PREFATORY NOTE

Summary

The editing of this play, like that of Romeo and Juliet in 1955, has been shared by Professor Duthie and myself. And, as before, he drafted the whole and handed it over to me with permission to make what additions or changes I thought fit. The Introduction (except for a paragraph on page xxiv about Cordelia) and the Note on the Copy are virtually as he gave them to me; and the text also is his, except for some slight adaptation of the stage-directions and emendations here and there, made with his consent. The Glossary too, apart from a few additions, is mainly his. Since, however, the Notes he drafted were predominantly textual in character, it has fallen to me to supply most of the exegesis, such textual notes as I am responsible for being labelled ‘J.D.W.’.

His earlier edition of the play, published in 1949, was at once recognized as a landmark in the study of Shakespearian textual criticism. Scholars may well turn then with especial interest to his present Note on the Copy, which embodies some of his second thoughts in the light of subsequent work on the text. Yet in a play like King Lear commentary presents problems almost, if not quite, as difficult as those involved in textual decision.