[In the following excerpt, Figes provides a historical overview of kingship and claims that Shakespeare 's plays serve the function of the "chronicling and dramatization of the history of past kings . . . [and] the justification and explication of the present."]

The actor who plays the king is playing a role—he is not directly fulfilling a sacerdotal function, but only providing an example for the audience to watch; the king who is a king is also playing a role, since his 'part' will at some time be taken over by someone else, and since he is made king by virtue of the drama of the coronation rituals, and the regalia which are his props. This duality can enrich the drama: Shakespeare makes use of it, when his Macbeth and Richard II display self-awareness of themselves as actors on a stage. They are of course actors in a double sense, and in this way all the world does become a stage, and the concept of theatre as a microcosm is reinforced.

At some stage in social evolution it is no longer tenable to burn the king when the crops fail. The correlation between the welfare of the people and the conduct of the king has to be seen in more subtle and less superstitious terms, and this is when the idea of the king as an example to his people takes over. Plato, who lists the qualities of a good king as being temperance, good memory, intelligence, courage and nobility of manner, took this view:

a monarch, when he decides to change the moral habits of a State, needs no great efforts nor a vast length of time, but what he does need is to lead the way himself first along the desired path ... by his personal example he should first trace out the right lines, giving praise and honour to these things, blame to those, and degrading the disobedient according to their several deeds (Laws, Bk IV).

What is surprising is that Plato should assume that it is easy for a monarch to change the morals of his subjects, and this is an assumption which is usually made by monarchists who think kings should rule by setting a good example. And Plato, of course, was not a monarchist anyway, which makes his statement even more surprising. It is still assumed that there is something special about kingship, as opposed to other forms of government. Sir Walter Ralegh, who was a staunch monarchist, also had a simplistic faith in the efficacy of a moral monarch. 'Subjects are made good by two means,' he wrote in The Cabinet-Council, 'by constraint of law, and the prince's example; for in all estates the people do imitate those conditions whereunto they see the prince inclined.'

Here there is a belief that people imitate examples set before them. Theatre is both an imitation and an example. Aristophanes believed that the necessity of a powerful moral example in the theatre was so strong that it required a poet of the stature of Aeschylus to 'save the city'. In The Frogs he prefers Aeschylus to Euripides because he is the better teacher, and likely to give better advice to his audience in a time of crisis.

That the king acts a part, and does not necessarily act it well, is expressed in Tasso's The Householders Philosophie which was, aptly enough, translated into English by the dramatist Kyd. Tasso draws a parallel with the theatre:

whatsoever others say, thou art thus to understand, that this distinction of Sovereign, Ruler, Governor, or Master, is first founded upon Nature, for some are naturally born to command, and others to obey. And he that is born to obey, were he of the King's blood, is nevertheless a servant, though he be not so reputed; because the people that only have regard to exterior things judge none otherwise of the conditions of men than they do in Tragedies of him they call the King, who, apparelled in Purple and glistering all in Gold and precious stones, represents the person of Agamemnon, Atreus, or Etheocles; where if he chance to fail in action, comeliness, or utterance, they do not derogate from his old title, but they say The King hath not played his part well.

Life, says Tasso, is a 'Theatre of the world'. Some princes 'act' better than others. Machiavelli took the concept one step further when he took the idea of 'acting' as a form of dissimulation, not to inspire the people, but to hoodwink them.

Shakespeare's Richard II does not play his part well. He does not play it well in two senses, firstly because he does not have the attributes of wisdom, temperance and judgment which make for a good king, but also because he is so very conscious of playing a role—he is, let us face it, downright theatrical. He dramatizes himself, and insists on wringing the last vestiges of pathos and irony from any given situation. The audience, both on and off stage, are aware that he is playing a role, putting on an act. Bolingbroke loses patience with his self-dramatizing, his determination to make a big production number out of each situation. In a political sense, he does not act effectively at all.

Macbeth, on the other hand, is a real man of action. He starts as a hero, and if he had been born to play the part of king he would have made a good job of it. It is only at the very end of the play, when his wife is dead and he himself faces defeat and death, that he realizes that the whole bloody mess, his usurpation of the throne and the murders which followed it, were all not worth while, and that being a king merely involves playing a role for a little while. He need not have bothered, and his ambition was worse than wicked—merely futile.

The idea that the anointed king is merely playing a role, one which he may act well or badly, is also reflected in the concept of the king's two bodies, the 'body politic' and the 'body natural'. The 'body natural', wrote Edmund Plowden in his Commentaries, is 'subject to all the Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or old Age', but

his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public-weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities which the Body natural is subject to, and for this Cause what the King does in his Body politic cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body.

