Why the"unnamed dramatist"[of King L e i r]
never merged from a position of obscurity ?
A literary-historical grotesque!
 True Chronicle History of KingLEIR 1605
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True Chronicle History of...KingLEAR 1608
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The author of the anonymous (!) Play "The True Chronicle History of King Le i r, and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella.", (s.Faksimile,left) registered in 1594, the year after Marlowe's alleged death, (but printed only a decade later, 1605 after it was re-registered is said to be unknown
A comparative textual analysis does not leave any doubt that Shakespeare's "King L e a r "(Q1,1608 (Faksimile right) is based on this early play "King L e i r". It has attracted critical attention principally for its relationship with "King Lear".
It seems preposterous to conceive that Shakespeare could have borrowed (stolen) essential ideas from an anonymous contemporary author. In the search for the alleged author, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lodge, Drayton and others have been considered but not Marlowe since →Sidney Lee (1909) concluded in a strange and bizarre way:
Sidney Lee: «Marlowe's genius entitles him to a better fate. It is fatuous to associate his name with an effort which no point rises to any fulnes of poetic utterance«…»[their] characteristic merits are far inferior to those of Marlowe. They walk on a the lower slope of the Elisabethan Parnassus…their dramatic work…lacks for the most part indutible marks of exalted individuality«......»and to have withheld all key to the dramatist’s name from the title page. The absence of the author’s name, or his initials, suggests that he[the poet] never merged from a position of obscurity«);
What could have been the cause that the "unnamed dramatist" [of King Le i r] never merged from a position of obscurity? Why no consistent explanation of Shakespeare experts has been elaborated?
The "monkey business" would have been completely unnecessary, of course, if the Marlowe-Shakespeare authorship thesis had been taken seriously!
Shakespeare's Q1-Lear ("History"-1608) and FF-Lear ("Tragedy"-1623) differ by about 400 lines: 3oo lines from Q1 disappeared in FF, whereas 100 new lines were added in FF.
A comparative textual analysis does not leave any doubt that Shakespeare's "King L e a r "(Q1,1608 (Faksimile right) is based on this early play "King L e i r". It has attracted critical attention principally for its relationship with "King Lear".
It seems preposterous to conceive that Shakespeare could have borrowed (stolen) essential ideas from an anonymous contemporary author. In the search for the alleged author, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lodge, Drayton and others have been considered but not Marlowe since →Sidney Lee (1909) concluded in a strange and bizarre way:
Sidney Lee: «Marlowe's genius entitles him to a better fate. It is fatuous to associate his name with an effort which no point rises to any fulnes of poetic utterance«…»[their] characteristic merits are far inferior to those of Marlowe. They walk on a the lower slope of the Elisabethan Parnassus…their dramatic work…lacks for the most part indutible marks of exalted individuality«......»and to have withheld all key to the dramatist’s name from the title page. The absence of the author’s name, or his initials, suggests that he[the poet] never merged from a position of obscurity«);
What could have been the cause that the "unnamed dramatist" [of King Le i r] never merged from a position of obscurity? Why no consistent explanation of Shakespeare experts has been elaborated?
The "monkey business" would have been completely unnecessary, of course, if the Marlowe-Shakespeare authorship thesis had been taken seriously!
Shakespeare's Q1-Lear ("History"-1608) and FF-Lear ("Tragedy"-1623) differ by about 400 lines: 3oo lines from Q1 disappeared in FF, whereas 100 new lines were added in FF.
Who may have made these late changes in FF?
