King Lear: Justice, Possession and Dover

At Dover in February 1601, Henry Neville’s journey back to his French embassy came to a halt. Cecil’s letters required him to return to court. Sir Thomas Fane, reporting from Dover Castle on 22 February, described how abruptly Neville left:

While I sought to prevent his passage by sea, he on the sudden took horse, leaving his wife and children here with the gentlemen of his retinue.¹

Fane sent Captain Windebank and one of his own servants after Neville to observe the route he took. If Neville went directly to court, they were “to pass as unknown persons”; otherwise, they were “to make stay of him by force of your warrant.” His wife and children remained at Dover with the gentlemen of his retinue; Neville rode towards examination and imprisonment.¹

The embassy journey had been planned before Essex’s rising. On 23 January, Neville told Winwood that he expected to leave just after Candlemas, travelling by Rouen. The rising on 8 February changed the circumstances: Neville had heard proposals from Essex’s associates, and his knowledge now exposed him to investigation. By 19 February he was at Rochester; Fane’s report places the decisive reversal at Dover.¹

Dover is also the destination towards which Shakespeare drives the closing movement of King Lear. Gloucester seeks death at its cliffs; for Lear it promises refuge. Having overheard a plot to kill the king, Gloucester urgently directs Kent to take him there:

GLOUCESTER
Good friend, I prithee, take him in thy arms.
I have o’erheard a plot of death upon him.
There is a litter ready; lay him in ’t,
And drive toward Dover, friend, where thou shalt meet
Both welcome and protection. Take up thy master.
—King Lear 3.6²

The earlier King Leir never names Dover. Its king and his companion Perillus escape across the Channel, surrendering their outer garments to pay for the passage, and find Cordella in France. Shakespeare keeps Lear in England and makes Dover the destination of his flight. Both plays bring a French army to Britain, but Shakespeare moves the father’s reunion with his daughter from France to the Dover setting. Defeat and captivity follow. The place that promises protection becomes the setting for its failure.³

For Neville, Dover had been the threshold of a return to his embassy; it became the point at which he was sent back into danger, separated from his wife and children. Shakespeare’s transformation of Leir gives the same port a concentrated dramatic weight: the expectation of safety, the reunion of a family, and the approach of imprisonment.

John Chamber and the stars

John Chamber, whose Treatise against Judicial Astrology appeared in 1601, was closely associated with Neville and his tutor Henry Savile. His edition of Barlaam’s Logistica, published the previous year, credited Neville’s repeated requests to bring it to press. Chamber later named Neville and Savile his executors.⁴

Chamber’s attack supplies a telling comparison with King Lear: two arguments on a single page become the opposing positions of a father and the son who is deceiving him. In 1.2, Gloucester accepts Edmund’s forged letter as evidence that Edgar intends to betray him. He then reads the same disorder in the heavens:

GLOUCESTER These late eclipses in the sun and moon
portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of
nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds
itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies;
in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and
the bond cracked ’twixt son and father.
—King Lear 1.2⁵

Chamber complains that astrologers’ almanacs offer precisely such a catalogue:

such catalogues of diseases, warres, treasons, and such like, without anie one mention of anie good to come, that a man would thinke there were no goodnes in heauen.⁶

Gloucester’s “portend no good” and list of broken bonds give dramatic form to the predictions Chamber attacks. When his father leaves, Edmund supplies the other side of the dispute:

EDMUND This is the excellent foppery of the world, that
when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of
our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters
the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains
on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves,
thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance;
drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced
obedience of planetary influence; and all that we
are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable
evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition on the charge of a star!
—King Lear 1.2⁵

On the same page as his catalogue of disasters, Chamber protests that men are ready to blame heaven for their own behaviour:

When men are thus readie to father all their follies vpon heauen, imputing to it the cause of whatsoeuer hapneth, who can hold, and not exclaime with him […].⁶

Phebe Jensen identifies a “striking resemblance to Edmond’s denunciation” in another passage of Chamber’s treatise. There he retells Augustine’s account of an astrologer who shifted responsibility for his sins to the planets:

This man denied that his owne will committed adulterie, but Venus: and that his owne will committed murther, but Mars […].⁷

The comparison reaches beyond a shared mention of the stars. Chamber’s argument joins human misconduct, celestial excuses and predictions of nothing but disaster. Shakespeare divides these materials between two characters: Gloucester sees betrayal foretold by eclipses; Edmund, who has manufactured the evidence of betrayal, ridicules the attempt to make heaven responsible.

