Dragon Fathers and Unnatural Children: Warring Generations in <i>King Lear</i> and Its Sources

Abstract

Most productions of King Lear today center on Lear: a king, a father, a man who smells of mortality. (1) Gloucester's experience in second plot simply repeats Lear's in another register--on a lower social level, or on a physical rather than psychological level. But 1608 quarto title page suggests that seventeenth-century audiences may have seen play differently: True Chronicle Historie of Life and Death of King Lear and his three Daughters. With unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam (italics added). The quarto subtitle emphasizes family, not father (Lear and his daughters, Edgar, son of Gloucester), and breaks symmetry between Lear's two plots by naming one after a father and other after a son. Lear equates--indeed merges--father with child on heath, when he recognizes Edgar as the thing itself (3.4.108-9), image of his own suffering. Edgar makes comparison as well, after learning that Lear is childed as I fathered (3.6.109). Edgar and Lear are linked elsewhere in text, as their common enemies are eager to point out. He is Lear's godson, one Lear named, one who keeps company with Lear's knights (2.1.91-97). Finally, as in no other version of Lear's story, Edgar inherits Lear s kingdom (5.3.321-28). (2) This essay argues that title page balance between father-king and child-heir illuminates both play's human tragedy and its political relevance at beginning of seventeenth century. By balancing a father's story with a child's, Shakespeare's play remains closer to original plot of King Leir (c. 159?), his primary source, than we have realized. Leir is divided more equally between Leir and Cordella in just this way. Shakespeare's Cordelia disappears from middle of play after she is banished, and Shakespeare shows only results of her actions, as, for example, when Kent reads her letter about arriving at Dover. But, in original play, audiences watched Cordella's new life in France, presented in scenes alternating with Leir's, and saw her making plans to rescue her father. Shakespeare's play crowds Cordelia out of main plot, but he maintains Leir's balance by dividing its story into two separate plots: life and death of King Lear, who inherits king's role from original, and unfortunate life of Edgar, who inherits Cordella's role. What Shakespeare does change is moral imbalance in Leir's presentation of father and child. In old play, it is clear that Leir is wrong and Cordella is right. She is sinned against, he is sinning. Such moral clarity was common in plays at time. Robert Greene's (?) Selimus (1591?), for example, reverses Leir's familial guilt. As its prologue promises, Here shall you see wicked son pursue / His wretched father with remorseless spite. The wicked son is guilty; wretched father is wholly innocent. (3) Shakespeare's dual plots suggest instead that father and child are both sinned against and sinning. For this darker vision of human relationships, Shakespeare moves outside old Leir play entirely. He borrows from Montaigne's unsentimental account of nature of fathers and children, who have good reason to hate each other as compete for scarce resources. (4) Generations always threaten to eat each other like creatures of deep. They must, if try to preserve themselves. Every father wants to keep his daughter to and subordinate his son's needs to his own, even if he isn't a foolish old man who has ever but slenderly known himself (1.1.295-96). Parents harm their children; they may not mean to, but do as Philip Larkin put it. (5) At same time, children, even if aren't evil bastards out for themselves like Edmund, hurt their parents. Children, Montaigne says, cannot in truth either be or live except at expense of our being and our life. …