Copia in King Lear
Wanting
Renaissance schoolboys to be playful in their
learning, Erasmus gave them writing and speaking exercises that appealed to
their
youthful sense of humour and certainly extended their
Latin vocabulary – like writing insults. Shakespeare was surely remembering
that
exuberant training (just look at the number of imaginative compound adjectives
he devises) when he lets Kent (disguised as the
servant
Caius) let rip on Oswald, calling Goneril's servant
‘A knave, a rascal, an eater of
broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited-hundred-pound
filthy,
worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical
rogue;
one trunk-inheriting slave, one that would be a bawd in way of good service and
art nothing but the
composition
of a knave, beggar, coward, pander and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one
whom I will beat
into
clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable
of thy addition’ (Act 2, Scene 2).
This is a speech that has only one
idea and expresses it over and over and over again. But that's exactly its delight.
For an actor, the pleasure of this speech is
first
of all its 'copiousness' – the principle of addition or amplification that
Erasmus was keen for students to explore in speech. It's the sheer 'copia' of
Kent's invention expanding on the
basic notion that Oswald is 'a knave' that gives the speech its energy, its
sense of acceleration and escalation. . . . . It's also written as
a
single sentence which allows the actor to rant, uninterrupted, to get his
pent-up rage out on a single breath that hits Oswald like a bulldozer. Notice
how
many times, as he does here,
Shakespeare constructs speeches built on catalogues, lists of things that work
by accumulation to a climax ('one whom I will beat').