There is another possible “source” for the play. An old courtier and “Gentleman Pensioner,” Brian Annesley, was suffering from senility. Two of his daughters wished him to be declared insane, and thus “altogether unfit to govern himself or his estate.”1 But a third daughter, by the name of Cordell or Cordelia, pleaded on her father’s behalf to Lord Cecil. After her father’s death in the summer of 1604, in fact, Cordell inherited most of his property. Cordell Annesley then went on to marry Sir William Harvey, Southampton’s stepfather. The case was well known, even beyond the Southampton circle, and indeed it may have prompted the revival of the old version of King Leir in 1605. It was a common enough occurrence for a contemporary sensation to be staged in the playhouses. It could have been performed by the Queen’s Men at the Red Bull, for example, a playhouse that had been built in 1605 for just such popular or populist drama with what Thomas Dekker called its “unlettered” audience “of porters and carters.”2
But King Lear leaves its sources far behind. Shakespeare removes the Christian allusions of the earlier drama, and gives it a thoroughly pagan atmosphere. This is a play in which the gods have turned silent. Shakespeare also strips away the romance elements, and fashions his plot out of disloyalty and ingratitude. The happy finale of the original King Leir, for example, is abandoned here for the numinous and tragic end of the protagonists. He invented the death of Cordelia cradled in her father’s arms, a scene not to be found in any of the sources. The unremitting horror of that conclusion has prompted one eminent critic, Frank Kermode, to postulate the play’s “unsparing cruelty” and “an almost sadistic attitude to the spectator.”3 Certainly the death of Cordelia would have come as an unhappy surprise to anyone acquainted only with the old play. King Lear is deeper and darker than any presumed original, with the forces of transcendence somewhere at work within it.
There are images throughout the play of the human body being wracked and tortured, as if Shakespeare were invoking the image of the Divine Human torn and dismembered. By slow degrees the wheel is turned, and all is thrown into agony and confusion. The play also elicits some of Shakespeare’s most enduring preoccupations, particularly that of the father and daughter. The family, and conflict within the family, are the bases of the play itself. Indeed the family is at the centre of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy; more than any other contemporary dramatist he is concerned with familial conflict. The action of King Lear itself exists only within the context of domestic hostility and rage. Lear and Cordelia are reunited, if not necessarily reconciled, and anticipate the family reunions of the later plays where in particular father and daughter achieve a living harmony — whether it be Pericles and Marina, Leontes and Perdita, Prospero and Miranda, Cymbeline and Imogen. The Latinate sonority of the daughters’ names suggests, too, that they are in part formal or primal figures of filial love. In the earlier plays, by contrast, fathers and daughters are at odds — Capulet and Juliet, Shylock and Jessica, Leonato and Hero, Brabantio and Desdemona, Egeus and Hermia, Baptista and Katherina, are the most prominent examples. It is a pattern too persistent to be altogether neglected. In the late plays, when Shakespeare himself was reaching the end of his life, an ageing father is reunited with a long-absent daughter; there may be feelings of guilt and shame associated with this absence, but all is forgiven. There are rarely mothers and daughters in Shakespeare’s plays. The essential bond is father and daughter. It may not be the pattern of his life, but it is clearly the pattern of his imagination.
There is another aspect of his dramaturgy that generally goes unremarked. In modern drama the accepted context is one of naturalism, which certain playwrights then work up into formality or ritual. In the early seventeenth century the essential context was one of ritualism and formality, to which Shakespeare might then add touches of realism or naturalism. We must reverse all modern expectations, therefore, if we are properly to comprehend King Lear.
There are many differences between the quarto and the folio editions of the play, to such an extent that the authoritative Oxford collection of Shakespeare’s drama prints two separate versions as if they were indeed two distinct plays. The quarto play was entitled The History of King Lear, and the folio play The Tragedy of King Lear. It seems that the first version was revised some five years after it was performed, and at that stage the newly fashionable act and scene divisions were introduced. The late folio omits three hundred lines of the early quarto, and adds a further one hundred “new”lines. In the quarto version there is a clear indication that Cordelia is leading a French army on English soil, where in the folio version the emphasis is upon domestic rather than foreign imbroglios. Cordelia is a stronger presence in the quarto than in the folio.
Since certain of the omitted lines reveal the presence of a French army on English soil, they may have been removed at the behest of the Master of the Revels. But it is much more likely that Shakespeare was responding to dramatic imperatives; the earlier version did not sufficiently isolate and clarify the figure of Lear. It scattered interest and effect, which could more usefully be focused upon the single tragic individual. It is the difference, perhaps, between the “history” and the “tragedy” on the respective title-pages. The later version is a more concise and more concentrated play, with greater attention to the pace of the action. The hundreds of minor changes between the two versions, compatible with a rewriting at speed by a dramatist absorbed in his work, also reveal the work of a thoroughly dramatic imagination, intent upon wholly theatrical effects. They prove beyond any possible doubt that Shakespeare was not averse to extensive revision and rewriting of his material, when occasion demanded it. His was always a work in progress.
CHAPTER 80. My Life Hath in This Line Some Interest
Shakespeare had returned to Stratford by the summer of 1607, at the very latest, in order to attend the marriage of his oldest daughter. Susannah Shakespeare, named as a recusant in the previous year, had now outwardly conformed; this may have been to facilitate the wedding itself. In any case she was marrying a man of Puritan belief, John Hall, so there was no great religious prejudice in the family itself.
On 5 June William Shakespeare processed with his family to the church where at the altar, in ritual fashion, he relinquished his daughter to her new husband. In the marriage settlement he had promised them the 127 acres of Old Stratford he had purchased from the Combes five years before. There is every reason to suppose that Susannah was his favourite child. Certainly she was singled out in his will for preferential treatment. She may in fact have inherited something of his spirit, and was described on her tombstone as being “Witty above her sexe” and “Wise to salvation.” The memorialist added that “something of Shakespeare was in that,” so at the time she must have been recognised as in some ways resembling her father. She could also sign her own name, a skill which her sister Judith did not possess.
Her spouse, John Hall, was a doctor. Since in his later drama Shakespeare himself displays the utmost respect for doctors, the union no doubt had his blessing. The bridegroom was only eleven years younger than Shakespeare himself, and so Susannah was marrying a figure of some authority not unlike her father. He had been born in Bedfordshire, and had attended Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. He had travelled in France for a period, and had set up practice at Stratford some years before his betrothal. The newly married couple lived in New Place for a period after the wedding, but it is possible that they soon purchased a house a few hundred yards away in the area designated on the maps as “Old Town.” A timber-framed house of the period still survives, and has become known as “Hall’s Croft.” But the Halls returned to New Place after Shakespeare’s death.