nor are we invited to ask.

What does the letter say? It probably tells Kent that by 2.2 Cordelia is already planning to invade Britain, since a few hours later, in 3.1, he sends a Gentleman to meet her on British soil; but does it also tell him why she is doing so, as many commentators have thought? In his edition of 1765, Dr. Johnson indicated that Kent reads the letter here and now in 2.2, and many editors, beginning with Charles Jennens in 1770, have marked “And shall finde … remedies” as words that Kent reads aloud from it. Cordelia, they would have us think, is promising in her letter at least to give (unspecified) losses their (unspecified) remedies.⁸ Now elsewhere in the play, where a character reads aloud from a letter—Gloucester at 1.2.46-54, for example, or Edgar at 4.6.262-70—the Folio sets the quoted text in italic; it does not do so here. Quite possibly Kent is not quoting Cordelia at all but is speaking for himself. He has just said that he needs sunlight, not the present “moone-shine” (2.2.32), to read by; that sunlight cannot have arrived three lines later. In the Folio a period marks a sentence break between “course” and “And” in line 168, but in the Quarto there is only a comma, which makes a mere parenthesis of “Who hath … course” and allows the sentence to continue after it.⁹ In the Quarto, then, the understood subject of “shall” is not Cordelia but Kent: “I [Kent] know 'tis from Cordelia (Who … course) and [I, Kent,] shall find time” to remedy losses. Many editors have so understood and punctuated the lines, giving a very different meaning from that in the Folio. Having now heard from Cordelia, Kent says that he may soon send news to her (as he does in 3.1) of the “enormous State” of affairs in England. Or he may simply mean, once I am away from this enormous state I am in (the king's messenger, sitting in disgrace in the stocks!), I shall seek out remedies, with the help of Cordelia, for present losses. It is impossible to tell whether Kent might be thinking of Cordelia's losses, Lear's, or his own, or whether any particular remedies are in his mind or hinted at in Cordelia's letter—which in any case he seems not to have read. Whatever he has in mind, he is reporting his own intentions, not Cordelia's.

The final reason to doubt that Cordelia writes that she is invading Britain to remedy her father's losses is Kent's word “Losses” itself. By that word, if it were in her letter, Cordelia could not possibly refer to Lear's loss of status in Goneril's household, or Goneril's threat to diminish his train, or Lear's being goaded to reject her straitened hospitality, or Regan's flight from offering hers. Cordelia can know nothing of these events, since they happened only a half day ago, on the previous afternoon and night; and Lear's being locked out in the storm will not happen for some hours yet, until just before Kent instructs the Gentleman to seek out Cordelia. No word of any of these events could possibly, in the actual world imaginable by an English audience, have gotten from Gloucester's or Cornwall's house, or from Albany's house, presumably further north, all the way to the Channel and across the Channel to Cordelia in France—let alone be the subject of a return letter to Kent which arrives back in Gloucester by 2.2. It is not Cordelia who knows of Lear's recent losses but Kent, who in 3.1 would naturally want the Gentleman-messenger to inform Cordelia of them instantly to motivate and guide her actions. Indeed, in 4.3 (Q only) we hear the Gentleman's account of her reaction to his report, and it is evident from his description of her reaction that the information is new and shocking to her:

Faith once or twice she heau'd the name of father,
Pantingly forth as if it prest her heart,
Cried sisters, sisters, shame of Ladies sisters:
Kent, father, sisters, what ith storme ith night,
Let pitie not be beleeft there she shooke,
The holy water from her heauenly eyes,
And clamour moystened her, then away she started,
To deale with griefe alone.

(4.3.25-32)

It should be clear then that Lear's mistreatment by his daughters cannot be Cordelia's motive for invasion in 3.1, since she cannot yet know anything about it.¹⁰

The difficulty arises in the Folio lines added to 3.1, which are obscure and probably corrupt, as many editors have suspected, and may not even be Shakespeare's, since their sentence structure and vocabulary are uncharacteristic of him (and of the speaker, Kent). I have argued elsewhere that these added Folio lines give the wrong impression because they were not placed, as the Folio reviser intended, after Q's “The King hath cause to plaine.”¹¹ So placed, the F lines would constitute a list of all the current sources of distress to the king, who had hoped to avoid future strife (“snuffes, and packings”) between the dukes and to insure his own happy retirement (not a “hard Reine”). Instead the lines were inserted in the Folio after “Intelligent of our State,” and so seem to describe the intelligence on which France is acting. But action upon such intelligence is impossible. The word “both” in line 27 is sufficient proof of this; the mistreatment of Lear by both the dukes cannot have been the motive for Cordelia's having landed in England, since Cornwall's mistreatment is scarcely an hour old.¹² This narrative of France's invasion simply will not work.

A second narrative is that France began preparations for an invasion immediately upon returning home in order to seek restitution or revenge for Lear's humiliation of himself and his new wife and for their loss of her dowry, one third of Britain. So argues James Bransom in 1934:

Lear's brutal treatment of Cordelia and his crass stupidity in dealing with her share were enough to bring upon his head the rebuke of a strong man. … The French king was by no means reconciled to the permanent loss of the richest province in Britain, which he still regarded as by right his wife's dower, and had his secret service men everywhere. These kept him informed of political movements in Britain, and he bided his time.

