About the Book:

The Tragedie of King Lear is a beautifully bound facsimile edition of Shakespeare's popular tragedy from his First Folio. Shakespeare's magnificent tragedy tells the story of an aging king who divides his kingdom between two daughters but leaves out the third, failing to understand that she loves him most of all. His mistake triggers a chain of lies and betrayal and dooms him to madness.

William Shakespeare is acknowledged to be the greatest dramatist in the English language, and yet none of his manuscripts survive. Shakespeare First Folio is a modern term applied by scholars to one of the world's most famous books, William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, the collected edition of Shakespeare's plays — and one of the highlights of the British Library. Published in folio form seven years after the playwright's death by Isaac Iaggard and Edward Blount, and overseen by Shakespeare's fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, the First Folio contains the text of thirty-six plays, half of which had not been previously published during the Bard's lifetime. At last, readers had the plays as they were actually performed, "where before," the editors wrote, "you were abused with diverse, stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters...." Sold for one pound each at the time, this remarkable collection is invaluable to our understanding of the playwright and our conception of his canon.

Today the British Library holds one of the precious few remaining copies of the First Folio. The British Library and the Globe Theatre in London worked together to produce an affordable and beautifully reproduced facsimile edition of The Tragedie of King Lear from the book. In addition to the text for the play, this hardcover book includes copies of the preliminary pages from the Folio — including the famous engraved portrait of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout and an introduction to each individual work by Anthony James West. This edition of The Tragedie of King Lear presents the authentic First Folio manuscript in a collectible format, an enjoyable publication for the general reader and Shakespearean scholar alike.

What people say:

"A quite wonderful idea. So blindingly obvious, I can't understand why nobody had thought of it before. I will certainly use the texts myself." — Sir Peter Hall, director, and founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)

About the Editor:

Anthony James West is an Honorary Research Fellow, University College London (where he earned his PhD); and a Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He has spent more than twenty-five years studying the history of the Shakespeare First Folio.