AUTHORIAL REVISION AND AUTHORITATIVE TEXTS: A CASE

There the matter must rest, while we wait for more positive arguments, if possible, from within the texts. (E. A. J. Honigmann, The Stability of Shakespeare’s Text, p. 10) King Lear has always been surrounded by textual problems, partly because there are two extant authoritative textual sources for the play, the so-called Pied Bull Quarto of 1608 and the First Folio of 1623.1 In recent years a controversy has emerged as to whether these two textual sources constitute two distinct versions of the play and whether it was Shakespeare himself who revised the Quarto King Lear in order to produce the Folio version of the play. This paper is an attempt to summarise the present state of the controversy and to show how a stylistic approach can be useful for textual 1 There exists a second Quarto, which appeared in 1619, but this ‘bad ’ Quarto basically reprints the 1608 text, though slightly edited, and it is widely regarded as a non-authoritative text. For the purpose of this paper, the existence of the second Quarto (Q2) will be ignored; the Pied Bull Quarto (Q1) will be refer as ‘the Quarto ’ or simply ‘Q’