HE story of King Lear and his three daughters was originally told by Geffrey of Monmouth, from whom Holinshed transcribed it; and in his Chronicle Shakespeare had certainly read it: but he seems to have been more indebted to the old anonymous play, printed by Simon Stafford for John Wright in 1605, under the following title of "The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella. As it hath bene diuers and sundry times lately acted." It is reprinted in the Collection of Plays on which Shakespeare founded, published by Steevens in 1779; which was entered on the Stationers' books by Edward White, May 14, 1594; and there are two other entries of the same piece, May 8, 1605; and Nov. 26, 1607. From the Mirror of Magistrates Shakespeare has taken the hint for the behaviour of the Steward, and the reply of Cordelia to her father, concerning her future marriage. The episode of Gloucester and his sons must have been borrowed from Sidney's Arcadia, no trace of it being found in the other sources of the fable. The reader will also find the story of King Lear in the recently published Metrical Chronicle of Layamon; in the second book and tenth canto of Spenser's Faerie Queene, and in the fifteenth chapter of the third book of Warner's Albion's England. Camden, in his Remaines, under the head of Wise Speeches, tells a similar story to this of Lear, of Ina, king of the West Saxons; which, if the thing ever happened, probably was the real origin of the fable. The story has found its way into many ballads and other metrical pieces; one ballad will be found in Dr. Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, vol. i. 3d edit. The story is also to be found in the unpublished Gesta Romanorum, and in the Romance of Perceforest. The whole of this play could not have been written till after 1603. Harsnet's Declaration of Popish Impostures, to which it contains so many references, and from which the fantastic names of several spirits are borrowed, was not published till that year. It must have been produced before the Christmas of 1606; for in the entry of Lear on the Stationers' Register, on the 26th of Novem ber, 1607, it is expressly recorded to have been played, during the preceding Christmas, before his majesty at Whitehall. The entry is as follows:-"26 Nov. 1607. Na. Butter and Jo. Busby.] Entered for their copie and 'thands of Sir Geo. Bucke, Kt. and the Wardens, a booke called Mr. Willm. Shakespeare his Historye of Kinge Lear, as yt was played before the King's Majestie at Whitehall, upon St. Stephen's night at Christmas last, by his Majesties Servants playing usually at the Globe on the Bankside." Malone, therefore, with great probability, places the date of the composition in 1605. An anonymous writer, who has instituted a comparison between the Lear of Shakespeare and the Edipus of Sophocles, and justly given the palm to the former, closes his essay with the following sentence, to which every reader of taste and feeling will subscribe: "There is no detached character in Shakespeare's writings which displays so vividly as this the hand and mind of a master; which exhibits so great a variety of excellence, and such amazing powers of delineation; so intimate a knowledge of the human heart, with such exact skill in tracing the progress and the effects of its more violent and more delicate passions. It is in the management of this character more especially that he fills up that grand idea of a perfect poet, which we delight to image to ourselves, but despair of seeing realised.*" In the same work from whence this is extracted will be found an article, entitled "Theatralia," attributed to the pen of Charles Lamb, in which are the following striking animadversions on the liberty taken in changing the catastrophe of this tragedy in representation. "The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery with which they mimic the storm he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passions are terrible as a volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that rich sea, his mind, with all its vast riches: it is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of age; while we read it we see not Lear, but we are Lear; we are in his mind; we are sustained by a grandeur, which baffles the malice of his daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, unmethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will on the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to do *The Reflector, vol. ii. p. 139, on Greek and English Tragedy. with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when, in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that they themselves are old!' What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw it about more easily. A happy ending!—as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation-why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station,as if at his years, and with his experience, any thing was left but to die." |