Page 13 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

viii PREFATORY NOTE
and the late Professor Kittredge constantly before me.
Finally—a point well known to scholars—the general
reader of a modern text of King Lear should be made
aware of the great debt all editors of this play owe to
Sir Walter Greg's various essays upon it and in parti-
cular to that little bibliographical masterpiece The
Variants in the First Qgarto of King Lear (1940),
which is the foundation of the present text and will
remain the foundation of all future ones.
How many years of his life Professor Duthie has
given to the text of King Lear I do not know. I have
myself only been able to spend sixteen' months on the
commentary. For life is short and the editing of Shake-
speare an endless adventure.
J.D.W.
CHRISTMAS I958