[The only one of his “discoveries” that he ever felt “bitter” about in after years, wrote Berryman to the National Endowment for the Humanities (May 31, 1971), “is proof that Shakespeare used Camden’s Remaines for Lear, because the other man who noticed this (S. Musgrove, in “The Nomenclature of King Lear,” Review of English Studies, VII:27 [July 1956], pp. 294–98) did not also see that in fact both plots of that intricate play formed in his mind while reading the few pages of Camden during which occur all the main names of Shakespeare’s characters—a circumstance dazzling enough for me to plan a chapter-opening around it …”]
NOT ENOUGH ATTENTION, perhaps, in the long and busy course of Shakespearean study, has been paid to the question of why the poet took up the themes he did when he did. This is a topic interesting in itself and crucial to biography. Perhaps it has been avoided precisely because students felt that nothing could be accomplished here, that our biographical materials were too meagre to make promising any enquiry into the nature and operation of the deep impulses that presumably guide the selection of themes, in an artist, for his most important works. But the general picture that scholarship gives, for it gives one, is very different from any suggested by such hesitation. One is asked to see William Shakespeare looking around for a subject for his next play, either quite at random or at the dictates of opportunism. One is asked to imagine a poet entirely unlike any other major poet we know anything about. It is an unfortunate by-product
of Henry N. Paul’s valuable study of the composition of Macbeth (The Royal Play of “Macbeth,” New York: Macmillan, 1950) that a most exceptional situation has the effect of seeming usual. Shakespeare certainly, with this play, planned to hypnotize the impatient King, James, though he had also other concerns hardly touched by Mr. Paul. But what other plays are so explicitly, in part, determined? Possibly: Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor. The bulk of his creation remains, plays coming mysteriously one by one into being. One notices at once that the father-dominated tragedy, Hamlet, must have been finally handled by the poet at a time very close to the death of his father in 1600 and that the mother-dominated tragedy, Coriolanus, must have been written close to the death of his mother in 1609, but upon examination each of the cases bristles with difficulties. The poet had twin children and in the early Comedy of Errors he doubles Plautus’ twins, and he shows a certain liking for twins later as well, but this does not take us very far. The lengthy mood dominations proposed by Dowden three-quarters of a century ago, and still largely accepted, tell us little of particular plays. Nor has much agreement yet been reached among critics who would like to see eight of the history plays as two gigantic tetralogies, laid down and carried out as a philosophical history of the English world; other critics see them arriving piecemeal, out of order, fortuitously. Shakespeare never, so far as we know, lifted a play out of (so to speak) the newspapers, like Chapman in the lost Keep the Widow Waking and the author of A Yorkshire Tragedy. Even if he had done so, we should still want to know whether enquiry was not desirable into why he had done this, at this time.
Another thing we really know nothing about is how he conceived his plays, whether over weeks or months of brooding, or with unbelievable rapidity. I think one is more likely to feel comfortable with the second of these ideas, which may also seem to receive a certain tangential support from the tradition that he scratched up some form of The Merry Wives in a fortnight; but then that was only The Merry Wives, largely a matter of writing—and we know that Shakespeare wrote easily and rapidly: the career tells us so, and his first editors do. But if we like better the second idea (upon no evidence), it may seem more desirable than ever to form some notion of the impulses at whose bidding he abruptly made an immense dramatic work out of some shabby, thin old story known to him for years, like that of King Leir—one perhaps already sometimes considered as a subject, one perhaps not.1
Wilfrid Perrett was quite clear half a century ago that Shakespeare used [William] Camden’s Remaines for King Lear, but truths are lost more readily than come by, and Kenneth Muir tells us now in Shakespeare’s Sources (London: Methuen, 1957, I, p. 143) that the evidence is “inconclusive.” His evidence may be. It is true that he nowhere notices Perrett’s book, the subtlest comprehensive study ever of the sources of a single Shakespearean plot to that date (1904).2
The old play (acted by the Queen’s and Sussex’s Men on April 6, 1594), so long familiar to him that some dozen years before 1605 he had modelled on one of its scenes [no. xix in the Malone Society reprint]3 the scene of Clarence’s murder, tells the flickering tale of Leir’s determination to resign his crown and divide his kingdom equally among his three daughters. Skalliger suggests the division should be “As is their worth, to them that loue professe.” Leir rejects this thought, but suddenly invents a stratagem to get his youngest daughter, Cordella, who has vowed to marry for love, to marry where he likes (he likes a King of Britanny): he will try which of the three loves him best and, while they vie, take Cordella “at the vantage.” The plot fails, and the King of France, who has come to woo, carries her off. Sorry to see Leir, deceived by flattery, cast off Cordella, a noble named Perillus pleads for her and is rebuked. When the inheriting daughters have turned of course on their father, this man calls him “the myrour of mild patience” and follows him to France, where all ends well. Contrapuntal to Perillus has been the daughters’ murderous messenger.
Shakespeare also knew odd versions of the story, clearly in various books he had read: in Holinshed, in The Mirror of Magistrates, in Book II of The Faerie Queene, perhaps even in Geoffrey of Monmouth. But the differences between these accounts and the old play make it clear to me, as to the elder [H. H.] Furness [in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, V: King Lear, Philadelphia, 1880], that the version dominant in his mind when he came to make out his own play was the theatrical one.
As for the story in Arcadia, first to be noticed by Mrs. Lennox, is it likely that Shakespeare had waited fifteen years to read the Arcadia?—in order, moreover, to find the story in Book II, chapter 10, bitterly paralleling the Leir story, and use it at once? Unsatisfactory and reluctant as our ideas are about Shakespeare’s reading, I suppose this will not strike anyone as plausible, and I assume that Sidney’s story too had been long familiar to him by 1605. It concerns an old man, once Prince of Paphlagonia, blind, and led by his son Leonatus, who at the instigation of his bastard son, Plexirtus, had once
ordered that this legitimate son should be led away and murdered. Leonatus escaped, to serve as a soldier, and now attends his father, who has meanwhile been blinded and driven out by the bastard. Misery and remorse alike make the father beg the son to lead him to the top of a rock that he may destroy himself. This story too ends well, the blind king restored, setting the crown on Leonatus’s head and dying at once of “excesse of comfort.”
Our problem is when, how, and why these stories fused.
Now, Malone thought, and Perrett agreed, that one detail in the work Shakespeare was to write came neither from the Leir stories nor from Sidney but from a section, “Wise Speeches,” in a book brand-new, Camden’s Remaines concerning Britaine of 1605.4 Shakespeare is not likely to have been long in coming on or being directed to this book, which praises him by name along with other modern authors. In considering the apparent effect upon him of the following passage, we may need to remind ourselves that he was a man as well as an author; whether he was in search of a subject for a new play we do not know, but he was certainly the father of two supremely unmarried daughters.
Ina, King of West-Saxons, had three daughters, of whom vpon a time he demanded whether they did love him, and so would do during their lives above all others; the two elder sware deepely they would, the yongest, but the wisest told her father flatly without flattery, That albeit she did love, honour, and reverence him, and so would while she lived, as much as nature and daughterly dutie at the vttermost could expect: Yet she did thinke that one day it would come to passe, that she should affect another more fervently, meaning her husband, where she were married: Who being made one flesh with her, as God by commaundement had told, and nature had taught hir she was to cleave fast to, forsaking father and mother, kiffe and kinne … One referreth this to the daughters of king Leir.
This is on here . We read on. Page 184: “King Eadgar of England.” 185: “Edmund the king of the East-Angles … forced to seeke his safetie by flight.” 187, “Earle of Kent.” 196, “Robert Earl of Gloucester base sonne to” and “some English … put out his eies.” 197, “from the cliffes there in a cleere day discovered the coast of Ireland … Merlins prophecies.” 201, “the Duke of Burgundie.” 204, “Earle of Cornewall.” 207 (Queene Eleanor, to Edward I, quoted as an example of “a most loving and kinde wife”), “I may reserve other to a fitter place”; cf. Cordelia’s still-loving “I would prefer him to a fitter place” than her sisters’ kindness. And back on page 65, in the
section on names, we find “Oswold, Ger. House-ruler or Steward” (on page 37 it is “Oswald”).
Here, within two dozen pages, we have every missing name of importance in the plays5—every name, in fact, except those of the three daughters, long familiar, and those of Oswald, Curan, and Caius, and the source of Oswald’s must be the passage on page 65, and even “Caius” is given earlier in the section on names, as meaning “Probus.” I take it that there is something here to be accounted for, and confess I do not know what will account for it except what I now suggest—that the reply of Ina’s youngest daughter was like a sword in Shakespeare’s heart, and that during the ensuing minutes, or hours, he conceived his entire tragedy, except possibly for the Fool, not merely fusing Sidney’s characters and situation with those of the old play but naming the new people as he turned the pages—in what state of mind and passion we can hardly imagine, but very very busy, perhaps as busy as any man has been.
[This essay was not finished; but in earlier passages Berryman explained further:]
What is new here, and apparently seized his attention, is the reason given by the youngest daughter: that in marrying she will inevitably forsake her father. Shakespeare was forty, both his daughters were too long unmarried though splendid matches; he must have hung on to them as well as wished them married; Dr. John Hall, who would two years hence marry Susanna, had been several years settled prominently in his Stratford practice.
Upon this argument—which I do not expect scholars to believe—the time limits for the play are narrow, and I think we have reason to think the play was wholly conceived with extraordinary velocity: in a day, or an evening: at a single reading of a few pages in Camden.
Take Shakespeare’s mind as attached strongly here, on personal grounds, to the Lear story, which indeed he may have been thinking for fifteen years of some time dramatizing. Add the singular congruity of the figure of Lear in the story, crotchety, peremptory, with the ruler in his most recent play—(not Othello, which is earlier, but) Measure for Measure of 1604—who also pretends to give up his power. But the Lear story is empty, for a Shakespearean tragedy of the great period: there is no all-possessing motive, as in Hamlet, nor any grand antagonist, like lago. A subplot then; and thrust itself into his mind a story from the fifteen-year-old Arcadia, of a bastard son usurping and blinding his king-father, who then wandering is succored
by the legal son whom he had driven out at the hypocritical instigation of the bastard. Here are two fathers who have favoured the wrong children. More closely, I suspect Shakespeare remembered—or noticed when he looked the story up, as we will find he did—a speech given by Sidney to the Paphlagonian King: “I had left my self nothing but the name of a King.”
BUT THE PRODUCT OF this creation (of this impulse and reflexion and linking and elaboration) was a universe seething with ingratitude, with treachery; and I think [ … ] that this ingratitude was the emotional governor of the choice of the Lear story, and of the fastening to it of the Paphlagonian story (the youngest daughter’s reply only pressing the button, as appearing to justify what nowhere else in the play can be justified: betrayal, that is, of the realm by the King, of a loyal nobleman by his King [app’ly: opposite], of father-king by daughters, of daughter by father, of father by [bastard] son, of brother, etc. etc.). Now why ingratitude?
1946–52