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INTRODUCTION
enthusiastically revived, provided a comprehensive system both for creating and
for evaluating works of literature, by which they meant not just poetry, drama and
fiction, but also letters, history and philosophical treatises.*
Obviously, the description that this book will eventually provide cannot
present a comprehensive line-by-line commentary resembling ones offered
by critical editions of the play, but it will demonstrate the rhetorical construct
of certain passages in order to give insights into the playwright’s mastery of
contemporaneous poetic knowledge. The task of defining the text, however,
requires strict specifications, especially in the case of this particular play.
Numerous scholarly works, books, and articles have been published on the
textual matters of King Lear,® since only about ninety percent of the two
available versions, the Quarto and the Folio editions, are identical. The main
difference lies in the fact that there are approximately four hundred lines that
are not present in one or the other of these editions.® Therefore, it is important
to emphasize that my main concern is the text of the 1608 Pied Bull Quarto
of King Lear,’ which is generally considered to be based on Shakespeare’s foul
papers.®
Even if it is difficult to prove whether or not Shakespeare authorized its
publication, the Quarto is less likely to show the traces of editorial revision
than the Folio version, so it may offer a more reliable perspective for the study
of poetic issues. The following sentence on the cover page of this edition
supports the idea that the text derives from a performed version: “as it was
played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall upon S. Stephans night in
Christmas Hollidayes. By his Maiesties seruants playing vsually at the Gloabe
on the Bancke-side.”
4 Brian Vickers: Rhetoric and Poetics, in C.B. Schmitt - Q. Skinner (eds.): The Cambridge
History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, 715.
5 The most significant works devoted to this topic are a collection of various studies entitled
The Division of the Kingdoms, edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, Steven Urkowitz’s
1980 monograph Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear, and Richard Knowles’ most recent article
The Evolution of the Texts of Lear. See Gary Taylor — Michael Warren (eds.): The Division of
the Kingdoms. Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear, Oxford, Calderon Press, 1983; Steven
Urkowitz: Shakespeare’s Revision of King Lear, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1980;
Richard Knowles: The Evolution of the Texts of Lear, in Jeffrey Kahan (ed.): King Lear: New
Critical Essays. Volume 33 of Shakespeare criticism, New York, Routledge, 2008, 124-154. The
deliberate choice of the 1608 Quarto has orthographical consequences as well, since even
the names of certain characters appear in different spellings in the two versions and, in
accordance with the Quarto edition, I will cite them as “Gonorill” and “Gloster.”
Urkowitz: Shakespeare’s Revision, 3-4.
7M. William Shak-speare: His True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and
his three Daughters. With the vnfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster,
and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam, London, 1608. All the quotations on the
following pages are from this edition unless otherwise indicated.
Urkowitz: Shakespeare’s Revision, 6.
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