Shakespeare’s Banality: Originality and genius within variants of the Lear legend

Shakespeare’s Banality: Originality and genius within variants of the Lear legend

Traditional source studies seeks to identify the works Shakespeare utilised in the creation of his own. Frequently, its concomitant aims are to articulate Shakespeare’s ‘originality’ in doing so, and thus demonstrate and validate his ‘genius’, perpetuating Shakespeare’s centrality within the canon and scholarship. As a consequence, variants of his work have been seen as just that, variants of his work: sources, appropriations, or irrelevant. The new source studies scholars seek to challenge this notion. By focusing on the interrelationship of texts within their cultural and historical context, and privileging one version of a story no more than the other, new source studies scholars move the methodology forward and the focus wider.

This paper, inspired by the new source studies scholars, removes Shakespeare’s centripetal force from study of early modern variants of the Lear legend to reveal an extraordinary array of texts, from seditious ballads, to nation defining historiographies, and legitimising genealogies. It suggests that Shakespeare’s King Lear, when contextualised against other variants of the Lear legend, is simply one of a crowd, equally as dependent upon context, and no more original than any other. This paper explores this inherently interrelated crowd of Lears, seeking their ‘genius’ and their ‘originality’.