Edmund then uses the language of eclipses to frighten Edgar. Jensen stresses that his polemic should not simply be accepted as the play’s verdict on astrology. Shakespeare has given a familiar argument to a calculating speaker, who can mock a belief in one moment and exploit it in the next. Neville’s association with Chamber places him close to the author of the treatise in which these arguments occur together.

Chamber’s publication plans also included an astrology work by George Carleton, to be printed alongside his own, with Neville and Savile as his executors. Carleton’s Astrologomania, published in 1624 as a work written nearly twenty years earlier, takes the debate into the circumstances of conception:

When Adulterie is committed and Bastards begotten, it is against the reuealed will of God […]

Carleton asks how sinful conduct can remain within divine government. Edmund makes his own “bastardizing” the test of a heavenly explanation for his character (King Lear 1.2). The fuller comparison, and the illustrated story of the book’s eventual publication by Thomas Vicars through the Jaggard press, appear in “Carleton, Vicars and the Jaggard Press” (Chapter 50).⁸

Possession, illness and performance

In 1599–1600, Neville reported on a woman whose supposed demonic possession was being used to accuse Henri IV of remaining secretly a Huguenot and planning to act against Catholics. Writing to Cecil on 26 August 1599, he linked Bennet, an English Capuchin recently captured in England, with an alleged plot involving a woman said to have feigned possession:

I understand there is one Bennet an English Capuchin lately taken in England, who was thought to have a hand very deep in the practice of the Duke of Joyeuse, about the woman that was suborned to counterfeit herself to be possessed with a devil. In which practice, it is thought here, there was a dangerous reach, and not thoroughly sifted, because it would have touched some great ones.

He wanted the affair investigated:

So as if now the bottom of it might be extorted from this Bennet, I think it would be very acceptable to the king.

On 27 April 1600, Neville reported that the woman had reached Rome:

The king hath been much troubled with the news he hath received from Rome, that the demoniac woman (whose imposture was discovered here in Lent was twelvemonth) is come to Rome, and there in her pangs hath delivered much scandalous matter against him; as if he were a dissembled Huguenot and no Catholic, and that he did but watch his time to declare himself, and to do some notable prejudice to the Catholics in favour of the heretics.

Neville then described the king’s response:

He is very careful to stop this scandal, and hath written earnestly to the Pope to clear himself, and to have the demoniac punished.⁹

The woman was probably Martha Brossier, whose case follows this Paris–Rome sequence. Neville’s concern was the political use of her alleged possession: who had arranged it, which powerful people were implicated, and how Henri IV could stop the accusations spreading.¹⁰

Shakespeare draws directly on a book about counterfeit possession for Edgar’s disguise as Poor Tom. Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) attacks the English exorcisms conducted at Denham in the 1580s by William Weston and other Catholic priests. Among its devils are “Captain Maho, Sara’s devil; Captain Modu, Maynie’s devil.” Edgar, disguised as the supposedly possessed beggar Poor Tom, announces:

EDGAR The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. Modo
he’s called, and Mahu.
—King Lear 3.4¹¹

Harsnett’s Smolkin likewise becomes Smulkin. These borrowed names make the book’s place in Lear tangible. Edgar uses the language of possession to survive; the audience knows that the apparent demoniac is a hunted son in disguise. Harsnett’s English cases and the French affair reported by Neville belong to the same contentious subject, although they concern different people and events.

