Tragedy of King Lear

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. For this second edition of King Lear, Jay L. Halio has added a new introductory section that focuses on recent developments in scholarly criticism as well as on contemporary productions of the play. The edition features a comprehensive account of Shakespeare's sources, including literary, political and folkloric influences on the work. Halio's text is edited from the Folio and he explains the differences between the quarto and Folio versions, alerting the reader to the rival charms of the quarto by sampling parallel passages in the Introduction and by including in an Appendix annotated passages that are unique to the quarto. An updated reading list completes the edition.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of illustrations (p. viii)
• Preface (p. xi)
• List of abbreviations and conventions (p. xiv)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• Date and sources of Shakespeare's King Lear (p. 1)
• The play (p. 14)
• King Lear on stage and screen (p. 32)
• Recent stage, film, and critical interpretations (p. 54)
• Textual analysis, part 1 (p. 65)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This is a thoroughly modern edition--modernized spelling, a modern emphasis on the play as performance, and a modern view of the text. Halio presents the Folio text of the play without inserting the approximately 300 lines that appear in the Quarto of 1608; he does, however, adopt readings from Q when he feels that Q is correct and F incorrect. But this edition does not skimp the Q text: there is a well-done collation and a very thorough presentation of parallel passages and of all passages in Q that are not printed as part of this text. Halio points out in introductory material and in the full commentary running at the bottom of each page of text that the F text presents a somewhat different effect from that presented by the conflated F and Q text. For this reason alone, this edition makes a real contribution to the study of King Lear. Like other volumes in the New Cambridge Shakespeare, the book has illustrations, but, unlike the Oxford Shakespeare volumes, it has no index to the commentary. All academic libraries and most public libraries should have this edition. D. C. Redding; SUNY at Albany