King Lear

The RSC Shakespeare

Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

Chief Associate Editor: Héloïse Sénéchal

Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,

Dee Anna Phares, Jan Sewell

King Lear

Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen and Trey Jansen

Introduction and Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate

Commentary: Penelope Freedman and Héloïse Sénéchal

Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin

In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings), Jan Sewell (overview),

Jonathan Bate (captions)

The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):

Adrian Noble, Deborah Warner, Trevor Nunn

Editorial Advisory Board

Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director,

Royal Shakespeare Company

Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK

Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,

Western Australia

Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,

Université de Genève, Switzerland

Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan

Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,

Columbia University, USA

Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

2009 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Copyright © 2007, 2009 by The Royal Shakespeare Company

Interview responses by Deborah Warner in “Director’s Cut”

copyright © 2009 by Deborah Warner

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The

Random House Publishing Group, a division of

Random House, Inc., New York.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks

of Random House, Inc.

“Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

The version of King Lear and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-1-58836-828-7

www.modernlibrary.com

v3.1_r1

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

An Old Man Tottering About the Stage?

The Division of the Kingdom

Ripeness Is All?

This Great Stage of Fools

About the Text

Key Facts

The Tragedy of King Lear

    Act 1

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

    Act 2

Scene 1

Scene 2

    Act 3

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

    Act 4

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

    Act 5

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Textual Notes

Quarto Passages That Do Not Appear in the Folio

Scene-by-Scene Analysis

King Lear in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

Four Centuries of King Lear: An Overview

At the RSC

The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Adrian Noble, Deborah Warner, and Trevor Nunn

Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

Beginnings

Playhouses

The Ensemble at Work

The King’s Man

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

The History Behind the Tragedies: A Chronology

Further Reading and Viewing

References

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

INTRODUCTION

AN OLD MAN TOTTERING ABOUT THE STAGE?

“King Lear,” wrote the early nineteenth-century Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in his Defence of Poetry, “may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world.” For all the Romantics, Lear was Shakespeare’s most “sublime” and “universal” play. John Keats wrote a sonnet “On sitting down to read King Lear once again”: having burned his way through the play, he would feel somehow purified and regenerated. For Keats’ contemporary Charles Lamb, Shakespeare’s anatomy of the human condition was so profound and tempestuous that the play seemed too vast for the stage. It is the centerpiece of his essay “On the tragedies of Shakspeare, considered with reference to their fitness for stage representation”: