King Lear

Project Gutenberg's Etext of Shakespeare's The Tragedie of
King Lear
Executive Director's Notes:
In addition to the notes below, and so you will NOT think all the spelling errors introduced by the printers of the time have been corrected, here are the first few lines of Hamlet, as they are presented herein:
Barnardo. Who's there? Fran. Nay answer me: Stand & vnfold your selfe
Bar. Long liue the King

As I understand it, the printers often ran out of certain words or letters they had often packed into a cliche . . .this is the original meaning of the term cliche. . .and thus, being unwilling to unpack the cliches, and thus you will see some substitutions that look very odd. . .such as the exchanges of u for v, v for u, above. . .and you may wonder why they did it this way, presuming Shakespeare did not actually write the play in this manner. . . .
The answer is that they MAY have packed liue into a cliche at a time when they were out of v 's. . .possibly having used vv in place of some w 's, etc. This was a common practice of the day, as print was still quite expensive, and they didn't want to spend more on a wider selection of characters than they had to.
You will find a lot of these kinds of errors in this text, as I have mentioned in other times and places, many scholars have an extreme attachment to these errors, and many have accorded them a very high place in the canon of Shakespeare. My father read an assortment of these made available to him by Cambridge University in England for several months in a glass room constructed for the purpose. To the best of my knowledge he read ALL those available . . .in great detail. . .and determined from the various changes, that Shakespeare most likely did not write in nearly as many of a variety of errors we credit him for, even though he was in/famous for signing his name with several different spellings.
So, please take this into account when reading the comments below made by our volunteer who prepared this file: you may see errors that are not errors. . . .