King Lear

This Norton Critical Edition is based on the Folio text of King Lear (carefully corrected prior to its printing in 1623). The editor has interpolated the best-known and most-often discussed passages from Quarto I (including the “mock-trial” scene) as is fully explained in both “A Note on the Text” and the annotations that accompany the play.

“Sources” helps readers navigate King Lear’s rich history and includes the nine essential primary sources from which Shakespeare borrowed significantly in creating his play, along with two additional likely sources.

“Criticism”provides thirteen major critical interpretations and three provocative adaptations and responses to King Lear. Critical interpretation is provided by Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, Peter Brook, Michael Warren, Lynda E. Boose, Janet Adelman, and R. A. Foakes, among others. The adaptations and responses are by Nahum Tate, John Keats, and Edward Bond.

A Selected Bibliography is also included.

About the Editor

Grace Ioppolo is the founder and director of the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project and is Professor of Shakespearean and Early Modern Drama in the Department of English and American Literature at the University of Reading, England. She is the author of Dramatists and Their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Heywood: Authorship, Authority, and the Playhouse (2006) and Revising Shakespeare (1991).

She has edited Shakespeare’s King Lear for Norton and has published widely on textual transmission, the history of the book and literary and historical manuscripts, most recently as the co-editor of Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (2007). She is the General Editor of The Collected Works of Thomas Heywood, forthcoming 2012–15.