And this, thinks Bransom, is how Kent in 3.1 (though not Gloucester in 3.3) understood the situation:

Kent does not speak of [the French landing] in so many words as destined to revenge the king's wrongs. His words convey to me a definite invasion of the land by the king of France for his own aggrandisement. But he sends his gentleman to Cordelia … with a description of the king's sufferings. He must, therefore, have conceived the possibility of turning the invasion to the king's account. … Gloster … may have jumped to the conclusion that this invasion was for the purpose of avenging the king.¹³

In 1940 Walter Greg carried this line of argument further on the basis of chronology: “There can be no doubt … that the French army had actually landed before Lear had any quarrel with his daughters,” and this being the case, “the preparations began as soon as the king left the British court.”¹⁴ His reasons are these: in 2.2 Kent has Cordelia's letter before dawn; it must announce her invasion plans, for by the evening of that same day, after Lear has plunged out into the storm in 2.4, Kent sends one of Lear's gentlemen to meet her in Dover. On that same evening Gloucester receives (in 3.3) a letter from someone “of a neutrall heart” (3.7.48), telling of a “power already landed” (Q) or “footed” (F); later that evening Edmund conveys this letter, concerning “the aduantages of France” (3.5.12), to Cornwall. The next morning Cornwall, on this letter's testimony, announces that “The army of France is landed” (3.7.2-3), blinds the “traytor Gloster” (l. 22), and sends him after Lear to Dover. There Cordelia's forces, we hear, are being joined by some of Lear's knights and other “well armed friends” (l. 20)—British “tratours / late footed [afoot] in the kingdome” (ll. 44-45), as Cornwall styles them.¹⁵ By the day beginning in 2.2 and ending in 3.6, which is only one day after Goneril drives Lear from her house in 1.4, an invasion, set in motion some time before, is far along.

Greg then proceeds to ask how much time there has been to mount the invasion—essentially, what interval of time elapses between the opening two scenes of the play and 1.3, when Goneril sets in motion Lear's departure from her house. If Lear's expostulation as he is leaving her—“What, fiftie of my followers at a clap, within a fortnight?” (1.4.295)—means “It has only been a fortnight since I arrived, and already Goneril has become so monstrously ungrateful as to halve my train,” then France has had a fortnight, two weeks, to prepare his forces. Greg finds this “the only natural explanation of the phrase” “within a fortnight.”¹⁶ But, as Ambrose Eccles noted in his edition of 1792,¹⁷ Lear may equally well mean “Goneril has just given orders that my train must be cut in half within the next fortnight.” In this case the time between 1.2 and 1.3 remains undefined. Indeed, Greg, who thinks that the foreground and background events happen at different rates of speed, goes on to show that the interval between 1.2 and 1.3 must be very short for the following reasons. In 1.2 Edmund promises Gloucester an “aurigular assurance … this very euening” of Edgar's guilt, then urges Edgar to hide in his, Edmund's, lodging “some little time” until (in F) “I will fitly bring you to heare my Lord speake” (ll. 92-93, 161, 168-69). Instead of these promised overhearings, Edmund substitutes the mock duel in 2.1, which does not occur until after Lear's “within a fortnight” remark in 1.4 and just hours before Kent receives Cordelia's letter in 2.2. Surely Edgar cannot have been hiding in his brother's room for a fortnight but at most for a day, or a very few days. Those few days at the beginning of the play would therefore be all the time that the King of France has had to prepare his and Cordelia's invasion.

And why might France undertake an invasion of England so quickly, before receiving any inkling of Lear's mistreatment? Because Greg could not bear the thought of “the gentle Cordelia spurring on her husband to the recovery of her portion,”¹⁸ he seized on hints that (as in some of the sources) the impulse to invade originated with the King of France. Though at the end of 1.1 Goneril and Regan interrupt their conniving to attend “further complement of leaue taking betweene France and [Lear]” (ll. 302-3), in the next scene Gloucester is dismayed at how “France in choller parted” (1.2.23). Perhaps remembering that angry parting, Lear later (2.4.212) calls France “hot-blouded” (F). Greg therefore surmises “that France, … incensed at some fresh insult to Cordelia, departed in a rage, determined to wrest by force her portion from the favoured ‘son-in-laws’, Albany and Cornwall.”¹⁹

This narrative, though logically argued, has two weaknesses. The first is that there is no hint whatsoever in the play that France is invading out of resentful rage. All we know is that he allows Cordelia to lead, or at least to accompany, a French army that lands in England and fights against the armies of Goneril and Regan. The second difficulty is Cordelia's speech in 4.4, where, at our first view of her since her return to England, she says explicitly that she is not motivated by any self-interest but only by concern for her father:

                                                                                                                                  ô deere father
It is thy busines that I go about, therfore great France
My mourning and important [F: importun'd] teares hath pitied,
No blowne ambition doth our armes in sight [F: incite]
But loue, deere loue, and our ag'd fathers right [F: Rite].

(4.4.23-28)

If France's and Cordelia's motive had ever been to recover her lands for herself, her purpose must by now have changed. That is entirely possible, of course, as Bransom imagined; it might even be that her tears had something to do with the king's return to France, leaving Cordelia in charge. It might; but again we do not have enough facts to assure us or even to plant this idea clearly in an audience's mind.²⁰

In yet a third narrative, Kent's statement in 3.1 that Cordelia will want to know of the “snuffes, and packings” of the dukes, or of “something deeper,” has led some commentators to claim that France is opportunely taking advantage of Britain's internal disorder for its own territorial gain. In his influential Prefaces to Shakespeare Harley Granville-Barker speculates, “Kent … suggests that it is the threat of [‘likely Warres,’ 2.1.10] which is bringing the French army to England. But the vagueness is suspicious. It looks a little as if Shakespeare had thought of making the hypocrite inheritors of Cordelia's portion fall out over it (an obvious nemesis) and had changed his mind.”²¹ Greg is doubtful: “This antagonism is an undeveloped motive in the play, either because Shakespeare was content only to hint at it, or because he found he lacked room for elaboration. … [Granville-Barker] puts the importance of the ‘division’ too high; it may have been the occasion, hardly the cause, of France's action.”²² That is, the division between the dukes, if it exists, is perhaps a contributing cause but not a sufficient one to motivate an invasion. René Weis, however, in his 1993 edition, thinks it an important one: “F's version, … by referring to a possible something deeper as the reason for the French invasion, strips it of its crusading character, the restoration in England of true domestic and national harmony. In fact, furnishings would suggest that, if anything, France's motives may be more sinister, perhaps using moral grievances as pretexts for territorial expansion.”²³

