ABSTRACT
Richard Dutton’s Shakespeare, Court Dramatist is a long overdue counterbalance to the focus of most Shakespearean criticism and scholarship on the commercial theatre. For whatever reason, perhaps a disapproval of the “elites,” Shakespeareans have, for the most part, privileged the commercial theatre and pushed the court theatre off the stage, affecting how the plays are read and staged. Dutton’s dismissal of conflated texts puts him at odds with Sir Brian Vickers’s case for The One King Lear. Vickers exercises his wide knowledge of book production and his fearsome rhetorical prowess to argue that the 1608 quarto and the 1623 folio of King Lear are differently mangled versions of an authorial copy, the quarto damaged by a novice printer and the folio the result of two-stage alterations by hands other than Shakespeare’s.
