King Lear exists in two different texts: the Quarto (1608) and the Folio (1623). Because each supplies passages missing in the other, for over 200 years editors combined the two to form a single text, the basis for all modern productions. Then in the 1980s a group of influential scholars argued that the two texts represent different versions of King Lear, that Shakespeare revised his play in light of theatrical performance. The two-text theory has since hardened into orthodoxy. Now for the first time in a book-length argument, one of the world’s most eminent Shakespeare scholars challenges the two-text theory. At stake is the way Shakespeare’s greatest play is read and performed.

Sir Brian Vickers demonstrates that the cuts in the Quarto were in fact carried out by the printer because he had underestimated the amount of paper he would need. Paper was an expensive commodity in the early modern period, and printers counted the number of lines or words in a manuscript before ordering their supply. As for the Folio, whereas the revisionists claim that Shakespeare cut the text in order to alter the balance between characters, Vickers sees no evidence of his agency. These cuts were likely made by the theater company to speed up the action. Vickers includes responses to the revisionist theory made by leading literary scholars, who show that the Folio cuts damage the play’s moral and emotional structure and are impracticable on the stage.

Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books addresses Wilde's obsession with the visual appearance or "look" of his published writings. It examines the role played by graphic designers in the production of Wilde's writings and demonstrates how marginal and decorative elements of the printed book affect interpretation. Nicholas Frankel approaches Wilde's writings as graphical or "printed" phenomena that reveal their significance through the beautiful and elaborate decorations with which they were published in Wilde's own lifetime. With extensive reference to and exposition on Wilde's theoretical writings and letters, the author shows that, far from being marginal elements of the literary text, these decorative devices were central to Wilde's understanding of his own writings as well as to his "aesthetic" theory of language. Extensive illustrations support Frankel's arguments. The first part of the book lays out a broadly historical view of Wilde’s writings, emphasizing their volatility at the hands of time as well as Wilde’s changing conceptions of his own work. The second part demonstrates the significance that Wilde and his publishers attached to the process of graphic design, showing how marginal and decorative elements of the printed book affect interpretation. Both parts stress the importance of late-Victorian publishing practices to our understanding of Wilde’s writings. The book further challenges the prevailing view of Wilde as essentially a playwright, demonstrating the importance of poetry to Wilde’s own understanding of himself as an author.The book attempts to do justice to Wilde’s own valorization of literature as one of the decorative arts. By emphasizing the visual and collaborative dimensions of Wilde’s texts, Frankel argues that visual decoration was central to Wilde’s theory of language as well as his practice as a writer. Anticipating Baudrillard's distinctionbetween appearance and the transparency, of the sign, Wilde’s writings argue that literary language is both a visual and a material phenomenon — what Wilde himself would call a “beautiful untrue thing” — that demands to be read with the eye as much as the brain.This book will appeal to specialists of Oscar Wilde and the Victorian fin de siècle, to textual and literary scholars, art historians, and linguistic philosophers interested in the graphical nature of the linguistic sign.