Once again we have a narrative with a certain plausibility but without clear support in the play and with real difficulties besides. Jacobeans would have found nothing surprising in a French king's designs on Albany's and Cornwall's land, since the French had shown such ambitions centuries later in 1066. Still, there is no explicit suggestion of such designs in any speech heard by the audience, and Cordelia disavows any such intentions. There are three other difficulties. First, the rumors of war probably represent news to be sent by Kent to Cordelia in Britain rather than reports already sent back to France—as I have said above. Second, while one would naturally expect the King of France to lead the invasion himself so as to claim the British lands in person, he is notably absent from Britain in both the Q and F versions. Third, it is hard to imagine why Cordelia should find so many British sympathizers to swell her ranks if they even suspected her aim were to subject Britons to foreign rule. One other possibility, rejected by Weis—that she invades in order to prevent rumored divisions between Albany and Cornwall from escalating into full civil war—is without any textual support. In any case, launching a foreign invasion would simply substitute one kind of war for another, while preventing a civil war would differ from her stated purpose—promoting “our ag'd fathers right.”

One more narrative. According to Peter Stone, Cordelia is so sure her sisters will mistreat Lear that she does not need to wait for evidence:

[T]he audience is intended at first to gain the impression … that the King of France is seizing an opportune moment to restore Cordelia to her rightful inheritance. Both Kent and Gloucester make the connection between the Dukes' quarrels and the invasion. … Regan and Cornwall are convinced that Gloucester is an agent of the French. … [But in Act IV the audience finally discovers that] There is no plot; and there cannot possibly be one. The French King has returned home before Lear arrives in Dover: there is only Cordelia to meet him, and no suspicion can attach to her motives. Then (in … IV.iv.23-8) she reveals the full truth: her husband has merely yielded to her entreaties, and those have been prompted by love, not ambition. There can be only one implication: she has meant all along to rescue Lear from her sisters, whose true nature she had penetrated though he had not; she has not needed to wait for evidence of their cruelties.²⁴

Once again, the play gives just enough evidence to make this narrative barely plausible, but no more than that. During the opening scene of the play, Cordelia remarks repeatedly on the hypocrisy of Goneril's and Regan's promises of devotion to Lear, and at her leavetaking she hints that in future they may not treat him as well as they should:

                                                                                                    The iewels of our father,
With washt eyes Cordelia leaues you, I know you what you are,
And like a sister am most loath to call your faults
As they are named, vse [F: Loue] well our Father,
To your professed bosoms I commit him,
But yet alas stood I within his grace,
I would preferre him to a better place.

(1.1.268-74)

Obviously she does not expect her sisters to treat Lear as well as she herself would do. But one would expect grounds more relative than a mere suspicion of future neglect, a hunch, for invading her homeland. Besides, she does seem genuinely shocked when, in 4.4, after landing at Dover, she learns of their mistreatment—apparently for the first time.

II

One may be impressed not only by the inherent interest of these narratives of Cordelia's return but also by how mightily their authors, highly intelligent critics and editors who care deeply about the play, have labored to provide a coherent explanation for an action that does not even appear in the text. Perhaps most fascinating is their faith that there can be—indeed, should be—an explanation when generations of playgoers have had a satisfactory experience of the play without ever worrying about the question at all. E. A. Horsman says, “In the theater we are not troubled by the possibility that, because news of the invasion reaches Kent by II.ii, it must have been planned before Cordelia could have known anything of her father's ill treatment. We are uncertain of the strict time taken even by the events on the stage and we readily accept the swifter movement of those which are related or implied rather than shown.”²⁵ Doubtless Horsman describes accurately enough the theatrical experience of many in the audience, though I suspect that even more are simply unaware of any discrepancy between strict and swift time. The critics who attempt to rationalize the background events seem to assume that even in a play founded on fairy-tale premises and having similarities to the late romances,²⁶ Shakespeare must or should have imagined and presented a world enough like the real one that its operation can be comprehended in terms of ordinary chronology and cause and effect. It is not an unreasonable assumption, since Shakespeare usually does so. Indeed most of the other offstage actions in this play may be imagined as being plausibly motivated and coherent.²⁷ Here, however, departure from his usual practice has occasioned such critical notice and concern that we may justifiably wonder why the play seems not to give us the information we need in order to understand the invasion.

One explanation—for many the least agreeable—is that the play is faulty. George Pierce Baker, Eugene O'Neill's drama teacher, thinks that Lear is simply too crowded a play—that its inclusion of two fully developed plots cramps adequate development of either: “It is much easier to get climax, a swift and unbroken movement, in manipulating a plot of a single interest than with a complicated plot.”²⁸ Similarly, A. C. Bradley censures the play's “principal structural weakness”:

[B]y means of this double action Shakespeare secured certain results highly advantageous even from the strictly dramatic point of view, and easy to perceive. But the disadvantages were dramatically greater. The number of essential characters is so large, their actions and movements are so complicated, and events towards the close crowd on one another so thickly, that the reader's attention, rapidly transferred from one centre of interest to another, is overstrained.

Discussing the ways in which Regan, Cornwall, Kent, Oswald, Lear, and finally (and unexpectedly) Goneril all arrive at Gloucester's house by 2.4, he says:

Thus all the principal persons except Cordelia and Albany are brought together; and the crises of the double action—the expulsion of Lear and the blinding and expulsion of Gloster—are reached in Act III. And this is what was required.

But it needs the closest attention to follow these movements.²⁹

The play certainly depends heavily on our readiness to accept (if not imagine) a great deal of offstage activity. Consider, as other examples, the offstage movements of two relatively secondary characters, Oswald and a Gentleman. Between 1.4 and 2.2 Oswald travels from Goneril's house to Regan's and then onwards to Gloucester's; between 3.7 and 4.2 he is sent ahead of Goneril and Edmund back to Goneril's house, and soon afterwards follows Edmund back again to Gloucester's house, where in 4.5 Regan tries unsuccessfully to read the letter he bears from Goneril; still following Edmund towards Dover in 4.6, he meets Edgar and Gloucester and is killed. In a comparable odyssey, one of Lear's knights, eventually designated “Gentleman,” follows Lear from Goneril's house in 1.5 to Gloucester's house in 2.4, is thereafter separated from Lear, but in 3.1 is sent by Kent to Cordelia, whom he meets near Dover before he reports to Kent on that meeting in 4.3 (Q only). In 4.4 the Gentleman is back with Cordelia, who sends him to search for Lear, whom he finds outside of Dover in 4.6 and helps to restore to sanity in Cordelia's camp in 4.7.³⁰ In a similar way Edgar journeys to many places between the scenes, even changing his disguise more than once in the process; and the many letters carried by a number of people between the scenes have provided much matter for Lisa Jardine's recent discussion of Shakespeare's “epistolary transactions.”³¹ The audience must try to find some coherence in these offstage actions if it is to understand how one scene follows from another. While in Folio Henry V it has the help of the Chorus, here it must rely on only its own attentiveness.

Now when he wished to, Shakespeare could give full and leisurely accounts of anterior action (for example, of the murder of Old Hamlet, or the supplanting of Prospero) or of offstage, between-scenes action (for example, Hamlet's capture by pirates and return to Denmark). Rawdon Wilson has recently devoted a whole book to such expository narratives within the plays.³² Even in such a crowded, two-plot play as Lear, Shakespeare found the time to describe at length Cordelia's weeping for her father (in Q's 4.3) and Edgar's reunions with Kent and his father (5.3). Yet Cordelia's reasons for mounting a military campaign against the rulers of her native country—no small matter—remain clouded. One might be reluctant to assume that the dearth of information about such a crucial event is simply the result of oversight or crowding. Might it not rather be intentional?

Another kind of explanation—one that does not posit faulty craftsmanship—is that Shakespeare often left the relationship between background events (such as Cordelia's preparations for a return) and foreground events (such as Lear's tribulations) intentionally vague and the overall time scheme accordingly elastic. The theory of “double time” was first proposed in 1849-50 by “Christopher North” (a pseudonym for Professor John Wilson of the University of Edinburgh) and, independently, in 1849 by the Reverend Nicholas J. Halpin of Dublin. According to this theory, Shakespeare allows background events that would require “long” (North) or “protractive” (Halpin) time to occur simultaneously with foreground events that apparently proceed rapidly in “short” (North) or “accelerating” (Halpin) time.³³ Thus Shakespeare creates the impression of passionate and vehement haste in the foreground action, while suggesting sufficient, deliberate time in the background events for the overall action to seem probable. It is part of Shakespeare's great dramatic skill that he achieves both effects of passion and probability even as the relationship of background and foreground events remains so indefinite that their inconsistency never troubles a reader or auditor.

Invoking this theory allows the critic to say that chronological inconsistencies in background events occur but do not matter because they go unnoticed. Thus the critic disposes of a problem by declaring that in effect none exists. Here is Virginia Gildersleeve in 1912:

Not much more than two weeks can have elapsed since Lear divided his kingdom and the disinherited Cordelia departed to France, and not more than two days since Goneril instructed her steward to begin to treat the king with discourtesy and neglect. Yet … [in 3.1] Kent speaks as if months had passed,—time for France to send spies … and to send forces which have secretly landed in several ports. When hearing this play performed one does not note the inconsistency. At some points Shakespeare seeks, by the use of ‘short time,’ rapidity of action; at others, by ‘long time’ he lends plausibility; and he does not permit considerations of theoretical consistency to hinder dramatic effectiveness.³⁴

The general theory of double time has been much debated and has had a number of defenders; others, however, have found it unnecessary or inadequate even when applied to Othello, for which it was first devised.³⁵ Even Peter Stone, who generally accepts the idea of a “wider time-scheme” for background events in Lear, rejects its particular application to Cordelia's return: “Not even the convention of double time will allow the French invasion to be prompted by news of the King's misfortunes: the two sets of events are clearly contemporaneous.”³⁶

A third explanation is that the Quarto and/or Folio texts of the play are faulty because they present different stages of Shakespeare's thoughts about the play. Here is Granville-Barker again:

The King of France comes armed with Cordelia to Lear's rescue, as is natural. Then, by virtue of the clumsiest few lines in the play [4.3.1-6], he is sent back again. Did Shakespeare originally mean Cordelia to restore her father to his throne as in the old play; but would a French victory in England not have done? … Shakespeare leaves us to the end a little unconvinced by the machinery of Cordelia's return. There is no dramatic profit in the confusion. Neither text may be as Shakespeare left it. But in this instance I prefer the Quarto's to an amalgam of the two.³⁷

Thus Granville-Barker constructs a narrative, not just of what happened offstage in this play but of what happened in an earlier, lost version—a narrative by its very nature incapable of proof. Similarly, R. A. Foakes, in his new Arden edition, invents an imaginary version in Shakespeare's early drafts, which, he believes, Shakespeare only imperfectly revised in the texts that we have:

The changes in F in 3.1, 3.5, 4.2, and 5.1, and the omission of 4.3, all may thus be seen as modifying an earlier conception of the action of the play that has left its traces in Q. That earlier conception apparently included an invasion by French forces with the King of France at their head. … It would seem that in F Cordelia takes over the role of leader of the French invading army, which was originally to be commanded by the King of France.³⁸

