MICHAEL CORDNER

PERFORMANCE, ANNOTATION,
AND THE PLAY OF INTERPRETATIVE POSSIBILITY:
THE OPENING OF KING LEAR

SUMMARY
In recent decades Shakespearean scholarship has acknowledged the origin of his plays as scripts for performance in numerous ways. This essay argues, however, that the default practices of annotation in modern Shakespeare editions still tend to restrict the play of potential meaning in his dialogue in a manner which is radically untrue to the richness of the interpretative options it presents, both to readers and to performers. It explores this proposition via a detailed exploration of the problematic style in which a brief passage in the first scene of King Lear has been handled in a range of editions over the last half-century and draws some proposals from that case-study for future practice.

- - - - - -
‘Words, words, words.’  We need them. There is no way out.
They’re never the end of something but the beginning,
and every word we find in Shakespeare is a starting point.
(Brook, 81)

‘Legitimate businessman, John. That’s what the judge said at the trial.’
‘Aye, and like you, I could hear the inverted commas.’
‘Tone of voice isn’t what gets written down, though.’
(Rankin, 100)

	As Lukas Erne has noted, modern Shakespeare editions “typically provide more paratext than text”. The resulting commentary comes in a rich array of forms – “textual, intertextual, lexical/philological, and so on” (72). For the majority of readers, however, the most urgent priority is that the annotation should offer them authoritative, lucid, and reliable assistance when they are confronted with complexities and opacities in the text. Different editions vary radically in how they handle this responsibility. 
This article begins as a close examination of the contrasting ways in which a short passage from the opening of Shakespeare’s King Lear has been explicated in modern editions of the play. From this micro-study it then seeks to develop larger questions about perceived limitations in the current practice of annotation in Shakespeare editions and to sketch some propositions about how these problems might be addressed. Our explorations, however, start with an earlier moment in the tragedy’s critical history.

	One character in King Lear, above all others, engaged Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s imagination – Edmund, Gloucester’s illegitimate son. For Coleridge, Edmund’s story became an exemplary tale of exceptional promise turned radically awry as the result of a single unthinking action by his own father.  
The initial impression Edmund makes on us, Coleridge asserts, is striking and heroic: “From the first drawing up of the curtain he has stood before us in the united strength and beauty of earliest manhood”. He is “Gifted . . . with high advantages of person and further endowed by nature with a powerful intellect and a strong energetic will”. Such outstanding properties mean that “pride will be the sin that most easily besets him”; but Coleridge urges that this tendency could, in propitious circumstances, have remained “a pride auxiliary if not akin to many virtues, and the natural ally of honourable impulses”.  
That benign outcome, however, is forestalled by the shame inflicted on him by his father’s gross behaviour. In the play’s opening moments Edmund is, in a life-transforming moment, forced to hear
   his mother and the circumstances of his birth spoken of with a most degrading and
   licentious levity – described as a wanton by her own paramour, and the 
   remembrance of the animal sting, the low criminal gratifications connected with her
   wantonness and prostituted beauty assigned as the reason why ‘the whoreson must 
   be acknowledged’.
Coleridge anatomizes the unhealable wound this experience inflicts on the Edmund he summons from Shakespeare’s play:
	This, and the consciousness of its notoriety – the gnawing conviction that every show 
	of respect is an effort of courtesy which recalls while it represses a contrary feeling – 
	this is the ever-trickling flow of wormwood and gall into the wounds of pride, the 
	corrosive virus which inoculates pride with a venom not its own, with envy, hatred,
	a lust of that power which in its blaze of radiance would hide the dark spots on his 
	disk, with pangs of shame personally undeserved and therefore felt as wrongs, and a 
	blind ferment of vindictive workings towards the occasions and causes, especially
	towards a brother whose stainless birth and lawful honours were the constant 
 	reminders of his debasement, and were ever in the way to prevent all chance of its
	being unknown or overlooked or forgotten.  (198-199)
The vivid, quirky circumstantiality of the writing here demonstrates the intensity of Coleridge’s imaginative investment in the doomed plight he evokes. We can acknowledge that achievement’s richness, while remaining sceptical about whether this extraordinary vision can, in practice, be reconciled with Shakespeare’s lines. In any case, Coleridge makes no attempt to align what he writes with what the text presents. He does not cite even one of Edmund’s lines, but focuses instead on excavating, layer after layer, the complexities of the psychological and spiritual wounds this victim is claimed to have suffered.
