Textual Problems

My name is John Leonard. I'm an independent scholar,

and this is a course about King Lear

starting in this session with the problem of the quarto and folio texts.

Now it's not actually that usual for a

textual problem to be relevant at schools level.

Typically, it's a finally our undergraduate or graduate matter.

But in the particular case of King Lear,

there is, I'm afraid, a problem with the texts, which you need to know about.

And that means going back to where

we actually get Shakespeare's texts from.

So Shakespearean plays survive in two forms known as quarter does

and the Folio.

If you say a quarter of what it means is that the paper it's been printed

on has been folded twice to produce a gathering of four leaves or eight pages,

and that implies a smaller book and typically the quarters.

This is a facsimile of the 16 oh eight quarto.

It's just the one play. It's not much larger than a modern paperback would be.

And if I open it up, you can see that you just have It's not column nated.

You just have text on on each page, so that's a quarter text,

and then

a total of 19 of Shakespeare's plays appeared in Quarto Tax one or More versions.

And then in 16 23 which is seven years after Shakespeare's death,

some of his friends from his theatre

company put together the first complete Shakespeare,

and that's known as the first Folio.

Folio means that the paper has only been folded once, so that you have four leaves.

And typically what happens is that three of those are put together

to produce a group of 12 leaves Folio in sixties.

And that's what Shakespeare's first Folio was.

It implies that it's a larger book, and so it is.

This is again about the same size. This is the Norton facsimile,

and if I

open this one up, you can see that you have the text in columns on the two pages.

And this. The first Folio contains 36 of Shakespeare's plays.

One is missing Pericles,

but

all the rest are in there.

And so that means

that for 18 of Shakespeare's plays,

there are

a quarter and a folio text

for 18 of the place. There's only a folio text,

and for one, there's only a quarter text

para athletes.

So

now it's important to understand what the problem is

and what the problem isn't.

And it isn't just that there are typos.

There certainly are typos.

When you are setting books in cold metal printing, you're setting hundreds,

thousands of tiny little pieces of metal upright on their narrow ends

in trays

and moving them around. There are going to be mistakes,

and most of those mistakes are relatively straightforward to deal with.

If someone says I am terribly in Jove,

you know that ought to be love,

and that's not a problem.

So although that can be tricky

sometimes,

uh, that can be disputable instances.

That's not really the problem that applies to all texts.

The problem is those plays that have quarto and folio texts or rather, some of them.

Out of those 18 plays that have quarto and folio texts, 14 of them

the text are pretty much the same.

But the other four,

including King Lear,

the quarto and Folio texts, are not

the same, and they are not the same by a significant margin.

There are scenes that disappear.

There are scenes that up here

there are changes in the attribution of speeches So in the case of King Lear

specifically,

for example, the mock trial, uh, in Act three on the Heath,

when Lear A Rains gonorrhoea and Regan who aren't really there but he sets up stools,

and he and poor Tom and the Full City and Judgement that is only in the quarter.

The scene with Kent and a gentleman praising

Cordelia

only in the quarter.

Other lines

The Fools prophecy

Only in the Folio

and the very last speech of the play

is It's the same in both texts, but in one of them, Edgar speaks it

and then the other. It's given to Albany to speak.

So with that, we've got a very different problem.

And the question is what editors do about that now. Historically,

originally, what they did was very simple,

because throughout the 18th and the 19th century,

what editors did was simply to ignore the quarto.

They simply said,

The Folio is That's the one that was put together by Shakespeare's friends.

It was carefully done.

It's the preferable text. The quarters are just erroneous early versions.

Uh, so we just print the folio and we have done

and up until about the 18 nineties.

That was what all editions of King Lear

would have been if they were actually Shakespeare's King Lear.

But then, in the 18 nineties, a man called Greg Walter Greg, later, Sir Walter Greg

came up with a completely different idea

and he said, No, no, no, he said.

Both the quarto and the Folio texts are imperfect versions of the Lost original.

And so what we ought to do

is put them together.

Any passage that appears in the quarter,

any passage that appears in the Folio, we put them all together.

And this produces a somewhat longer taxed,

which is known as the eclectic tax because it comes from different sources.

And from about 80 years,

if you bought King Lear,

that was what you bought. The eclectic text from the 18 nineties to the 19 eighties.

So the first Arden Edition and the Second Arden Edition and the

old Cambridge edition and one volume additions like the Alexander taxes,

all eclectic text.

But then, in the 19 nineties,

a big argument began about it the most

important argument in Shakespeare studies in my lifetime.

It's still going on,

and people said No, no, hang on a minute Great makes no sense.

We haven't got to imperfect versions of some perfect lost original.

What we've got is a play and then a revised version of the play.

These are not just random changes. This is a set of revisions made by a single hand

implicitly Shakespeare's.

And if you think that,

then the eclectic text makes absolutely no sense at all.

It's like taking a picture of someone aged four

and a picture of the same person aged 14

and printing them on top of one another

and saying that that's the real person. Somehow

it's just nonsense.

And since then

people have argued about it, and by and large the revision argument has prevailed

so that it, no matter what edition

of Shakespeare's King Lear you now by

it, has made a textual decision on your behalf.

And what that textual decision is can vary very

considerably if we take the major current paperbacks.

The Arden three

maintains the eclectic text

rather oddly, but now,

with lots of tiny little superscript cues and F's to indicate what's quarto

and what's Folio makes it pretty unreadable as far as I can see.

But that's what they did

then we have the world's classics. That's the quarto text

we have the new Cambridge That's the folio text.

And we have the Longmont annotated,

which is in parallel text with quarter on Folio on

facing pages gaps where things appear or don't appear.

So the thing is, it doesn't actually matter

in one way, whether you're reading cue or F or the eclectic tax.

But it does matter that you know which you're reading.

And if a text is being prescribed by your school,

if your teacher has made a choice or the school has made a choice,

or even the exam board has made a choice, you need to know about that.

And it's perfectly legitimate to ask why they've made that choice. And

is it possible that you will be facing questions about

the textual issue?

Or is it possible that you will be asked to comment

on a passage that is quarto only or folio only?

Or have those been excluded in some way?

So it doesn't matter which, but it does matter that you know which,

and in fact it is potentially very interesting in one other way as well,

because if you accept the revision theory, which a majority

a considerable majority of Shakespeare scholars now do. I certainly do.

Then, actually,

you can see Shakespeare at work.

You can see him in the process of revising.

And you think, Okay, why did he cut that bit? Why did he have that bit?

And he stops being this remote

barred figure who kind of uttered some some perfect text.

Instead, he's a working playwright thinking about it.

If the mock trial is cut from the court out of the Folio,

then presumably there was some kind of problem with staging it.

It didn't work on stage as well as he'd hoped.

Actually, I think that's that's quite an interesting way of looking at the text.

But whether or not you do that,

you need to know about the basics of the textural issue.

Q F eclectic and which is it that you're reading?