Foakes does not argue that Cordelia's motives were originally different, only that in Q she appears an emblem of saintly pity, in F a warrior invader³⁹—distinctions that seem to imply somewhat different motives for or attitudes towards the invasion. Foakes is among those commentators who have rejected the claim of some two-Lear critics that Q and F versions of the war in Lear differ, one being a foreign invasion and the other a domestic uprising.⁴⁰ Yet here he preserves the two-Lear critics' notion that the Folio methodically excises references to France in order to give a different impression of the war—in Foakes's opinion, to make Cordelia rather than the King of France the “leader” of the invading army. Though he concedes that his theory of evolution from a pre-Quarto version is entirely “speculative,”⁴¹ his edition excludes some Quarto lines from 3.1 on the basis of that theory. In fact, however, in both Quarto and Folio the King of France is absent from the battle, and in both texts his army, though commanded by a French general, is headed by Cordelia. There is no difference in the conduct or leadership of the French campaign, and of course no evidence whatever that an earlier, pre-Quarto version existed containing still more differences. In Q 4.3 France is mentioned as originally heading the forces; insofar as we can know, he would have been so mentioned in F if the whole of 4.3 had not been cut from that text in order to shorten the play. In both Q and F the invasion has his approval (4.4.25-26); in both he is absent from Britain. In both versions, though Cordelia is the titular or authoritative head of the forces, these are commanded in battle, as they were in the old play Leir, not by her or the King of France but by a French general. In Q he is identified as la Far (4.3.8); in F he is an unnamed commander who leads Cordelia's forces while she is caring for Lear (4.6.215-16). In both texts, though Cordelia enters with soldiers in 4.4 and 5.2, during the battle itself she apparently cedes even her titular leadership of the army to Lear, for in both texts Edgar says, “King Lear hath lost,” adding “he and his daughter taine” (5.2.6). There is simply no evidence that France was ever intended to lead the army into the final battle in Q (or in an imagined earlier version) but not in F, or that Cordelia is ever “a general leading invading troops,” or that this soft-spoken girl is more “active and warlike” in either text.⁴² J. S. Bratton records productions in which she has appeared “‘as Queen of France’ and escorted by French knights” (Charles Kean, 1858), “in a brilliantly white gown and rich blue surcote” (Byam Shaw, 1959), in contrast to her “less successful” appearance in “forbidding battle-dress” (in Stratford, 1976).⁴³ Her initial motives, of course, remain obscure either way, and theories of textual revision seem not to explain that fact.

III

All of these explanations may yet be true in some way and in some degree. Lear is a long and crowded play, and its information about background events is often slight. Whether or not a system of double time is operative throughout the play, clearly the time scheme of background events remains vague. And obviously revision has added to the problem. Whoever added the Folio lines about French spies (3.1.24-29) probably intended to give more plausibility to the action by providing a means whereby Cordelia and the King of France might have gauged conditions in England while preparing for an invasion; but like the rumors of dissension between the dukes, these spies quickly disappear. We hear nothing more about them after 3.1, and the added Folio lines, by displacing necessary ones in the Quarto, simply add to the confusion about why Cordelia has landed.

There remains, of course, one other possibility: that no explanation exists for Cordelia's return because Shakespeare intentionally refrained from providing one. If neither the most attentive listeners in the theater nor the most careful critics in their studies find a coherent explanation for Cordelia's and France's behavior, and if Shakespeare customarily provides such explanations elsewhere, then we may suspect either that he was remarkably forgetful here, concerning this most important of matters, or that for some reason he intentionally omitted speeches and scenes that would have made all plain. That is, he may deliberately have sacrificed clarity about the invasion in order to gain other dramatic advantages. This is the assumption of those who invoke double time: clarity and plausibility are sacrificed to speed and passion. But perhaps more particular advantages were aimed at.

Madeleine Doran, for example, has suggested that by having Cordelia return sooner than in his sources, Shakespeare was working for a tight interconnection between the Lear and Gloucester subplots, for heightened suspense, and for thematic emphasis:

In Shakespeare's sources for the Leir story, Cordelia did not come into Britain until after she had been reconciled with her father, who had gone to her in France. … If … Shakespeare intended her to be in Dover thus early in the play, it is readily apparent that he has given the invasion a dramatic importance which it did not have from the beginning. Primarily, it is made an effective tool in Edmund's hands in accomplishing his father's ruin. … [Secondly,] by bringing Edmund into frequent contact with Cornwall, Shakespeare has brought the minor plot into important relations with the principal story. In the third place, he has heightened suspense by the mysterious and ominous rumors, often repeated, of a foreign power afoot in the kingdom; he has increased anticipation of the speedy avenging of Lear's sufferings. Finally, by suggesting that division between the dukes in Britain is the direct occasion for the coming of the French, he has increased the political significance of Lear's abdication.⁴⁴

Similarly, Geoffrey Bullough thinks that Shakespeare omitted scenes that would clarify the invasion in order to deflect attention from its foreignness and to bring all the major characters from both plots together in one grand final scene:

To intensify the action Shakespeare now makes his most considerable omissions from the old play [Leir]: Cordella's envoy sent to invite her father to France (Sc. 16); her journey with her husband in disguise, Leir's crossing and exchange of clothes with the seamen (Sc. 23); and, later, the embarcation of the Gallian forces, the beacon-watchers (Sc. 27, 29), the landing and the capture of Dover. Shakespeare wished to have Lear meet his daughter on British soil, to avoid emphasizing the French invasion and to bring all his characters together for the catastrophe.⁴⁵

Surely a desire for speed and momentum lies behind the departures from the Leir play which Bullough lists. Instead of a mid-play interlude, requiring Lear to wander as an outcast for days and weeks while France and Cordelia get news of his fate, decide to remedy it, and then proceed to raise and transport their forces, in Shakespeare's play the atrocities of the daughters and the counter-action from France happen almost simultaneously, allowing the play to move towards its crisis and resolution without any pause in momentum or emotional intensity.⁴⁶ The second half of the old Leir play, by contrast, plods towards its conclusion in a leisurely succession of episodes.

