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The Renaissance

The Renaissance unleashed tensions that made people feel both excited and frightened. ‘Truths’ that had been reliable and comforting for hundreds of years were being questioned and for every person who welcomed the new learning there were others who felt threatened by it. Challenged existing ‘truths’ in all intellectual spheres – astrology, religion, medicine, science, economics, politics – led to more humanist thinking, less reliant on orthodoxy, dogma, the church and the aristocracy (although not fully embedded in all people)

 

It is particularly useful to see Shakespeare’s play as the dramatic manifestations of these tensions – between old, comfortable, conservative belief-systems, and new, challenging, liberating discoveries.

Jacobean theatre

Against this turbulent backdrop, then, the theatre was the one place where rich and poor could congregate and see enacted, through old or made-up stories, a refracted image of their own desires and anxieties. Jacobean theatre flourished during King James I's reign, following the Elizabethan era. This period saw a shift towards darker themes, exploring revenge, corruption, and moral decay. Jacobean theatre acted as a subtle subversive art form by critiquing prevailing social, political, and moral issues through dark, complex themes and biting satire, reflecting the cynicism and moral ambiguity of the era.

Growing mercantile class/ early capitalism

Society shifting from feudalism to early capitalism. Mercantile: relating to trade or commerce; commercial. Emergence of new market capitalism – self-transformation possible. Rapid increase in bourgeois wealth – fears of an upstart, aspirational group rivalling the traditional ruling class At the same time, increasing numbers of merchants, financiers, manufacturers and industrialists were gaining wealth.

New Individualism and the New Man

Yet the fixed absolutes implied by the Chain of Being were beginning to be challenged. Economic accumulation established the dominance of market capitalism; a free market economy emphasised that unlimited self- transformation and economic growth was possible. Political thinking changed: feudal society with its strong social hierarchy had virtually vanished and discoveries in science and the New World, together with increasing wealth from commerce and manufacture, fostered new ideas about value, merit and status, something Edmund articulates in Act One scene 2. Social mobility became a reality: in Elizabeth’s time, gentlemen could be ‘made’ as well as born, and James sold knighthoods for cash. A newly prosperous gentry and commercial class challenged the power of the king whilst the aristocracy divided among itself. Political factions were rife, reflected in King Lear in the dangerous rivalry existing between Albany and Cornwall.

The Poor

There were significant numbers of beggars on the street and the first poor law of 1601 aimed to tackle this. This made each parish responsible for its own poor, and parish vestries were authorised to raise a rate to pay for their relief, house the homeless or pay a dole in money or kind to poor people. While Shakespeare was writing King Lear, England was convulsed by a terrifying social crisis. Harvests failed with alarming regularity. There were serious riots in London in 1595, and regional famines in 1596 and 1597. James 1 handed the ‘Poor Man’s Petition’ in 1600. One of the most visible signs of all this was a sharp upturn in the number of people on the streets. Seeing 'poor naked wretches;' would have been normal. Unsympathetic commentators talked of a 'swarm' of beggars. When the government undertook one of its periodic round-ups, the numbers on the streets were startling: dozens could be arrested in a single town over a few months. Economic change in the countryside contributed too: arable fields were replaced with pastures, common fields were enclosed, and some peasants were forced off the land.

Madness

The Bethlehem hospital in London was an asylum that housed many of the ‘mad’ or ‘insane’. It was nicknamed Bedlam. In the Tudor and Stuart periods, begging was a capital offence. Beggars could be flogged (or worse) if caught outside their parish. The only people allowed to beg were those legally deemed insane. This led to huge numbers of mad beggars, both genuine and fraudulent.

Religion

During the 1530s Henry VIII created an independent Protestant state. There was deep suspicion of Roman Catholics as potential traitors, reinforced by the Spanish Armada in 1588 where there was an attempt to overthrow Elizabeth and restore England to Roman Catholicism. The associations of treachery were reinforced by the foiled Gunpowder plot of 1605, when a Roman Catholic attempted to destroy the government of England. King Lear was written in the same year, in a time of uncertainty and unrest. Shakespeare had to be careful in addressing Christian matters - the 1606 Act stood in the way of directly talking about the Christian God on stage. But everybody in Shakespeare's audience would have heard and recognised the play's Christian and Biblical resonances. Everyone would have spotted that the talk of gods, heavens, stars and so forth was code for the Christian God.

Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures

King James I believed in the supernatural and witches, but Shakespeare borrows from Harsnett’s more sceptical 1603 work A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures a “polemical attack on a group of Catholic priests who conducted exorcism in private houses” and was “part of an official campaign against exorcism as practised both by some Protestants and by Catholics”. It’s an anti-Catholic text. Shakespeare mocks King James’ superstitious beliefs or supports the protestant king’s anti-papist ideas. Papist = Roman Catholic

Gunpowder plot

The Gunpowder Plot of November 1605, in which a well-organized group of Catholic conspirators installed thirty-six barrels of gunpowder under the chamber where Parliament was to meet, with the aim of killing James, his heir Prince Henry, and the entire government, concentrated royal attention on the threat of Catholic disloyalty. The impact of the Gunpowder Plot reverberated powerfully into 1606. It unleashed a maelstrom of fear, horror, a desire for revenge, an all too brief sense of national unity and a struggle to understand where such evil came from. Such turbulence profoundly shapes Shakespeare's King Lear.

The plague

The bubonic plague killed some 30,000 Londoners in 1603.

“Pestilence was rife in the Bard’s time, closing theatres and ravaging life.

When Shakespeare became a professional actor, then a playwright and shareholder in a London company, plague presented both a professional and existential threat. Between 1603 and 1613, when Shakespeare’s powers as a writer were at their height, the Globe and other London playhouses were shut for an astonishing total of 78 months – more than 60% of the time.

The mood in the city must have been ghastly – deserted streets and closed shops, dogs running free, carers carrying three-foot staffs painted red so everyone else kept their distance, church bells tolling endlessly for funerals – and something similar seems to be happening in the bleached-out world of the play. The text is saturated by images of death, chaos, nihilism and desperation, and everyone seems to feel the chill.”

The Divine Right of Kings

The Divine Right of Kings is the absolutist idea that a monarch’s authority to rule comes directly from God and that he or she is not subject to any earthly authority

Kingship: The True Lawe of Free Monarchies

In 1598, King James VI of Scotland first published his essay on the theory of kingship: The True Lawe of Free Monarchies In it, James explores the relationship between monarch and subject through the metaphor of the king as a father to his people. James develops this theme further, comparing the metaphor of the father as head of the family to that of the king as the head of a body composed of his subjects. He presents both of these ideas as laws of nature. He also discusses the natural love a father feels for his children and the duty children owe their father. James describes as ‘monstrous and unnatural’ the act of a son rising up against the father, controlling him, killing him or cutting him off. As Lear does, James I also looks to the animal kingdom and finds that only the viper strikes against its parent.

Unification

Before James became king, Shakespeare was an English playwright. Now he had to be a British playwright. James’s big project was the political unification of the entire island. In his opening address to the London Parliament in 1604, he compared his accession to an indissoluble marriage: “What God hath conjoined then, let no man separate. I am the husband, and all the whole isle is my lawful wife.” The silver medal minted to commemorate his accession acclaimed James as the “emperor of the whole island of Britain,” and his coronation medal hailed him as “Caesar Augustus of Britain.” But the forging of a new identity for James’s “Great Britain” was a formidable ideological challenge.

 

Lear’s dismembering of his kingdom is the negative correlative of James’s destiny to make its body whole again.

The body politic

For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the monarch was regarded as the head of the nation, with the people as its body. Thus, any disturbances or problems with the monarch had a profound effect on the whole country. This idea is connected to the concept of the Body Politic. Sir Edmund Plowden (1518–1585) was a lawyer and legal theorist who wrote about the nature of the king’s two bodies – the idea that there is an abstract concept of the king as well as his physical body – and the relationship between the king and his subjects. Plowden explained that the king has two bodies: the body natural and the body politic. The body natural is mortal and subject to age and infirmities as anyone’s body would be, but the body politic is a metaphysical entity consisting of policy and government and is ‘utterly void of Infancy and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities’. The two bodies form an indivisible unit in the person of the king.

the GCoB

In the Elizabethan World Picture, everything in the Universe fitted into three overall classes of existence: – heavenly
– human
– natural. These categories were ranked in order of status and importance. Each category was believed to have a particular role in the hierarchy or ‘Great Chain of Being’ which organised the world into a fixed order, with God at the top, descending successively through angels, men, women, animals, birds, fishes, insects, trees and plants to stones.

