SOURCE: Hoeniger, F. D. “The Artist Exploring the Primitive: King Lear.” In Some Facets of “King Lear”: Essays in Prismatic Criticism, edited by Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff, pp. 89-102. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974.

In the following essay, Hoeniger concentrates on archaic sources and themes associated with nature in King Lear.

There may once have been a King Lear in ancient Britain after whom the city of Leicester was named, and perhaps he had three daughters. But the story about him which Shakespeare retells, both in the form in which he found it and the form into which he cast it, is highly unreal, utterly remote from any familiar history. King Lear lived, according to Tudor historians, at some vague time during the era of the Kings of Judea. Of the mocking prophecy which the Fool recites at the end of 3.2, he says that it...