I think, however, that Shakespeare had a very particular reason for wanting speed and momentum: Shakespeare's play is the only version of the Lear story in which the old king goes mad. The excruciating effect of this madness in the tragedy, and its deepening of themes of order and chaos in nature, of the relationship of blindness, suffering, and insight, and many more, hardly needs any discussion here. The king's madness is one of the additions to the Lear story that lifts it realms above any other version, as Shakespeare surely realized. But as many commentators have noted, stage madness may easily slide over into grotesque comedy, evoking embarrassed laughter rather than horror and pathos.⁴⁷ Shakespeare confines Lear's derangement to three scenes, the first two (3.4, 3.6) spanning no more than an hour of Lear's wandering in the fields, and the third (4.6) occurring an indeterminate time later, after Lear has reached Dover. Perhaps not even Shakespeare could have extended scenes of the king's madness much further, as he would have had to do if he had made Lear's plight the motive for France's invasion, and if days and weeks of preparations for that invasion had to be accounted for until Lear's reunion with Cordelia could restore him to sanity.

Protecting the pathos of Lear's madness by keeping it brief and preserving the momentum of the play's movement towards its end are both great dramatic advantages that depend on an early beginning of France's and Cordelia's invasion. But the swift pace in Lear would have required that, to be made believable, the early French invasion must have sprung from entirely selfish motives—France's desire for revenge or territorial expansion, Cordelia's to recover her third of a kingdom—not from moral altruism occasioned by news of Lear's mistreatment. But such self-serving motives would have made the French invasion more troubling than in any of the sources and much less sympathetic to Shakespeare's English audience. This may be why we are kept so much in the dark about those motives. Instead of definite clarification, we get a variety of hints, mostly mysterious, possibly even intentionally confusing and contradictory, that Cordelia's instinctive concern, or France's anger, or the golden opportunity of a divisive civil war in Britain, or “something deeper, / Whereof (perchance) these are but furnishings” lies behind the invasion.

Meanwhile, the audience gets a series of passing hints that something is about to happen, for some reason, but can only guess at what exactly is going on. We hear twice that France's hot blood has been aroused but not what he plans to do. Kent risks his life to watch over Lear, but his “made intent” (4.7.9) is a secret to the end. Cordelia writes to Kent from France, but her message, like his means of receiving it, remains a mystery. Kent says that he or Cordelia or both of them will somehow remedy someone's losses, whatever those may be and however they may be remedied. We hear that a French power has landed at Dover, but its size, purpose, and leadership are not specified. Kent sends news to Cordelia there, along with letters (4.3.9) not originally mentioned and whose contents can only be guessed from her reaction to them. Gloucester also hears of a power footed, apparently to revenge the king's injuries (3.3.12-13), but its nationality and location are not revealed until 3.5 and 3.7, and its plans remain obscure. Cornwall learns that the army of France is landed and that British friends of Lear, including some of his knights, are gathering at Dover, but their purposes and relationship with each other are not given. Regan notes what is never shown, that Gloucester's blindness “moues / All harts against vs” (4.5.10-11); Albany notes that Lear and Cordelia are being joined by some British citizens, who might or might not be the ones Cornwall hears of, “whome the rigour of our state / Forst to crie out” (5.1.22-23)—the latter an admission of guilt as startling as it is unsubstantiated. These hints of background movements give the audience a hopeful sense that some kind of countermovement is at work and prepare it for Cordelia's appearance and for the battle in the last act, but they give no real information about when or why Cordelia and France have invaded. They seem consistently and therefore intentionally vague, incomplete, and enigmatic, and of a piece with rumors of an impending civil war that never materializes and with puzzling, apparently untrue references to the mistreatment of Lear by both dukes.

It looks to me, in short, as if Shakespeare is practicing some very clever sleight-of-hand: now we glimpse a foreign invasion, now we don't—at least not steadily and whole enough to think very hard about it. While we know that it (and many other things) are happening, we are kept far enough away that we do not—indeed, cannot—question its raison d'être. When Cordelia finally returns to the stage, she voices her disavowal of ambition, promising blamelessly, in the language of the Gospels, to do her father's business and restore his rights. Such a speech would have made no sense earlier in the play, when she knew nothing of her father's lost rights, and so it sheds no light on her original motives. Not only is the chronology of background events vague, the events themselves and their resistance to rational explanation are consistently hidden from our view.

The notion of deliberate sleight-of-hand goes quite counter to our general sense that “transparency is a … general feature of Shakespeare's tragedies, which adds to the feeling that Shakespeare is a friendly, dependable author for his public.”⁴⁸ One reason that I am receptive to the idea nonetheless is the growing recognition of a good deal of intentional indeterminacy in Lear, as in other Shakespearean plays. Stephen Booth has argued that the indeterminacy in Lear may be quite conscious and intentional:

As the play progresses, a series of beckoning hints of a coming clash between the two dukes … misleads us down a path to nowhere and does nothing to prepare us for the conflict between the two duchesses. … Whenever we find fault with something Shakespeare does in King Lear, the alternative turns out to be in some way less acceptable. The plotting of King Lear invites adverse criticisms, but what Lear says to Kent on the heath might well be said to anyone who accepts even the most obvious of the invitations:

                                                                                                    Thou'dst shun a bear;
But if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea,
Thou'dst meet the bear i' th' mouth.

