OLD KING LEIR

‘A play!’ Lord North’s eyes lit up. ‘How capital!’ Then his eyes narrowed, and he stood back considering us. ‘A Tudor play, it seems from the look of you.’

‘You are quite right on that score, sir,’ I said.

‘Not a bloody tale of revenge, I imagine, so …’ He paused. ‘A pleasant comedy?

The Ado about Nothing?’

 

We shook our heads.

‘Then the Dream at Midsummer?’

‘No, sir,’ Rosamund blushed prettily. ‘It is King Lear we are attempting.’

‘King Lear?’ Lord North looked first astonished and then a shade disappointed (as everyone must, I think, at the prospect of enduring such an exercise in extended gloom).

When King Lear popped up unexpectedly in the research for my new novel The Bells of Fortune, like Lord North I did rather wish it had been anyone else instead.

Shakespeare’s play certainly is an exercise in extended gloom: a marathon of existential despair not to mention psychological and physical torture. I had suffered through a four or five hour staging of the play at the RSC in my twenties, which I had watched from the hard seats in the gods being then a penniless student. I was pretty scarred by that experience and left with an enduringly jaundiced view of the whole thing.

Though I later became an English lecturer, I never taught a Shakespeare course, my own expertise being eighteenth-century political writing. But I did retain a vague idea that Shakespeare’s plays had been meddled with over the centuries. In particular, I had the idea that the eighteenth-century had especially disliked the play (Samuel Johnson loathed it) and, in the view of scholars, had destroyed Shakespeare’s work of genius by giving it a happy ending.

This was pretty much all I knew about Lear when I embarked on research for my latest novel starring the incorrigible Susan Bell, who first appeared in The Bells of Westminster in 2024.

I knew that her next destination was to be her father’s family seat of Fortune Hall in Leicestershire. I therefore now needed to discover a story for her there, which might rival the amazing true tale of the 1774 opening of Edward Longshanks’ tomb in Westminster Abbey, which had formed the basis of the previous book.

The Society of Antiquaries in London had been responsible for that tomb-opening, so it seemed natural to turn to their Leicestershire equivalents in search of another true story which might be the occasion for a new adventure. Imagine my surprise when these remarkable observations turned up in the midst of a discussion of the city of Leicester.

Among other traditions, it is said that King Leir built a vault under the river, which he dedicated to Janus, under the which his daughter Cordelia caused him to be buried.

King Leir? Cordelia? Was this King Lear? But, hang on, Cordelia dies in his arms at the end of Shakespeare’s play. What in the world is she doing burying him whom, moreover, another antiquary ‘supposes to have been the founder of this place and to have given the name to it.’

Leicester named after King Lear? I marvelled again. What on earth is going on?

Remembering those eighteenth-century meddlers, I went back to them and now learned that the play they usually staged in preference to Shakespeare’s original, was a mash up of Shakespeare’s text with an earlier play I’d never heard of.

This earlier play was based on Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, which was in turn based on the work of an old friend of my characters, the twelfth-century ‘historian’ Geoffrey of Monmouth, whom Lindley Bell calls that old story spinner with a fevered brain. 

So, King Lear was not Shakespeare’s original creation, then, but an ancient king of Britain with a history of his own! I now understood that the eighteenth-century objectors hadn’t been meddling for no reason but instead had chosen to return to the original myth.

More reading soon revealed that in the story told by Holinshed and Geoffrey of Monmouth, there is indeed a happy ending. Cordelia rallies the troops of France to aid her father when he is abused by Goneril and Regan. She and her husband lead the army back to Britain and defeat the evil sisters. Lear is restored to his throne, and lives out a happy old age before Cordelia lovingly buries him in his magnificent, lost tomb under the river Soar in Leicestershire.

Yes, I had first regretted that it was King Lear I had to deal with, and not some chirpier Shakespearian comedy or other. But not anymore. Some of the deeper themes of the play are echoed in the novel – if in a much more light-hearted way. And how much funnier it is, after all, to have the frivolous Susan and Lindley Bell run up against a work of such enduring and gruelling genius.

 

The Bells of Fortune by Leonora Nattrass (Profile Books) Out Now

The hunt for an ancient king could prove deadly... Leicestershire, 1774. Following a minor royal scandal, Susan Bell's father has lost his post as Dean of Westminster, and the two find themselves exiled to the family's country seat, Fortune Hall. Susan fills her days attempting to prevent her fiancé Lindley from being married off to a richer bride, while her father takes on the tutorship of Francis North, son of the Prime Minister. When a visiting surveyor mysteriously disappears near a fast-flowing river, the man is presumed to have drowned. Susan alone is not convinced by this explanation, or by that of eccentric visiting librarian Mr Quintrel, who declares the surveyor likely lost in the tunnels that form the tomb of the mythical King Lear. But when the young Francis North also disappears, Susan knows that her family's reputation is at stake and she must investigate. What did the surveyor stumble upon that someone would possibly kill to hide? And what darker secrets are waiting to be revealed

More information about the author can be found on her website.

She can be found on X @LeonoraNattrass