Three weeks ago I had what seemed like a fun idea at the time: I’d live-tweet a steady stream of my responses to Brian Vickers’s — sorry: Sir Brian Vickers’s — new work of counter-revisionist literary/textual/theatre history, The One King Lear (Harvard UP, 2016). It turned into a bit of an all-consuming exercise, as Vickers’s book far exceeded my worst expectations; the final chapter was so brimming with misrepresentations and inconsistencies that I eventually threw my hands up after 200 tweets. I’m now writing a “proper” review of The One King Lear, but since some people seemed to find the long strings of 140-character-notes useful, I decided to Storify them for easier reading. And then Alison Croggon wrote this:
This is the beginning of one of the greatest feats of tweeted criticism ever. He's done the whole book. https://t.co/bpbtKrxQN3
— Alison Croggon (@alisoncroggon) June 2, 2016
and that:
@literasyme @This_Big_Hush You must make a page with all the Storify links together so it's easy to read through.
— Alison Croggon (@alisoncroggon) June 2, 2016
And who am I to disagree with Alison Croggon? So, without further delay, here are the nine chapters, Storified:
Part I: The Quarto, 1608
Chapter 1: King Lear at the Printer
Chapter 2: Adjusting Text Space to Print Space in the Shakespeare Folio and Quartos
Chapter 3: Nicholas Okes Compresses the Play
Chapter 4: Nicholas Okes Abridges It
Part II: The Folio, 1623
Chapter 5: One Play, One Manuscript, Two Printed Books
Chapter 6: The Folio Editors Regularize Shakespeare
Chapter 7: The King’s Men Abridge a Tragedy
Part III: The One King Lear
Chapter 8: The “Two Versions” Revisited
There is a Conclusion as well, but I’ve decided to stop with the end of Chapter 8. Vickers adds nothing that would merit further commentary in that Conclusion, although he provides a conspiracy-theory-tinged account of how the “revisionist” school of thought could ever get anyone to accept their ideas; that part is worth reading before reading the rest of The One King Lear if one is the kind of reader who wants to understand the author’s motivation for writing before reading his book. Otherwise, my last tweet on Chapter 8 can stand as my final response to the entire volume:
200. 200 tweets into this chapter, reading Sir lecture about “accepted scholarly practices” induces hysterical laughter. #1Lear
— Holger Syme (@literasyme) June 1, 2016
20 Responses to Live-Tweeting The One King Lear
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Holger Syme's work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.Images may be reused as long as their source is properly attributed in accordance with the Creative Commons License detailed above. Many of the photos here were taken at the Folger Shakespeare Library; please consult their policy on digital images as well.
[…] Sir Brian Vickers (UCL), The One King Lear (Harvard, 2016), el tratamiento inusual de más de 500 tweets de crítica demoledora al libro que ha, por mucho, excedido sus “peores expectativas”. Empezó el 11 de mayo, […]
Alison Croggon states my sentiments exactly. Thank you! I’m so sorry it’s over now.
[…] professor of English at the University of Toronto live-tweeted his appalled criticism — running to more than 500 tweets — of what he sees as a “tremendously awful” new book on the texts of King Lear […]
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[…] misrepresentations and inconsistencies that I eventually threw my hands up after 200 tweets,” wrote Syme on his blog, where he has collected his 500-plus tweet […]
[…] misrepresentations and inconsistencies that I eventually threw my hands up after 200 tweets,” wrote Syme on his blog, where he has collected his 500-plus tweet […]
[…] misrepresentations and inconsistencies that I eventually threw my hands up after 200 tweets,” wrote Syme on his blog, where he has collected his 500-plus tweet […]
[…] misrepresentations and inconsistencies that I eventually threw my hands up after 200 tweets,” wrote Syme on his blog, where he has collected his 500-plus tweet […]
Thank you! I’m so sorry it’s over now.