The body politic 'wipes away every Imperfection of the other with which it is consolidated'. So that 'he has a Body natural adorned and invested with the Estate and Dignity royal'. Like an actor.

During Shakespeare's lifetime a king was still required to be clean-living, not so much because of a primitive belief in pollution following the breaking of taboos, or rituals left undone, but because the king had to set an example. He not only had to do this so that his subjects would copy the example, but in order to govern wisely and well. 'A man must first govern himself,' wrote Ralegh, 'ere he be fit to govern a family; and his family, ere he be fit to bear a part in the government of the commonwealth.'⁴ Ralegh recognized that royalty were subject to special temptations. 'Great princes,' he wrote, 'rarely resist their appetites, as for the most part private men can.'⁵ He had no doubt that a bad king had to be endured as an unfortunate Act of God, 'as fire, floods and other inevitable plagues are necessarily to be suffered'. It is necessary for princes to resist their appetites and wherever possible to listen to those older and wiser than themselves. 'Experience hath proved that commonweals have prospered so long as good counsel did govern; but when favour, fear, or voluptuousness entered, those nations became disordered.' And he goes on to say that 'The election of counsellors is and ought to be chiefly among men of long experience and grave years'. All of which inevitably reminds us of Richard II, who was governed by his appetites and jeered at the counsel of old John of Gaunt.

Thus the king's personal habits continued to have a special significance in spite of a more sophisticated view of politics and kingship than that encountered amongst ancient Germanic people or, more recently, African tribes. This gives a new dimension to the long eulogy to Henry V which we find in Holinshed's Chronicles, and enables us to understand why Shakespeare's Henry had to turn his back on his old cronies on becoming king. The eulogy is very long, and Henry is described as a 'captain against whom fortune never frowned', a just and courageous king, who left no offence unpunished, no friendship unrewarded. But most noticeable is the emphasis on the purity of his private life. 'This Henry was a king, whose life was immaculate, and his living without spot.' We are also told that 'he did continually abstain himself from lascivious living and blind avarice'. In Macbeth, when Malcolm tests Macduff by pretending that he would make an even worse king than Macbeth, the first sin he lays claim to is voluptuousness and unbounded lust, and the second is 'a staunchless avarice'.

The concept of kingship as a fountainhead of pure living and hence good government is most aptly expressed by Webster in The Duchess of Malfl:

In seeking to reduce both state and people
To a fix'd order, their judicious king
Begins at home: quits first his royal palace
Of flatt'ring sycophants, of dissolute
And infamous persons . . .
Consid'ring duly, that a prince's court
Is like a common fountain, whence should flow
Pure silver drops in general: but if t chance
Some curs'd example poison't near the head,
Death, and diseases through the whole land spread.

Plowden also described the king as the 'fountain' of all 'Justice, Tranquility and Repose', which for him justifies the royal prerogative, which puts the king above the law. As we have seen, Guevara also described a prince as a fountainhead, on which the purity of streams depended. Plowden also uses an image with which we are familiar through Shakespeare (particularly Coriolanus), that of the king as head of a body, 'the Members thereof are his Subjects, and he and his Subjects together compose the Corporation'.

As a result the business of the king is the business of everyone, which is a good justification for re-enacting his deeds on a public stage, so that everyone should know about them. Plowden wrote that 'every Subject has an Interest in the King, and none of his Subjects that is within his Law is divided from the King who is his Head and Sovereign. So that his Business and Things concern the whole Realm.' This view of the king is reflected in Holinshed's description of Henry V: 'Every honest person was permitted to come to him, sitting at his meal, and either sincerely or openly to declare his mind and intent.' The image of Henry keeping open house to his subjects is almost feudal in conception: the royal palace as a meeting place for subjects. Significantly, Holinshed also praises Henry for his liberality, in spite of his own immaculate living.

The plays written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries dealt with the history of past kings. It is quite clear, both from these texts, and from other literature, such as Ralegh's writing, that subjects had no right to rebel against an evil or inadequate king. They had to suffer the yoke, because of his divine position. This view of kingship goes back to Anglo-Saxon times. 'The people,' wrote Aelfric, 'have the option to choose him for king who is agreeable to them; but after that he has been hallowed as king he has power over the people, and they must not shake his yoke from their necks.' Shakespeare's Richard II relies on the fact that

Not all the waters in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm of an anointed king

and in the long-term he is proved right, because the usurpers are ultimately punished, though not within his own lifetime.

