Page 207 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

132 TH E COPY FOR

purpose was to produce a substitute prompt-book,
why is the Q I text so much longer than that of F,
which, as we have seen, reflects the prompt-book
in use in the early 1620's? Would the official acting
version of 1607-8 have differed from that of 1622-3 a s
Q 1 differs from F ? Greg speaks of the possibility of
'the two versions having been differently cut for
1
acting'. But Dr Alice Walker points out the objections
to this:*
What lies behind the notion of alternative cutting and two
acting versions of Lear seems on a par with the supposition
that, after a play had been written and performed, its
author continued to tinker with its dialogue....Whether a
book-keeper or the author added here and subtracted there,
the risk of confusing the actors, accustomed to the first
version of the matter, would be just the same.
Furthermore, she notes that 'what is missing from the
quarto seems...too pointless to represent a coherent
effort to shorten the play', and she thinks, probably
correctly, that the Q 1 omissions are 'not cuts but losses
due to negligence'. Q 1, then, does not look like an
actors' reconstruction, and my 1949 theory had better be
abandoned. Some telling points were made against it in
a review by Professor Leo Kirschbaum.3
Professor Kirschbaum has his own theory of the
genesis of the Q I text, and Miss Walker has hers.* The
former appears to think of it as a reconstruction made by
a single reporter who had studied and memorized an
authentic manuscript. I find this quite incredible; the
text, with all its imperfections, is too full and good for
1
The Editorial Problem, p. 93.
* Op. cit. pp. 51-2.
3 See R.E.S. (April 1951), p. 169.
4
See Kirschbaum in M.L.N. (1944), pp. 197-8, in his
1
book The True Text of King Lear* (1945), and in P.M.L.A.
(1945), pp. 697 ff.j and see Miss Walker, op. cit. pp. 37 ff.