King Lear

Abstract

‘Some Stonehenge of the mind’ G.K. Hunter says is the impression made by King Lear;¹ the image is a suggestive one because it reflects a common modern sense of the play’s primitivism. But it is difficult to define how much of this notion of the primitive or prehistorical, the legendary or mythic, would have attached to the story of Lear in Shakespeare’s time. Lear, apparently an invention of Geoffrey of Monmouth as one of the successors to Brutus, Britain’s Trojan descended first founder, by the time he reached Holinshed in the sixteenth century had been historicised into the chronicle: ‘Leir the sonne of Baldud was admitted ruler over the Britaines, in the yeare of the world 3105, at what time Joas reigned in Juda’ (Bullough, VII, 316). Yet there was some shakiness in the historical status of this sort of record, and the antiquarian Camden was sceptical of Lear as the eponymous founder of Leicester (Leir-cestre): ‘that it was built by the fabulous King Leir, let who will believe for me’. Its origins in folk-tale, its adoption into chronicle, its associations with myths of origin, gave to the storystuff of King Lear its complex quality.