William Shakespeare’s King Lear has long received considerable attention for textual, philological and theatrical reasons. This monograph combines academic research and the close reading of the 1608 Quarto to find answers to the question what makes this play an outstanding and exceptional work of art. Written to be performed to a courtly audience, the text bears traces of the dramaturgical heritage of Tudor interludes as well as the tropes of early Jacobean public discourses. Relying on George Puttenham’s contemporaneous handbook of rhetorical and poetic conventions, the monograph argues that the corporeal image cluster of the text corresponds to the rhetoric of royal discourses based on the tropes of the body politic. Thus the 1608 King Lear Quarto stands as a dramatic response to royal propaganda and holds a mirror of governance to both the royal court and to King James, who supposedly was present at the first performance of the play in Whitehall.

This book is included in DOAB.