Shakespeare

There are many differences between the quarto and the folio editions of the play, to such an extent that the authoritative Oxford collection of Shakespeare’s drama prints two separate versions as if they were indeed two distinct plays. The quarto play was entitled The History of King Lear, and the folio play The Tragedy of King Lear. It seems that the first version was revised some five years after it was performed, and at that stage the newly fashionable act and scene divisions were introduced. The late folio omits three hundred lines of the early quarto, and adds a further one hundred “new”lines. In the quarto version there is a clear indication that Cordelia is leading a French army on English soil, where in the folio version the emphasis is upon domestic rather than foreign imbroglios. Cordelia is a stronger presence in the quarto than in the folio.

Since certain of the omitted lines reveal the presence of a French army on English soil, they may have been removed at the behest of the Master of the Revels. But it is much more likely that Shakespeare was responding to dramatic imperatives; the earlier version did not sufficiently isolate and clarify the figure of Lear. It scattered interest and effect, which could more usefully be focused upon the single tragic individual. It is the difference, perhaps, between the “history” and the “tragedy” on the respective title-pages. The later version is a more concise and more concentrated play, with greater attention to the pace of the action. The hundreds of minor changes between the two versions, compatible with a rewriting at speed by a dramatist absorbed in his work, also reveal the work of a thoroughly dramatic imagination, intent upon wholly theatrical effects. They prove beyond any possible doubt that Shakespeare was not averse to extensive revision and rewriting of his material, when occasion demanded it. His was always a work in progress.

CHAPTER 80. My Life Hath in This Line Some Interest

Shakespeare had returned to Stratford by the summer of 1607, at the very latest, in order to attend the marriage of his oldest daughter. Susannah Shakespeare, named as a recusant in the previous year, had now outwardly conformed; this may have been to facilitate the wedding itself. In any case she was marrying a man of Puritan belief, John Hall, so there was no great religious prejudice in the family itself.

On 5 June William Shakespeare processed with his family to the church where at the altar, in ritual fashion, he relinquished his daughter to her new husband. In the marriage settlement he had promised them the 127 acres of Old Stratford he had purchased from the Combes five years before. There is every reason to suppose that Susannah was his favourite child. Certainly she was singled out in his will for preferential treatment. She may in fact have inherited something of his spirit, and was described on her tombstone as being “Witty above her sexe” and “Wise to salvation.” The memorialist added that “something of Shakespeare was in that,” so at the time she must have been recognised as in some ways resembling her father. She could also sign her own name, a skill which her sister Judith did not possess.

Her spouse, John Hall, was a doctor. Since in his later drama Shakespeare himself displays the utmost respect for doctors, the union no doubt had his blessing. The bridegroom was only eleven years younger than Shakespeare himself, and so Susannah was marrying a figure of some authority not unlike her father. He had been born in Bedfordshire, and had attended Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. He had travelled in France for a period, and had set up practice at Stratford some years before his betrothal. The newly married couple lived in New Place for a period after the wedding, but it is possible that they soon purchased a house a few hundred yards away in the area designated on the maps as “Old Town.” A timber-framed house of the period still survives, and has become known as “Hall’s Croft.” But the Halls returned to New Place after Shakespeare’s death.