Till that the nature of your fault be known

To the Venetian state. (To officers) Come, bring away.

OTHELLO

Soft you, a word or two before you go.

I have done the state some service, and they know’t.

No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely but too well,

Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought,

Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,

Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees

Their medicinable gum. Set you down this,

And say besides that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,

I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog

And smote him thus.

He stabs himself

LODOVICO O bloody period!

GRAZIANO All that is spoke is marred.

OTHELLO (to Desdemona)

I kissed thee ere I killed thee. No way but this:

Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.

He kisses Desdemona and dies

CASSIO

This did I fear, but thought he had no weapon,

For he was great of heart.

LODOVICO (to Iago) O Spartan dog,

More fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea,

Look on the tragic loading of this bed.

This is thy work. The object poisons sight.

Let it be hid.

⌈They close the bed-curtains ⌉

Graziano, keep the house,

And seize upon the fortunes of the Moor,

For they succeed on you. (To Cassio) To you, Lord

Governor,

Remains the censure of this hellish villain.

The time, the place, the torture, O, enforce it!

Myself will straight aboard, and to the state

This heavy act with heavy heart relate.

Exeunt ⌈with Emilia’s bodyl ⌉

THE HISTORY OF KING LEAR

THE QUARTO TEXT

King Lear first appeared in print in a quarto of 1608. A substantially different text appeared in the 1623 Folio. Until the first appearance of the Oxford text, editors, assuming that each of these early texts imperfectly represented a single play, conflated them. But research conducted mainly during the 1970s and 1980s confirms an earlier view that the 1608 quarto represents the play as Shakespeare originally wrote it, and the 1623 Folio as he substantially revised it. He revised other plays, too, but usually by making many small changes in the dialogue and adding or omitting passages, as in Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello. For these plays we print the revised text in so far as it can be ascertained. But in King Lear revisions are not simply local but structural, too; conflation, as Harley Granville-Barker wrote, ‘may make for redundancy or confusion’, so we print an edited version of each text. The first, printed in the following pages, represents the play as Shakespeare first conceived it, probably before it was performed.

The story of a king who, angry with the failure of his virtuous youngest daughter (Cordelia) to respond as he desires in a love-test, divides his kingdom between her two malevolent sisters (Gonoril and Regan), had been often told; Shakespeare would have come upon it in Holinshed’s Chronicles and in A Mirror for Magistrates while reading for his plays on English history. It is told also (though briefly) in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Book 2, canto 10), and had been dramatized in a play of unknown authorship—The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters—published in 1605, but probably written some fifteen years earlier. This play particularly gave Shakespeare much, including suggestions for the characters of Lear’s loyal servant, Kent, and of Gonoril’s husband, Albany, and her steward, Oswald; for the storm; for Lear’s kneeling to Cordelia; and for many details of language. Nevertheless, his play is a highly original creation. Lear’s madness and the harrowing series of disasters in King Lear’s final stages are of Shakespeare’s invention, and he complicates the plot by adding the story (based on an episode of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia) of Gloucester and his two sons, Edmund and Edgar. Edgar’s love and loyalty to the father who, failing to see the truth, has rejected him in favour of the villainous Edmund makes him a counterpart to Cordelia; and the horrific blinding of Gloucester brought about by Edmund creates a physical parallel to Lear’s madness which reaches its consummation in the scene (Sc. 20) at Dover Cliff when the mad and the blind old men commune together.

The clear-eyed intensity of Shakespeare’s tragic vision in King Lear has been too much for some audiences, and Nahum Tate’s adaptation, which gave the play a happy ending, held the stage from 1681 to 1843; since then, increased understanding of Shakespeare’s stagecraft along with a greater seriousness in theatre audiences has assisted in the rehabilitation of a play that is now recognized as one of the profoundest of all artistic explorations of the human condition.

In the text which follows, the Quarto scene numbers are followed by the equivalent Folio act and scene numbers in parentheses. There is no equivalent to Sc. 17 in the Folio.

THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY

LEAR, King of Britain

GONORIL, Lear’s eldest daughter

Duke of ALBANY, her husband

REGAN, Lear’s second daughter

Duke of CORNWALL, her husband

CORDELIA, Lear’s youngest daughter

Earl of KENT, later disguised as Caius

Earl of GLOUCESTER

EDGAR, elder son of Gloucester, later disguised as Tom o’ Bedlam

EDMUND, bastard son of Gloucester

OLD MAN, a tenant of Gloucester

CURAN, Gloucester’s retainer

Lear’s FOOL

OSWALD, Gonoril’s steward

Three SERVANTS of Cornwall

DOCTOR, attendant on Cordelia

Three CAPTAINS