LEAR. Attend the Lords of France &
  Burgundy, Glouster.
GLOU. I shall, my Lord.
LEAR. Meane time we shal expresse our darker
  purpose.
Give me the Map there. Know, that we have
  divided
In three our Kingdome: and 'tis our fast
  intent,
To shake all Cares and Businesse from our
  Age,
Conferring them on yonger strengths, while
  we
Unburthen'd crawle toward death. Our son of
  Cornwal,
And you our no lesse loving Sonne of Albany:
We have this houre a constant will to publish
Our daughters severall Dowers, that future
  strife
May be prevented now. The Princes, France
  & Burgundy,
Great Rivals in our yongest doughters love,
Long in our Court, have made their amorous
  sojourne,
And heere are to be answer'd. Tell me my
  daughters
(Since now we will divest us both of Rule,
Interest of Territory, Cares of State)
Which of you shall we say doth love us most,
That we, our largest bountie may extend
Where Nature doth with merit challenge.
  Gonerill,
Our eldest borne, speake first.

Halio's comments, summarizing arguments made by Thomas Clayton, Urkowitz, and others on what he considers F's 'additions of entirely new material' (p. 72) in the speech deserve to be quoted in full, since they state what not only he but other revisionists consider one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the two-text theory:

The complex effects of this amplification (in F) are essentially threefold: (1) anticipation of Lear's firmness, as in the alteration of Q 'our first intent' to F 'our fast intent' (line 33), and the added 'We have this houre a constant will' (line 38); (2) provision of more detailed and rational-sounding motives for abdication, as in the desire to confer responsibility of the realm on 'yonger strengths' (line 35) and the wish to prevent 'future strife' by immediately publishing the daughters' dowries (lines 38-40); (3) contributions to the patterns of imagery involving clothing and nakedness, as in the announcement that Lear will 'divest' himself of rule, territory and responsibility for the state (lines 44-5). Careful comparison of the entire speech in F with its shorter—and different—form in Q, combined with other changes later in the Folio version of the play that Clayton notes, strongly suggest, though they cannot prove, authorial second thoughts and subsequent revision. (pp. 72-73)

No one has better stated the case for revision than Halio has in the above paragraph. And it must be said that if his analysis of the F 'amplifications' in this speech is correct, then we cannot dispute his conclusion. But the fatal flaw in Halio's discussion of the differences between Q and F here, as elsewhere in the play, is his total disregard of an alternate (and, in my opinion, a more satisfactory) explanation for these differences. In my earlier article, I suggested that the so-called amplifications in F were part of the speech as Shakespeare first wrote it, and that Q's text represents not an earlier state of the speech, but a corrupt and truncated version of it. What we are dealing with are not F's 'authorial second thoughts' but Q's omissions. Shakespeare could never, even in a first draft, have omitted all reference to Cornwall and Albany and their role in the division of the kingdom. That lines 35-40 (beginning 'while we' and ending 'may be prevented now') have simply dropped out of the Q text, thereby creating the false apposition, 'Confirming them on yonger yeares / The two great princes France and Burgundy', is in my opinion a far more likely supposition than that they were added in F. Significantly, as I pointed out in my earlier article, the metrically incomplete Q line, 'Confirming them on yonger yeares', is completed in F by 'while we', the first two words of the omitted passage.