[III.iv.9-11]⁴⁹

Actors, too, recognize the indeterminacy. Here is Alan Howard, who played Lear in Peter Hall's National Theatre production at the Old Vic in 1997, speaking about how the play's factual “slippage” deserves to be a focal point of production: “One person says one thing and someone else says something completely different about an event that is alleged to have taken place. So who is one to believe? Things are never quite as they ought to be.”⁵⁰ Such indeterminacy or “slippage” in the matter of Cordelia's return seems to me to be very carefully calculated so as not to raise questions in audiences' minds about the event's verisimilitude while allowing for maximum dramatic effect, particularly in preserving the integrity and intensity of Lear's madness and in propelling the action to its denouement.

Notes

1. Excerpts from all of these sources are reprinted in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia UP, 1957-75), 7:269-420.

2. Unless otherwise noted, quotations of King Lear in this essay follow the 1608 Quarto (Q1); act-scene-line numbers given in parentheses are those of The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

3. George Steevens, ed., The Plays of William Shakspeare, 10 vols. (London, 1778), 9:450.

4. Lewis Theobald, ed., The Works of Shakespeare, 7 vols. (London, 1733), 5:156; Edward Capell, Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare, 3 vols. (London, 1783), 1.2:163.

5. George Lyman Kittredge, ed., The Tragedy of King Lear (Boston and New York: Ginn and Co., 1940), 170.

6. Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980), 73.

7. I quote here from the 1623 Folio; though substantially the same, the Quarto version of this passage erroneously has “not” for “most” and “and” for “their.”

8. Samuel Johnson, ed., The Plays of William Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London, 1765), 6:59; Charles Jennens, ed., King Lear: A Tragedy (London, 1770), 72.

9. If, as many scholars now believe, Q derives from a late rough draft, its light punctuation is probably authorial; heavier punctuation was routinely added to Folio texts by their scribes and compositors.

10. Some editors have seen this difficulty very clearly: thus S. E. Goggin, ed., King Lear, University Tutorial Shakespeare (London, 1910): “Apparently it is from the letter that Kent derives the information he communicates to the Gentleman in [3.1.30-34]. But if that be so, apparently Cordelia hears of her father's misfortunes before they take place. … We learn that a French force has actually been landed in the kingdom, and that Cordelia is at Dover. It is noteworthy that this expedition is stated [3.1.26-28] to be the result either of the quarrels of the dukes or of their ill-treatment of the old king. Yet this ill-treatment of Lear could not possibly be known in France, for Regan and Cornwall had only just refused to receive him, and Goneril's conduct was not yet two days old” (153 and 159). The problem was first recognized by Styan Thirlby, in his manuscript annotations (1733-47) in Theobald's 1733 edition: “How does it agree with Cordelia's being landed with an army to right her father y^t she shd not hear of his wrongs (nb. Gonerill's first ill usage) till after her landing” (Folger copy 2, 5:185). P. A. Daniel's solution is “We must suppose, then, that from the spies, darkly hinted at by Kent, she had gained sufficient knowledge of her sister's intentions to convince her that her return to England was urgently required” (“Time-Analysis of the Plots of Shakspere's Plays. Part II. The Tragedies,” The New Shakspere Society's Transactions [1877-79]: 180-256, esp. 220). Although, out of Cordelia's hearing at the end of 1.1, the sisters agree to future discussions of defensive tactics against “vnconstant starts” of caprice on Lear's part, neither sister evidences any actual intentions until Goneril confides hers to Oswald in 1.3, a few minutes before putting them into action in 1.4; and secondhand reports to Cordelia (even if there were time for them) of Goneril's unrealized intent to reduce Lear's train would scarcely be credible grounds for an immediate armed invasion.

11. See Richard Knowles, “Revision Awry in Folio Lear 3.1,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995): 32-46.

12. And there is no evidence whatsoever that Albany has persecuted Lear; at worst, he failed to aid him in 1.4 when Goneril was persecuting him. Perhaps what is meant is that Albany's household (albeit controlled by Goneril) has mistreated Lear.

13. J. S. H. Bransom, ed., The Tragedy of King Lear (Oxford: Blackwell, 1934), 193 and 190.

14. W. W. Greg, “Time, Place, and Politics in ‘King Lear’,” Modern Language Review 35 (1940): 431-46, esp. 441 and 443n. The inadequate time to mount an invasion had been pointed out by Henry James Pye, A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle ([London, 1792], 133) and Comments on the Commentators on Shakespear (London: J. D. Dewick, 1807), x-xi.

15. R. A. Foakes, ed., The Arden Shakespeare King Lear (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997), 298, adopts the odd and surely erroneous claim of his student Grace Ioppolo (Revising Shakespeare [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991], 175) that these traitors are French soldiers. They must of course be Britons. The Oxford English Dictionary defines traitor as “One who is false to his allegiance to his sovereign or to the government of his country” (2d ed., sb. 2). French invaders can betray no allegiance to a British ruler, having none. Cornwall, having interrogated Gloucester about his connections with the French, next asks about his connection with the British faction of “well armed friends” gathering at Dover, whom Cornwall rightly suspects of disloyalty to him.

16. Greg, 439.

17. Ambrose Eccles, ed., The Tragedies of King Lear and Cymbeline (London, 1792), 82.

18. Greg, 444.

19. Greg, 444.

20. France's return is briefly explained in 4.3 (Q only) to be motivated by concern for events transpiring at home. Since that scene is missing from F, apparently having been cut to shorten the play, his motives in that text are left completely mysterious.

21. Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, 1st ser. (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1927), 148n.

22. Greg, 441-42n.

23. René Weis, ed., King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition (London and New York: Longman, 1993), 165n.

24. P. W. K. Stone, The Textual History of King Lear (London: Scolar Press, 1980), 73n. Cf. Thomas G. Pavel, The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985): “It is … reasonable to attribute the early presence of the French army at Dover not only to the French king's awareness of the latent conflict between Albany and Cornwall, but also to Cordelia's foreboding of the breakdown of Lear's arrangements with his older daughters” (101-2). Cf. Daniel, 180-256, esp. 220.

