Shakespeare's Tragedy of King Lear

Excerpt from Shakespeare's Tragedy of King Lear

This edition of King Lear was first published in 1880. As now revised, it is substantially a new edition on the same general plan as the revised Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Hamlet, and other plays that have preceded it.

Many of the notes on textual variations have been either omitted or abridged. Those that have been retained are mostly on the passages (particularly numerous in this play) in which different readings from the folio or the quarto have been adopted in the more important modern editions. For further information on this subject Dr. Furness's edition may be consulted. No teacher or critical student can afford to do without his encyclopedic volumes, in which all the readings and notes of the early and standard modern editions are recorded or epitomized, together with large extracts from the best commentators and much admirable criticism from Dr. Furness himself.

I have also omitted most of the "Critical Comments" from the introduction, as the books from which they were taken are now to be found in public or school libraries. For these extracts I have substituted familiar comments of my own, and have added more of the same kind in the Appendix. A concise account of Shakespeare's metre has also been inserted as an introduction to the Notes.

Minor changes have been made throughout the Notes.

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