Page 208 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

KING LEAR, 1608 AND 1623 133

that. Miss Walker's theory is more plausible. She
thinks that the two boy actors who played Goneril and
Regan 'borrowed' the foul papers from the theatre
library and made a transcript by means of the one
dictating the text to the other. The one who dictated
was liable on occasion, in passages which he knew well
from performances, to allow his memory to usurp the
function of his eyes—and so memorial corruption got
into the scenes in which he had acted, but not into the
others, where he would have to keep his eyes continually
on the foul papers. The boy who was taking down the
text might also unconsciously slip in a memorial error
instead of writing down what his confederate had read
out. Miss Walker claims that 'memorial contamination
of the quarto is always heaviest in episodes where both
were on the stage and more evident in scenes where
Goneril only appeared than in scenes with only Regan'.
The theory is attractive, but it requires some modi-
fication. Some of Q I'S memorial corruption is of a kind
not easily attributable to Miss Walker's explanation.
Thus, in a Goneril-Regan scene, Lear intends, according
to a i»
To shake all cares and busines of our state,
Confirming them on yonger yeares,

and he goes on—>
The two great Princes France and Burgundy, etc.
Compare this with the F version of 1.1.3 8-44 (followed
in the text in the body of this volume). Q substitutes 'of
our state' for 'from our Age', memorially anticipating
line 49. Q's 'Confirming' for F's 'Conferring' is
probably an anticipation of line 137. Q's 'yeares' for
F's 'strengths' is the kind of substitution of a pale for a
vivid word that memorial reconstructors commonly
make. The Q line 'Confirming...yeares,' is metrically