Page 197 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

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THE COPY FOR KING LEAR,

l6o8 AND 1623

The play was first published in 1608. Two quarto
editions exist bearing this date, the one with a long, the
other with a short, imprint. The former is known to be
correctly dated, and to be the first edition—Q 1; while
the latter is known to be falsely dated, to have been
printed in 1619, and to be the second edition—Q 2, a
reprint of Q i. 1
Ever since, in 1885, P. A. Daniel published his intro-
duction to the Praetorius facsimile of Q 1, the theory has
been widely held that the Lear text given in the 1623
folio (F) was printed from a copy of Q 1 which had been
edited by hand so as to bring it into general accord with
an official prompt-book (though the editor on occasion
failed to make necessary corrections).
Q 1 survives in a dozen copies, amongst which there
are textual differences. In certain formes, proof-
correction took place after the printing had been begun,
and the type was altered before the printing was com-
pleted. Uncorrected and corrected sheets were bound
up indiscriminately. This proof-correction was erratic.
Sometimes the corrector recovered the reading of the
copy. Sometimes he left errors unaltered. And some-
times he changed erroneous readings by conjecture
rather than in the light of the copy—for example, the
original 'crulentious' in 3. 4. 6 is obviously a mis-
reading of 'contentious' (the F word), and the press-
reader's 'tempestious' is a conjecture, involving tauto-
1
See A. W. Pollard, Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates
(1930, 1937), pp. viii ff.; E. K. Chambers, William
Shakespeare (1930), I, 133 ff.