Jesús Tronch "Variations from conventional single-reading texts for editing Lear's textual variations"

This paper will address the question of making available to modern readers the early Quarto and Folio versions of King Lear from the perspective of "the multiple-text editors", as Shillingsburg called one of the modes of textual criticism reflecting changes in editorial theory and practice in the 1980s (1989: 58). It will situate what can be termed multi-reading editions within this Franco-German school of editing, and will advocate this type of edition as a format that, departing from the conventional single-reading text, will most economically serve a specific reading use: that of readers interested in easily comparing variants and appreciating the play's textual diversity. The essay will discuss possibilities, problems and decisions and that would be encountered in multi-reading editions of Lear using several varieties of scholarly editing (as classified by Tanselle [1995: 10-28]): in historical and in non-historical approaches; in diplomatic and in modern-spelling critical texts; in eclectic and in conservative positions, in rationales reconstructing authorially intended texts, publisher's texts or the texts made available to readers at given times.