Scholar claims Shakespeare didn't shorten King Lear – it was his printer

New book from Sir Brian Vickers claims the revisionist movement that believes the Bard shortened the text himself is mistaken

As the world celebrates the 400th anniversary of his death, battle lines are quietly being drawn in the world of Shakespeare scholarship over the text of King Lear.

The Bard’s great tragedy exists in two versions, the 1608 Quarto and the 1623 Folio, each of which is abridged. The Quarto is missing 100 lines that appear in the Folio, and the Folio lacking 300 lines found in the Quarto. The texts were combined as one version in editions of the play for centuries, until a revisionist movement in the 1980s argued that Shakespeare had shortened the Folio text himself, and that the two texts represented two versions of the play.

For 300 years people just took the bits which were missing from one, and put them in the other, and everyone was happy

The excitement of the revisionist theory was that for the first time, we could see evidence of Shakespeare at work

Related: If Shakespeare was writing today, he'd be a crime writer

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