FIRST FOLIO

The Tragedy of King Lear

NOTE TO KING LEAR

When King Lear first appeared in a 1608 quarto (now named Quarto 1 or 'Q1') it was titled The Historie of King Lear, or, to be exact, M.William Shak-speare HIS Historie, of King Lear.   When it subsequently appeared in the First Folio of 1632 (F1) it was titled The Tragedie of King Lear.   It is believed that Shakespeare himself returned to the play to make substantial revisions, an unusual practice for a playwright at the time (the extraordinary conveyor belt of Elizabethan plays had given rise to a 'here-today, gone-tomorrow' shrug towards the art-form).   More often it was the company of actors who made revisions, whether to cut running time, insert topical jokes, or otherwise 'improve' it.

Editors are generally torn between conflating the two King Lear texts or treating them as two distinct entities.   As we are a resource we produce editions to reflect the permutations; namely, Q1, F1, and a typical modern conflation of Q1 and F1(the kind most commonly used in schools and productions).

FIVE DIFFERENT TYPES OF 'THEATRE SCRIPT FOR INDIVIDUAL SPEECHES' AVAILABLE

1	No annotation (i.e. no definitions or explanations) & no notation (i.e. no scoring of text showing any performance clues)
2	With annotation but not notation
3	'SCHOOL SAFE EDITION'. Annotation but not notation as 2. above but with sexual explanations removed
4	500 out of 700 verse speeches set as prose (see explanation in Post below)

Unelided - suitable for teaching elision

1

No annotation (i.e. no definitions or explanations) & no notation (i.e. no scoring of text showing any performance clues)