But many of the plays deal with kings who were either downright evil, or injudicious, or voluptuous. How are we to explain this in the light of contemporary monarchist philosophy? Firstly the kings written about were all dead, and secondly history can provide 'examples' in more senses than one. History, wrote Ralegh in the Preface to his History of the World, allows us to see 'how kings and kingdoms have flourished and fallen; and for what virtue and piety God made prosperous, and for what vice and deformity he made wretched'. Holinshed saw the uses of history in similar terms. Whilst Montaigne gave carte blanche to critics of kings when he wrote:

Let us make this concession to the political order: to suffer them patiently if they are unworthy, to conceal their vices, to abet them by commending their indifferent actions if their authority needs our support. But, our dealings over, it is not right to deny to justice and to our liberty the expression of our true feelings, and especially to deny good subjects the glory of having reverently and faithfully served a master whose imperfections were so well known to them, and thus to deprive posterity of such a useful example (BK I, Essay 3).

Dead kings no longer require our uncritical obedience; on the contrary, we owe it to ourselves and posterity to tell the truth, however unflattering to the dead monarch. The king is required to control his appetites, according to sixteenth-century political philosophy in England, not because of any automatic pollution, as would be the case in a less developed society, where the king's functions are primarily sacerdotal, and not only because the king provides an example for his people to follow, although this is important enough. A king who is ruled by his appetites cannot make just and rational decisions, and does not treat his subjects with fairness and impartiality. He also becomes subject to bad influences at court. This sounds highly idealistic but is more concerned with Realpolitik, since the subjects with whom a monarch must deal fairly are not the peasantry, who do not matter a damn, but the nobility, who can cause a great deal of trouble if they feel they have a grievance.

Both Edward II and Richard II were considered by Holinshed as inadequate for these kinds of reasons, and Marlowe and Shakespeare gave the examples living reality by dramatizing the dire consequences of such regal weakness. For Holinshed Edward II exemplifies the anger and discontent which is aroused amongst the powerful nobility if the king has a particular favourite. In his Maxims of State Ralegh used the famous Elizabethan concept of 'degree' to emphasize that a king must control his nobility by ensuring that honour, power and wealth are fairly distributed amongst them. (The common people are relatively unimportant—in The Cabinet-Council Ralegh writes that 'the vulgar sort is generally variable, rash, hardy, and void of judgment', which is very much the way Shakespeare portrayed them.) All historians and dramatists of the period warn against the dangers of flattery and bad advice, which can lead a monarch astray. In elaborating his concept of 'degree and due proportion', Ralegh wrote that it was important for the king to ensure that no nobleman should

so excel in honour, power, or wealth, as that he resembles another king within the kingdom, as the house of Lancaster within this realm. To that end, not to load any with too much honour or preferment, because it is hard even for the best and worthiest men, to bear their greatness and high fortune temperately, as appeareth by infinite examples in all states.⁶

Here, in a nutshell, we have the tragic story of Macbeth, a valiant nobleman who was overloaded with honours by a king too weak to fight his own battles, and who could not bear his high fortune 'temperately'. Shakespeare does not emphasize the regal weaknesses of Duncan in his play, where the main emphasis is on his age, but Holinshed tells us that Duncan was 'soft and gentle of nature' and 'negligent in punishing offenders', so that his reign was upset by 'seditious commotions'. But the worthiness of Macbeth in the eyes of his fellow nobles and the king, and the latter's reliance on him, are never in doubt in the early, expository part of the play. Duncan had failed to keep political 'degree', and chaos came upon his kingdom as a result.

The seditious commotions which plagued Richard II were also of his own making, and thus provided a useful example for posterity. Unfortunately, in the case of Shakespeare's play on the subject, the historical example came uncomfortably close to reality: Elizabeth saw herself as Richard and the supporters of the rebellious Essex had the play revived in 1601 for propaganda purposes. Holinshed wrote that Richard

forgot himself, and began to rule by will more than by reason, threatening death to each one that obeyed not his inordinate desires: by means whereof, the lords of the realm began to fear their own estates, being in danger of his furious outrage whom they took for a man destitute of sobriety and wisdom, and therefore could not like of him, that so abused his authority.

Thus Richard lacks the personal virtues of clean-living and temperance which were thought essential to good monarchy, and also fails to observe Ralegh's 'degree'. The fact that almost the entire nobility should have rallied to the Duke of Lancaster is emphasized by Holinshed as 'a very notable example, and not unworthy of all Princes to be well weighed'. Essex, however, proved no Bolingbroke.

