Sources for King Lear

The kernel of the Lear story can be found in a fairy tale. In ‘The Goosegirl at the Well’, a king decides that the inheritance of his daughters will depend on which loves him the best. The eldest says, ‘I love my father as dearly as the sweetest sugar’. The next says, ‘I love my father as dearly as my prettiest dress.’ The youngest is at first silent, then says she does not know how to compare her love, and finally says, ‘The best food does not please me without salt, therefore I love my father like salt’. The father replies, ‘If thou lovest me like salt, thy love shall also be repaid thee with salt’. The girl is given a sack of salt and cast out, living disguised as an ugly goose-girl under the protection of an old woman, until her parents repent and come to find her. [1]

The first story about ‘King Leir’ is in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1135). Leir, having been badly treated by his elder daughters and their husbands, the dukes of Cornwall and Albany, defeats them with the help of Cordeilla and her husband; however, after Leir’s death, Cordeilla is defeated and imprisoned by her nephews, and kills herself. [2] Geoffrey embedded the folktale motif in a ‘historical’ account, warning of the consequences of a divided kingdom, and tying the story in with known places: Leir ‘built upon the river Sore a City called in the British Tongue Kaerleir, in the Saxon Leircestre’ (Leicester). [3]   The Historia was not translated into English in the Elizabethan period, but versions of the story existed in verse, in John Higgins’ Mirrour for Magistrates (1574) and Spenser’s Fairie Queene (1590). [4] The story was retold in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, [5] whose description of Gonorilla saying she loves Leir ‘more than toong could express’ [6] may have inspired Goneril’s line in King Lear, ‘Sir, I do love you more than word can wield the matter’. [7]

Like Hamlet, King Lear had a predecessor on the English stage. Published in 1605, The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters; Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella is thought to have been extant since 1594. In that year, a play called The most famous Chronicle historye of Leire Kinge of England and his three Daughters was entered in the Stationers’ Register, and a play called Kinge leare was performed at the Rose by ‘the Quenes men and my lord of Sussex to geather’. It is assumed that all of these references are to the same play. [8] Shakespeare’s version was not entered in the Stationers’ Register until 1607, and the First Quarto was printed in 1608. [9] The Leir play is perhaps the most obvious immediate source for Shakespeare’s play, yet it is much simpler than Shakespeare’s King Lear. The daughters are called Gonorill, Ragan and Cordella. As the play begins, Gonorill and Ragan discover that Leir plans to test their love for him. They agree to flatter Leir so as to receive portions of the kingdom and marry the Kings of Cornwall and Cambria. They plot against Cordella, thinking that if she refuses to marry the suitor Leir favours, Leir will take this as evidence of a lack of daughterly love. Leir dispossesses Cordella, but is then rejected by Gonorill and Ragan, who plot to have him killed. Leir escapes and is reunited with Cordella. Along with Cordella’s husband, the King of Gallia, Leir and Perillus (the equivalent of Kent in King Lear) journey to Britain to restore Leir to his throne. Although victorious, Leir relinquishes his kingdom to the Gallian King.

The subplot in King Lear involving Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund is missing from Leir, as is the tragic ending involving the deaths of Cordelia and Lear himself. The Gloucester subplot is thought to have been taken from Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590). Sidney tells of a king who has been deceived by his illegitimate son. Like Gloucester, he is blinded and cast out. He is led through a stormy winter landscape by his legitimate son, whom he has begged to lead him ‘to the toppe of this rocke, thence to cast himselfe headlong to death’. [10] In Lear, Gloucester asks Edgar to bring him to the brink of ‘a cliff whose high and bending head/ Looks fearfully in the confined deep;/ [...] From that place/ I shall no leading need’. [11] Another influence of Arcadia on the Gloucester subplot comes from an episode in which the King of Iberia is tricked into believing that his son is planning to murder him, just as Edmund deceives Gloucester into believing that Edgar wishes to kill him. [12] Lear’s madness may have been inspired by the real-life case of Brian Annesley, whose two eldest daughters tried to have him declared insane in 1603, but whose youngest daughter, Cordell, appealed on his behalf. [13] Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures (1603), contains vivid descriptions of mad and ‘possessed’ people wandering the countryside, which Shakespeare is thought to have adapted for Lear. [14]

Shakespeare’s deft reworking of folktale, verse, chronicle, story, pamphlet and play elements, plus his addition of a tragic denouement, creates a more nuanced and complex plot than is to be found in any of his individual sources.

Karen Kay