King Lear, King James and the Gunpowder Treason of 1605

Renaissance Studies

Volumn 17, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 695-715

  Taunton, Nina ^a   Hart, Valerie ^a  

^a BRUNEL UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149624627     PISSN: 02691213     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2003.00042.x     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. 'Within the realm, the accession of James I brought on an explosion of print. The new monarch was a new type: the king as litterateur . . . All the king's writings on monarchy, demonology and religion were reprinted.' Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 4,
2. citing Les Reports del Cases in Camera Stellata, 1593 to 1609 (London, 1894), 179-82.
3. Commonly referred to as His Maiesties Speach, this account was published in 1606 together with a pamphlet, A True and Perfect Relation of the trials of the plotters. This joint publication came to be known as The King's Book. Quotations and citations from this speech are from 'A Speach in the Parliament Hovse as neere the very words as Covld Be Gathered at the instant', in Johann P. Sommerville (ed.), King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge, 1994), 147-58.
4. Francis Herring, Pietas Pontificia . . . (1609);
5. Alexander Julius, Descriptio horrendi . . . (1609).
6. For liturgies praising the king's happy deliverance, see, for example, Robert Barker, Prayers and Thankesgiuing to bee vsed by all the Kings Maiesties louing Subiects . . . (1606).
7. Garry Wills, Witches & Jesuits (Oxford, 1996), 15-24, 30.
8. For responses to the news of the Gunpowder Plot by loyal counties, and loyal letters of encouragement sent to the Council, see Mark Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot (Manchester, 1991), 35-6.
9. The issue of dating is central; therefore, the text used throughout is that of the first quarto, edited and introduced by Graham Holderness: M William Shak-speare: HIS True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three Daughters (1608) (Hemel Hempstead, 1995). All quotations and citations are from this edition.
10. Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare (Los Angeles, 1988), 115-17, 120.
11. Other topical readings of Lear include Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London, 1977), 131-47;
12. Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear (Princeton, 1980).
13. The work of Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (eds), The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear (Oxford, 1983), 73-119,
14. and Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, 1984), 58-73,
15. and Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford, 1989), 106-16, are, like that of Marcus, particularly influential.
16. An early localized reading of Shakespeare, Lilian Winstanley's Macbeth, King Lear and Contemporary History (Cambridge, 1922), examines the relationship between the Gunpowder Plot and Macbeth
17. Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures, to withdraw the harts of her Maiesties Subiects from their allegeance, and from the truth of Christian Religion professed in England, vnder the pretence of casting out deuils (1603).
18. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (2 vols, Oxford, 1930), II, 463-70.
19. Chambers's authoritative work provided a framework extensively used by subsequent editors of the texts such as Kenneth Muir (ed.), King Lear (London, 1994).
20. and Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, 58-73.
21. Their case derives from internal evidence linking the opening scenes of the play to James's opening speech at the third session of Parliament on 18 November 1606, just before he attended the performance of Lear at court in which he exhorted Parliament to decide in favour of the union of Scotland and England. James's address is couched in language which finds close echoes in the opening scene of the play. However, it is worth noting that Richard Knowles, in his reviews of Urkowitz, in Modern Philology, 79 (1981-2), 197-200,
22. and Taylor and Warren, in Shakespeare Quarterly, 36 (1985), 115-20, indicate that from the bibliographical point of view at any rate, the dating debate is far from over.
23. Chambers, William Shakespeare, 468.
24. Kenneth Muir, King Lear (Harmondsworth, 1986), 117-20. Muir summarizes the seven points for and against attempts at refining the date of composition. He is 'driven to conclude that the play was written between March 1603 and December 1606, and probably in the second half of that period' (120).
25. Kenneth Muir (ed.), King Lear, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1994), xxii.
26. According to Taylor, King Lear is peppered with signs that Eastward Ho (Marston and Chapman, 1605 text) was a stimulus: Gary Taylor, 'A new source and an old date for King Lear', Review of English Studies, 33 (1982), 296-413.
27. An alternative source, that of the contested will of Brian Annesley and the upholding of the claims of the youngest daughter Cordell in December 1604, does not succeed in narrowing the span between 1605 or 1606: Muir, King Lear (1986), 119.
28. Gary Taylor, 'Monopolies, show trials, disaster and invasion: King Lear and censorship', in Taylor and Warren, The Division of the Kingdoms, 111.
29. For a clear, though curtailed, summary of the editorial controversy, see the New Casebooks Contemporary Critical Essays on King Lear, ed. Kiernan Ryan (Basingstoke, 1993), 180-1.
30. R. N. Foakes (ed.), King Lear, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd edn (London, 1997).
31. 24 March 1603, in John Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of James VI with Sir Robert Cecil and others in England (London, 1861), 75-6;
32. Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot, 116-7.
33. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (eds), Stuart Royal Proclamations (Oxford, 1973), I, 124-5.
34. Sommerville, King James VI and I, 152.
35. Francis Edwards (ed.), The Narrative of Oswald Tesimond (London, 1973), 140.
36. Bruce, Correspondence of James VI, 36.
37. Antonia Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605 (London, 1998), 69-82, 93;
38. Alan Haynes, The Gunpowder Plot: Faith in Rebellion (Dover, 1994), 48-53.
39. Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, 106-7.
40. Holderness, True Chronicle Historie, 40.
41. Donald Carswell (ed.), Trial of Guy Fawkes and Others (William Hodge, 1934), 87.
42. The letter to Monteagle is inserted in the king's account of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot (105-9). According to Carswell, this account was lifted from the first collection of the King's writings, published in his own lifetime. Carswell, Trial of Guy Fawkes, 105.
43. Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot, 155.
44. Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemianors from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (33 vols, London, 1809), II, 166-94.
45. See Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 150, on James's recourse to the Court of Chancery to frustrate opposition to his use of the royal prerogative and the references in the trial scene in Q1 to these practices.
46. Roger Warren, 'The folio omission of the mock trial: motives and consequences', in Taylor and Warren, The Division of the Kingdoms, 47, argues that this scene was removed from the folio merely because it was too difficult to perform - a view dismissed by Holderness as part of the revisionist need to establish an 'improved' folio. Holderness contends that this need ignores aspects of the trial scene which contributed to the genuinely popular appeal of the playhouse theatres with their 'subversive carnival energies', though he does not ask to what end these subversive energies were directed.
47. Carswell, The Case for the Crown, 65-70.
48. See Gary Taylor's discussion of the omission of the mock trial scene. His argument is that the cuts which appear in the folio represent the censorship of the play before its royal performance. Taylor and Warren, The Division of the Kingdoms, 88-97.
49. James VI and I of England, A Fruietfull Meditation; Containing a Plaine and Easie Exposition . . . of the 7. 8. 9. 10 Verses of the 20 Chap, of the Revelation (1603).
50. See Joseph Wittreich, 'The Apocalypse in King Lear', in C. A. Patrides and J. Wittreich, The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Manchester, 1984), 183.
51. See Patrides and Wittreich, The Apocalypse, 183-4.
52. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford, 1988, repr. 1992), 92.