	Echoes of Coleridge’s reading can be found in many later treatments of the play. Marvin Rosenberg’s 1972 The Masks of King Lear, for example, centres its explorations in the play’s variegated performance history, but also includes critical excursions, in which Rosenberg’s own readings are expounded, often uninflected by any dialogue with stage testimony or experience. In an early passage he offers his version of the moment between Gloucester and Edmund that had so transfixed Coleridge. His predecessor’s influence is everywhere apparent in what he writes; but from that inheritance Rosenberg derives a radical proposition about the moral logic underpinning the Lear subplot’s overall trajectory:
	. . . the father derides the bastard boy, speaks jovially of the boy’s mother, a sportive
	whore. The father says this before the boy, as if the boy were nothing. The boy hears.
	I will speak later of the underlying satisfactions of the motif; but note here the
	clear, if soft, sound of Nemesis. A father who carelessly rouses the image of the
	primal sexual act to inflict pain on his son in the fantasy life of fiction does so at
	great peril to himself. This father has blushed to acknowledge the boy; the boy will
	indeed bring blood to the old man’s cheeks: cheeks now braz’d – hardened – to the 
	shame of this illegitimacy. Shame – this is to be a central motif of the play. (12)
In the perfervid domestic drama Rosenberg etches here, from direct intra-familial aggression is bred, ineluctably, and justly, the terrible violence which follows.   
In this variation on the Coleridgean precedent, Gloucester is set on deriding and humiliating Edmund and, by that action, triggers a narrative logic of inevitable reciprocation. His reported blushing at having sired an illegitimate son punitively morphs into the blood from his blinded eyes which stains his cheeks in the aftermath of the violent assault from Cornwall and Regan to which Edmund abandons him. The motive Rosenberg attributes to Gloucester – an explicit desire “to inflict pain on his son” - generates (or, rather, implies) line-readings which an actor might plausibly execute, but to which there are multiple, equally plausible, alternatives with which he might also productively experiment. In a study which at various points provides lavish citations from contrasting stage interpretations, Rosenberg here cites nothing from the performance history, to validate, complicate, or challenge his preferred overview of the Gloucester plot; and no more than Coleridge does he attempt to earth his reading down in the encounter’s line-by-line specifics. (His only allusion to the text itself is the weaving into his own prose, at two points, of excerpts from Gloucester’s statement that he has “so often blushed to acknowledge him that now I am brazed to’t” (1.1, 9-10).)1 So, what any of this might mean for the performance realisation of the script in a particular production remains obscure.  
An editor of the play needs to work at the micro-level Coleridge and Rosenberg shun. S/he needs to track, and disentangle, its moment-by-moment challenges and enigmas and, in so doing, facilitate and enhance readers’ comprehension, and experience, of the reproduced text’s meanings and potentialities. When compiling his 1880 Variorum edition of King Lear, Furness naturally invoked Coleridge’s “fine remarks on Edmund” (5) in a note and reproduced them at length in an appendix (419-20). It is less immediately obvious that non-Variorum editions should find a place in their annotation for Coleridge’s interpretation. If they do choose to cite it there, editors will, in theory, be faced with the need to test it against the text with some rigour.
Several major modern editions do invoke Coleridge in their notes. Here, for instance, is Kenneth Muir in the Arden 2 King Lear:
   Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Raysor, I. 56, says that Edmund ‘hears his
   mother and the circumstances of his birth spoken of with a most degrading and 
   licentious levity’. But Kittredge argues that Edmund, though on the stage, does not
   hear this conversation.  (4)
His Arden 3 successor, R. A. Foakes, does not cite Coleridge by name, but his indebtedness is clear:
	   If Edmund hears his father’s coarse joking and boasting, it could help to account for
	   his later behaviour. Adelman, 105, notes that Gloucester speaks of Edmund as his
	   mother’s son (14), while he claims Edgar as his own son (18).  (158)
J. L .Halio, in the 1992 New Cambridge Shakespeare edition, is recognisably in the same tradition, when he writes:
	  Gloucester’s coarse humour must be offensive to Edmond [sic], if he overhears his 
	  father speaking thus, as Rosenberg assumes (p.12).  (95)
None of these editors takes us further in linking the Coleridgean version of this moment with specific textual detail; and, while echoing Coleridge’s reading, all three feel the need to imply less than full commitment to its propositions, but with unsatisfactory results.  
