Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 3 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear by DUNCAN SALKELD Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 he two early texts of King Lear , the 1608 Quarto (hereafter Q) and the 1623 Folio (hereafter F) differ substantially from each other. TConsequently, there has been much critical dispute over how those differences arose. Some have regarded Q as derived from an authorial manu - script, others as a reconstruction from memory by one or more of its actors. F has been thought to be based on Q, or possibly the 1619 quarto (hereafter Q2), or on a playhouse manuscript. The current orthodoxy is that Q (printed by Nicholas Okes) represents Shakespeare’s first draft, and that F is a later revision made by Shakespeare sometime after 1608. Throughout most of the twentieth century, editors tended to choose the best readings as they saw them from both Q and F, and offered readers a conflated ‘ideal’ text, one that reflected the judgement of the scholar responsible for the edi - tion. In the 1980s, this policy of making the best of all possible readings was strongly challenged by a group that came to be known as the ‘revisionists’. 1 These influential critics included Michael Warren, Steven Urkowitz, and Gary Taylor. Collectively, they maintained that conflation could only pro - duce a patched-up text that Shakespeare never in fact wrote. Their view is that Q was essentially Shakespeare’s first attempt, and that F constituted a much-revised version. 2 So persuasive has this argument been that significant scholarly editions of the plays have since absorbed its line of thinking. Readers now find themselves offered as many as three King Lear s, separate editions of Q and F, plus a conflated text that merges the two. If the detail involved in these debates appears sometimes complex and technical, the revision theory at least had the virtue of making the solution seem simple. I am grateful to Brian Vickers for prompting me to write this article, and for his support. I also wish to thank the exacting anonymous readers of drafts of this article who have at various points saved me from misapprehension and error. My sincere thanks also go to Peter Holland, MacDonald P. Jackson, Pervez Rizvi, and Stanley Wells for their helpful responses to a draft of this article. 1 Richard Knowles, ‘Revision Awry in Folio Lear 3.1’, Shakespeare Quarterly , 46 (1995), 32–46 (p. 32). 2 See for example Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare’s Revision of King Lear (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 129. The Library , 7th series, vol. 22, no. 1 (March 2021) © The Author 2021; all rights reserved Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 4 4 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear This article adopts a different view, but one that is not entirely new. An implication arising from it is that no revision of King Lear took place after 1608, save for a few corrections made in Q2. Part of the Lear problem, it seems, has resided in the way the relation between Q and F has been under - stood. Almost all studies have assumed that F, printed in 1623, must to some extent derive from Q, printed in 1608. On this view, F contains improve - ments or corrections made after Q. But, for reasons that will become clear, the reverse appears to have been the case. The great majority of verbal alterations (aside from significant excisions in F) happened to Q, not to F. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 Furthermore, there is no sign that these alterations were made as part of a deliberate strategy of re-shaping the play. The argument here is that, while F was printed later than Q, the manuscript on which it was based (or one similar) was available to the printers of Q. In short, a manuscript very much like F, but without its cuts, lies behind Q. In line with several studies before it, this article argues further that Q is a reported text, but a report of a very specific kind. Before proceeding further, it may be helpful to expand on what is meant by this claim. The central argument here proposed runs as follows: Q was printed by dictation in the printing house from an uncut manuscript very similar to F. It is well-known that Q has material not in F, perhaps because the manu - script behind F was shortened for performance (mainly at 2.2.7–15, 3.6.17 –55 and 94–112, 3.7.98–106, 4.1.61–66, 4.2.32–51, all of 4.3 and 5.3.203–20). 3 Q’s numerous verbal slips derive on the whole, though not entirely, from a combination of misreadings and mishearings made between a lector , or reader, and Okes’s on-duty compositor. The idea that the first quarto might have been produced by dictation was considered, though not endorsed, by Madeleine Doran as early as 1931, but has since received little attention, perhaps for lack of evidence that this was a method much used by early printers. The proposition set out below is that the complete text of King Lear was broadly finished by 1608. An imperfect quarto was published in that year from a manuscript that had been read aloud, and a version of this text was later reprinted with a few corrections in 1619 (Q2). In 1623, the play was printed again as one of the tragedies of the First Folio, but by this time the manuscript had been cut for performance. In order to explain the rationale for these claims, some review of prior critical studies is required since a broad but important consensus held before the revision hypothesis emerged. That consensus produced a number of insights that ought still to be heeded, especially in so far as they touch on the question of mishearings. For clarity, this article is divided into four sec - tions. It begins with an account of some of the complexities of the Lear 3 Line references to Shakespeare’s plays are throughout keyed to the editions of the Third Series of the Arden Shakespeare, unless otherwise stated. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 5 Duncan Salkeld 5 debate. These details may at times seem technical, but they are central to the argument. It adds an account of the currently dominant view—the revision theory—and its critics. The second section risks testing the reader’s patience by providing a brief recapitulation of critical positions regarding the Q/F problem. But this summary is necessary since it demonstrates that key observa tions regarding misreadings and mishearings were generated by these prior studies. The third section sets out to establish the order of the Lear texts, and challenges a long-influential account by P. A. Daniel, pub - lished in 1885, which all subsequent studies of the question have followed. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 The fourth section sets out some of the evidence for dictation. It will be clear that several scholars have anticipated, in one way or another, the con - clusions advanced in this article. Complexities and Revision The complexities of the Lear problem can seem daunting. Not only do the play’s two earliest imprints (Q and F) differ in significant respects, but Q itself survives in varying states. Of the twelve extant quartos, no two are iden tical. As is characteristic of early printed texts, each contains a pattern of variants not exactly reproduced in any of the others. It appears that as Q was going through the press, its sheets were checked for faults and occa - sional corrections were added. Some were only partly corrected but the improved sheets were subsequently distributed haphazardly (as it were) in the final work. Ever since W. W. Greg’s definitive study of these variants, Q’s original or uncorrected sheets have usually been referred to as ‘Qa’, and its sheets in the amended or corrected state designated ‘Qb’. Each of the extant quartos contains different sheets in either state. Greg provided a table showing the distributions of these anomalies in the twelve quartos, arranged by the sheet-signature and forme on which they appear. 4 From this table alone, it would appear that Q’s marked degree of instability resulted from agents other than Shakespeare. There are abundant signs in the surviving quartos that Q was printed with out much thought or care. Verse is very often set as prose, occasionally prose is given as verse, character speech prefixes are sometimes confused, and punctuation is often either omitted or quite out of kilter with the sense. Q contains some 300 or so lines that are not in F, while F has about 100 lines not in Q. One of the many striking differences between the texts is that, sporadi cally, sections ranging from a few lines to entire passages appear either only in Q or only in F. Among other omissions, F lacks thirty lines for the ‘mad trial’ of Goneril (3.6.17–55) and the whole scene of 4.3. Several other substantial Q-only passages confirm that the original manuscript was 4 W. W. Greg, The Variants in the First Quarto of ‘King Lear’ (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1940), p.