King Lear A Parallel Text Edition

General Editors:

Charlotte Brewer, Hertford College, Oxford
H. R. Woudhuysen, University College London
Daniel Karlin, University of Sheffield

King Lear, Shakespeare’s supremely powerful exploration of kingship, family and madness, has long been acknowledged as one of his greatest works. However, the existence of the play in two distinct versions - the Quarto of 1608 and the Folio of 1623 - has also provided a fascinating puzzle for generations of scholars. How do differences in Quarto and Folio alter our understanding of the play and affect the way it is performed? Did censorship lie behind major textual absences in Folio? And what can we infer about Shakespeare’s working practices from the two versions?

This edition of King Lear provides fully annotated, modern-spelling versions of the Quarto and Folio texts of the play, printed in parallel on facing pages. By highlighting the differences between the two versions, the reader can engage directly with the problems raised by them and consider current thinking about the play.

In a closely argued introduction, René Weis re-examines the continuing textual and bibliographical debate on the relationship between The History of King Lear (Q) and The Tragedy of King Lear (F) and considers the case for and against revision. This revised and updated edition also contains an illuminating new essay in which Weis subjects a number of key Q / F variants to close palaeographic analyses, arguing that they reflect different guesses at Shakespeare’s foul papers.

René Weis is Professor of English at University College London. His most recent book is Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography (2007). He is currently editing Romeo and Julietfor the Arden Shakespeare.

This reissed edition of Longman Annotated Texts King Lear includes comprehensive notes, annotations and an introduction, all designed to be of use to undergraduates and interested readers.

King Lear is one of Shakespeare's most widely studied tragedies. However, since the late 1970s textual scholars, critics and editors have argued that there is no single 'King Lear' text. Anyone studying the play needs to be aware of two different texts, one based on the quarto of 1608, The History of King Lear, and a revised version published in the first folio of 1623, The Tragedy of King Lear. This edition offers a fully annotated, modern spelling version of the texts set side by side, identifying and elucidating the major discrepancies between the two. It presents some possible reasons for the differences between the two texts, which themselves shed light on a number of issues relating to literary transmission in the Renaissance and give an insight into the nature of performance and censorship.