King Lear Part 1: ‘How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth it is to Have a Thankless Child!’

**Philip Rowe** (0:09)
Welcome to The History Of European Theatre podcast, and thanks for joining me on this journey through millennia of theatrical history. Episode 217, King Lear Part 1 How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.
Last time, Shakespeare took us to the dark world of time and misanthropy, as we saw a man rapidly fall from the heights of wealth and end up disillusioned and bitter as he lived and died in the heart of nature. It is judged by history as a less than successful play, but all of those features could also be applied to King Lear, the play that is now often regarded as Shakespeare's finest and deepest work. It is intriguing to think on how the playwright made such a success of one play while the other failed, but King Lear is most often compared to the two other great tragedies of the period in Shakespeare's writing, Hamlet and Othello. And, of course, there are thematic comparisons that can be made with these plays, but it has to be pointed out that King Lear is also a very different play in tone and structure. Whether we rate King Lear as Shakespeare's best play or not, it is a play that has deeply affected audiences and critics through the centuries, and I can only imagine the mark that it leaves on actors who take on the main roles. Sadly, what we lack is any detail about the initial reactions to the play.
The entry for King Lear in the Stationer's Register, which was made on 27th November 1607, mentions that the play was performed at court on 26th December 1606 From references in the text to recent eclipses that might have been prompted by celestial events that occurred in September and October 1605, we might infer composition after that date, and scholars have also suggested some references to Eastwood Ho in the text, which would mean that the play was certainly written after June 1605, when that play was staged. That puts completion as late as sometime at the back end of 1606, but with most agreeing now that late 1605 is the most likely date. With the thematic similarities to Timon of Athens and the other plays of the period, it is difficult not to feel that this play was a long time in the making and had, perhaps, been on Shakespeare's mind and in a draft form for quite a long time.
For some of the themes and concepts expressed in the play, the influence of Montaigne's Essays published in 1603 and Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, published the same year, can be seen. Harsnett's work was an expose of Catholic exorcisms as nothing more than fraudulent theatrical performances. The detailed descriptions of confessions and named devils that he reported in that book were undoubtedly a major influence on the idea and description of feigned madness in the play. Montaigne's influence on Shakespeare is more fundamental. Shakespeare would have read his work in a translation by John Florio, and for King Lear in particular, he leans into Montaigne's thoughts on the problem of the elderly continuing in positions of power which would better be handled by their children, his ideas on cruelty and suffering, and his view that the artificialities of society needed to be stripped away so that man's true state in nature could be discovered. This is Lear as the unaccommodated man during the scenes on the heath.
The first edition of the play in print was published in 1608, and it is a text that has led to much speculation about its origin over the years, but the consensus is now that it was based on Shakespeare's manuscript copy, but printed with many errors. A second quarto edition was published in 1619, correcting a good portion of the printing errors in the first edition. The version published in the first folio cuts about 300 lines from these quarto editions and adds about 100 new lines. A study of the stylistic elements in these editions suggests that the folio was based on the 1608 quarto that was revised in about 1610 The first quarto titles the play as A True History Of The Life And Death Of King Lear, whereas the folio calls it The Tragedy Of King Lear. The texts published for the modern audience tend to be a mixture of these original texts as selected by an editor.
As we heard in my recent guest episode with Darren Freebury-Jones, there was an earlier version of the story on stage known as The True Chronicle History Of King Lear, which is now attributed to Thomas Kidd. That play was published in 1605 but had been written at least 15 years earlier. It is possible that Shakespeare acted in that play probably around 1594 He certainly knew it well, but his version is no direct copy. In fact, it is a very free retelling of the story that was probably known to him in several versions, not least that recounted by Hollenshed in his Chronicles of England, where a story originally told by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century is repeated. Elements of the story, such as Cordelia's death, could have been prompted by Spencer's Fairy Queen, published in 1590, and the story of Gloucester and his sons is taken from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. In fact, there are many other works from the period that have been suggested as possible sources for various parts of the story, but I've restricted myself to just the main ones here.