King Lear in context: The cultural background, Keith Linley
SECTION 1 - The historical context: an overview
- Shakespeare’s age believed in imminent cataclysm, expected the apocalypse. Sunday sermons spoke of
the end of the world and the Last Judgement, visionaries predicted it in pamphlets and theologians and
painters depicted it in words and images.
- Jacobeans lived in fear of plague, starvation, social collapse and bloody catholic outrages or invasion.
- The play is a microcosm of a society disintegrating.
- The Armageddon wreckage portrayed in the last scene mirrors what some Jacobeans saw as they looked
around them.
- Though the setting is ostensibly pagan, the moral bases by which the audience judged what it saw are
biblical.
- Elizabeth I died in 1603 and King James VI of Scotland became James I of England. King Lear was
written between 1603 and 1606.
- The new king, ruling until 1625, was of a Scottish family, the Stuarts and they were a dynastic disaster.
None of them were an effective king and kingship is a key theme in Lear.
- James shirked the routines of work government involved, disliked contact with his people, drank heavily,
was extravagant, impulsive and tactless, constantly in debt, and in perpetual conflict with parliament.
- Religion was a major area of conflict. Catholic opposition to the new Church of England and Puritan
desires for freedom from tight central control created a constant battleground.
- The ‘new individualism’, another context, emerges in the self-centred ruthlessness of Goneril, Regan,
Edmund and Oswald.
- Despite all the official changes to religion, the essential beliefs in sin, virtue, salvation, the centrality of
Christ and the ubiquity of the Devil (the idea that he was everywhere, looking to tempt man) were the
same as they had always been.
- One feature of the period was the unceasing rise in prices, particularly of food, bringing about a decline in
the living standards of the poor, for wages did not rise. Rising numbers of poor put greater burdens on
Poor Relief in small, struggling rural communities and added to the elite’s fear of some monumental
uprising of the disenchanted.
- Economic difficulties, poverty, social conflict, religious dissent and political tensions relating to the role and
nature of monarchy and the role and authority of parliament all remained unresolved.
- Emerging problems are ignored or masked because the ruler disallows discussion of the. Elizabeth, for
example, passed several laws making it treason to even discuss who might succeed her. Such a ruler’s
death exposes the true state of things. Many of these features are reflected in the contexts of Lear.
- The plan to ‘divest’ himself of rule and the love test expose flawed thinking and suggest his decision
making in general may be faulty. In exposes and activates the fault lines in his family. Lear’s behaviour
raises the question, often asked in James’ time, of the place that councillors, personal advisors and
parliament should have in making state decisions.
- Attitudes to religion and freedom from church authority began to develop into resistance and science
began to displace old superstitions and belief in magic.
- Lear is a typical Jacobean play, dark, cynical, satirical, violent, psychological, exploring character and
motive.
SECTION 2 - The Elizabethan world order: from divinity to dust
- Strict hierarchy and organic harmony (everything being part of a whole and having a function to perform)
were the overriding principles of the broad orthodox background to how the audience thought their
universe was structured, how they saw God and religion and how their place in order of things was
organised. The disorders and disharmonies upsetting roles and expectations in Lear make it a deeply
unsettling threat to established order.
- Everyone was fairly clear where they were in the universal order, the ‘Great chain of being’. Man was
inferior to God, but superior to all animals, birds, fish, plants and minerals. God ruled heaven, kings ruled
on Earth and Fathers ruled families, like God at home.
- The human link contained three different ranks: the ‘better sort’ (monarchs, nobles), the ‘middling
sort’ (merchants, farmers) and the ‘baser sort’ (artisans, peasants, beggars).
- The universe was thought of as a series of transparent crystal spheres, one inside the other and each
containing a planet. Each planet and sphere circled the earth at different orbital angles and different
speeds.
- By Shakespeare’s time, the Ptolemaic system was beginning to be undermined. The great Copernican
revolution put the sun at the centre of the universe.
, - The iconoclastic, rationalist, free thinking, humanist Renaissance man. Daringly breaking through the
barriers, was an oddity often in conflict with the authorities, confined to small minority groups of
progressive scientists and intellectuals.
