King Lear

Who, then, is to lead the French army? In Quarto, the Gentleman informs Kent that the Marshall of France, Monsieur La Far, has been left in charge. By omitting the scene in question, Folio obliterates Monsieur La Far; it compensates by altering the staging of the next scene (Act 4 scene 4 in the received editorial tradition, Act 4 Scene 3 in ours). In Quarto, the scene begins “Enter Cordelia, Doctor and others,” whereas in Folio it begins “Enter with Drum and Colours Cordelia, Gentleman and Soldiers.” Where in Quarto Cordelia is a daughter seeking medical attention for her father, in Folio she is a general leading an army. She has replaced Monsieur La Far. This alteration is part of a broad shift of emphasis from family to state in the revision—Folio makes less of the familial love trial and more of the fractured internal politics of the divided kingdom. So it is that the later version adds some crucial lines in the opening scene, giving a stronger political justification for the division of the kingdom:

We have this hour a constant will to publish

Our daughters’ several dowers, that future strife

May be prevented now.… (1.1.41–43)

Furthermore, Folio cuts the so-called arraignment of Goneril, the mock trial in the hovel scene that is the quid pro quo for the show trial of love in the opening scene. This has the effect of retrospectively rendering the opening more political and less personal.

Other Folio cuts include the passage at the end of the blinding scene when loyal servants promise to apply flax and whites of egg to Gloucester’s bleeding eye sockets. When Peter Brook cut this from his famous 1962 RSC production, critics rebuked him for imposing on the play his own theater of cruelty. But now we know that Brook’s cut was made in Shakespeare’s own theater.

A further intensification of the play’s moral bleakness is brought about by a series of cuts to Albany’s role: his castigations of Goneril in Act 4 Scene 2 are severely trimmed back, considerably reducing his moral force. Quarto Albany is a well-developed character who closes the play as a mature and victorious duke assuming responsibility for the kingdom. In Folio he is weaker, he stands by as his wife walks all over both him and the moral order, he avoids responsibility. His ultimate vacation of power is such that the revision ends at the point where my discussion began: with Edgar having no choice but to take over as sustainer of the gored state.

If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rushlight and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.

But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a reasonably well-printed Quarto was available, Lear notable among them, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare’s will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, “read him and again and again,” but they also wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to the theater-life for which Shakespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the RSC Shakespeare, in both Complete Works and individual volumes, uses the Folio as base text wherever possible. Significant Quarto variants are, however, noted in the Textual Notes and Quarto-only passages are appended after the text of King Lear.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition: