Page 14 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

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INTRODUCTION

I. Sources and Date

The story of King Lear and his daughters is a very old
one, and it had been told by many writers before it
supplied Shakespeare with the main plot of his mightiest
tragedy. Shakespeare apparently knew four renderings
of the tale. He knew it as it is chronicled in the pages of
Holinshed. He knew it as it is told in the second book of
The Faerie Qyeene. He knew it related—as coming from
the mouth of the youngest daughter, after her death—
by John Higgins in the Mirror for Magistrates. And he
knew it already presented in dramatic form, by a play-
wright whose identity we do not know, as The True
Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters t
Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordelia.
The reader who wishes to go into the question of the
relationship between Shakespeare's play and its sources
should consult first the beautiful and too little known
1
lecture on the subject by R. W. Chambers, and for
details an article published in The Library* by Sir Walter
3
Greg in 1940. Greg lists some two score parallels be-
tween Shakespeare's version and the Leir play. It would,
seem, as he says, that, as Shakespeare wrote; 'ideas,
phrases, cadences from the old play still floated in his
memory below the level of conscious thought, and that
now and again one or another helped to fashion the words
that flowed from his pen'. He shows also that there are

1
King Lean the first W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture, by
R. W. Chambers (Glasgow, 1940).
3
4th series, XX (1939-40), 377 ff.
3
There was room for only a few of these in our
Notes.