- The good life meant not the carnal life of fleshly pleasures, but the hard-working, devoted life of the family
man or woman, whose days were struggled through with Christ’s examples as their personal model.
- Order was part of everything and maintaining order was a form of worship, an acceptance of God as
author of that order.
- This ignores the fact that many elite men did wrong because they knew they could escape penalty by
buying off the law, by family influence or by the psychological power they had over the subordinate
majority.
- Lear reflects collisions between old and new ways in the references to cozeners, monopolies, courtiers,
usurers and in the behaviour of Goneril, Regan, Edmund and Oswald.
- Within the family pyramid, an unmarried man was subordinate to his father and other male elders, Once
married, he was still subordinate within his extended patrilineal family, but ruled his nuclear family, wife,
children and servants.
- Lear behaves as an unquestionable, bullying autocrat, unused to opposition and reacting angrily and
punitively when opposed. How quickly he banishes Kent, a long-term loyal counsellor, upon pain of death
if he returns.
- Goneril’s anger at the behaviour of Lear’s knights and their ‘rank and not-to-be-endured riots’ is a hit at the
sort of drunken rampages constantly breaking out in the taverns and streets of London in the early years
of James’ reign, when thousands of elite young men flocked there seeking court places. Contemporary
plays are full of men claiming gentlemanly status but behaving badly.
- Despite society’s intense stratification, dividing lines were becoming blurred by many individual cases of
social mobility, James’ creation of new knights, growing bourgeois wealth and the increasingly complexity
of society.
- Lear and Edmund both exhibit hubris, one too proud of his status and the other believing himself worthy of
better status. Goneril and Regan too, once elevated, behave as if they are superior.
- The character and role of Oswald as obsequious underling assumes a topical contextual significance in
the Jacobean court. Edmund too offers advancement to the Captain he send to execute the king and
Cordelia.
- Edgar draws his idea for disguises when he is outlawed from the position of the lower orders or the ‘baser
sort’. The state of the poor is raised in Lear. There were about 12,000 beggars in London in 1600.
- While your astrological sign provided the broad characteristic of your personality, the proportions of the
four humours determined your temperament more precisely.
- The phlegmatic person was normally easy going and stoical, remaining calm in crises and seeking rational
solutions.
- The choleric man was inclined to temper, was bossy, aggressive, ambitious and liked to take charge. Lear
is described as ‘choleric’.
- The sanguine man tended to be positive, active, impulsive, pleasure-seeking, self-confident, sociable,
friendly and open-hearted.
- Those in whom black bile dominated tended to be considerate of others but melancholic, negative, overly
introverted and inclined towards pessimism about he imperfections of the world.
- The Machiavellian individualist Edmund rejects the idea of the stars forming personality. Conceived ‘under
the dragons tail’ and born ‘under Ursa major’ he would be expected to be ‘rough and lecherous’ but
believes himself as maker of his own destiny.
- The lion topped the animal world because of its imagined links to courage, nobility and kingship. Tigers
were noted for ferocity. Mother tigers’ protectiveness of their young is admired, but the ‘tigers not
daughters’ description by Albany of Goneril and Regan’s behaviour suggests an unreliable, savage aspect.
- Kites (many combed the London rubbish tips) are always represented negatively, linked with the
parasitical behaviour of feeders and sycophants hanging around the households of men of power. Lear
calls Goneril a ‘detested kite’.
- The fourth line of Lear introduces the first unsettling of order, diving the kingdom. The disassembling order
of Lear’s world would have had uneasy political relevance for the audience, the feeling of a takeover of
power, a new force, adding to the general mood of uneasiness in a society that believed the world was in
decline.
- Religious life was severely conflicted. The paganism of Lear precludes allusion to that, but presents moral
issues whose bases would have been largely agreed by the various faiths.
- Shakespeare was always concerned with order, nationally, socially, personally and spiritually.
- In Lear, Cornwall is very ready to deconstruct the old King’s power to assert and augment his own new
status. We see how slow to recognise danger and react the decent people are. Christians believed evil
