Page 209 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

i 3 4 T H E COPY FOR

defective, and it is followed by a gap, Q omitting four
complete lines and two portions of lines. Q's 'The
two.. .Burgundy? looks as if it had been patched up
with the addition of 'two great' (not in F) in order to
produce a metrically complete line after the lacuna.
Q here shows a memory faltering, failing, and recovering,
the recovery involving metrical patching. As I have
1
written elsewhere, 'We are surely not dealing with a
negligent scribe relying on his memory, his eye tem-
porarily off his copy, but with someone in desperate
difficulties with nothing but the straw of a failing
1
memory to clutch at. Why did Miss Walker's dictating
actor, in real trouble here, not simply consult the foul
papers that were in his hand ? It should be noted that the
two parenthetic lines which in F contain the phrase
'Cares of State' are omitted by Q I. In memorial re-
constructions we quite frequently find that a reporter at
point (a) anticipates a passage belonging to point (J>),
and then, arriving at point (J>), omits the passage entirely.
A full examination of i. i. 35-53 suggests that the
whole speech was memorially reconstructed for Q 1, and
not very well. Nor is this the only case in point. Miss
Walker does not in her book think of the foul papers
behind Q 1 as having been in places mutilated, necessi-
tating memorial reconstruction simpliciter; but it looks
as if this will have to be assumed. And while on the one
hand some memorial corruption in Goneril-Regan
scenes is attributable to this, there are on the other hand
memorial errors in scenes not involving these characters*
—memorial errors in places where, according to Miss
Walker, such should not exist. Thus I cannot think that
her claim that 'Goneril' and 'Regan' were the culprits
is proved.
Yet, though these modifications of Miss Walker's
1
In my 1949 edition of the play, p. 24.
2
See ch. in of my 1949 edition, passim.