King Lear has been widely acclaimed as Shakespeares most powerful tragedy. Elemental and passionate, it encompasses the horrific and the heart-rending. Love and hate, loyalty and treachery, cruelty and self-sacrifice: all these contend in a tempestuous drama which has become an enduring classic of the worlds literature. In the theatre and on screen King Lear continues to challenge and enthral.This Wordsworth edition of King Lear provides a comprehensive, integrated text of the play.
Introduction
The Text of King Lear
A Note on the Text
Textual Variants
Sources
PRIMARY SOURCES
Anonymous·From The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters
John Higgins·From The Mirror for Magistrates
Raphael Holinshed·From Chronicles
Edmund Spenser·From The Faerie Queene
Sir Philip Sidney·From The Countesse of Pembroke's Arcadia
James VI of Scotland·From The True Law of Free Monarchies
James I·From Basilikon Doron
Samuel Harsnett·From A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures
William Camden·From Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine
POSSIBLE SOURCES
The Case of Cordell Annesley and Her Father, Bryan
Geoffrey of Monmouth·From Historia Regum Britanniae
Criticism
Nahum Tate·Preface, The History of King Lear
Samuel Johnson·Notes on King Lear
Charles Lamb·From On the Tragedies of Shakespeare
William Hazlitt·From Characters of Shakespeare's Plays: King Lear
A. C. Bradley·From Shakespearean Tragedy
Jan Kott·From Shakespeare Our Contemporary
Peter Brook·From The Empty Space
Michael Warren·Quarto and Folio King Lear and theInterpretation of Albany and Edgar
Lynda E. Boose·From The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare
Janet Adelman·From Suffocating Mothers
Margot Heinemann·"Demystifying the Mystery of State": King Lear and the World Upside Down
R. A. Foakes·From Hamlet versus Lear
Stanley Cavell·From The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear
Adaptations and Responses
Nahum Tate·From The History of King Lear
John Keats·On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
Edward Bond·From Lear
Selected Bibliography