Shakespeare's King Lear: An Edition with New Insights
Shakespeare’s King Lear is often called his mightiest play. This comprehensive edition by S. Nagarajan (who edited the evergreen Signet edition of Measure for Measure) presents a lifetime of scholarship on Shakespeare and fifteen years of research specifically on Lear. Accessibly written, this edition serves the reader who has access to well-stocked libraries and lively theatres, as well as the student whose resources are more limited.
The play-text is a conflation of the Quarto text and the First Folio text, and the notes provide a generous but discreet selection of alternative readings of lines and contexts. In ten erudite essays, Nagarajan provides a thoroughly researched picture of Shakespeare’s sources for the play, his unique use of language, Elizabethan theatre, history and values of the play, analysis of enigmatic scenes, glimpses into its performance history and other subjects, with special attention to Indian dramatic art theory. This edition is the first to bring together both the best scholarship on Lear to date and perspectives from Indian poetics and philosophy. The result is a text that robustly includes, but goes beyond, Anglophone cultures and Euro-American experiences, making it truly representative of Lear’s global stage.
Professor S. Nagarajan, 1929–2014, received his PhD in English from Harvard University, and was one of the world’s leading authorities on Shakespeare. He published on a wide range of subjects in prestigious journals like the Shakespeare Quarterly, Comparative Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Ariel, and the Oxford Essays in Criticism, and was the Indian Correspondent of the World Shakespeare Bibliography for about three decades. Greatly loved by his students everywhere, Professor Nagarajan was Chair of the University Department of English at the University of Poona and the University of Hyderabad, India. He served as Dean of the School of Humanities and for some time as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, where he was also founding Director of its Centre for the Study of Comparative Literature. He served as an Emeritus Fellow of India’s prominent University Grants Commission (UGC), and was Visiting Professor and advisor for the University of Mauritius. He was a British Council Visitor, an American Studies Fellow at Harvard, a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, a Leverhulme Fellow at the Australian National University and a Commonwealth Universities Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He was elected Life Member at Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge.
“This edition deserves Shakespeare’s words: ‘O wonderful, wonderful, most wonderful, wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping!’ Nagarajan’s King Lear is for all readers who want a thorough yet judicious, readable commentary on the play.”
Sylvan Barnet
General Editor of the Signet Classics Shakespeare
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