The History of King Lear: The Oxford ShakespeareThe History of King Lear (The ^AOxford Shakespeare)

Foolishly, Amazon will post this review of 'King Lear' probably to every edition available, of which there are dozens. In a way, that is what has happened to Shakespeare's "King Lear". The texts I read in high school and college, taught for decades, were mash-ups of two plays: the 'King Lear' printed in the First Folio after Shakespeare's death, and the History of King Lear printed in the First Quarto while he was still an active playwright and actor. James Shapiro's "In the Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606" made me realize the play I studied was conflated by editors out of two, quite distinct, plays. I needed to go back and re-read Shakespeare's first, original "King Lear". The introduction to this volume also made me reflect on the performances I've seen of Lear (I've seen it staged at least three times) and wonder what choices the directors had made of scenes to include and to omit.

The OXFORD is a great source. What the ARDEN'S may not touch on, these do, and thus, shed more light on the subject at hand.

I am teaching a 30 session acting course on the play and it is an invaluable source of background material and definitions. I have word means and explanations of difficult passages at my fingertips. I have been involved in several productions of the play over a 40 year career in the theater. I only wish I had this important edition with me for all of them.

The staging of King Lear that Samuel Johnson admired over the sad thing that WS wrote. It's great that you can lay your hands on this so easily!

The format makes it very difficult to read on kindle since footnotes are everywhere.

Great

The merits of this masterpiece are unassailable, so I will focus instead on the edition itself. As in others of the Oxford Shakespeare, the text is abundantly supplemented with on-page notes, making for convenient and enjoyable assistance, particularly in aid to understanding archaic terms or unusual grammatical structures. In addition there is the excellent, lengthy Introduction. The paper is thick enough to endure multiple readings and frequent use. These newly reprinted (2008) volumes of the series are wonderful.

The play, of course, is a masterpiece. My complaint is with the Kindle edition, which shows blocks of text alternating with blocks of notes—as if the page spreads had been scanned in and the results not shown as spreads—very confusing. Buy the paperback.

We students of the 70s and 80s didn't realise how relatively simple things were back then (from a textual point of view, anyhow). Nowadays, when it comes to some of Shakespeare's seminal works, it isn't so much a question of which play we're studying as which version of the text. As Wells tells us in his introduction, the 'conflated' editorial tradition of combining the two early sources of 1608 (Quarto) and 1623 (Folio) was begun by Lewis Theobald in 1735 and followed right up until 1986. Wells himself was one of the series editors of the groundbreaking Oxford Collected Works of that year. This volume presented two different versions of King Lear, one based on the Quarto, the other on the Folio.The thinking behind this illustrates changing attitudes. The Quarto is now seen as an early, working version of the play, not a 'corrupt' or 'unauthorised' one. The Folio meanwhile is viewed as a revised version, by Shakespeare or Shakespeare's company - the product of several years of performance, adaptation and rethinking. Wells bases this single-play Oxford Shakespeare on the Quarto, not because it is a superior text, but because his main rivals (ie Arden and New Cambridge) base their editions on the Folio. This fact alone makes Wells' version worth serious consideration.Another advantage of this edition is that it includes The Ballad of King Lear. Although published in 1620 (ie some fifteen years or so after the play's composition) it might just cast light, Wells argues, upon some aspects of the play's early stage history. Moreover, here as elsewhere, The Oxford Shakespeare is alone in providing an index of unusual words and phrases used in the play. This excellent innovation helps the reader find the passage they're looking for without the need for a computer search.Despite unpromising beginnings ('Once upon a time, probably in 1605, a man called William Shakespeare, using a quill pen, wrote a play about the legendary King Lear ...') there are, in fact, many reasons why students might want to opt for this particular Lear. Not least, because it skilfully introduces us to a wealth of critical ideas about the play. One of a modern editor's main tasks is to help us sort out the wheat from a mountain of chaff, and a selection of the more influential and important thinking on Lear is neatly summarised in the Introduction. Two bibliographies offer scope for further, independent analysis, while Wells himself is especially illuminating on the play's language and structure.Excellent editions of King Lear are already out there, especially those by RA Foakes and Jay L Halio. But this one manages to offer something new and stimulating.

This is Nahum Tate's adaption of King Lear, and what he thought of as an improvement ! It is definitely not Shakespeare, but it is well worth reading to see what writers and audiences wanted by the end of the 17th century. Spoiler alert - it has a happy ending !!! But to be fair to Tate, his play does have a kind of logic to it - it is not a completely random bodge up of Shakespeare; and of course, Shakespeare was adapting an earlier "Leir" that was a comedy with a happy ending. If you are interested in Theatre history and particularly Shakespeare theatre history, you will find this fascinating.

Wife studying at College

Great book, thank you

This item is a must have for all Shakespeare’s lovers. It portrays the types of social conflicts back in the Renaissance period. Despite the language used being a bit archaic, the notes contained in this version are quite helpful.