King Leir - The Annesley Case

The Annesley Case

Some commentators have argued that King Leir was printed in 1605 to take advantage of the attention drawn by Shakespeare's similar play — which would mean that Shakespeare's Lear was being acted in 1605. Yet "a remarkable historical parallel" provided "a topical reason" for the publication of Leir, and perhaps also for Shakespeare's interest in the story c. 1605.

Brian Annesley was an elderly former follower of Queen Elizabeth, a wealthy Kentishman with three daughters: Grace (married to Sir John Wildgose), Christian (the wife of William Sandys, 3rd Baron Sandys), and the youngest, the unmarried Cordell. In 1603, Grace tried to have her father declared senile and incompetent to manage his estate. Cordell wrote to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury to protest her older sister's action, and otherwise supported her father against his eldest daughter. Brian Annesley died in July 1604; Cordell Annesley successfully defended her father's last will and testament, which left most of the family property to Cordell.

One of the executors of the will was a Sir William Harvey (not the famous medical researcher of the same name); he was a veteran of the 1588 campaign against the Spanish Armada and the third husband of the Dowager Countess of Southampton, the mother of Shakespeare's patron Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. (Harvey is also one of the many proposed candidates for the "W. H." of Shakespeare's sonnets.) Once the Dowager Countess died in 1607, Harvey married Cordell Annesley.

So, a true-life scandal with noteworthy parallels to the Leir/Lear story was in the news in 1603 and 1604, and may have helped to inspire both Shakespeare's play and the publication of the old play King Leir.