Author: William Shakespeare

Publisher: Prentice Hall

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13:

What modern readers and audiences generally know as 'Shakespeare's King Lear' is a composite construction created by merging The Tragedie of King Lear (1623) and the earlier (1608) Quarto version. In the last twenty years these two texts have again been disentangled from one another, and recognised as different states in a process of textual production: but only since editors and critics have generally agreed that both texts were separately written by Shakespeare himself, who produced the 1623 version by adapting, editing and 'revising' the Quarto. This new critical edition presents the play in a largely unmodernised form, with a minimum of editorial interference; and argues that both in terms of its relation to the Folio and its character as an individual text, it is better approached formally and historically as an independent play than evaluated on the basis of a speculative theory of authorship.