• Table of Contents
  
• A Selective Historical Summary
  
• Rationale Behind the Project
  

The Cambridge King Lear CD-ROM: Text and Performance Archive

King Lear is an extraordinary play in every respect. The complex intermingling of textual and performance issues throughout the performance history of this play, however, make King Lear a particularly challenging and an appropriate play to use as the basis of a project on Shakespeare in performance. The Cambridge King Lear CD-ROM: Text and Performance Archive project has as its central aim the bringing together of the interests of textual and performance scholars. Over time the text of King Lear has changed drastically, in part due to the work of editors of printed editions of the text but also in a large part due to the alterations made to the text by theatre artists to accommodate the changing tastes of audiences over time. Of course this play is particular in that it also exists in two very different versions from the outset. The Quarto text of 1608 contains approximately 300 lines which are not in the Folio of 1623, the Folio contains 100 lines which are not in the Quarto.

This web page has been designed to give its users a sense of the kinds of information which are available on the King Lear CD. What follows is first the Table of Contents for the disk, followed by a list of some of the most important events in the history of this play in performance, accompanied by illustrations from the performance history database, and finally an explanation of the rationale behind the project. Unfortunately this form of presentation forces a linearity which is not necessary when using the CD. The web page also lacks the functionality of the disk in terms of searching the materials available. My hope is that this outline will give a flavour of CD’s character and contents rather than a complete illustration.