	Note, for example, Muir’s use of the present continuous – “does not hear” – in his explanation of Kittredge’s dissentient view. It is as if, in some recurring enactment of the scenario Shakespeare determined, the action is constantly unfurling, with Edmund only ever becoming part of the conversation between his elders when his father explicitly invites him to join them. It is a phrasing which presumes that there is only one way in which Shakespeare’s vision can be faithfully fulfilled, and that the attempt to identify that one true way is the apt goal of scholarly exploration. This was once a default mode of criticism; but we are no longer so confident that clear answers of the kind Kittredge sought can be achieved. Shakespeare may have had a firm preference about how the action might or should unfold; but the dialogue he has bequeathed to us is, as the stage history demonstrates, susceptible of a variety of contrasting stage renderings, which all make coherent sense of the lines the script requires to be spoken. So, Muir’s note does no more than suggest that he does not completely trust Coleridge’s interpretation. 
However, he still chooses to put that interpretation into renewed circulation, including to those potential Arden 2 readers who will not previously have heard of it, but refrains from himself actively testing its plausibility against the lines his comment nominally addresses. The sense of a missed opportunity is increased if one consults Kittredge’s edition and discovers that the relevant comment there consists of a bare assertion that Coleridge is mistaken, and that “Edmund stands in the background and hears nothing till he is called forward . . . to be introduced to ‘my Lord of Kent’” (1157). Kittredge advances no reasons for believing this. So, Muir’s note offers no more than a shadow dance of unproven assertions.
	Foakes’s intervention is similarly inconclusive. Beginning with “If”, it signals from the start its lack of full commitment to Coleridge’s proposition. But, like Muir, he feels obliged to include the idea in his annotation. He then yokes that first sentence to a citation from Janet Adelman’s mould-breaking Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’. But there is no logical connection between the two. Even if accurate,2 Adelman’s comment on those lines contributes nothing to the discussion of whether or not Edmund is to hear what Gloucester said. (I should note that, in its original context in her book (105), it was not designed to do this.) If Edmund hears Gloucester, then what Adelman observes, if accepted, might be considered a further aggravating factor, if we are to imagine an Edmund recoiling in shame and horror from his father’s words. But there are too many “ifs” in play here. Like Muir’s, this note does no probing of its own to validate or disprove the tradition it once again puts half-heartedly into play.   
	Halio’s tactics are different again, but still problematic. His note is cautious in tone: he reports an assumption which Rosenberg makes, but does not fully embrace that assumption himself, even though he rates it highly enough to afford it space in his commentary. It is revealing to observe what Halio deems to be speculative here, and what he considers to be indisputable. If Edmund overhears the remark, he “must” be offended by it; but whether he overhears it is open to debate. Yet the reason for doubt in the latter case – the lack of specific textual proof – also applies with equal force in the first one, since nothing Edmund says in the scene articulates the outrage Halio assumes he “must” experience. In both cases, the argument, such as it is, builds a hypothesis from textual silence; and, in the case of Edmund’s imputed response, the undeclared premise has to be that, in such circumstances, any son “must” resent such denigration of his mother and indulgence in “coarse humour” about the circumstances of his own begetting. The character’s individuality is subsumed into a generalisation that all sons would feel these emotions, given such provocation. But what if, for example, Edmund were to have been created to be an exception to this alleged rule? The note’s logic is circular and unconvincing; and, once again, the (here implicit) invocation of the Coleridgean tradition’s authority distracts from the execution of what might be conceived to be the annotator’s core responsibility – i.e., to test any critical observations s/he decides to report in the commentary against the dialogue the actors are tasked to deliver.
