Shakespeare and Possibility, Part 4: The Demands of Editing King Lear

Episode Topic: The Demands of Editing King Lear

Enter the office of Peter Holland, McMeel Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Notre Dame and Chair of the International Shakespeare Association, with Dr. Jennifer Birkett, Shakespeare at Notre Dame’s postdoctoral research associate, to learn more about Holland’s current, and perhaps most daunting, project: editing King Lear for the upcoming Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series. Listen in to the inside story of not only the task of editing Shakespeare, but also the demands of editing King Lear.

Featured Speakers:

• Jennifer Birkett ’23 PhD is a Postdoctoral Fellow with Shakespeare at Notre Dame
• Peter Holland, McMeel Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Notre Dame and Chair of the International Shakespeare Association

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/363dbe.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Shakespeare & Possibility.

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Transcript

1 0:06

Thank you for inviting me and us to your office. it's great to be here, and I thought we would just chat a little bit today about your process for editing King Lear for the Arden Shakespeare play. Upcoming, what, 2026?

2 0:22

The first volumes will appear in 2026. It's called Future Planning.

1 0:26

I'm going to begin with a very general question, which is What exactly does an editor of a Shakespeare play do?

2 0:33

By and large, people edit Shakespeare plays for series. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning as a scholar and thinks, Oh, what I really want to do is edit King Lear. I wonder if somebody will publish the edition I want to make. they're always in a series. And so a lot of what you do as an editor is defined by the nature of that series. Here's an example. Some years ago, Stephen Orgel and Albert Braunmuller decided to revise and revive the Pelican Shakespeare. And six of us were commissioned to edit six plays apiece. we got a nice range of well known plays and obscure plays and so on. And it was a much simpler task than something like editing for the art in Shakespeare. we were sent scans of the pages of the old edition. we were asked to make adjustments to the glossing notes at the bottom of the page and to write. a brief introduction about four or five thousand words. And that was the job. there were very few guidelines except, Stephen Orgel emphasized many times over, we are not to leave in place, glossing notes which said, as it used to then, asexual meaning here. We had to spell it out. and it's funny, I thought I knew Romeo and Juliet And when I began in real detail to try to gloss what Mercutio is saying, I realized just how dirty his language is.

1 1:55

sexual innuendo here.

2 1:56

the task that you're set varies according to the nature of the series. if you're editing for the Arden Shakespeare, that's been for a very long time the kind of gold standard for Shakespeare. It's not designed for somebody called The General Reader. it is designed for undergrads. but undergrads can be daunted by the amount of Commentary and so on the page. All of that is something about the way that it has always established itself. And of course that means there's a lot to do. I edited Coriolanus for the Art and Shakespeare 3rd series. It came out a few years ago. the introduction is 100 pages in print. The commentary notes, were over 150 pages of typescript. all of which is written from scratch. It's not as if you just start from somewhere else and add in. so it is a huge endeavor. And you know that your work is going to be picked over by other scholars if you're in that series. they're going to, a ton of them, enjoy finding faults and errors. More often, just realize that there is something different about what your edition is trying to achieve. one of the things we're already finding with the Arden Shakespeare fourth series is just how much has changed in our thinking about Shakespeare plays since the third series.

1 3:19

Really?

2 3:20

volumes that are now 25, 30 years old look as though they come from a completely different era of study. In terms of gender, in terms of race concerns, in terms of how the practice of the detail of editing is achieved. And I think one of the things that is really invisible to most readers, is how much work goes into deciding what word, what punctuation mark, who speaks what, and where, and when you have to make changes, and so on. Nobody wants to read, unless you're a really strange scholar, an unedited version of an early text. You want to see it modellised. You want to see stage directions that are missing put in. You want puzzles in the language sorted out and explained so that it becomes something you can work with, use, whether you're A student, a theatre director, an actor, or even the general reader.

1 4:29

And that's a lot of audiences to be thinking about for you as the editor. in your book, Work with King Lear specifically, what do you find are your kind of guiding principles or who's your audience that you think you're writing to as, when you're doing commentary, when you're writing the introduction?

2 4:46

Primarily I'm thinking of writing for other scholars. that doesn't mean it's obscurely written. But it's something that is aware of what has been done and is working with that. one of the things that is going to be new in the Alban Shakespeare Fourth Series is that, there are going to be two versions of the commentary. There's going to be, as it were, the long commentary in the, Traditional art and style, and a briefer version, about half the length. And the idea is that, for many people, the full length commentary is simply daunting and not of any help. And what people want is some contextual material, primarily explanation. What does this word mean? What does this sentence add up to? Why is this happening? that kind of thing. And we want, so we're going to do that.

1 5:31

Will that be two different books, or is that in the same?