25. E. A. Horsman, ed., The Tragedy of King Lear, Bobbs-Merrill Shakespeare (Indianapolis and New York, 1973), xxvii.

26. On Lear's similarities to the romances, see, e.g., Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1965), 63-66; John Reibetanz, The Lear World: A study of King Lear in its dramatic context (Toronto and Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1977), 116-17; and John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 208-38.

27. After working out a timetable of comings and goings between 1.1 and 2.4, Bransom concludes: “All these movements, with the possible exception of Goneril's journey to Regan's palace, can be made out with certainty from the text. They are all movements sufficiently well motivated and are perfectly natural; written down in an orderly manner they strike one as obvious. But they are apt to be confusing on the stage. … Shakespeare had very clearly imagined the course of historical events and constantly had it in mind; … he fitted the scenes into it, but in his elaboration of these did not make the course of events very clear to his readers or his audiences” (56). The question remains, of course, why he did not.

28. George Pierce Baker, The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 267-68.

29. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (London and New York: Macmillan, 1904), 254, 255, and 449.

30. Though mathematical proof is impossible, many accept that the Gentleman in these several scenes is in all likelihood the same character and is played by the same actor. See, e.g., Wilfrid Perrett, The Story of King Lear from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Shakespeare (Berlin: Mayer and Müller, 1904), 198-99; and Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), who add: “So interpreted, the Gentleman becomes an important minor role, linking the two halves of the play, Lear and Kent and Cordelia” (533). Though Molly Mahood toys with the idea that Q's “Knight” in 1.4 and 2.4 may be different from F's “Gentleman” in 1.5 and successive scenes, she reports that directors usually make “the Gentleman of 1.5 and 2.4 one and the same with the character who meets Kent at the height of the storm, is reunited with him at Dover, and figures in the scene of Lear's recovery (4.7)” (Bit Parts in Shakespeare's Plays [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1992], 163-67, esp. 164).

31. Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 90-97, esp. 91.

32. See Rawdon Wilson, Shakespearean Narrative (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1995).

33. Christopher North, “Dies Boreales, Nos. V, VI. Christopher under Canvass,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 66 (1849): 620-54; 67 (1850): 481-512; Nicholas J. Halpin, The Dramatic Unities of Shakespeare (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1849). These pieces were reprinted in condensed form a quarter of a century later in The New Shakspere Society's Transactions (1875-76): 351-412; (1877-79): 21*-41*. For an extended study, based on this theory, of dramatic time in all of the plays, see Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, The Shakespeare Key (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1879), 105-283.

34. Virginia Gildersleeve, ed., The Tragedy of King Lear, The Tudor Shakespeare (New York, 1914), 164. Among others who have applied this theory to Lear are Mable Buland, The Presentation of Time in the Elizabethan Drama (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1912), 124-26; Greg, 439-40; Horsman; and Kristian Smidt, Unconformities in Shakespeare's Tragedies (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 146 and 241.

35. For discussions of critics who have either accepted or challenged the theory, see Horace H. Furness, ed., Othello, A New Variorum Edition (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1886), 358-72; and Ned B. Allen, “The Two Parts of ‘Othello,’” Shakespeare Survey 21 (1968): 13-29, esp. 16 and 27. In The Whirligig of Time: The Problem of Duration in Shakespeare's Plays (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1961), S. C. Sen Gupta recasts the idea in different terms, distinguishing between definite indications of passing time, which Shakespeare largely “leaves out of account,” and the reader's or spectator's sense of a “continuous flow” of development in character and action, or “duration” (150-61, esp. 150).

36. Stone, 72-73.

37. Granville-Barker, 149n and 226.

38. Foakes, ed., 401.

39. See Foakes, ed., 74, 139-40, 318, 321, and 401.

40. The theory first appeared in Gary Taylor, “The War in ‘King Lear,’” SS 20 (1980): 27-34. Among those embracing it are Stanley Wells, “Revision in Shakespeare's Plays” in Editing and Editors: A Retrospect, Richard Landon, ed. (New York: AMS Press, 1988), 67-97; and Jay L. Halio, ed., The First Quarto of King Lear, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 26. Among those rejecting it are E. A. J. Honigmann, “Do-It-Yourself Lear,” New York Review of Books, 25 October 1990, p. 59; and R. A. Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1993), 245-46.

41. Foakes, ed., 402.

42. Foakes, ed., 140.

43. J. S. Bratton, ed., King Lear, Plays in Performance (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), 171.

44. Madeleine Doran, “Elements in the Composition of King Lear,” Studies in Philology 30 (1933): 34-58, esp. 45.

45. Bullough, 7:294.

46. Perhaps this is what Kenneth Muir had in mind when he said, without further elaboration, “This confusion [about the motive for the invasion], which could be avoided only by slowing up the action, was the result of cunning rather than carelessness”; see his edition of King Lear for the Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1952), li.

47. This is one line of argument explaining the astonishing cut from the Folio of Lear's mock trial of Goneril and Regan in 3.6. The potential that the lines might slip into coarse humor is discussed by, e.g., Alfred Hart, Stolne and Surreptitious Copies: A Comparative Study of Shakespeare's Bad Quartos (Melbourne and London: Melbourne UP, 1942), 147; and Muir, ed., xlviii. For discussion of the idea that these lines might seem eccentric and redundant, see Roger Warren, “The Folio Omission of the Mock Trial: Motives and Consequences” in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear, Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 45-57, esp. 46ff.

48. Pavel, 109.

49. Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1983), 56-57.

50. Alan Howard, as quoted in the London edition of Time Out, 3-10 September 1997, p. 29.