September 29, 1998
Contact: Dick Hatfield Phone: 573-341-4328 [email protected]
"KING LEAR" AN OBJECT LESSON FOR KING JAMES, UMR PROFESSOR SAYS
ROLLA, Mo. -- Did William Shakespeare write "King Lear" as an object lesson for England's King James? A Shakespeare expert at the University of Missouri-Rolla thinks so, and also believes the play was first performed before King James' court, rather than at the Globe Theater.
In a paper presented Friday, Oct. 9, at a conference on manuscript studies in St. Louis, Dr. Nicholas Knight, professor of English at UMR, and Linda Kaufman, a UMR English major, say evidence from the 1608 quarto of "King Lear" indicate that Shakespeare and his troupe performed the play first at King James' Whitehall Palace in 1606. Other evidence from the stationer's register's manuscript entry for the quarto provide further support for their claim.
Their paper, "Manuscript Evidence for Shakespeare's Royal Performances: 1603-1613," was presented Friday, Oct. 9, at Manuscripta: the 25th Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies at Saint Louis University's Vatican Film Library in St. Louis.
Knight and Kaufman point to text from the title page of the first quarto of "King Lear," published in 1608 and now housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. The text notes that "King Lear" was "played before the King's Majesttie at Whitehall (King James' palace) upon S[t.] Stephens night in Christmas Hollidayes/By his Majesties servants playing usually at the Globe/on the Bankside."
The phrase "playing usually at the Globe," Knight says, indicates that the premier performance of "King Lear" was not at the Globe Theater, but at Whitehall.
"I do not assume, as editors do, that there must have originally been a performance at the Globe preceding that at Whitehall, only that those wishing to purchase a copy are assured that the presenters were so associated and there may have been a subsequent performance there," Knight writes. "In other words, until there is evidence to the contrary, I assume King Lear was first performed at court and was composed chiefly for the major members of that audience, King James himself."
Shakespeare led the "king's players" during King James' reign, and traditionally the St. Stephen's Night (Dec. 26) performances were new plays performed for the king. They were "directed toward King James' personality, family or personal concerns," Knight writes. The first recorded performance of "Hamlet," for example, was Dec. 26, 1603, and is set in Elsinore, where James' wife, Queen Anne, lived.
That "King Lear" was performed before King James in 1606 is further evidenced by the official stationer's register's manuscript entry for the play, Knight and Kaufman write. That entry, dated Nov. 26, 1607, notes that "King Lear" was "played before the kings majestie at Whitehall upon St. Stephens night at Christmas Last by this majesties servantes playinge usually at the Globe on the Bankside."
The phrase "playinge usually at the Globe" could be interpreted as meaning "as usual" or "as was custom," Knight says. But, he adds, "I prefer the sense that the manuscript received by the stationer's register for recording was that which was performed before the King and by his players usually but not in this case associated with the Globe."
"King Lear" closely parallels the life of King James, who was king of England at the time Shakespeare wrote the tragedy. As Knight explains, King James and Queen Anne had three children, as did King Lear. One of James' children, the daughter, got married and went to Bohemia, leaving two sons -- Henry and Charles -- to battle over the king's inheritance.
In the play, the references to James' family were thinly veiled, Knight and Kaufman point out. Like James, Lear has three children: a daughter exiled to France (Cordelia) and two remaining daughters, Regan and Goneril, whose husbands stand to inherit the kingdom equally from their father-in-law. Regan and Goneril are married to the dukes of Cornwall and Albany, respectively, which were the titles of James' two sons.
"Before Henry became the Prince of Wales at the time of the play, he was only the Duke of Cornwall title," Knight writes. "As for his younger brother, who had just become the Duke of York in 1605, from birth he had the title Duke of Albany."
The play also paralleled Shakespeare's own life, as he had two daughters.
"So, Shakespeare's 'King Lear' was not only for King James' court in its first performance, but the king would see, as Shakespeare did for his own daughters, that it was a play about leaving his inheritance to his sons," Knight writes.
To write such an object lesson for the king was a risky proposition. "If the king were directly represented in a play ... the text was censored and the actors, no matter how well meaning, were sent to prison," Knight explains. But Shakespeare was close to King James -- not only as an adviser, but also as a friend.
"Shakespeare wanted King James to be a good and lawful person," says Kaufman, a junior English major whose interest in Shakespeare stems from her plans to study law after graduation. "In order to help him, he would write plays that would appear to be about Shakespeare's own life but that also closely paralleled the king's. It was a method to try to help teach King James without being very brusque about it."
Knight is a Shakespeare scholar perhaps best known for his work to authenticate the bard's signature. In 1996, he went to the British Museum in London to look at a possible Shakespeare signature on the inside cover of a 1603 English translation of Montaigne, the French essayist. He compared that signature to one on a similar copy of Montaigne in the Folger Shakespeare Library and concluded that it, too, was an authentic Shakespeare signature.
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