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    A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's King Lear
    A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's King Lear
    A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's King Lear
    Ebook58 pages1 hour

    A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's King Lear

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's "King Lear," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Shakespeare for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Shakespeare for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 21, 2015
    ISBN9781535826891
    A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's King Lear

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's King Lear - Gale

      1

      King Lear

      William Shakespeare

      1606

      Introduction

      King Lear was first acted on December 26, 1606, St. Stephen's Night, by Shakespeare's acting company, The King's Men, before King James I and the court at Whitehall; this is known because, on November 26, 1607, the play was entered along with that identifying information on the Stationers' Register, a journal kept by the Stationers' Company of London in which the printing rights to dramatic works were chronicled. In 1608, the First Quarto of the play was published by Nathaniel Butter who, along with John Busby, had made the entry in the Stationers' Register. The 1608 Quarto is called the Pied Bull Quarto because Nathaniel Butter's shop, where the Quarto was sold was in Pauls Church-yard at the sign of the Pide Bull neere St. Austins Gate. There are twelve copies of the Pied Bull Quarto extant today, but they are not uniform because of the way proofreading was done. Sheets were read as the quartos were printed, resulting in the separate volumes having different corrected and uncorrected sheets bound together.

      A 1619 edition of the First Quarto was printed, although falsely dated 1608, by William Jaggard for Thomas Pavier, reprinting one of the original 1608 editions. In 1623, King Lear appeared in the Folio volume of Shakespeare's work that John Heminges and Henry Condell, his fellow actors in The King's Men, published in tribute to him. The Folio text varies significantly from the First Quarto texts. The Folio text has an additional 300 lines that the first Quarto texts do not have and the Folio text is missing 100 lines found in the Quarto editions. The 1623 Folio is thought to have been printed from one of the 1608 Quartos that had been corrected and emended, probably by consultation with a manuscript quite close to an original by Shakespeare, perhaps his company's prompt book of the play. Authoritative contemporary editions of King Lear are consolidations and emendations of the two texts, using the Folio, adding the lines from the Quarto that it lacks, and comparing readings in the two texts when there is confusion about which is better. In 1988, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor printed both Quarto and Folio texts individually in The Oxford Shakespeare, arguing that they were two substantially different plays, each by Shakespeare, with the Folio text being a revised version of the Quarto text.

      There are a number of sources for the story of King Lear. The primary source is an earlier play, probably dating from around 1594, with which Shakespeare was undoubtedly acquainted, called The True Chronicle History of King Leir. The story of Lear and his daughters, however, can also be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin work, History of the Kings of England (c.1136), in the collection The Mirror for Magistrates (1574), in Holinshed's Chronicles (1577), in William Warner's Albions England (1586), and in Edmund Spenser's epic The Fairie Queene (1596). The source for the Gloucester plot is found in Book II, Chapter 10 of Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia (1590). Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures (1603) is the source for much of Edgar's mad talk and references to demons.

      King Lear has a strange performance history. In 1642, the English Parliament, politically at odds with King Charles I, and Puritanical in its religious inclination, ordered the theaters closed in London. And closed they remained during the English Commonwealth which the Puritan government established in 1649 under Oliver Cromwell. It was not until 1661, a year after the restoration of the monarchy, when Charles II ordered them to be re-opened. When the theaters reopened, the theater, as well as English culture itself, was quite different from the way it had been in Shakespeare's day. Boys no longer acted the parts of women—women did. The stage was no longer a bare stage—something like a platform at an inn yard—but a proscenium stage adapted to using, even depending upon, scenery. Most significantly, with the restoration of the monarchy, the

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