How Shakespeare knew King Leir

Shakespeare Survey

Volumn , Issue 55, 2002, Pages 12-34

  Knowles, Richard ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 62449091112     PISSN: 00809152     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: 10.1017/ccol0521815878.002     Document Type: Article

References (124)

1. Shakespeare, Works, ed. Lewis Theobald, 7 vols. (1733), vol. 5, pp. 217-18
2. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, ed. Edward Capell, 10 vols. (1768), vol. 1, p. 55
3. Martin Mueller, 'From Leir to Lear', Philological Quarterly, 73 (1994), 121
4. Shakespeare, Plays & Poems, ed. Edmond Malone, 10 vols. (1790), vol. 1, p. 353
5. Philip Henslowe, Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge, 1961), p. 21
6. 'Stationers' Records', in W. W. Greg, Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (BEPD), 4 vols. (1939-59), vol. 1, p. 11
7. W. W. Greg, 'The Date of King Lear and Shakespeare's Use of Earlier Versions of the Story', 4, Library, 20 (1940), 384
8. King Lear, Arden Shakespeare, ed. Kenneth Muir (1952), p. xxxii
9. Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen's Men and their Plays (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 160-6
10. The History of King Lear, Oxford World's Classics, ed. Stanley Wells (Oxford, 2000), p. 12, n. 1
11. George Steevens, ed., Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare, 4 vols. (1766), vol. 1, p. 16
12. Malone, Plays & Poems, vol. 1, pp. 352-3
13. Greg, 'The Date of King Leaf', 383-4
14. Muir, King Lear, pp. xxii-xxiv
15. Greg, 'Stationers' Records', vol. 1, p. 20
16. J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare's Theater (Ithaca, NY, 1991), p. 176
17. Shakespeare, Works, ed. George Lyman Kittredge (Boston, 1936), pp. 1195-6
18. Wells, History of King Lear, p. 11
19. Wilfrid Perrett, The Story of King Lear from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Shakespeare, Palaestra 35 (Berlin, 1904)
20. Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7: Major Tragedies (London and NY, 1973), pp. 270, 276
21. Dorothy E. Nameri, Three Versions of the Story of King Lear (Salzburg, 1976), p. 9
22. King Lear, Arden Shakespeare, ed. R. A. Foakes (Walton-on-Thames, 1997), p. 90
23. See esp. King Lear, Arden Shakespeare, ed. W. J. Craig (1901), pp. xxx-xxxv
24. Perrett, Story of King Lear, pp. 143-289 passim
25. King Leir, Shakespeare Classics, ed. Sidney Lee (London and NY, 1909), pp. xxxviii-xliii
26. Allardyce Nicoll, Studies in Shakespeare (1928), pp. 139-55
27. Greg, 'The Date of King Lear', 386-97
28. Robert Adger Law, 'King Leir and King Lear: An Examination of the Two Plays', in Studies in Honor of T. W. Baldwin, ed. Don Cameron Allen (Urbana, 1958), pp. 112-24
29. Bullough, Narrative, pp. 337-402, notes passim
30. Nameri, Time Versions, passim
31. Donald M. Michie, ed., King Leir (Madison, Wis., 1979; NY, 1991), pp. 31-9
32. Peter Pauls, 'The True Chronicle History of King Leir and Shakespeare's King Lear: A Reconsideration', Upstart Crow, 5 (1984), 93-107
33. The following quotations and line references from Shakespeare's King Lear are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974)
34. See William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, 1966), pp. 63-71
35. John L Murphy, Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and King Lear (Athens, Ohio, 1984), pp. 119-34
36. See Alfred Hart, Stolne and Surreptitious Copies: A Comparative Study of Shakespeare's Bad Quartos (Melbourne and London, 1942), pp. 21-32, 41, 63
37. George Ian Duthie, ed., Shakespeare's King Lear: A Critical Edition (Oxford, 1949), pp. 125-6. F1's 'reserue thy state' and 'reuoke thy guift' are further from the wording of the source play
38. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1930), vol. 1, p. 470
39. Thomas Marc Parrott, Shakespearean Comedy (NY, 1949), p. 295. Parrott also thinks that 'there can be no doubt whatever' that Shakespeare read the printed book
40. Karl Wentersdorf, 'Shakespeares Erste Truppe', Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 84-6 (1950), 128
41. Hardin Craig, 'Motivation in Shakespeare's Choice of Materials', Shakespeare Survey 4 (Cambridge, 1951), p. 32
42. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen's Men, pp. 160-6
43. Alfred W. Pollard, 'Introduction' to Peter Alexander, Shakespeare's Henry VI and Richard III (Cambridge, 1929), pp. 13-21
44. G. M. Pinciss, 'Shakespeare, Her Majesty's Players and Pembroke's Men', Shakespeare Survey 27 (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 129-36
45. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923), 2:202. Speculations that manuscripts of these plays passed to the Chamberlain's company are briefly discussed later in this essay
46. So Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 2, p. 338
47. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford, 1996), pp. 175-6, 262-3, 269-72. It is uncertain who first acted Err., LLL, and TGV, and when; the Chamberlain's Men have been proposed for all three, in 1594 and later
48. Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, p. 279
49. Meredith A. Skura, Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago and London, 1993), pp. 285-6
50. Mueller, 'From Leir to Lear', 195
51. Richard Levin, New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago and London, 1979), pp. 209-11
52. Skura, Shakespeare the Actor, p. 287
53. Bullough, Narrative, p. 377 n
54. Mueller, 'From Leir to Lear', 204
55. Robert Adger Law, 'Richard the Third, Act I, Scene 4', PMLA 27 (1912), 117-41. Quotations are from pp. 119 n., 131, 135, and 136
56. Thomas H. McNeal, 'Shakespeare's Cruel Queens', Huntington Library Quarterly, 22 (1958-9), p. 43
57. Richard III, New (Cambridge) Shakespeare, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1954), p. xxxii
58. Wolfgang Clemen, A Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard III (Göttingen, 1957), tr. Jean Bonheim (1968), p. 89 n
59. Hermann, Freiherr von Friesen, Shakspere-Studien. Vol. 3: William Shakespere's Dramen von 1601 bis zum Schlusse seiner Laufbahn (Wien, 1876), p. 86
60. Perrett, Story of King Lear, p. 114, n. 2
61. McNeal, 'Shakespeare's Cruel Queens', 48-9
62. Antony Hammond, ed., Richard III, Arden Shakespeare (London and NY, 1981), pp. 183-4 n
63. Shakespeare, Works, Eversley Ed., ed. C. H. Herford, 10 vols. (1899), vol. 9, p. 10
64. Clemen, Commentary, pp. 88-90
65. Law, 'Richard the Third', 139
66. Arden of Feversham, in Minor Elizabethan Tragedies, ed. T. W. Craik (1974), pp. 236-7
67. Harold Brooks, 'Richard III: Antecedents of Clarence's Dream,' Shakespeare Survey 32 (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 145-50
68. Greg, (Rev. of Sidney Lee, ed., King Leir, 1909), MLR 6 (1910), 515
69. Hammond, Richard III, p. 61
70. Robert Adger Law, 'King John and King Leir', Texas Studies in Literature and Language 1 (1960), 473-6
71. See Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. 4: Later English History Plays (1962), 4:46, 116
72. Thomas H. McNeal, 'Margaret of Anjou: Romantic Princess and Troubled Queen', Shakespeare Quarterly, 9 (1958), 1-10
73. McNeal, 'Margaret of Anjou', 46-7
74. Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950), B 780
75. R. W Dent, Shakespeare's Proverbial Language: An Index (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981), s593.1
76. McNeal, 'Margaret of Anjou', 41, 50
77. Jacquelyn Pearson, 'Much Ado about Nothing and King Leir', Notes and Queries 226 (1981), 128-9
78. McNeal, 'Margaret of Anjou', 47
79. Pearson, 'Much Ado', p. 128
80. Whetstone, Promos and Cassandra, in Mark Eccles, ed., Measure for Measure, New Variorum Shakespeare(NY, 1980), p. 352
81. George Peele, The Old Wives Tale, ed. Frank S. Hook, in Life and Works, ed. Charles T. Prouty, 3 vols. (New Haven and London, 1952-70), vol. 3, p. 403
82. The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda, ed. John J. Murray (NY and London), p. 15
83. Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene, A Looking Glosse for London and England, ed. George A. Clugston (NY and London, 1980), pp. 135-6, 184
84. George Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie (1589), p. 210
85. r
86. r
87. Sr. Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (NY, 1947), pp. 75-7
88. Muriel C. Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (1955), pp. 34-5
89. Jacquelyn Pearson, 'The Influence of King Leir on Shakespeare's Richard II', Notes and Queries, 227 (1982), 113-15
90. Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580-1642 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 125
91. Mueller, 'From Leir to Lear', 201. Mueller's further argument that the 'contamination' in Shakespeare's mind of Leir and Rosalynde produced both the hostile brothers in Lear (which derive immediately from Sidney's Arcadia) and the 'dynastic interlace' of sexual relations between the children of a ruler and his friend, i.e. between Hamlet and Ophelia and between Edmund and Goneril and Regan, depends on analogies too general and far-fetched to be taken seriously
92. McNeal, 'Margaret of Anjou', 7