	Shakespearean annotation is a complex interweaving of indebtedness, revisionism, and innovation. But one of its history’s oddities is what sometimes looks like the haphazard process by which some propositions bed down in the tradition, and are thereafter recurrently accorded sustained respect within it, while others fail to gain any purchase. As a well-qualified counter-witness to Coleridge, we might summon Harley Granville-Barker, an outstanding Shakespearean director as well as an alert and theatre-savvy scholarly commentator, whose reading of this moment takes a quite different tack.  
What Granville-Barker discerns in the text is a first sighting of Edmund which prioritises calm self-possession and inscrutability – qualities which provide an apt prelude to the clinical ability to dissimulate seamlessly which Edmund later deploys in his pitiless pursuit of his own advancement, but whose true significance, in this version, spectators can only properly decode in retrospect. Granville-Barker asks of this encounter:
	   who could suspect the modest young newcomer, making his bow with
			Sir, I shall study deserving
	   of having such unpleasant thoughts in mind?   (202)
In this scene, Edmund speaks only three brief speeches, consisting of thirteen words in total. Each of his contributions is cued by his elders’ prompting, and phrased in deferential accord with his subordinate position in relationship to them. So, Granville-Barker’s scenario fits the given data perfectly, and also makes sense in terms of later developments.
 This is not to argue that this is the only way the scene can legitimately be played. But, unlike Coleridge’s, this is an interpretation which is avowedly responsive to the dialogue Shakespeare has provided for his actors. If our three editors are, to varying degrees, tentative in their recycling of the Coleridgean view, and less than sure about its textual necessity, what justifies their failure to invoke, for instance, this plausible alternative account, in order to lend, at the very least, some sense of balance to their commentary? This uncertainty of purpose means that none of these editions serves their readers to best effect at this point; and, in the process, they all offer a restricted view of the interpretative possibilities the text is capable of offering.  

	If they are fallible in this respect, how do they otherwise acquit themselves when seeking to alert their users to the possible subtleties of meaning and implication in the dialogue in this encounter? (In exploring this question, I will, as we go, play into the discussion some other modern editions of the play.)  
	The scene opens with a few lines of conversation, between Kent and Gloucester, devoted to the imminent division of the kingdom, and then Kent asks: “Is not this your son, my lord?” Gloucester’s reply to this begins: “His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge” (1.1, 9) – a sentence which has prompted a variegated array of responses from editors. (Not all of them, however, choose to pause here. Muir, for one, passes by in silence.)  
Foakes offers this paraphrase for the line:
   birth and upbringing have been at my expense (OED charge sb. 10c).   (158)
Halio’s contribution is shorter, glossing “breeding” as “(1) upbringing, (2) parentage” (95). G. K. Hunter’s 1972 New Penguin edition provides:
	   I have been financially responsible for his upbringing (or ‘I might be held 
	   responsible for his birth’)  (186)
The Bate/Rasmussen Royal Shakespeare Company single-play edition offers separate entries for the two nouns, explaining “breeding” as “upbringing (plays on the sense of ‘conception’)” and “charge” as “cost (plays on the sense of ‘accusation, blame’)” (28). Stanley Wells’s single-play Oxford Shakespeare edition follows the same pattern. For “breeding”, it offers “may play on the senses ‘begetting’ and ‘bringing up’, ‘educating’”, while, for “charge”, it provides “at my expense; or, more generally, my responsibility” (100). So, our selected line-up of editions manifests a variety of approaches, conveying different nuancings of meaning, and reflecting distinct interpretative preferences. None of them, however, is fully satisfactory.  
Foakes, for example, unnecessarily restricts the meaning of “charge”, equating it only with “financial cost”. To support this, he cites one OED entry for the noun, but, in so doing, tacitly rules out of consideration several other relevant early modern meanings of the word, ratified by OED entries he does not choose to cite. These include 13a, the “duty or responsibility of taking care of (a person or thing)”, and hence, by extension, “care, custody, superintendence”; and 12, “A task or duty laid upon one; commission, trust, responsibility; an office entrusted to one”. Opening up a further range of possibilities, there is also OED’s 16a, “Attribution or imputation of something culpable; accusation”, which bred the idiom, “to lay to one’s charge” – i.e., “to impute to one as a fault, charge one with, charge upon one”. So, the potential field of lexical play is distinctly richer than Foakes’s note recognises.
