King Lear survives in two versions that refuse to agree: the 1608 Quarto — the History of King Lear — and the 1623 Folio’s Tragedy, some three hundred lines shorter, with a different shape to the war and a different final speech. For two centuries editors quietly stitched the two into one play; whether that conflation is a masterpiece or a fabrication is still a live argument.
So the editor on the spine matters more here than almost anywhere in the canon. Below: one edition that shows you the seams, one that gives you the Quarto on its own terms, one that takes the Folio’s side, and one that simply gets you through the storm intact. Choose the Lear you’ll want to argue with.
1Arden Shakespeare, Third SeriesOur pick
Ed. R. A. Foakes · Bloomsbury, 1997
Foakes gives you a conflated text with every Quarto-only and Folio-only passage marked, so you can watch the two Lears diverge line by line. The fullest single-volume treatment of the hardest textual problem in Shakespeare.
2Oxford World’s Classics
Ed. Stanley Wells · Oxford University Press, 2000
Wells edits the 1608 Quarto on its own terms — the History of King Lear as it first reached print, before the Folio’s revisions. Read it second and the argument between the two texts becomes the play’s shadow drama.
3The New Cambridge Shakespeare
Ed. Jay L. Halio · Cambridge University Press
Halio’s Folio-based text takes the opposite bet from Foakes, and his commentary is patient and unshowy about why. The right second opinion.
4Folger Shakespeare LibraryFirst read? Start here
Ed. Barbara Mowat & Paul Werstine · Simon & Schuster
The gentlest on-ramp to the canon’s most demanding play: facing-page glosses keep the storm scenes readable at speed. Start here; the textual argument can wait.
New to the play? Start with our King Lear page — the orientation essay, and every screen version worth your evening.
Reading King Lear this year?
Mark it in your record when you finish — one seat, kept for decades.