That the difference between Q's 'first intent' and F's 'fast intent' is a Shakespearean amplification designed to create an 'anticipation of Lear's firmness' is a baseless assumption. 'First intent' makes no sense in the context of the speech and the scene, which deals with Lear's fast intent to divest himself of rule and to divide his kingdom. Even Halio, having cited the difference between the two readings, as part of his 'threefold' argument for revision here, admits in a footnote (p. 72) that 'first' may simply be a misprint for 'fast', corrected in F. To even grant the possibility, as Halio does here, that a variant reading in Q may be an error is to violate one of the basic stratagems of the revisionists. For to the adherents of the two-text theory, beginning as they do with the a priori conviction that Shakespeare revised King Lear, every verbal difference between Q and F is seen as evidence of deliberate authorial tinkering, and any other explanation for such differences is dismissed out of hand. Thus, Randall McLeod, commenting on the difference between Q's 'great pallace' and F's 'grac'd Pallace' (I.4.201; TLN 755), concedes that 'one must admit the ease of phonetically or graphically confusing "grac'd" and "great"', but then goes on to assert that 'the issue is whether one need postulate error in either text'.¹² But I would maintain that to postulate revision here, or elsewhere, is to take a far greater leap into conjecture than to postulate error.

The presence of error in Q is not simply a possible alternative hypothesis to that of revision; it is a demonstrable fact, and the kind and number of errors are such as to destroy the theory that Q was printed from an authentic Shakespeare manuscript, no matter how illegible it is presumed to have been. The assumption of compositorial misreading cannot explain the overwhelming number of errors of mishearing, mislineation, and mispunctuation that again and again destroy the sense of what Shakespeare must have written, and what is correctly given in F. Nor can these errors represent Shakespeare's first thoughts, later revised in F; rather, they are clearly corruptions of the text preserved in F.

The first two acts of the play alone provide a number of examples of errors (almost certainly mishearings rather than misreadings) that turn F's sense into nonsense:

Q. She is her selfe and dowre.
F. She is herselfe a Dowrie.
                           (I.1.236; TLN 264)

Q. [ … ] epicurisme and lust make more
  like a taverne
or brothell, then a great pallace
F. [ … ] Epicurisme and Lust
Makes it more like a Taverne, or a Brothell,
Then a grac'd Pallace.
                           (I.4.199; TLN 753)

(Despite McLeod, 'grac'd Pallace', a necessary antithesis to the squalid, ungraced "Taverne or a Brothell', is obviously right here, and 'great pallace' is in error).

Q. with accent teares, fret channels in her
  cheeks
F With cadent Teares fret Channels in her
  cheekes
                           (I.4.240; TLN 799)

Q. striving to better ought, we marre what's
  well.
F. Striving to better, oft we marre what's
  well.
                             (I.4.300; TLN 870)

Q. You should doe small respect, shew too
  bald malice
Against the Grace and person of my maister,
Stobing his messenger.
F. You shall doe small respects, show too
  bald malice
Against the Grace, and Person of my Master,
Stocking his Messenger.
                          (n.2.119; TLN 1209)

'Stobing', in uncorrected copies of Q, is an obvious error and was changed by the press corrector to 'stopping', an intelligent guess but one that proves he cannot have consulted an authentic manuscript, since the F reading, 'stocking', is, as the context makes clear, what Shakespeare must have written in the first place.¹³

Q. nothing almost sees my rackles
But miserie
F. [ … ] Nothing almost sees miracles
But miserie.
                              (n.2.148; TLN 1242)

Here again, the Q press corrector, desperately guessing, without recourse to a genuine manuscript, has changed 'my rackles' to 'my wracke'. Nothing in Q, incidentally, is more certainly a mishearing than 'my rackles'.

Q. Why the hot bloud in France, that
  dowerles
Tooke our yongest borne
F. Why the hot-blooded France that
  dowerlesse tooke

Our yongest borne
                          (n.4.205; TLN 1505)

These examples of simple mishearing in Q, not only in the first two acts of Lear, but in other acts as well, could be further expanded. But it is sufficient to cite, in addition to those already given, the most notorious error in the Q text, occurring in the great confrontation scene between Lear and Gloucester in the latter part of the play:

Q. see how yon Justice railes upon yon simple theife, harke in thy eare handy, dandy, which is the theefe, which is the Justice, thou hast seene a farmers dogge barke at a begger. [ … ]

And the creature runne from the cur, there thou mightst behold the great image of authoritie, a dogge, so bade in office. F. See how yond Justice railes upon yond simple theefe. Hearke in thine eare; Change places, and handy-dandy, which is the Justice, which is the theefe: Thou hast seene a Farmers dogge barke at a Beggar? [ … ]

And the creature run from the Cur: there thou might'st behold the great image of Authoritie, a Dogg's obey'd in Office.