Homily of Obedience (1547)

At the time that King Lear was written, a text called the Homily of Obedience (1547) was read out in Church twice a year. The Homily emphasised that not only is everything (and everyone's place) in the Chain determined by God, but the stability of the world depends on everything (and everyone) sticking to their place.

Basilikon Doron

In 1599, King James VI of Scotland published Basilikon Doron (The King’s Gift), a letter to his young son Henry (1594–1612), drawing on his own experience as king to offer advice on how to be an effective ruler.

James I advises against being a tyrant; for honouring one’s parents; for supporting the poor; for being well acquainted with one’s subjects; for the careful selection of loyal gentlemen and servants for one’s household; against the wife of a king being allowed to meddle in politics; for the active participation of the king in councils in order to be able to govern well.

Only seven copies of the published text were printed at the time, suggesting that it was intended for a select private readership of family and nobility. Throughout 1603, the year Elizabeth died and James I acceded to the English throne, a revised text was widely printed. It was also translated into other languages and became an international bestseller.

Basilikon Doron emphasises the importance of union and the dangers of the division of a kingdom. From 1604 King James struggled with Parliament over his attempt to bring together his two kingdoms of Scotland and England in an act of union.

Elizabeth 1’s death

It was still unclear what would happen to the English throne when she died. Some feared the result would be civil war, invasion, religious revolt or an unholy combination of all three. The sixteenth century saw two queens reigning in quick succession, Mary I and Elizabeth I (or three if you count Lady Jane Grey, who ‘reigned’ for only nine days), prompting both unease about and the possibility of women in power.

Women and family

Women were believed to be intellectually feeble and unreliable and easily overheated sexually. Belief in women's sexual insatiability reflected a insecurity around cuckoldry and a man's uncertainty as to whether the child he was paying to bring up was indeed his own - fears related to questions of inheritance and keeping the family bloodline pure. The widow either rampantly free or easily victimised, reflecting the standard view of predatory female sexuality and echoing anxieties about overhasty second marriages for women

John Knox’s pamphlet entitled 'The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women' (written in 1558, the year of Elizabeth I's accession) gives us an interesting context in which to read attitudes towards women in Shakespeare’s plays:

·         “women should have no mastery over men save only her natural one of motherhood.”

·         “Weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish: and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment.”

family

The stress on domestic discipline and the utter subordination of the child found expression in extraordinary outward marks of deference which English children were expected to pay to their parents in the 16th and early 17th centuries. It was customary for them when at home to kneel before their parents to ask their blessing every morning and even as adults on arrival and at departure from the home. Perhaps ultimate subservience is evident at the close of the play, as all three daughters lie dead on stage, forever silenced. The Jacobeans saw the family as a microcosm of the state. Jacobean understanding of the relationship between monarch and country that saw in it an analogy to the relationship between a patriarch and his household.                                                                               Second and third sons in Elizabethan England counted for little and daughters for even less.

Primogeniture

Deriving from feudal law, primogeniture is the right, by law or custom, of the firstborn legitimate son to inherit his parents' entire or main estate, in preference to shared inheritance among all or some children, a child other than the eldest male, a daughter or illegitimate child or a collateral relative.

Bastards

'Bastards' are evil in Renaissance drama, because, being on the margins of the aristocracy, half connected with it, half a product of another world, they have a clear motive to contest the dominant (or 'hegemonic') ideology, which defends a particular, aristocratic, mode of property inheritance: from father to first-born, legitimate son. In the end, the play itself comes down on the side of the aristocratic ideology, represented most obviously in Kent and Cordelia, the very figures of the dutiful retainer or daughter whose loyalty withstands any horror that the hegemonic aristocratic and patriarchal order can throw at them: tyrannical anger, expulsion, and banishment. However, it makes such a good stab at representing the germ of a more modern point of view that we sympathise with Edmund's sense of injustice.

