Prophecy and emendation: Merlin, Chaucer, Lear’s Fool

Abstract

This article traces the critical and textual reception of the Fool’s cryptic prophecy in the Folio text of King Lear. I argue that critics have overlooked the widespread early modern circulation of the speech’s main source, six lines of verse ubiquitously known as ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy.’ Reading the Fool’s prophecy as a deliberate riposte to this famous poem, I propose that William Warburton’s 1747 emendation offers the most intertextually engaged and politically subversive text of the speech.