(IV.5.145-51; TLN 2595-2603)

I have put the ludicrous Q reading 'a dogge, so bade in office', in its context, not merely to show how Q mangles one of Shakespeare's most powerful images but also to reveal the presence of other errors, of dropped words or phrases, of reckless mispunctuation, as here, that are endemic throughout Q, and that cannot be explained away as compositorial misreadings of a Shakespeare holograph.

It is such errors, as well as those of mislineation, to which I now turn. As early as the first scene, we find what is a pervasive characteristic of the Q text: a running together of phrases that belong in F to separate clauses or sentences, and that in F are properly set off by necessary marks of punctuation. Regan's first speech in Q begins:

Sir I am made of the self same mettali that
  my sister is,
and prize me at her worth in my true heart,
I find she names my very deed of love, only
  she came short

The corresponding lines in F read:

I am made of that self-mettle as my Sister,
and prize me at her worth. In my true heart,
I find she names my very deede of love.
                             (I.1.64; TLN 74)

I cannot here list all the instances of such sense-destroying mispunctuation, but I give some of the more flagrant examples. In Q, Goneril says:

His Knights grow ryotous, and him selfe
  obrayds us,
On every trifell when he returnes from
  hunting,
I will not speake with him, say I am
  sicke.

The corresponding passage in F reads:

His Knights grow riotous, and himselfe
  upbraides us
On every trifle. When he returns from
  hunting,
I will not speake with him, say I am sicke.
                               (I.3.7; TLN 513)

In Q, Lear's outburst at Goneril reads:

Doth any here know mee? why this is not Lear, doth Lear walke thus? speake thus? where are his eyes, either his notion, weaknes or his discernings are lethergie, sleeping, or wakeing; ha! sure tis not so, who is it that can tell me who I am?

The corresponding lines in F read:

Do's any heere know me?
This is not Lear:
Do's Lear walke thus? Speake thus? Where
  are his eies?
Either his Notion weakens, his Discernings
Are Lethargied. Ha! Waking? 'Tis not so?
Who is it that can tell me who I am?
                            (I.4.185; TLN 738)

Later in this scene, we have a complete breakdown of sense in another of Lear's passionate outbursts in Q:

We that too late repent's, O sir, are you
  come?
Is it your will that we prepare any horses,
ingratitude! thou marble harted fiend.

Compare this gibberish with the corresponding lines in F:

Woe, that too late repents:
Is it your will, speake Sir? Prepare my horses.
Ingratitude! thou Marble-hearted Fiend.
                            (I.4.212; TLN 769)

Even more corrupt is the continuation of Lear's speech in Q: 'detested kite, thou list my traine, and men of choise and rarest parts, that all particulars of dutie know'. In F, these lines form the beginning of a new speech, after Albany's interjection, 'Pray, sir be patient':

Detested Kite, thou lyest.
My traine are men of choice, and rarest parts
That all particulars of dutie know.
                              (I.4.217; TLN 775)

Still another example of Q's transformation of sense into nonsense is found later in Regan's speech, which reads in Q:

It was great ignorance, Gloster's eyes being
  out
To let him live, where he arrives he moves
All harts against us, and now I thinke is gone
In pitie of his misery to dispatch his nighted
  life,
Moreover to discrie the strength at'h army.