Justice

King Lear reflects the passionate interest of the Jacobeans in justice and the processes of law. Litigation, taking one’s neighbour or other person to court, was a common feature of life in Shakespeare's England.

Providence and Fortune

In the 16th century the issue of divine Providence (the foreseeing guidance of God over the earth) was a key subject - the reformation and its political and social consequences made it a matter of real significance to the lives of many ordinary people. As an alternative to Providence, the idea of 'fortune' determining men's fate also became more important. Not surprisingly, however, the questioning of Providence provoked angry reactions from those with a traditional view of God's care of the world and around the end of the 16th century, these arguments were being widely debated.

The wheel of fortune

The Wheel of Fortune was a popular image reflecting the unreliable nature of one's fortunes. It was how the classical world explained the workings of Fate, providing an apt image of great men falling from power to misery and or death (central to the idea of tragedy). Fortuna, goddess of Fate, was frequently depicted as blindfolded to express the arbitrariness and impartiality of good or bad luck.

In the Middle Ages, though the wheel image was often invoked, it was increasingly connected with the will of God.  God - omnipotent and omniscient - planned everything. A fortunate rise in luck or an unforeseen disaster were not the work of untrustworthy Fate but of Providence. Thomas Cooper, an Elizabethan bishop, commented that what 'we call Fortune is nothing but the hand of God, working by causes and for causes that we know not.' Nature was 'nothing by the finger of God working in his creatures' and 'whenever misery or plagues happeneth to man, it cometh not by chance, but by the assured providence of God.'

First performance

Scholars believe Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of King Lear around 1605-6. The title page of the 1608 Quarto edition dates the first performance of the play to Saint Stephen's (Boxing) Day in 1606. There is only evidence of one other performance of the play – in Yorkshire in 1610 – until after the Restoration.

Sources for the play

12th century Latin History of Kingdom of Britain, which then influenced Henry Higgins’ (1574) Mirour for Magistrates (Elizabethan version Shakespeare would have known) Raphael Holinshed’s (1577) Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (one of Shakespeare’s favourites)  Considered to be historically true (Leir) – a story told many times. A popular story since the middle ages.  All stories end in Lear reinstated and Cordelia alive. An anonymous play about Lear and his daughters performed by the Queen’s Men in 1594 - it’s believed Shakespeare acted in this.  A tragi-comedy, it has a resolved ending where Lear is reinstated to the throne, Cordelia lives, in fact every single character survives. It did not have the Fool, Oswald, Lear as fully mad nor a storm scene.  In fact, Kiernan Ryan, in the Penguin edition Introduction states that Shakespeare, ‘erased virtually every trace of his source’s Christian vision, leaving his characters marooned in an altogether bleaker, pagan universe.’

Nahum Tate: rewriting Lear

The restoration of the monarchy in England in 1660 marked the return of Charles II as king (1660–85) following the period of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth. In general, the term is used to denote roughly homogenous styles of literature that centre on a celebration of or reaction to the restored court of Charles II.  The Restoration Period a number of Shakespeare’s plays brought back to the stage but to suit the aesthetics and political tastes of the new age.

In 1681 Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear, leaving Lear alive and restored to the throne. Cordelia and Edgar marry. Tate’s revision- tragi comedy. Order restored!

Shakespeare’s Lear: “Too horrible, too comfortless to be enjoyable” (Tate)

It’s believed Shakespeare’s original text was not performed again until the Victorian era. 

Quarto/ Folio

The King Lear Quarto (1608) and Folio (1623) are significantly different texts, with the Folio omitting around 300 lines of the Quarto while adding about 100 new lines. Key differences include the absence of the "mock trial" scene and the discussion between Kent and a Gentleman in the Folio. The Folio also weakens the characters of Albany and Kent while strengthening Edgar's role, potentially shifting the play's conclusion and mood. Modern editions typically conflate both texts to create a single, complete version.