Holinshed, in the preface to his Chronicles, stated his belief that the main purpose in the writing of history was 'the daunting of the vicious' by 'penal examples', apart from the encouragement of patriotism. If Richard II provided one penal example, no one more than Edward II illustrated the consequences of wanton living in a monarch. Through the influence of Gaveston, writes Holinshed,

he was suddenly so corrupted, that he burst out into most heinous vices .. . he began to have his nobles in no regard, to set nothing by their instructions, and to take small heed unto the government of the common wealth, so that within a while, he gave himself to wantonness, passing his time in voluptuous pleasure, and riotous excess . . .

Piers Gaveston saw to it that Edward's court was full of 'jesters, ruffians, flattering parasites, musicians, and other vile and naughty ribalds', so that the king spent 'both days and night in jesting, playing, banqueting and in such other filthy and dishonourable exercises'. Moreover, he procured 'honourable offices' for these ruffians, and antagonized the peers of the realm by his arrogant manner.

If historians thought the main function of history was to provide political 'examples' of virtue rewarded and vice punished for the instruction of the living, there is no reason to suppose that the authors of historical plays did not see their function in a very similar light. The fact that vice can be so entertaining is of course an added bonus.

The chronicling and dramatization of the history of past kings serves to provide examples for the contemporary audience or reader. But another function is also served, and that is the justification and explication of the present. We have seen that such a function was served in Greek tragedy, where the stories dramatized helped to provide an origin and to explain a current religious rite or custom. A similar function is served by Christian nativity and passion plays, and the ritual drama of the aborigines also served to explain the present in terms of a dim and distant past, the Wingara.

The Shakespearian plays which deal with the real or supposed past of the British Isles also serve a purpose of this kind. The most obvious example, with which every student is familiar, is the whole series which (chronologically in history) follows on the tragedy of Richard II, through the civil turmoils which followed, to the establishment of the glorious Tudor present. But Macbeth is another example, although it is not usually seen in this light, since it is a self-contained play, set in a dim and distant past, a play which is both a highly entertaining thriller and constructed in a way which conforms neatly to the theories of Bradley or any other critic of the tragic 'form'.

Macbeth was written shortly after the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne. With his reign began a new dynasty, and we see this dynasty foretold in the play, by the witches who prophesy and reveal an unending line of kings descending from Banquo, the fictional ancestor of James I, first Stuart king of England. Shakespeare got Banquo from Holinshed, who got him from Boece, who invented both Banquo and the witches in order to give the Stuarts a respectable pedigree. No doubt James must have been pleased to see a play with so much emphasis on witchcraft, since he firmly believed in witches, but the long line of kings stretching to the crack of doom, ie. long past James himself, must have been even more gratifying.

In a society basically committed to the idea of a static state, prophecy is a way of validating political change. Thus the invention of Boece, visibly dramatized by Shakespeare, helped to make a new royal family acceptable to a public who had only recently been inculcated with Tudor mythology. Prophecy gives an added force to this long pedigree, because it is supernatural and therefore implies both inevitability and divine sanction. The fact that the witches are agents of the Devil (and their prophecies to Macbeth are deliberately misleading) is a theological point which Shakespeare rather glides over. In his Daemonologie, published in 1597, only a few years before his accession to the English throne and the composition of Macbeth, James VI of Scotland discussed at some length whether the Devil and his agents could look into the future, and concluded that although witches could make some guesses by judging from past experience and the laws of natural causes, true prophecy belonged to God. The theological dilemma can, however, be resolved by the assumption that a contemporary audience would have regarded the line of kings as 'true' since the Stuarts had already ascended the English throne, thus fulfilling the prophecy. If the witches were allowed to show the truth, no doubt it was only to punish and torment Macbeth.

We have already tried to show at some length that disaster as a punishment for sin is a concept of cause and effect inherent in tragic drama, as it is inherent in a religious view of the world. It pre-dates the scientific rationalism which has, since Shakespeare's day, overtaken our own society and changed our attitudes to most, though by no means all, misfortunes that can overtake mankind.

In the sixteenth century history and politics were very much viewed as part of such a pattern of cause and effect, and it was not only the poets who imposed that kind of order on reality and on the past.