2 5:34

Two different online versions. So that will only be available through the online edition. That's what we're currently told by the publishers. And of course, publishers determine what's happening.

1 5:45

Does Arden have specific rules? I know a lot of editions have specific rules about how many notes you can put on a page, how many glosses you can put on a page.

2 5:52

There is a famous other kind of edition, which is the Veriorum Shakespeare. And the Veriorum Shakespeare, begun in the late 19th century in America, by a group of men, All of the editors of the old Variorum edition were male, who used to meet over dinner and discuss Shakespeare and then they decided, why don't we just turn this into an edition? And they're called Variorum editions because it comes from a Latin phrase which means with notes by various editors. And it really brings together everything. so the Ad Series was born. Published through the 1890s and on into the early 20th century, it now exists as the new Variorum Shakespeare. And when the new Variorum King Lear came out just a few years ago, brilliantly edited by Richard Knowles, it's in two fat volumes. Each volume is a volume. Over a thousand pages. And the typeface is tiny. frankly, I use a magnifying glass to read it. because there is so much going into it. Now Is that for a general reader? No. you get one, or if you're lucky, two or three lines of text. And then perhaps two or three or four or five pages of the notes for just those few lines of text.

1 7:08

and that's one, the New Vimorium might be one resource that you use as an editor to write. research what you're going to be writing or thinking about with the play. I'm assuming you watch a lot of productions of King Lear?

2 7:21

yes, and read a lot about other productions that, either were never filmed or proceed filming. in order to use that both in the introduction and in the commentary. to be able to say at this point, Actor X did this, and isn't it interesting that the actor made that choice on that particular moment. Doing something strange and different, and making a different kind of comment by doing so. There are so many resources that we now have because we're editing in an online era. here is an example. when I was first editing Shakespeare, if I wanted to check a word in the Oxford English Dictionary, I had to go to the library and take down one of the, 18 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary and turn to the right page and read it and take some notes and so on. Now, I have it all online. the result is I check much more in the OED because it's instantly to hand. one of the things we know is that the Oxford English Dictionary is inevitably not totally reliable about when a word is first used. it argues that Shakespeare was the first user of many words that no good He didn't. It wasn't. and they, the OED is endlessly being revised and corrected with that kind of thing in mind. But there's a wonderful resource called Early Print, or one word, earlyprint. org, which, is a corpus of searchable work from the early modern period. thousands upon thousands of books. And I can search a word in that. I can get anti datings to Shakespeare. I can get a broader sense of early modern usage for that word. And I may find that actually the only thing that turns up is, indeed, a passage from Shakespeare. And it may be, indeed, Shakespeare's invention. But I'm now much surer, even if I can't be entirely sure, about what's happening. So all of that changes. Just the granular detail of the editing.

1 9:16

It seems to me that kind of research could go on forever.

2 9:20

and does, because the play is going to, somebody else is going to edit King Lear after me, in another edition for a different series, or for the Alden Shakespeare 5th series, by which point I'll be long gone.

1 9:29

So how long have you actually been working on this edition?

2 9:31

I've been working as one of the general editors, of the Ardent Shakespeare 4 series for about five years so far, and been working in detail on King Lear for about three of those years. I'd agreed earlier, but really got stuck into it about three years ago. and it is very much endlessly work in progress. There is a point at which you just have to say, I can't tinker with the text and the commentary anymore. it's done. and it has to be prized out of my hands, and turned into a published work. Particularly with something like King Lear. First of all, there is such a tremendous amount of brilliant scholarly writing. New scholarly writing, older, earlier thinking about it. And also because our view of the play, and particularly the text of the play, has changed radically over the last half century or more. Scholars knew for ages that there are two different early texts of King Lear. A quarto, published in 1608, and the text as it appears in the first folio, and that these are very different texts from each other.

1 10:36

Whole scenes different.

2 10:37

Whole scenes absent, and hundreds of tiny things changed, or not the same, and Long speeches, present or absent, all kinds of changes, there are pluses and minuses, it's not all in one direction. in brief, there are about 300 lines in the quarto that don't appear in the folio, and about 100 lines in the folio that don't appear in the quarto. nobody quite knew what to think about that. Were they two witnesses of the same original? Or did they represent something different? And in the 1980s, a different kind of argument strongly emerged. That the folio shows us Shakespeare's revision. I think the idea that Shakespeare revised the text is one I'm perfectly happy with. The idea that there was a revision. is something I don't accept. there is nothing to prove that this was all done at one time. The whole problem with texts that appear in the folio is that all we know is that they were in this state when they reached the printer sometime in 1621 22 when the printing began.

1 11:47

Which is after Shakespeare's dead.

