Volume 37, Number 16 · October 25, 1990
Do-It-Yourself Lear
By E.A.J. Honigmann
The Complete King Lear, 1608–1623 (1623), 149
by William Shakespeare, prepared by Michael Warren
University of California Press, Part 4: The First Folio (1623) in photographic facsimile, 54 pp., Part 1 available separately, $45.00
At the World Shakespeare Congress held in Washington, DC in April 1976, Michael Warren read a short paper on 'Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar'[1]—a paper hailed by some as the start of a new era in textual studies and deplored by others as a will-o'-the-wisp that would lure the weak-minded to their destruction. Mr. Warren, a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Cruz, took issue with the traditional view 'that there is one primal lost text, an 'ideal King Lear' that Shakespeare wrote, and that we have two corrupt copies of it,' the Quarto and Folio versions (hereafter Q or Q1 and F). Instead he proposed that Shakespeare had revised King Lear, and that this explains most of the differences between Q and F. So many words and longer passages differ in the two texts, he maintained, that Q and F should not be conflated (or jumbled together), as hitherto, but 'should be treated as two versions of a single play, both having authority.' If accepted, this theory has momentous implications for Shakespeare's editors.
Review, 3260 words
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