King Lear: Text and Performance

A king foolishly divides his kingdom between his scheming two oldest daughters and estranges himself from the daughter who loves him. So begins this profoundly moving and disturbing tragedy that, perhaps more than any other work in literature, challenges the notion of a coherent and just universe. The king and others pay dearly for their shortcomings–as madness, murder, and the anguish of insight and forgiveness that arrive too late combine to make this an all-embracing tragedy of evil and suffering.

Each Edition
Comprehensive explanatory notes
Vivid introductions and the most up-to-date scholarship
Clear, modernized spelling and punctuation, enabling contemporary readers to understand the Elizabethan English
Completely updated, detailed bibliographies and performance histories
An interpretive essay on film adaptations of the play, along with an extensive filmography

From the Paperback edition.

John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary.