Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transcription
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Not Knowing Their Parents’: Reading Chivalric Romance
- Chapter 2 The Progress of Romance (I): Kenilworth, 1575
- Chapter 3 Castles in the Air: Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage
- Chapter 4 ‘Gentleman-Like Adventure’: Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury
- Chapter 5 ‘The Lady Errant’: Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance
- Chapter 6 The Progress of Romance (II): Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages
- Conclusion: ‘The Chronicle of Wasted Time’
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Chapter 4 - ‘Gentleman-Like Adventure’: Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transcription
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Not Knowing Their Parents’: Reading Chivalric Romance
- Chapter 2 The Progress of Romance (I): Kenilworth, 1575
- Chapter 3 Castles in the Air: Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage
- Chapter 4 ‘Gentleman-Like Adventure’: Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury
- Chapter 5 ‘The Lady Errant’: Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance
- Chapter 6 The Progress of Romance (II): Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages
- Conclusion: ‘The Chronicle of Wasted Time’
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Summary
THE CLIMAX of the subplot of King Lear comes in the fifth Act of that play, when the Duke of Albany accuses Edmund, bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, of ‘capital treason’. This claim he proposes to uphold, not through any due process of questioning of witnesses or examination of proof –which would be perfectly possible, since Albany is in possession of a letter from his wife, Goneril, to the same Edmund which insinuates ‘a plot upon her virtuous husband's life’ –but rather through an altogether more archaic legal form, the trial by combat. Albany declares that ‘if none appear to prove upon thy person/ Thy heinous, manifest, and many treasons’, he will undertake the combat himself. In the event, Edmund is challenged by his disguised half-brother, Edgar, the Earl of Gloucester's natural son. Having refused to reveal his identity, Edgar turns to his brother and accuses him of being a traitor. Should he deny the accusation, ‘This sword, this arm, and my best spirits are bent/ To prove upon thy heart … Thou liest’. His brother responds:
In wisdom I should ask thy name;
But since thy outside looks so fair and war-like,
And that thy tongue some say of breeding breathes,
What safe and nicely I might well delay
By rule of knighthood, I disdain and spurn;
Back do I toss these treasons to thy head,
With the hell-hated lie o'erwhelm thy heart,
Which, for they yet glance by and scarcely bruise,
This sword of mine shall give them instant way,
Where they shall rest for ever. Trumpets, speak.
(v, iii, 141–50)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance , pp. 134 - 168Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003