Halio’s decision to gloss only “breeding” is problematic, both because it ignores the challenge raised by “charge”, and because the pair of glosses it offers for “breeding” provides a less than adequate reflection of the range of senses the noun potentially mobilises. In addition, Gloucester’s use of “breeding” alludes more bluntly to the act he committed in siring Edmund than is reflected by Halio’s preference for the anodyne “parentage” as a synonym for it. That meaning is validated by OED sb. 1b; but halting the search there is ill-advised. Gordon Williams, for instance, in his Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery, cites a line, about women in childbed labour, from John Fletcher’s A Wife for a Month, to illustrate another common usage: “. . . their throes / When they are breeding” (149). Think also of Hamlet’s question to Ophelia, “Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” (Hamlet, 3.1, 123-124), or Perdita’s “No more than, were I painted, I would wish / This youth should say ‘twere well, and only therefore / Desire to breed by me” (The Winter’s Tale, 4,3, 101-103). Halio’s euphemistic choice of synonym misrepresents what is in play here.
Hunter’s twin paraphrases raise different issues. Why is one contained within brackets, as if of secondary, or more doubtful, status? If that is the distinction intended, on what grounds is it being made? Why also the change of tense in the second paraphrase? Shakespeare’s “hath been” is far from accurately represented by Hunter’s “might be”. And why change the syntactical order of the original in the paraphrase? The slippage just noted becomes easier to commit because Hunter’s rendering is no longer tied to reflecting the source’s grammatical logic exactly.3
Bate and Rasmussen also introduce an implicit hierarchy into their explanation of the two key nouns. In each case one meaning is given precedence over the other, and the latter is then introduced as the secondary, or junior, partner in the wordplay being deployed. Why so? And what arguments could be produced in defence of this? None are advanced by the two editors.
Similar problems affect Wells’s note. Why “may play” in his note on “breeding”? The two meanings he then identifies are well attested in contemporary usage, and therefore have to be potentially in play here, since both fit the sentence and context neatly. What prompts then the less than total conviction in the chosen phrasing? Does it hint at an implicit doubt as to whether Gloucester is the kind of character who would indulge in such wordplay? That is the only reason I can think of which might inspire the hesitation; but, if so, what might justify that surmise? The note on “charge” is more confident, but offers only a synoptic account of the spectrum of meanings available. Also, in common with the majority of the editors so far cited – Foakes and Hunter are the exceptions - Wells treats the words he selects for explication in isolation from the sentence which bonds them, and therefore from the ways in which this pair of nouns, interacting with, and mutually informing, one another, can generate a diverse range of options for readers, and actors, to explore.
The predominant form Shakespearean annotation takes is to concentrate on the single word or short phrase. Exploring longer units – an extended sentence, for example – is the rarer choice. This partly reflects the imputed constraints of book publication – or, rather, the default way in which notes are organised in editions of this repertoire.4 Annotation squeezed onto the bottom of a page inevitably becomes an exercise in the tightest economy of expression and therefore favours targeting issues which can be handled concisely. But some of the most teasing interpretative choices can only be brought into focus if the resonances of the interrelationships between words across longer spans are mapped and probed. This sentence of Gloucester’s is a case in point.
Let us explore the possibilities it offers. Relevant OED entries for one spectrum of the senses of “breeding” which are relevant here are: 3, “The rearing and training of the young; bringing up: formerly in sense of ‘education’”, and 4, “The results of training as shown in personal manners and behaviour; generally used for ‘good breeding’, good or proper manners”. With these meanings in mind, along with those for “charge” which we explored earlier, one logical paraphrase might produce: “Edmund’s rearing and education are a responsibility I have taken on and carried out”. (Whether willingly or unwillingly, graciously or ungraciously, is something on which the actor can make the call.) Another alternative is: “[The costs of] his rearing and education have been at my expense/have been paid by me”.  