The absurdity of Gloster's having gone to descry the strength of the army vanishes when we turn to F's version of these lines:

It was great ignorance, Glousters eyes being
  out
To let him live. Where he arrives, he moves
All hearts against us: Edmond, I thinke is
  gone
In pitty of his misery, to dispatch
His nighted life: Moreover to descry
The strength o' th' Enemy.
                             (IV.4.11; TLN 2394)

I find it hard to believe that any compositor, no matter how bungling, could have misread 'Edmond' as 'and now'. The error is far more likely to be due to a lapse of memory, by whoever prepared the copy for Q, as with other errors in the Q text.

One more example of memorial distortion must suffice. Edgar's description to his blind father of the imagined heights on which they stand reads thus in Q:

  [ … ] the murmuring surge
That on the unnumbered idle peeble chaffes
Cannot be heard, its so hie ile looke no more

Compare the same lines in F:

              The murmuring Surge,
That on th'unnumbered idle Pebble chafes
Cannot be heard so high. Ile looke no more
                            (IV.5.20; TLN 2455)

One of the most conspicuous features of the Q text is its frequent inability to reproduce the verse lineation of the original text. Either the attempt is given up as hopeless, and verse is simply broken down into prose, as in virtually all of the first half of the first scene of Act II, or the verse is nonsensically mislined, resulting in such absurdities as these lines of Lear's in Q:

The art of our necessities is strange that can,
Make vild things precious, come you hovell
  poore,
Foole and knave, I haue one part of my heart
That sorrowes yet for thee.

Compare F:

The art of our Necessities is strange,
And can make vilde things precious. Come,
  your Hovel;
Poore Foole, and Knave, I have one part in
  my heart
That's sorry yet for thee.
                         (III.2.68; TLN 1725)

I find it difficult to believe that the Q compositor is here following an authentic manuscript, embodying a first version of the play by Shakespeare. It is, of course, just possible that someone in the printing-house dictated these lines to the compositor, who was unable to read a badly illegible manuscript. But I think it far more likely that the manuscript was already corrupt when it reached Okes's print shop, as the memorial errors I have already cited demonstrate.¹⁴

In any case, this is not an isolated example of mislineation in Q, with attendant damage to punctuation and sense. At the beginning of III.3, there is a futile attempt by Q to make verse out of the prose preserved in F as in the opening lines of Gloucester's speech:

Alacke alacke Edmund I like not this,
Unnaturall dealing when I desir'd their leave
That I might pity him, they tooke me from me
The use of mine owne house.

Compare F:

GLOU. Alacke, alacke Edmund, I like not this unnaturall dealing; when I desired their leave that I might pity him, they tooke from me the use of mine owne house.

(III.3.1-3; TLN 1753-55)

Another example of mislineation combined with mis-punctuation in Q is found in Edgar's reply to Albany's wondering question, 'Where have you hid your selfe? / How have you knowne the miseries of your Father?' :

By nursing them my Lord,
List a briefe tale, and when tis told
O that my heart would burst the bloudy
  proclamation
To escape that followed me so neere,
O our lives sweetnes, that with the paine of
  death,
Would hourly die, rather than die at once
Taught me to shift into a mad-mans rags

To assume a semblance that very dogges
  disdained
And in this habit met I my father with his
  bleeding rings,
The precious stones new lost became his
  guide,
Led him, beg'd for him, sav'd him from
  despaire.

F here reads:

By nursing them my Lord. List a breefe tale,
And when 'tis told, O that my heart would
  burst.
The bloody proclamation to escape
That follow'd me so neere, (O our lives
  sweetnesse,
That we the paine of death would hourely
  dye,
Rather than die at once) taught me to shift
Into a mad-mans rags, t'assume a semblance
That very Dogges disdain'd; and in this habit
Met I my father with his bleeding Rings,
Their precious stones new lost: became his
  guide,
Led him, begg'd for him, sav'd him from
  dispaire.
                          (v.3.172-82; TLN 3144-54)

