Textual Problems

About the lecture

King Lear is one of four plays where the quarto text differs significantly from the folio text: there are scenes that appear, scenes that disappear, and speeches that are reassigned. In this module, we explore the textual problems associated with King Lear, and how these have been dealt with in the past and nowadays.

About the lecturer

Born in Bristol, and educated at Oxford and St Louis, Dr John Lennard has taught English, American, and Commonwealth Literature in Cambridge, London, and Jamaica over more than twenty years. He has written two widely used textbooks (on poetry and drama) and monographs on Shakespeare, Paul Scott, Nabokov, and Faulkner, as well as two collections of essays on contemporary genre writers in crime, science fiction and fantasy, and romance. Enthusiastic, discursive, widely knowledgeable, and a demon for punctuation (on which he has also published extensively), he has been a popular Summer School Course Leader and lecturer for the Institute of Continuing Education since 1992.