But these options do not exhaust the possibilities. As one of the greatest of living playwrights, Alan Ayckbourn, has reminded us,
English – a nightmare of imprecision for lawmakers and compilers of statute books – 
is a God-given, double-meaningful gift for dramatists. Most things we say to each 
other can be interpreted two, three or sometimes five ways.  (48)
Ayckbourn especially delights in the difference a subtle adjustment of inflection can make. So, if we apply that thought to the last of the paraphrases above, a version with a different nuancing offers itself – i.e., “these expenses have, of course, been paid by me – I can afford it, and men of rank, unlike some of their inferiors, always pay for the results of their sexual escapades”. Jacobean civic authorities were much preoccupied with the consequences of bastardy, for economic more than ethical reasons. Essentially, their view was that it “was wrong because it lengthened relief rolls and strained local budgets” (King, p.139); and so the force of the law was directed to ensuring that fathers paid, with heavily punitive consequences for those of lower status who lacked the wherewithal. Gloucester, in this rendering of his line, implicitly boasts that he is loftily above all such inconveniences (and penal threats), because of his rank - and wealth.
	A further option could be: “Looking after his upbringing and training has been a burden I have borne, or a burden I had to accept, or a burden I gladly assumed or undertook”.  So, the same lexical data can produce interpretations which grade from the resentful to the affectionate. A further ironic twist to the tone an actor deploys could yield, with the help of OED’s 16a gloss for “charge”: “being responsible for training this “whoreson” (1.1, 23), with all the unruliness to be expected from such a child, has been something which has not been to the advantage of my reputation, or has been laid to my blame or discredit”. The tone here could range, for instance, from ruefulness or annoyance at the fate which the consequences of his adultery have carved out for him to grudging or whole-hearted admiration for the boy’s being so difficult to tame – a chip off the old block, in effect, in his defiance of traditional decorums.5
Bringing into play the other range of meanings for “breeding” yields a similarly varied harvest of readings. One version might go: “getting his mother pregnant has caused me shame, or been to my discredit, or been constantly held against me”, while another would be: “fathering him has proved expensive for me, or brought a financial cost which I have paid”. (Whether willingly, or perforce is, again, the actor’s choice.) A third option might run on these lines: “siring him has generated a long train of consequences for me”. A fourth alternative would generate: “impregnating Edmund’s mother outside marriage was indeed my doing, as everyone knows, and as your [Kent’s] question has just implied”. That reading might derive additional force, and a boastful inflection, from another current meaning of “charge”, which I have not seen invoked in any edition of the play. Williams’s Dictionary documents “charge” in the period, though without citing this Lear passage, as also meaning “sexual assault”, and adds: “This martial image evokes the masculine role in the sexual encounter, frequently in terms of the infantryman’s charge” (229). So, Gloucester, in this version, swaggeringly takes responsibility for being the forceful initiator in the coupling which generated Edmund. It is a note which potentially chimes eloquently with his later boast about the “good sport [he enjoyed] at his making” (1.1, 22).6    
This multiplication of possibilities is not intended to be exhaustive. One of the excitements of seeing a play of this quality in a first-rate production can be the yield of re-imaginings of familiar lines it will generate. In Twelfth Night, Feste instructs Viola that “A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit, how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!” (3.1, 11-13). That comment assumes the existence of both a right meaning and a wrong one. Shakespearean dialogue is more multifarious in its implications than that. But it does remain possible to identify wrong meanings there too. These would, for instance, consist of paraphrases which either assign meanings to words and phrases which were not current in the language as the sixteenth century gave way to its successor, or which defy the logic of the given syntax, to produce results which require a sentence’s original structure and organisation to be twisted out of true in order to render them conceivable. But, while satisfying those two criteria, even an apparently simple sentence like “His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge” proves, as we have seen, to be amenable to multiple renderings. More than one of these might - in particular, compatible, pairings or trios - be voiced by an actor simultaneously; but they cannot all be conveyed at the same time. Yet all of them can be educed from the words Shakespeare has written and the situation within which he has decreed they be spoken.  