2 11:49

Which is, exactly.

1 11:50

Hard to revise as an editor.

2 11:51

Exactly. But, If we take an example. There's a moment where the Fool in Lear has a speech known as the Fool's Prophecy. It's a vision of the future. It's an imaginary vision. When was it written? I don't know. Who was it written by? I don't know that either. Can I guarantee it was written by Shakespeare? No. Could it have been an invention by the actor playing the fool? Yes. Was it the first actor playing the fool or was it a later actor playing the fool? Possibly. All I know is by 1623 it existed because it was printed. And beyond that I can't be sure.

1 12:34

And it's not in the quarter.

2 12:35

And it's not in the quarter at all. So when you have a moment like that, You have to think, what am I trying to do? Where do I put it in my edition? Do I simply print, as it were, the maximal text? With all the quarter text and all the folio text combined? Or does that misrepresent something? Does that create a play that never really existed?

1 12:58

And this is why I think editing a text like King Lear, presents a very daunting task.

2 13:04

It's terrifying.

1 13:05

Yes, I don't know how you do it.

2 13:07

There have been many moments where I thought, Why did I want to do it? and it's only going to get worse. I know that. Stanley Wells, who, still at the age of 94, is an active Shakespeare scholar of great brilliance. when Stanley retired, The first thing he did was to edit King Lear. And he made a very strong decision. he edited the quarto text. He didn't edit something between quarto and folio, or combining the two passages that are only in folio. Just aren't there. And he's absolutely clear on the title page that's what it is. This is King Lear the quarto text. and, Being Stanley and having a work ethic that puts the rest of us to shame and makes us all feel lazy and idle, he produced something very brilliant, by that narrow, Focus and concentration. The difficulty is, and this is where, scholars argue and get rather heated about it. I don't know when the folio text was begun. I know when it ends, 1623, when it's printed. But I don't know at what point that text began to come into being. And that is a puzzle.

1 14:15

can I ask if you're going to be Conflating the quarto and the folio in this edition, or does that have to be a secret?

2 14:21

No, it's not a secret. it's going to be primarily quarto, but I do think there are moments where, quarto has errors because of the nature of its printing that I think folio helps with. The longer passages that are folio only are going to be in an appendix. except for one, which I think I'm going to keep in the main text. But it's still all up in the air and up for grabs.

1 14:46

Yeah. And would you say that, you as the editor are wanting to showcase the differences, have it in different, one in italics, one in bold, or is it just this is the text and we let them?

2 14:58

Absolutely. I think those kinds of games, if you like, with how you present the text tend to give the question of the source of the text too much primacy. I I want people to be interested in reading King Lear in the two different versions we have, but if that's all they're interested in, if that's the first thing they're interested in, I think they're missing, as it were, the experience of reading the text. of grappling with this absolutely astonishing

1 15:30

Because, for instance, if we go see King Lear at the theatre, no one's going to be like, you're almost reading a new text every time you see it performed in that way.

2 15:39

directors edit their own versions of Shakespeare plays almost all the time. Actually, I don't want to go to the theatre and sit through a four to five hour Hamlet. I'm sorry, it just doesn't appeal. I want to know those other scenes are there and the other speeches are there. But directors, actors, everybody involved in the production cut and shape the play according to the version they want. In its way. It's a bit like what happens when you do Shakespeare in another language, and you have a brand new translation. if you are directing a Shakespeare production at a major German theater, you may well commission a brand new translation for your production, and the translator you'll work with to create something that is in line with your vision of what the play is doing. You won't go back necessarily to an earlier translation, but you'll let the translation be shaped by and itself then to shape. How your production is going to work. And I think that's something that also happens, as you edit, for production. That different sense of editing. a director is going to go into rehearsal with something close to his, her version of what they want it to be. And actors may say, oh, please can I have that line back or could I lose that speech? And there'll be arguments about it in the rehearsal room and so on. but you don't go in with. The whole full length play, and let's try and cut it on the hoof as we're going.

1 17:10

It's a lot of memorization work.

2 17:11

Oh, it's not going to work in rehearsal.

1 17:14

Peter, I actually have a funny story for you. we were both at the Shakespeare Association of America just recently in Portland. As I was there, I was at one of the hotel cafes, and the barista who was checking out, I was buying a muffin, that's not important, but at the checkout, he had asked me, What is your favorite Shakespeare play? And I said, that's a great question, so I was telling him, and I said, have you been asking all of the Shakespeare scholars this? He's yes. I said, What's been the favorite? He said, King Lear. King Lear is the favorite, by a long shot. But fascinating that in a group of hundreds of scholars of Shakespeare, a clear favorite seems to be currently King Lear.

