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OCR
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. + ]1 +
