Shakespeare’s crowning glory

In the 18th century, as Shakespeare began to take on classic status, editors began to notice differences between the texts of the plays preserved by his fellow actors in the posthumously published First Folio of his Comedies, Histories & Tragedies and those that had been published in the playwright’s lifetime in the cheap pocket editions, analogous to modern paperbacks, known in the trade as Quartos.

In the case of King Lear, the subject of Sir Brian Vickers’s new book, the Quarto of 1608 is strikingly different from the Folio of 1623. The Quarto has nearly 300 lines that are not in the Folio; the Folio has over 100 lines that are not in the Quarto; there are more than 800 verbal variants in the parts of the play that the two texts share. For a long time, the standard editorial response to this difficulty was to treat the Quarto as a ‘memorial reconstruction’ by actors — a phenomenon that accounts for the First Quarto of Hamlet, which includes the immortal and presumably half-remembered line ‘To be or not to be, ay, there’s the point.’