ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to assess the particular quality of Butler's scholarly work on Shakespeare, and focuses on King Lear. It suspects that the writing of his unwieldy magnum opus was motivated less by the desire to publish a book than to put on paper his passion for the play and, while he was about it, to be comprehensive and exhaustive in its explication. Guy Butler's Lear, two bulky companion typescript volumes, lies unread in the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown. There are multiple copies and different versions in draft, partly corrected and amended in holograph, with references missing or incomplete. Butler urges that the legendary ancient Britain foregrounded in various modern accounts of the play is a scholarly phantasm. Elizabethans and Jacobeans lacked the historical imagination to conceive of ancient Britons as being other than they were themselves. There was a blatant disregard for strategic academic publishing imperatives in Butler's project.