One of the disasters which the Elizabethans feared most was civil war, and strong monarchy provided security against such dissension. The Wars of the Roses provided a recent example of the horrors such political chaos could bring upon a nation. 'The greatest and most grievous calamity that can come to any state is civil war,' wrote Ralegh. Such calamity is viewed as the result of sin, a punishment brought upon the people. In Shakespeare's famous history cycle the Wars of the Roses follow on the sin of regicide. Holinshed constantly ascribes foreign invasions to internal factions: the Romans, he writes, were able to invade Britain 'the sooner doubtless, by reason of the factions amongst the Princes of the land,' and the Saxons were always quarrelling and fighting amongst themselves, 'so as no perfect order of government could be framed, nor the Kings grow to any great puissance, either to move wars abroad, or sufficiently to defend themselves against foreign forces at home'. Foreign invasions are punishments for misdemeanours at home (Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet all end with a foreign invasion force). Insufferable tyranny, on the other hand, is also punished by the hand of God. The Danes, wrote Holinshed, were so barbarous that God

would not suffer them to continue any while over us, but when he saw his time he removed their yoke, and gave us liberty, as it were to breath us, thereby to see whether this his sharp scourge could have moved us to repentance and amendment of our lewd and sinful lives, or not. But when no sign thereof appeared in our hearts, he called in another nation to vex us, I mean the Normans.

Holinshed believed that in a dim and distant golden age the whole island had been ruled by one prince, and that this idyllic state of affairs had been ruined by 'ambition' and internal strife. Like all golden ages, it is seen as ending through human sin. It also reflects the wistful longings of a people who had been having trouble with the Welsh and Scottish peoples for many, many centuries.

Two plays of the period mirror this vision of unity and its destruction. Both are set in ancient Britain, and thus provide an origin for the afflictions which have beset the English people since those dim and distant times through human—and particularly royal—folly. One is Gorboduc, written by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville in 1561 and usually termed the first English tragedy, and the other is King Lear, written forty years later. Although we do not think of these plays as 'histories' we must remember that to contemporary audiences Gorboduc and Lear, just like Macbeth, were historical kings. All three figure in Holinshed, for example.

Both Gorboduc and King Lear feature an ancient king who, because of his advanced years, wishes to abrogate his responsibilities and divide his kingdom amongst his heirs. (The failing powers of an old king can here be linked in a very real way with a belief in kingship which inspires certain societies to equate the health of their king with the life force of the society itself, and thus dispose of an ailing king.) Lear divides his kingdom between two of his daughters, disinheriting the third, and Gorboduc divides his kingdom between his two sons. In each case the result is civil strife.

The play of Gorboduc starts with a dumbshow designed to signify that 'a state of unity doth continue strong against all force, but being divided, is easily destroyed', a sentiment very much in evidence in the writings of Holinshed. Gorboduc is a crude play but it is useful for a greater understanding of King Lear, because it overtly expresses many of the political concepts which are implicit in Shakespeare's play. It also helps us to understand how Shakespeare, using the theme of the abdicating king and father, fused the relationship between natural order and political order into a poetic whole. A link which is much more baldly stated in Gorboduc,

Gorboduc, like Lear, is deaf to wise counsel when he first makes his decision to abdicate. In most societies age confers higher status on a man, but in societies which are conceived of as inherently static, that is, governed by a natural order which is also the political order, which exists for all time and is divine in origin, age and seniority confer special status which must be observed. Seniority was strictly observed amongst the aborigine tribes .. . ; age was also linked to status in fifth-century Athens. Thus, by allowing himself to be ruled by his own children, Gorboduc (like Lear) is overturning the natural order, which is also the political order. One of his advisers warns him

To yield to them your royal governance,
To be above them only in the name
Of father, not in kingly state also,
I think not good for you, for them, nor us.

And the reason why it is not good for either the royal household or the country at large is spelt out:

Nature hath her order and her course,
Which (being broken) doth corrupt the state
Of mind and things, ev'n in the best of all.

Much has been written about the concept of 'nature' in King Lear. In Shakespeare's play the emphasis is on the 'unnatural' behaviour of children, and from there the whole play is broadened out into a dialectic on what should be regarded as natural and unnatural. What is not brought out in the text itself is the fact that Lear was himself behaving in an unnatural way by abrogating his responsibility as king and father, and that by abdicating his authority he was himself the author of the chaos that followed. Of course we see, as a twentieth-century audience, that he was to blame in that his behaviour was rash, autocratic and foolhardy, and we may regard him as an unnatural father in his behaviour to Cordelia. But a contemporary audience would have understood, without having to be told, that his real irresponsibility lay in abdicating and dividing the kingdom. In Shakespeare's plays fathers are habitually authoritarian in their dealings with their daughters: this in itself would not have seemed blameworthy to Shakespeare (who obviously had troubled dealings with his own daughters) or to his patriarchal audience.

