A NEW SOURCE AND AN OLD DATE FOR KING LEAR

Abstract

I T has long been recognized that the original composition of King Lear must have taken place between I6 March I603, when Samuel Harsnet's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures was entered in the Stationers' Register, and 26 December I606, when the play was performed at court. Attempts to fix a more precise date have failed, in part because of continuing uncertainty about the exact relation between the completion of Shakespeare's play and the publication of one of its principal sources, the anonymous King Leir, entered in the Stationers' Register on 8 May I605. E. K. Chambers concluded that Shakespeare's play must have been composed after the publication of its source; W. W. Greg argued that the theatrical success of Shakespeare's play itself prompted the publication of King Leir, which Shakespeare might have seen in manuscript. I hope to demonstrate that King Lear shows clear signs of the pervasive influence of another work which, at the very earliest, could not have been available until after April I605; if I am right, the discovery of this new source should resolve the dispute between Greg and Chambers (in Chambers's favour). The work I offer as a new source is Eastward Ho, the collaboration by Jonson, Chapman, and Marston which landed at least two of them in prison in i605.2 This play is itself so notorious, for purely historical reasons, and so often read for purely literary reasons, that one could be forgiven a certain scepticism that any remarkable relationship with King Lear could have been so long overlooked. I can only suggest that those who have examined Eastward Ho have usually been absorbed by the authorship problem, or the