The Lear World, A Study of “King Lear” in Its Dramatic Context by John Reibetanz

Abstract

Two details: Why does Hamilton discuss the logical divisions of sonnets in terms which are appropriate to rhyme-schemes: sestets, quatrains, couplets, and something which he calls “triplets” (which at least avoids confusion with the prosodic term “tercets” ) ? In an otherwise most decently produced book one faultily indented line of verse on p. io i, another on p. 103, and a third on p. 104 can be corrected in the inevitable reprint. a . k e n t h ieatt / The University of Western Ontario John Reibetanz, The Lear World, A Study of "King Lear” in Its Dramatic Context (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). xi, 142. Cloth $12.50, paper $5.95 The aim of this study, as Reibetanz explains it, is to set King Lear in the specifically Jacobean dramatic tradition, and to show how Shakespeare makes use of contemporary dramatic conventions and devices to shape our response to the play. The method requires a frequent reference to works by other Jacobean dramatists, but its claim to our attention rests not on what it has to tell us about them directly, so much as on the light they can be made to cast on King Lear. Reibetanz fully recognizes his debt to past and current scholar­ ship in this field, but his concern is to apply that scholarship rather than to extend it. No attempt is made to assess how much Shakespeare contributed to the unfolding of the Jacobean tradition, and how much he learned from others. “I hope to make it clear that the object of attention is not documen­ tary sources but a context of living, evolving traditions, where Shakespeare gave at least as much as he took, anticipated as often as he recalled” (p. 7). The first chapter deals with the “self-enclosed” nature of the “worlds” pre­ sented in Jacobean drama, and in more detail with the “world” of King Lear. In particular it stresses the domination of the dramatic pattern by abstract ideas, and shows how firmly rooted in contemporary tradition was Shake­ speare’s otherwise astonishing freedom of dramatic invention. The second chapter deals with the apparently disconnected arrangement of scenes in Jacobean drama and in King Lear, with the emblematic significance they convey, and with the general absence of narrative continuity of the kind we look for in the novel, and find to some degree in the earlier tragedies of Shakespeare. This enables Reibetanz convincingly to answer Bradley’s doubts about the construction of King Lear, and also to correct the emphasis of some later criticism. This is a useful and instructive chapter. In the third chapter Reibetanz deals with the “stage-managing” of the play — with its masterly theatricality — and with conventional themes and 360 configurations that were familiar to Shakespeare’s audience. The fourth chapter deals with the formal arrangement of characters into good and bad, and with contemporary and traditional views of fools and madmen. This —like the chapter on the absence of narrative continuity — helps to make clear how misleading must be any approach to the play which relies, as Bradley and many lesser critics have done, on standards of psychological naturalism. The last chapter raises questions of tragic inevitability, of poetic justice, and of the final import of the play. It is here that doubts are most likely to arise, and even here one has to say that Reibetanz, though he may move one to disagreement, is at least tackling the difficult questions of interpretation, when he might more prudently have left the reader to make his own applica­ tion of the useful comparisons with other Jacobean plays in the earlier chapters. There is of course always a danger, when pursuing a comparison of this kind, that necessary distinctions may be overlooked. Though Shake­ speare may usefully be seen in his Jacobean context, and though Reibetanz makes good use of this approach, distinctions are sometimes blurred. The disconnectedness of the Lear story, for example, is unlike the disconnectedness in the work of most of the Jacobeans; the difference is often that between a random collection of stones and a mountain blown apart by volcanic force. Reibetanz sometimes makes the necessary distinctions, as for example in Chapter 3...