How Shakespeare Knew King Leir

Summary

Lewis Theobald thought that Shakespeare gave a tragic ending to his King Lear ‘to vary from another, but most execrable, Dramatic Performance upon this Story: which I certainly believe to have preceded our Author’s Piece’. From that work, the anonymous True Chronicle History of King Leir (1605), Theobald quotes some lines of ‘such Poetry as one might hammer out, Stans pede in uno’, so ‘That Shakespeare . . . may stand acquitted from the least Suspicion of Plagiarism.’ From the initial doubt that the ‘silly old play’, as Edward Capell called it, had much or any influence on Shakespeare, we have today come to the contrary opinion of a recent critic that ‘The True Chronicle Historie was a remarkably pervasive presence in Shakespeare’s career for well over a decade and exercised considerable power in shaping the formal and thematic structure of several quite different plays.’ Edmond Malone doubted that Shakespeare had ever read the 1605 edition of Leir, preferring to think that it was published after the first appearance of Shakespeare’s play so as to cash in on its stage success. Rather, Malone supposed, Shakespeare had known the old play before its publication in 1605: ‘without doubt he had often seen it exhibited; nor could he have found any difficulty in procuring a manuscript copy of it . . . I suspect, however, the old play had been published in 1594’.