King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition.

The two-text theory of King Lear is now generating separate editions of the Quarto and Folio texts rather than conflated versions. Professor Halio offers a modernized edition of Q with a short but effective Introduction, a full apparatus, and brief discussion of selected textual variants. But it is difficult to see the purpose of his edition. It is not a working text of The History of King Lear for ordinary use, since it is expensive and lacks explanatory annotation; nor is it a scholar's text of Q, since it is modernized and frequently emended from F. It would have been more useful (and better value) if it had included a facsimile of Q, since many of Q's bizarre readings become comprehensible when one studies the layout of the text on its crowded pages. The value of Dr Weis's edition is clearer, though the publisher's claim that it will be 'essential and accessible reading for all A-level and undergraduate students' is wide of the mark: the exclusively textual introduction is too densely written to be accessible to anyone not already familiar with the play and its textual problems, while the annotation is rightly focused principally on those points of …