A man, said Ralegh, must first learn to govern his own family before he is fit to govern the commonwealth, and before that he must learn to govern himself. Lear obviously cannot govern himself, and when he gives up his kingdom he also gives up the ability to govern his family. Gorboduc is warned of the consequences of his action

When fathers cease to know that they should rule,
The children cease to know they should obey;

We must remember that in a society where age is an element in the structure of social hierarchy, the necessity for 'children' to obey and respect their elders, particularly their parents, most particularly the father, does not cease when they become adults. The sons of Gorboduc are obviously not minors, or there could be no question of dividing the kingdom between them. In Shakespeare's King Lear we have both a questioning dialectic on the nature of Nature and a much more subtle characterization because Shakespeare understands that such a hierarchy of seniority raises problems: his daughters are grown-up women with minds of their own, just as Edmund is no less a human being for being born a bastard. And as Cordelia rightly points out, once a woman marries half her love and duty must go to her husband, who is her new lord and master in the patriarchal system.

Gorboduc, which is a relatively crude play devoid of real poetic imagination, reads more like a political tract in places. As a result it provides useful information on contemporary attitudes, when a greater work, like King Lear cannot necessarily be regarded as representative. The authors of Gorboduc also recognized that the hierarchy of age seniority raised real problems. In relation to the problems of primogeniture they discuss the sibling rivalry which can follow as a manifestation of the goddess Nature:

And such an equalness hath Nature made
Between the brethren of one father's seed,
As an unkindly wrong it seems to be,
To throw the brother subject under feet
Of him, whose peer he is by course of kind;
And Nature, that did make this equalness,
Oft so repineth at so great a wrong,
That oft she raiseth up a grudging grief
In younger brethren at the elder's state:
Whereby both towns and kingdoms have been rased,
And famous stocks of royal blood destroyed:

Edmund's famous monologue in King Lear is usually regarded as the last word in irreverence, but the above speech, which is spoken on good authority by a wise counsellor, would appear to give him some justification in contemporary eyes. If Edmund's attitude was not correct, it was at least understandable:

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother?

It is significant that his first objection is not to being discriminated against on the grounds of being a bastard, but because he is a year younger than his brother.

So he appears to justify his attitude firstly by telling the audience that he intends to obey the goddess Nature, as is only natural, a concept that they were already familiar with (as Gorboduc shows) and strengthens his case by the complaint about being a younger son, before going on to argue against the concept of bastardy. No doubt there were many younger sons in the audience who were only too ready to sympathize. Both plays recognize that in some points Nature seems to be at odds with itself, and certainly at odds with human customs and the social order, and no doubt contemporary audiences understood this from personal experience. The basic philosophy of a social and political order based on 'natural' order was not always as neat in practice as it was made out to be in principle, and the dramatized conflicts as presented in the theatre could attempt to resolve them, not necessarily in argument, but in the ending of the play, which is the resolution. In the case of Edmund his argument is undermined by making him a metaphorical bastard, a thoroughly bad lot. His logic may be impeccable, but his actions turn the audience against him. When he goes under his original argument appears to have been refuted. The status quo is restored, the custom of primogeniture and legitimacy appears to have been justified, and the audience have long forgotten (if they were inclined to sympathize with Edmund) that he really would have appeared to have suffered a basic injustice in the first place. A modern dramatist, working within a different system of ethics, would present Edmund as socially deprived, someone with a chip on his shoulder as a result of emotional or economic deprivation in his formative years, a criminal as a result of a broken home, with an absentee father or mother.

Gorboduc gives us an origin for the loss of that golden age which Holinshed and his contemporaries envisaged, a time when Britain was ruled by one monarch, and its people enjoyed peace, since lost for ever. When Gorboduc is warned against dividing his kindgom one counsellor tells him

Within one land, one single rule is best:
Divided reigns do make divided hearts;

And he is also reminded that his ancestor, the mythical Brutus, made a similar mistake when he divided his kingdom between his three sons:

But how much British blood hath since been spilt,
To join again the sunder'd unity!

