For a review of the play itself, see https://www.librarything.com/work/10242/reviews/195353226

The back cover of the Norton Edition proclaims "The First Folio (1623) Text". They forgot to put an asterisk on this statement. While technically the text of the First Folio is used as a base, even the editor admits in her "A Note on the Text" that it is a conflated text - with the parts that were only in the Quarto are interpolated into the Folio text so it is actually a conflated one. Which actually makes it a better text I think - but that statement on the back is confusing.

The introduction is an introduction of the whole book, not just the play which makes it almost safe to read before the play. Almost though - it does have a few elements you may want not to see before you had read the play for the first time. As with most Norton editions of Shakespeare, the notes and annotations on the text itself are mostly lexical although there are a few more extensive where they are really required. Coded by line, they can be skipped if one wants to just read the play - there is no indication which lined have notes unless you want to look at the bottom of the page.

The bulk of the book contains the Sources and Criticism sections.

Most of the sources are well known: Holinshed, the Legend of King Leir, John Higgins, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Philip Sidney's Arcadia, James VI (and I) writings and Camden. Samuel Harsnett was a surprise - he does not write about Leir or kingship (which is what puts James in) but he writes about demons and it made me think about that part of the play. All of the excerpts are dated and some of them even have notes on how they are used in the play. Reading these passages assembled together shows both how influenced Shakespeare was from what was written before him and how he played with facts and sources to create something new (in all sources Cordelia wins and lives and rules at the end for example). The editor includes two sources that may also have be sources although it is unclear if Shakespeare had access to them - one very old one (Geoffrey of Monmouth) and one contemporary - known from a set of letters collected a lot later but possibly being common knowledge and in printing in London at the time (almost like using the yellow press for a source today...).

The criticism is the usual mixed bag. Unlike the sources, some of these are not dated (what book/magazine they were printed inis mentioned but the first publication date is not always there). And this is important because as far as this play is involved, that matters a lot. The way it had been read and interpreted had changed a lot through the years. The section gives a good representation of that changing tide and reading through it in order shows how society changes - from the butchery performed by Nahum Tate in 1681 (which hid the real play from the public for a couple of centuries) through Samuel Johnson in 1765. Charles Lamb in 1818, William Hazlitt in 1838, A. C. Bradley in 1904 to Jan Kott (the only non-English speaker in the whole section) in 1964 - you can see the patterns shifting. And that's about the time when (as one of the later will explain), King Lear starts eclipsing Hamlet as the best play of Shakespeare and the rest of the essays are mostly modern (and sometimes post-modern) interpretations including the feminist ones and the overly sexual ones (and some of these are almost disturbing and feel like overdoing it and trying to get a rectangular object into a round hole that is 3 sizes too small). There is a lot of sexuality in the play, there are things that can be read in certain ways but.... some of those later essays are discussing the F/Q differences and how conflating the text is an abomination (Michael Warren), some talk about how the Hamlet/King Lear swap happened in the audience opinion (Foakes). This is also where the first female critics show up although I found exactly these essays to be pushing in directions that did not sound logical (which initially did not register with me - it was when I started reviewing that I saw that the 3 essays I really disliked were the ones that were written by the 3 female critics). They were selected for their ideas, they are valid interpretations... and still...

The last section was the one that was the most fun: the Adaptations and Responses.

As expected, the section opens with the final scenes of Nahum Tate's abomination (I mean adaptation) of the play. If this is how the audience knew the play, I am not surprised that they did not think it was a good play - butchery is a weak word. Although I am planning to read the whole thing to see just how bad it is outside of this end...

The other two entries are Keats' poem "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again" (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44482/on-sitting-down-to-read-king-lear-once-again) and an excerpt of Edward Bond's Lear (which I stopped reading in the middle because I decided to read the whole play instead).

Overall a pretty good Norton edition. As for the play... it still is one of my favorite ones. ( )