Comfort and Despair in King Lear

Abstract

Enter Kent, Gloucester, and Edmund. Kent. I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall. Gloucester. It did always seem so to us: but now, in the division of the kingdom [kingdoms, Q] it appears not which of the Dukes he values most, for qualities [equalities, Q] are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety. Kent: Is not this your son, my lord? (King Lear I.i.1-6, F)1 TEXTUAL DIVISIONS BETWEEN the quarto (Q) and the Folio (F) King Lear emphasised by scholars over the past forty years have made the play less easy to interpret singly; more interesting, however, because producing more tentativeness about any overarching reading, knowing this may not be fully supported by both the texts and their variants but may reflect on the critic’s desire for consistency, or for a single comforting, or discomforting, strain within the reading. Any interpretation will find itself disconfirmed by either Q or F at every turn. The necessity of plural readings indicates the play’s multiple strands, for the variants often provide distinctions, not between sense and nonsense, though sometimes they do (and the traffic here is rarely one-way, one version being consistently better than the other), but between differing valid readings, as if, in the intensity of writing, one speech, or emphasis, or moment of speaking is assignable to more than one character with equal rightness or possibility. The divisions between the texts spark plural energies, possibilities of reading, within each.2