But Gorboduc does not follow 'grave advice', instead he follows 'wilful will' and is a victim of flattery, thus showing very much the same weaknesses as Lear. At the end of the play the British people are left with no monarch at all and the threat of an imminent foreign invasion. The equation between civil strife and an inability to resist foreign invasion, so clearly stated in Holinshed, is also clearly stated in this play. The parallel with the ending of King Lear is also obvious. We are surely not making too great an assumption in thinking that a contemporary audience would have seen in Shakespeare's play yet another origin of later strife. At the very least he provided a warning and example. Like Gorboduc, who

A mirror shall become to princes all,
To learn to shun the cause of such a fall.

If Lear is at once an example of how kings should not behave and a possible origin for the British falling away from a supposed golden age of political unity, he is also something much more. In history he may be one of the first kings of the island, but in a poetic and imaginative sense Shakespeare sees him as the end of a line, the last of a line of kings. He did of course depart quite fundamentally from Holinshed, who had Lear restored to the throne by the forces of Cordelia, but also departed radically from an earlier dramatization of the story, which also ended happily. One could say that his pessimism was inspired by reading a little further into Holinshed, who tells us that Cordelia succeeded her father to the throne, but that her nephews levied war against her and took her prisoner, whereupon she killed herself. But the feeling one has that Lear is the last of a line of kings is reinforced by the perfunctory and ambiguous ending: the political order is not restored, no one really believes in Edgar as the next ruler, least of all himself. He is only a stand-in—for what? The answer is left blank, a vacuum is suggested. Instead of a moral and positive speech to round the play off we have four sad lines, the ambiguity of which has been commented on by Peter Brook in The Empty Space:

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

To me the second line suggests a deliberate rejection of the political platitude of order restored, whilst the last two suggest that the time of chaos is not over, and that Edgar and his contemporaries will have short and violent lives, and cannot expect to die quietly in their beds of old age.

As an entity the play of King Lear presents us with a very profound exploration of the nature of Nature, and a dialectic on two opposing points of view runs right through it. Some characters, notably Edmund, present a cynical view of the universe where both human nature and the forces of nature are cruel, and where the gods do not care what happens to us, and even enjoy our sufferings. The other view, represented by the forces of right, maintains that the gods are just, and that wickedness will inevitably be punished in the end. Now, the first view undoubtedly comes over more forcibly throughout the play, and although Shakespeare makes his wicked characters die one feels that they did so more by accident than through any Grand Design. The positive view is put forward very feebly—by Albany, for instance, who hardly comes across as a strong character. Gloucester, who starts off as foolishly complacent in his religious beliefs, becomes highly pessimistic as a result of his suffering, and is only reconverted to piety by a trick in his pathetic blindness, one which is visible to the entire audience. Edgar may be doing him a kindness in deceiving him, but it is a kindness played upon an old man who cannot bear too much reality.

Now the position of kingship depends upon a belief in a natural and moral order which also includes a political order. Kings were put there by God, and their subjects' obedience depended on a recognition of this fact. One very practical reason for continued support for the monarchy in sixteenth-century England was this divine sanction. 'Monarchies royal,' wrote Ralegh in The Cabinet-Council 'are for the most part ancient and hereditary, and consequently easy to be governed. For it is sufficient for the prince to maintain the old laws, and on occasion temporise with those accidents that happen.' Machiavelli also recognized the practical advantages of hereditary rule.

But what if there is no such divine and natural order, no degree upon which the monarchy depends? In Richard II we are certainly shown that it is no good a monarch depending too heavily on his divine status, but nevertheless his actions and what happens to him are incorporated into that broader political philosophy of a bigger order embracing incidental chaos. This is not the case in King Lear.

Lear certainly breaks the rules of monarchy by being arrogant, wilful, and deaf to good advice. But Shakespeare's characters in this play do not argue a political case, as they do in Richard II or Gorboduc. Ultimately the struggle is not between human beings fighting for power but between Lear and the elements. Richard relies on the fact that he has been anointed by the society over which he rules, but Lear goes much further: he abandons political power but still relies on a special relationship with the gods (expressed in non-Christian terms as Lear is supposed to be an ancient British king). He is constantly calling on the powers above to pour curses on his disobedient daughters. When he disowns Cordelia he summons down Jove's thunder, and demands that lightning should strike her blind.

But the elements are indifferent to his regal authority. They do not, it appears, distinguish between a king and the meanest beggar. When the storm breaks, it is Lear who gets wet.

In a sense Lear has only himself to blame, as the Fool points out. In a society which equated old age with wisdom, he had grown old without growing wise and he had turned degree topsy-turvy, like Gorboduc, in making his daughters his mothers. But the vision of chaos and monstrosity which the play represents goes far beyond any sin of omission or commission on Lear's part. He has indeed spawned monsters, humanity does 'prey on itself, and Goneril and Regan are offsprings of the same legitimate marriage bed as Cordelia; they cannot be explained away, like Edmund, on the grounds of bastardy and an adulterous relationship.

