ABSTRACT
The title page of the 1608 Quarto of The True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters not only gives the name of the playwright in unusually large type but also announces a double provenance for the play itself; it was acted before the King at Whitehall on St Stephen’s night (26 December), by ‘His Majesty’s servants playing usually at the Globe on the Bankside’. Fascinating though it is to speculate on the effect of this play at a court performance, and common though it is to see it as the work of a famous playwright, our concern here is with King Lear as a play for the Globe audience. It may not have been so popular as the other three plays we have looked at, but there is no reason to believe it was an outright failure. A second quarto was printed eleven years earlier, substantially the same as the first, and the play appeared again in the 1623 Folio edition of the author’s collected works. The Folio version represents a substantial revision, possibly carried out by the author himself; this suggests that the play had, or was intended to have, a continuing life in the repertoire. On the other hand, a comparative lack of contemporary references suggests that it did not have the impact of, say, Richard III or Hamlet, and the printing history does not indicate anything like the wild (and admittedly unusual) success of If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody. In this chapter we shall look at the grounds of the play’s appeal to its first audience, and at the reasons why this appeal may finally have been limited. The discussion will be based on the Quarto version, with occasional excursions into the Folio. The Quarto, being somewhat more discursive and moralizing than the Folio, is closer to the play’s roots in popular dramaturgy; the revision makes the play more elliptical and sophisticated. Moreover, there is reason to believe that the Quarto text, like that of Part One of If You Know Not Me, is based on a shorthand transcription of the play in performance, giving it at some points the special value of an eyewitness account. 1
