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Prophecy and emendation: Merlin, Chaucer, Lear’s Fool

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Abstract

This article traces the critical and textual reception of the Fool’s cryptic prophecy in the Folio text of King Lear. I argue that critics have overlooked the widespread early modern circulation of the speech’s main source, six lines of verse ubiquitously known as ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy.’ Reading the Fool’s prophecy as a deliberate riposte to this famous poem, I propose that William Warburton’s 1747 emendation offers the most intertextually engaged and politically subversive text of the speech.

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Notes

  1. Lineation from Hinman (1968).

  2. Modernized quotations from King Lear refer to Shakespeare (1997); quotations from other plays refer to Shakespeare (2015).

  3. See Weiskott in this issue.

  4. For more on the early modern Merlinic tradition, see Weiskott’s contribution to this issue.

  5. John Upton noticed the parallel in Urry’s 1721 edition of Chaucer (Upton, 1748, xix), while George Steevens cited the poem’s appearance in Puttenham (Johnson and Steevens, 1773, 9:404).

  6. One fifteenth-century manuscript (Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 59) does attribute the poem to Merlin (Skeat, 1896; Dean, 1996, 17), and since it was owned in 1614 by William Browne of Tavistock, a friend to Jonson and Drayton, it is perhaps not wholly impossible that Shakespeare could have encountered this manuscript in his lifetime. On Browne, see Edwards (1997).

  7. Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.15; Cambridge, University Library MS Ii.3.26.

  8. Eric Weiskott, in unpublished research, has identified 30 manuscript witnesses.

  9. National Archives, SP 15/29, fol. 190r.

  10. On the ‘Protestant Chaucer,’ see Georgianna (1990), Jones (2015), and Simpson (2015).

  11. On the comparable case of Piers Plowman as a prophetic resource for early modern readers, see Weiskott (2015).

  12. On the formal conventions of prophecy, see Dean (1996, 1–2).

  13. Space prevents me from discussing the ingenious defense of the Folio reading presented in De Grazia (2012).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to audiences at the 2017 MLA Convention and Stanford University’s Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies for their feedback on earlier versions of this article, and to Katherine Walker and Joseph Bowling for their detailed editorial attention.

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  1. Department of English, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Misha Teramura

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Teramura, M. Prophecy and emendation: Merlin, Chaucer, Lear’s Fool. Postmedieval 10, 50–67 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0116-0

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