So, making sense of the text – i.e. constructing a coherent sequence for an encounter, which will, in turn, generate a plausible story from it – is a matter of a combination of hypothesis and selection for both actor and reader. The script, in itself, does not give us sufficient data to justify any confident prescriptions about what a particular line must convey. Instead, we are working with a spectrum of possible meanings, varying probably in richness and diversity from sequence to sequence, play to play, but also always encompassing more options than the kind of annotation we have earlier analysed is designed to recognise or able to cope with.
Foakes and Hunter, as I noted earlier, at least seek to deal with the implications of the whole sentence. But Foakes’s paraphrase reduces “breeding” to “birth and upbringing” and “charge” to “expense”, while Hunter’s two versions offer only an etiolated sketch of what is potentially in play here. Another version, not previously cited – from Grace Ioppolo’s Norton edition - echoes Hunter’s first paraphrase, but essays a bolder variant of his second one, while also identifying a further tonal possibility which a decisive choice of inflection might open up:
(1)	upbringing was at my expense; (2) paternity was charged, or legally named, as 

mine (about which Gloucester may remain unconvinced).  (4)
 Meanwhile, the gloss provided in René Weis’s Parallel Text edition of King Lear escapes the simple binary either/or patterning of the Hunter and Ioppolo explanations:
his rearing has been at my expense; also, perhaps ironically, his begetting has been
blamed on me, or, his personal behaviour is my responsibility.  (80)
That note travels in what seems to me to be a helpful direction, by recognising more possibilities for the complete sentence than any of its competitors conveys. It also manages it with admirable concision. Even so, the actual range of options in play here remains more expansive than even Weiss’s gloss contrives to communicate. His note also implies that the first one it identifies is the foundational one, since the second and third paraphrases it offers are prefaced by an “also”, which positions them as secondary or subsidiary senses to their predecessor.  But why so?
	
	The micro-study undertaken here has a narrow focus; but its data is drawn from a range of editions by distinguished scholars, who, between them, possess rich editorial experience and achievements. So, the problematic nature of the practices identified here potentially raises more general concerns.
	W. B. Worthen has recently proposed a parallel between editorial labour and the work that generates a theatre performance:
	Rather than seeing performances as failed editions, we might understand books also to
	materialise a certain kind of performance of the work. If books are like performances,
	it is not because they are individual interpretations of the metaphysical work of art; it
	is because they materialise the work as a unique event in time and space. Each Hamlet
	on the stage uses Shakespeare’s words, and much else, to fashion a new and 
	distinctive performance; each Hamlet on your shelf uses Shakespeare’s words, and 
	much else, to fashion a new and distinctive performance. (10)
In some respects, Worthen’s analogy works plausibly enough. Each Hamlet edition possesses a range of features, from its handling of the modernisation of spelling and punctuation to its choice of priorities in its commentary, which distinguish it, in a myriad of detailed ways, from any other extant edition. A similar logic renders any one Hamlet production distinct from all other stagings of the same play, whether it be in its actors’ choices of tempi, phrasings and inflections, their physical interactions, the nature of its stage design, etc., etc. But Worthen’s analogy can also be pressed too far. In any one particular performance of a production, actors need to decide between the range of options that present themselves. 
	G. K. Hunter offered a vivid sketch of the professional circumstances within which Shakespeare’s plays were designed and realised:
	The poetry of the Elizabethan stage was not written to be read, but understood as
	embedded in the performed action of the play. This means that its original perceived
	meaning depended on matter not made explicit in writing and so not directly
	available to later generations. The coherence of the theatrical experience in which
	the words were heard depended on the coherence of the acting company and the 
	response of the audience – factors likely to change from night to night, so leaving
	open a gamut of different possibilities, each one able to claim authenticity.