Edward Jorden’s Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother, also published in 1603, offers a medical comparison with Lear’s own distress. The book grew out of the controversy over Mary Glover in London, for whose symptoms Jorden offered a natural explanation. Kaara L. Peterson places its publication alongside Harsnett’s attack on exorcism: both books challenged supernatural explanations of apparent possession.¹²

Jorden’s account gives particular force to Lear’s description of his suffering. He calls the condition “Passio Hysterica,” or “the Mother,” and describes the womb’s “rising,” when it is “drawn vpwards” above its natural place. Martha J. Craig has already compared this upward movement with Lear’s words, given here in Folger’s edited text, which reads “Hysterica” where the early quarto and folio print “Historica”:

LEAR
O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow!
Thy element’s below.–Where is this daughter?
—King Lear 2.4¹³

The term and the upward movement work together: Lear commands a bodily sorrow to return to its proper place. Jorden’s description concerns a uterine illness; Shakespeare transfers that language to an anguished father. Harsnett’s account of Richard Mainy also contains “the mother,” and Peterson warns against treating Lear’s words as a straightforward medical diagnosis.¹³

Jorden also names Martha Brossier among his examples of counterfeited possession, referring readers to the history of her case while allowing that illness and deception could overlap. His book thus discusses the very French affair that Neville had probably been reporting to Cecil.¹⁰

Neville’s personal association with Jorden is documented later. In a complaint dated 1 December 1615, Jorden recalled an alum proposal involving Neville about two and a half years earlier. Southampton, Neville, Robert Killigrew and Herbert Croft belonged to the proposed security group. The arrangement brings Neville, the physician and the dedicatee of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece into the same business proposal in 1613, several years after Lear.¹⁴

An imagined cliff

Jorden’s book also describes a way of treating sufferers through their beliefs. When argument and persuasion fail, he writes:

we may politikely confirme them in their fantasies, that wee may the better fasten some cure vpon them […].¹⁵

“Politikely” means by calculated contrivance. Rather than simply contradicting a false belief, the healer can work within it to bring relief. Jorden illustrates the method with people made to believe that the supposed cause of their illness has been removed.

At Dover, Edgar stages just such a contrivance. Gloucester wants to leap from the cliff. His son leads him over level ground while describing a dizzying height, with fishermen like mice on the beach below. Before Gloucester falls, Edgar tells the audience what he is doing:

EDGAR, [aside]
Why I do trifle thus with his despair
Is done to cure it.
—King Lear 4.6¹⁵

Gloucester falls on the ground. Edgar adopts a new voice and persuades him that he has survived a tremendous drop: the gods have preserved him. His invented cliff answers his father’s desire for death with an invented deliverance. The correspondence with Jorden concerns the method—entering a sufferer’s imagined situation to change its meaning—and Edgar states its curative purpose himself.

Chrysostom and the suffering poor

The play’s movement from exposed bodies to moral obligation has another scholarly comparison behind it. Debora Shuger places Lear’s suffering poor beside the sermons of John Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher whose works Henry Savile would edit. She connects him both with Lear and with the hunger protests in Coriolanus:

What Shakespeare shares with the Church Fathers is this savage perception of earthly injustice and these tragic bodies of the poor […]¹⁶

Savile’s edition of Chrysostom appeared in 1610–13. The comparison brings into view a body of writing central to the scholarly interests of Neville’s former tutor.¹⁷

In his eleventh homily on 1 Corinthians, Chrysostom asks his listeners to imagine a poor man trying to sleep:

For how is he to sleep after all, with pangs of the belly, restless famine besetting him, and that often while it is freezing, and the rain coming down on him?¹⁸

He asks them to remember that man when they return to lighted houses, prepared tables and beds. Their own comfort should make them attend to the person who has none. Shakespeare gives Lear that recognition while the king himself is exposed to the storm. At the entrance to shelter, concern for Kent and the Fool becomes a prayer for those his kingship has neglected:

LEAR
Prithee, go in thyself. Seek thine own ease.
This tempest will not give me leave to ponder
On things would hurt me more. But I’ll go in.–
In, boy; go first.–You houseless poverty–
Nay, get thee in. I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.
[Fool exits.]
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp.
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may’st shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.
— King Lear, 3.4.¹⁹

Chrysostom asks the comfortable to imagine deprivation; Lear has been made to feel it. He calls on “pomp” to undergo the same exposure and surrender its surplus. The king who began by distributing his realm now recognizes what he failed to give its poorest people. His changed understanding comes through the body: cold, hunger, raggedness, and the need for shelter.