The various Q errors that I have cited, mishearings, omissions, mispunctuation, mislineation, are all characteristic features of so-called 'bad' quartos, texts that have long been considered the products of memorial reconstruction, whether put together by renegade actors or playhouse note-takers, or assembled for provincial performance by a company lacking its play-books. The theory of 'bad' quartos needs and has received some modification in recent years, most impressively I do not maintain in an important article by Paul Werstine.¹⁵ I do not maintain that Q of Lear is corrupt throughout; as Greg himself emphasized, no simple explanation can account for all the textual features of Q, not least the obvious Tightness of many passages, particularly in the middle scenes of the play.¹⁶ But, as I have tried to demonstrate, there are many clear errors of a sort that can only be due to some form of oral transmission, and that are difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis of an authentic Shakespeare manuscript as the copy for Q.¹⁷

If I am right in believing that both the absence of any external evidence for Shakespearean revision of Lear, and the weakness of the internal evidence, make it improbable, to say the least, that Q represents a first version of the play, the question remains: why has the theory of a two-text Lear, enshrined as it has been in two prestigious editions, the one-volume Oxford Complete Works, and the New Cambridge King Lear, won such widespread acceptance? The answer to this question involves a number of factors.

First of all, there is the complete assurance, the categorical dismissal of all alternative hypotheses, with which the theory is presented by its adherents. Warren, for example, concludes his influential article with the following words: '[Q and F] must be treated as separate versions of King Lear, and [ … ] eclecticism cannot be a valid principle in deciding readings. Conflated texts such as are commonly printed are invalid, and should not be used either for production or for interpretation [ … ]. [The conflated text is] a work that has no justification for its existence' (pp. 104-05). It is no wonder that many scholars, confronted with such absolute certainty, should accept the two-text theory as proved beyond a doubt.

Even more important in muting possible criticism of the two-text theory has been the constant iteration, by some of the more active revisionists, of their theatrical expertise, which has enabled them to discern major differences of dramatic emphasis and staging to which Greg, Duthie, Alice Walker, and others were presumably blind.¹⁸ Most Shakespeare scholars, with some notable exceptions (such as G. Wilson Knight and Kenneth Muir), have had little or no experience as actors or directors, and are reluctant to challenge the confident assertions by revisionists that transform palpable errors into heavily charged markers of changes in stagecraft.

Above all, the two-text theory has flourished because it has lent support to, and been supported by, the deconstructionist emphasis on textual indeterminacy, and the virtual disappearance of the creative autonomy of the author, what R. A. Foakes has characterized as 'the new enthusiasm for cutting Shakespeare down to size' (p. 9). The idea that King Lear, arguably the greatest literary work in English, is not one play, 'absolute in [its] numbers, as he conceived them', but at least two separate plays, has had a powerful appeal, especially for younger scholars. Thus, we have been told by a respected scholar, 'Shakespeare was a reviser of scripts subject to numerous contingencies; there never was a King Lear'.¹⁹ And Leah Marcus, arguing that Shakespeare may have revised his plays for different audiences and different venues, observes: 'We may find ourselves gravitating towards a multiple editorial presentation of the plays that allows us and our students to explore deviations between texts not as symptoms of corruption but as signs of local difference.'²⁰

What I am concerned to affirm is the integrity, the oneness of King Lear as a coherent vision of life and human relationships. There are not two Lears, or as some would have it, an indefinite number of possible Lears, but one supreme masterpiece, that like Rembrandt's sublime painting of 'The Return of the Prodigal Son', with its Lear-like theme of reconciliation and mutuai forgiveness, convinces us, despite the apparent bleakness and nihilism of the close, that something can come of nothing.²¹

Notes

¹ 'Shakespeare's Supposed Revision of King Lear', Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 (1984), 506-11 (p. 506).

²King Lear, p. 69. All act, scene, and line references are to the New Cambridge King Lear, ed. by Jay L. Halio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Even those few scholars who remain unconvinced that Q and F King Lears are separate and independent plays accept, for the most part, the idea that it is a revised version of Q. Thus, in his excellent recent book, 'Hamlet versus Lear' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), R. A. Foakes concludes: 'What I take to be the revised King Lear of F is thus significantly different from Q, though not as radically different as the authors of The Division of the Kingdoms would have us think' (p. 212).