93. Arthur Golding, tr., The .xv. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis (1567), pp. 137-8, 141-2
94. Thomas Cooper, Dictionarium (1565), sig. 16
95. The Merchant of Venice, Arden Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown (1955), p. lv
96. John Lyly, Works, ed. R. Warwick Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1902), 2:21
97. Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblèmes (1586), p. 203
98. Marlowe, Works, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1973), 1:316
99. Mueller, 'From Leir to Lear', 208-9, 211
100. W. W. Greg, 'Shakespeare and King Leir', TLS, 9 Mar. 1940, p. 124
101. Mueller, 'From Leir to Lear', 205-7, 216
102. Mueller, 'From Leir to Lear', 121
103. Greg, 'Shakespeare and King Leir', 384-5
104. Greg did concede, 'I have no great liking for this hypothesis.' George Ian Duthie, 'Introduction' to King Lear, New (Cambridge) Shakespeare, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, i960), p. xiv, thinks it 'has nothing in it inherently unlikely', at best a lukewarm endorsement. I know of no other
105. Wilfred T. Jewkes, Act Division in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama 1583-1616 (Hamden, Conn., 1958), p. 201
106. Michie, King Leir, p. 21. Greg does note that 'the text is thoroughly good... The printing, moreover, is generally correct and the punctuation unusually careful.' See also n. 53
107. Peter W. M. Blayney, 'The Publication of Playbooks', in A Neiv History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David S. Kastan (New York, 1997), pp. 392, 418, n. 19. The cost was between 2 and 3 shillings
108. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Foakes and Rickert, xp. 21,7. The Master of the Revels licensed performances of the play throughout the country as a whole, and his judgement and authority in these matters were deferred to by local authorities
109. and BEPD no. 213, 1:337-8. White never printed any of his five plays; Adam Islip printed Friar Bacon in 1594 and Peele's David and Bethsabe only after another five years, in 1599. White's other two plays besides Leir, namely John of Gaunt and Robin Hood and Little John, are not known ever to have been published. As Peter Blayney notes (pp. 386-9), there was a glut of plays in 1593-5, and in the best of times printers recovered costs within five years on only one in five plays. There was no great incentive to publish Leir
110. For Famous Victories and True Tragedy, see McMillin and MacLean, The Queen's Men, pp. 113-20
111. for Selimus, Peter Berek, "Locrine Revised, Selimus and Early Responses to Tamburlaine" Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 23 (1980), 43
112. John Danter acquired another Queen's Men play, Peele's The Old Wives Tale, on 16 April 1595
113. his edition of that year seems also to its editors Frank S. Hook (1970, vol. 3, pp. 351-6)
114. and Norman Sanders (Revels Plays, 1970, pp. lvii-lx)
115. to be author's foul papers, and that behind the second appears to Jane L. Gooch (ed. 1981, p. 36) to be a clear author's or reviser's manuscript or a transcript of this. Paul Werstine (privately) doubts the reliability of the conclusions of Lavin, Sanders, Binnie, and Gooch, because the distinguishing marks on the basis of which they detect authorial manuscripts may also be found in some theatrical manuscripts
116. See Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 3, p. 461, who calls the play a 'boil-down'
117. Arthur M. Sampley, 'The Text of Peele's David and Bethsabe', PMLA 46 (1931), 659-71
118. Jewkes, Act Division, pp. 127-8
119. George Peele, ed. Sally Purcell (S. Hinksey, 1972), p. 91
120. Katharine F. Pantzer, in A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland . . . 1475-1640, 2nd edn, ed. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols. (1986-91), vol. 3, p. 190, says that in this entry the Stationers' Register 'erroneously specifies "per Patrimonium"', a phrase that means by virtue of his father's being a stationer. John Wright was the second son of the stationer Thomas Wright, though apprenticed to Edward White. As for Stafford's reputation, Wright trusted him to do a good job of printing, and he did
121. Michie, King Leir, p. 4, enlarging on Sidney Lee (ed. 1909), p. xvi
122. Michie takes this distinction from W. W. Greg, Some Aspects and Problems of London Publishing between 1550 and 1650 (Oxford, 1956), p. 80
123. Roslyn Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare's Company 1594-1613 (Fayetteville, Ark., 1991), pp. 9, 59
124. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Foakes and Rickert, pp. 21-2