Did Shakespeare see Lear as a 'last' king, the end of a line, in the sense that he represented a type of kingship no longer associated with his own period, the kind of kingship we find in tribal societies, or in Anglo-Saxon England, or was he doing a more thorough demolition job in associating him with kingship in general? It seems to me that the historical sense of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was very unlike our own, and such distinctions between different kinds of monarchy would have been quite alien to him. Sixteenth-century historians viewed the past as basically a static state, interrupted by periods of commotion from time to time, and their own period with its monarchy as a continuation of that static state. I think that one therefore must conclude that the vision of the universe which Shakespeare presented in King Lear was one which made the concept of kingship a nonsense and an absurdity. Lear is not deposed or usurped in the normal way of histories or historical tragedies. He is gradually made aware of his own humanity, his weak flesh, his affinity with the meanest beggars in the land once his royal trappings are stripped away. Calls to the powers above are useless, they are deaf and blind and the heavens merely piss on his unprotected head. He does not need to be got rid of by murder: he dies of his own accord, of a broken heart.

Shakespeare had done with history, and the tragedy of kings. From them on his kings belonged to fairy land, to romances where reconciliation between fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, was still possible; his kings belonged to a world of make-believe where wounds could still be healed and lost kingdoms restored. We may regard this as a higher wisdom, but there is no doubt that Shakespeare turned his back on monarchism as a positive political reality.

From then on the history of kings was to play an increasingly unimportant part in English drama. With the bourgeois revolution and the execution of Charles I the figures of kings lost their symbolic and political potency. The need for examples was lost, since bad kings could be disposed of and did not represent the organic head of the state. One could chop the head off and the state would survive. The taboo surrounding the awesome sin of regicide was lost, and the killing of the king no longer represented an explanation for consequent political turmoil or public and private suffering. The Restoration of 1660 did not bring with it a restoration of the old charisma surrounding the monarchy, and attempts at tragic drama set in royal palaces were a flop. Instead the theatre depicted a world of wealthy immorality and private pleasure, totally divorced from any sense of social responsibility.

In France the hothouse flowering of the French tragic drama of royalty represented an absolutism enforced by strict literary censorship. The tragedies of Corneille and Racine are written specifically for an élitist audience, and they represent all too clearly the divorce between monarchy and people. The royal personages in these dramas have no political responsibility, they move in a goldfish bowl of private passions, obsessed with honour, divorced from the rest of society. Ordinary mortals have no place in these plays except as servants, confidants conveniently placed to listen to their woes. Significantly, these dramatists could not draw on the real history of the French people and its monarchy; they were forced to draw on a false, neoclassical model and parade their characters in togas or Spanish costumes, anywhere, just so long as the setting and costume were not French. And if necessary classical models had to be altered so as not to offend the gratifying self-image that the French aristocracy had of itself, as quite unlike the rest of humanity. Strange as it may seem to us, with our theatrical traditions, Racine's characters were often considered scandalously unkinglike. Corneille was better at toeing the political line and giving his tiny public what they wanted. But even Racine altered the story of Phèdre, for example, so that it is her nurse who accuses Hippolyte and brings about his death—he thought such an action unsuitable for a princess. 'Cette bassesse m'a paru plus convenable a une nourrice, qui pouvoit avoir des inclinations plus serviles', he wrote.

French absolutism and censorship resulted in tragic drama which not only did not reflect the ideals and aspirations of a cross-section of society, a collective consciousness; it did not even reflect the true humanity of the tiny minority to whom it was addressed. What the drama does reveal is the extent of the divorce between rulers and ruled, the lack of any sense, so strong in English writing of the sixteenth-century, that the king's business is the business of everyone, because the welfare of the nation depends on him, and that his royal prerogative is dependent on his royal responsibility. Kings are not shown to govern, well or badly, and do not provide examples. Marooned in their palaces, their tragedies are purely private, honour and duty conflicting with passion and desire. No commotion, no fighting, no sounds of thunder breaking overhead. But in the silence, with hindsight, we can hear the tumbrils beginning to roll.

Notes

⁴ W. Ralegh, Maxims of State (Works, Vol. 8, 1829).

⁵Idem., The Cabinet-Council (Works, Vol. 8, 1829).

⁶Idem., Maxims of State (Works, Vol. 8, 1829).