King Lear has been widely acclaimed as Shakespeares most powerful tragedy. Elemental and passionate, it encompasses the horrific and the heart-rending. Love and hate, loyalty and treachery, cruelty and self-sacrifice: all these contend in a tempestuous drama which has become an enduring classic of the worlds literature. In the theatre and on screen King Lear continues to challenge and enthral.This Wordsworth edition of King Lear provides a comprehensive, integrated text of the play.

Introduction

The Text of King Lear

 A Note on the Text

 Textual Variants

Sources

 PRIMARY SOURCES

 Anonymous·From The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters

 John Higgins·From The Mirror for Magistrates

 Raphael Holinshed·From Chronicles

 Edmund Spenser·From The Faerie Queene

 Sir Philip Sidney·From The Countesse of Pembroke's Arcadia

 James VI of Scotland·From The True Law of Free Monarchies

 James I·From Basilikon Doron

 Samuel Harsnett·From A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures

 William Camden·From Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine

 POSSIBLE SOURCES

 The Case of Cordell Annesley and Her Father, Bryan

 Geoffrey of Monmouth·From Historia Regum Britanniae

Criticism

 Nahum Tate·Preface, The History of King Lear

 Samuel Johnson·Notes on King Lear

 Charles Lamb·From On the Tragedies of Shakespeare

 William Hazlitt·From Characters of Shakespeare's Plays: King Lear

 A. C. Bradley·From Shakespearean Tragedy

 Jan Kott·From Shakespeare Our Contemporary

 Peter Brook·From The Empty Space

 Michael Warren·Quarto and Folio King Lear and theInterpretation of Albany and Edgar

 Lynda E. Boose·From The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare

 Janet Adelman·From Suffocating Mothers

 Margot Heinemann·"Demystifying the Mystery of State": King Lear and the World Upside Down

 R. A. Foakes·From Hamlet versus Lear

 Stanley Cavell·From The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear

Adaptations and Responses

 Nahum Tate·From The History of King Lear

 John Keats·On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again

 Edward Bond·From Lear

Selected Bibliography