The Tragedy of King Lear (The New Cambridge Shakespeare)

I cannot remember another work of literature that left me, upon finishing the reading of it, so dumbfounded and drained. I have felt similarly at the conclusion of performances of about ten works of music, a couple operas, and a couple staged dramatic works. But not by simply reading a play. Not even "Oedipus the King" or "Hamlet".William Hazlitt thought that it was impossible to give either a description of KING LEAR or of its effect upon the mind. "All that we can say must fall far short of the subject; or even of what we ourselves conceive of it."I will take heed and say nothing else, other than to quote two trios of lines at the conclusion of the play that give some sense of its desolation and the bleak and tragic nature of the human condition that it reveals.Lear holds the limp body of Cordelia, his youngest daughter and the love and much of the meaning of his life, who has been hanged."Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more.Never, never, never, never, never."Lear himself then dies, but his godson, Edgar, thinking that perhaps Lear had fainted, tries to bring him around. The Earl of Kent cuts him short:"Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass. He hates himThat would upon the rack of this tough worldStretch him out longer."I went sixty-seven years before I read KING LEAR. I hope to read it every five years or so for whatever span is left. Bleak and tragic though it may be, it nonetheless is powerfully seductive.

Several passages have been highlighted. Worse, due to a printing error, 16 pages are completely blank. I want my money back.

The editor of this edition, Jay L. Halio, has made the decision to base the text purely on Shakespeare's folio, rather than on the more usual conflation of the folio and the quarto. Quarto passages which aren't in the folio appear in an appendix at the back. This means that the text in this edition departs quite significantly from the text of other editions in key places. Halio makes a scholarly case for his decision representing something closer to Shakespeare's final version of the play, but it's frustrating if you're interested in the quarto or if you want to read King Lear in its more usual modern form.