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Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Cultures of Quotation from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen by Kate Rumbold (review)

produced by the revisionists to support their theory. To other scholars and critics, cutting a whole scene (4.3) and severely reducing the fantastic mad trial scene (3.6) have seemed like extraordinarily bad theatrical judgments from a misguided desire to speed up the action. A repeated criticism of the revisionists’ explanations of F’s changes is that they seemed to be post-facto rationalizations rather than plausible reasons for making some of F’s indefensible changes to Q’s narrative structure and characterization. In Vickers’s judgment, “It is inconceivable that he [Shakespeare] would . . . have damaged his own design by making the crude cuts found in the Folio: it would have been an act of self-mutilation” (xiii). Vickers defends this conclusion by celebrating the play’s countless moments of genius in one scene, character, and passage after another, from beginning to end. Ultimately, his profound understanding of both Shakespeare’s play and the vicissitudes of printing allows him and us to appreciate fully how remarkably its innumerable and incomparable excellences have survived despite the several varieties of difficulty and misfortune in the publication of its two indispensable early printed editions—the inexperience of its first printer, the several intrusive sophistications introduced by his successor. As Vickers’s book triumphantly reveals, these later developments only serve to demonstrate and confirm the original and indestructible greatness of every aspect of Shakespeare’s masterwork. Vickers’s fine book only confirms the fact that Shakespeare never had any reason to become disaffected with his greatest play, nor to feel the slightest impulse to attempt to change it. King Lear remains, as it has been from the beginning, sui generis.