³Revising Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 184.

⁴ Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

⁵'Henslowe 's Diary and the Economics of Play Revision for Revival, 1592-1603', Theatre Research International, 10 (1985), 1-18 (p. 1). Knutson effectively confutes G. E. Bentley's conclusion (heavily relied on by the revisionists) that 'almost any play [ … ] kept in active repertory by the company which owned it is most likely to contain later revisions by the author or, in many cases, by another playwright working for the same company' (The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 263).

⁶ E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), II, 332.

⁷Textual Companion, p. 17.

⁸ 'Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar', in Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. by David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978), pp. 95-105. Warren's essay has, since its publication, served as one of the cornerstones of the two-text theory of Lear, and its conclusions have never been seriously challenged.

⁹'Hamlet versus Lear', p. 208.

¹⁰ 'Shakespeare's Supposed Revision', p. 510.

¹¹'King Lear. The Date and Authorship of the Folio Version', in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear', ed. by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 376.

¹² ' Gon. No more, the text is foolish', in The Division of the Kingdoms, p. 176. The refusal to see corruption rather than revision as the explanation for differences between Q and F is even shared by Foakes. He speaks, for example, of 'the conversion [my emphasis] of Lear's "Who is it that can tell me who I am? Lear's shadow" (Q) into a dialogue with a mocking retort by the Fool: "Lear. Who is it that can tell me who I am? Fool. Lear's shadow" (F)' (p. 101). I believe that F is clearly right here and represents what Shakespeare must have written in the first place, whereas Q corrupts the meaningful dialogue of Lear's anguished question and the Fool's bitter response into a meaningless rhetorical question that Lear immediately answers.

¹³ See Peter W. M. Blayney, The Texts of 'King Lear' and their Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982- ), Vol. I; Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto, 'The variants in Lear are of many different kinds. Some of the substantive alterations suggest, with varying degrees of probability, that the copy was consulted and that its readings were correctly restored. Others appear to reflect nothing more reliable than the corrector's wrong guesswork' (p. 219). See also

¹⁴ As Greg observed in The Shakespeare First Folio, p. 387, note B: 'It looks as though the copy for Q had been written continuously, without line division, and without punctuation, and that it had been left to the compositor to punctuate the text and identify and divide the verse as best he could.' But if Greg's conjecture is correct (as I believe it is), then we must reject the assumption of the revisionists that the copy for Q was an authentic Shakespeare manuscript. There is no evidence to suggest that Shakespeare, or any other Elizabethan dramatist, ever wrote, even in a first draft, without line division or punctuation. On the other hand, this is precisely what we would expect of an orally transmitted play text.

¹⁵ 'Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts: "Foul Papers" and "Bad Quartos'", Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (1990), 65-86.

¹⁶First Folio, p. 383.

¹⁷ I have by no means, in this article, exhausted the list of palpable errors that betray the surreptitious origins of Q, and which have been catalogued and analysed by such scholars as Greg, G. I. Duthie, Alice Walker, and others, to whose work I am deeply indebted.

¹⁸ See, for example, Steven Urkowitz, '"Well-sayd olde Mole": Burying Three Hamlets in Modern Editions', in Shakespeare Study Today, ed. by Georgianna Ziegler (New York: AMS Press, 1986), p. 39.

¹⁹ Jonathan Goldberg, 'Textual Properties', Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), 213.

²⁰ 'Levelling Shakespeare: Local Customs and Local Texts', Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991), 169.

²¹ Michael Warren's invaluable The Parallel King Lear (1608-1623) (Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press, 1989), has been a major resource in the writing of this article.

Source: "The Integrity of King Lear," in The Modern Language Review, Vol. 90, No. 3, July, 1995, pp. 572-84.