2 17:53

There's a very interesting book, written by Reg Folks, who edited King Lear brilliantly for the Arden Third Series. the more I spend time with what Reg was doing in his edition, the more in awe of his achievement I am. but he also wrote a book alongside it, called Hamlet vs. Lear. And it's about the cultural history of the argument, as it were, which is the greater play. Now, the greatest Shakespeare play of all time, the greatest play of all time, that's, it's a pointless discussion. But there has been a kind of oscillation of, is Hamlet more important than Lear or Lear more important than Hamlet? And I think at the moment, Lear speaks so strongly to us. And I think it speaks strongly to us because of, Two things. One is, it's a play about weather. And in an era of climate change, we're well aware of what that means. And it's a play that is dealing so profoundly and powerfully with our identity, and our identity in terms of dealing in relationships between parents and children. Lear and his three daughters. Gloucester and his two sons. And That's something that is troubling. I'm aware of so many friends who have had to deal with what do we do with the aged parents, who need help more than they're perhaps willing to accept, who are, as it were, a source of Stress and trauma and pain for the children. Loving children, never mind about children who, like Goneril and Regan, hit the point where they just can't put up with Dad any longer. But it is something that in our culture, in Western cultures, particularly, has become a dominant issue and a difficult issue. My wife and I both lost our parents early in our lives. And for all that we endlessly miss them and wish they could be with us, we're also spared, and we know we're spared, the real pain that we watch loving children going through. what do we do? How do we cope? What on earth is the answer?

1 20:06

Absolutely. And they say often that King Lear is a play that is perhaps most appreciated as you age. And it's an older play in the sense that it's one of Shakespeare's later plays in his life. often when I say, oh, I wouldn't academically touch King Lear, scholars would say, oh, give it some time. You will, eventually. You're just not at that stage of your scholarship yet, which I think is actually a fascinating experience.

2 20:30

But that happens with a lot of Shakespeare plays. I used to think Romeo and Juliet was all about Romeo and Juliet. And I actually am now much more interested in the parents. Yes. Who are dealing with these, awkward characters. Teenagers. who won't do what you expect them to do, et cetera. the parents have had a pretty bad rap over the history of Maria and Juliet. But there is a way in which Shakespeare plays change as you age. The Tempest becomes much more powerful when, as you age, every third thought does become something about your grave. Every third thought shall be my grave, as Prospero says later in the Tempest. And I think Lear speaks endlessly powerfully about that experience of aging, and what, Does that mean, what does that mean for everyone around you? What does that mean in terms of whether you're somebody who may have, as the daughters say, ever but slenderly known himself. but it may also be that you become more irrational, more irascible, more difficult to deal with.

1 21:37

Peter, I'm gonna close with a final question. And this is, I guess this is just, I'm curious. You, we, in our conversations, I've taken an editing class with you and we've chatted a lot about the process. You always mention that, an editor can be up at night or stuck in the shower shampooing twice a week. Three times, four times, thinking about am I going to put a comma there? Am I going to put a period there? am I going to do this? Am I going to do that? And so I'm just interested if there's something currently in King Lear that is perplexing you or haunting you, whether that's a theme or a character or whether that is a nitty gritty textual detail.

2 22:15

it's the bit we were talking about before. It's the little bit of folio that isn't present in quarto that appears in the very first scene. when Lear announces to Cornwall and Albany, his addressees, that he has a constant will to publish our daughter's several dowers, that future strife may be prevented now. And the reason I'm interested in it and agonizing about it, are for purely technical, dramatic reasons. It's the first time That we know which of the two husbands we've already seen come onto the stage is Cornwall and which is Albany. So one of the things that happens in the play, if you name somebody, they have an identity in a different way. We've heard about them before, the very first lines of the play. Kent says, I thought the king had more effected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall. But that doesn't tell us which of these two men we are now seeing on stage is which. the other is the announcement that what is happening is a dowry distribution. And that seems to me to be really important. The Division of the Kingdom is actually handing over, defining what is going to be the daughter's several dowers. It comes up later in the scene, but that's after Cordelia hasn't got her share and so on. with, when Cormel and Albany are told that they can have her dower and digest hers into theirs. that's different. And I think the action needs to be told that this is what's happening. And that's why I'm in agonies as to whether this speech is going to stay in the edition or the main body of the text or go into the appendix.

1 24:03

And where are you leaning? Current today? Right now,

2 24:05

at the moment it's in.

1 24:06

All right.

2 24:07

standing in the shower, it often changes in the course of the period. It takes even to what Wash, what hair I have left

1 24:15

wonderful. Thank you so much for talking with us. I will very much be looking forward to reading this text when it's finally finished.

2 24:22

will I.

1 24:24

Thank you.