ABSTRACT
This essay revisits a vexed question that has in recent years provoked much heat and dogmatic claims on both sides, namely, whether the numerous and important differences between the 1608 Quarto and 1623 Folio texts of King Lear indicate that someone, perhaps Shakespeare himself, deliberately reworked the play. In my edition of the play for the Arden Series 3, published in 1997, I found the evidence of revision by someone skilled in writing for the stage persuasive. Reviewing the treatment of the texts between 1980 and 2000 in Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002), Kiernan Ryan takes the side of those who reject the idea of deliberate revision, and indeed says that the revisionist hypothesis has been dealt “a series of body-blows from which it looks unlikely to recover”; he thinks changes found in the Folio might have been made by anyone, and “most of the cuts and revisions are not convincing on artistic or theatrical grounds anyway” (Ryan 3). This dismissive assertion led me to reconsider the evidence here, with, I trust, greater sharpness and clarity.