In a suggestive, but more limited, variant of the performance/editing analogy Worthen favoured, Hunter offered this further thought:
	It is a situation in which the actors might be thought of as the first annotators: they
	determined, by voice, by gesture, by pause and speed of utterance, the focus of
	significance for the words they spoke, and different actors, or the same actors on
	different afternoons, no doubt changed the emphases they gave to their speeches, and
	so the range of meanings that audiences could take from them. (178)
The same realities apply to performances in subsequent periods. But, whatever choice an actor playing Gloucester might make on a particular occasion, there is no one vocal reading which is capable, in the case of a line like “His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge”, of encompassing all that the line is potentially capable of conveying. So, the actor must select, and fully commit to, the specific decision he makes, on each occasion. No such imperative, however, binds the editor. Indeed, s/he has an opposite duty.	
	“To edit entails making choices”, proclaims J. Gavin Paul (183). But some choices editors make represent, in effect, misuses of scholarly trust. To gloss “charge” only as “expense” in our Lear sentence represents one instance of this, since it silently rules out alternative possibilities, which are fully ratified by OED’s careful tracking of the verb’s Jacobean meanings. Early modern plays come to us with none of the markers of authorial intent, with regard to tone and inflection, which were common in theatre-scripts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – nothing, for example, on the Shavian lines of “in blank bewilderment”, “also perplexed, and rather scandalized”, “very seriously indeed, and even a little severely” or “with gentle emphasis” (97). Accordingly, Gloucester’s sentence can, for example, be performed to communicate an enduring prickliness about being burdened with a bastard child or, as one among numerous alternatives, a pride in what the adult Edmund has become, shaped as he has been by the care Gloucester has invested in his education. A. R. Braunmuller has lamented instances where editors
	have not respected the possible plural signification of the text but have sought to make 
	it singular. They have most certainly not respected, or even allowed, jouissance. (143)
That judgement applies to many of the notes this article has examined.
At the most basic level, much of this annotation misrepresents the lexical wealth present in the sentence on which I have principally concentrated. Firstly, none of the notes cited which gloss one or both of those two nouns reflects adequately the full complexity of the layerings of meaning in the early modern uses of both “breeding” and “charge”; and in some cases they arbitrarily restrict the senses in play in a way which defies the clear evidence provided by OED. Secondly, some of them offer a single paraphrase – or, at best, two - for the sentence as a whole, without identifying the range of viable meanings latent in each of these two key nouns individually, with the result that the reader is not given a clear image of the pool of possibilities from which the proffered paraphrases have been selected. This is the core information on which all subsequent interpretative moves depend. Transparency requires that it ought to be reported to the reader as lucidly, but also as fully and justly, as possible. 
So, a first conclusion would be that annotation of this kind of dramatic text should always give us separate guidance about any individual words in which well-attested early modern practice offers a choice of available meanings which are apt to the passage under consideration. That would, in this case, have generated a much more variegated range of glosses for our sentence’s two nouns than any of these editions provides. At the very least, for “breeding”, readers should be told that the list of possibilities ranges from “making Edmund’s mother pregnant”, through “maintenance (including financial), looking after”, to “upbringing, training, education (including in the manners and skills apt to being Gloucester’s son)”; while, for “charge”, the spectrum would cover “financial cost”, “responsibility, office or duty of care, superintendence”, “blame, public shame”, and “sexual initiative or assault”. From different ways of combining individual meanings of each of these nouns radically distinct paraphrases for the sentence as a whole can be generated. So, readers need to be armed with this information, whatever speculations about the larger unit’s meanings may also be sketched in the annotation. 
	In addition, however, editors should also be expected to indicate the existence of the contrasting interpretative possibilities which longer units than the single word or short phrase constantly breed. Reading contemporary editions of early modern plays sometimes gives one the impression that editors feel a duty pressing down on them to be authoritative and, therefore, to decree in favour of this or that competing reading, even when it is unrealistic and unjustified to do so. What we have before us in a work like King Lear is dialogue susceptible of multiple, plausible and persuasive, incarnations, either in performance or in the realisations the solitary reader creates as s/he imagines the exchanges in the script unfolding in full narrative action. If it is not true to that basic reality, annotation will radically mislead an edition’s users as to the potential interpretative generosity of the work before them.
	At the same time, however, so fertile is that generosity that tracking all the possible configurations of meaning in an (at first sight) simple sentence like this of Gloucester’s is far beyond what can be accommodated in the space normally available in a modern edition. It would also, in any case, be hubristic to think it was even a practicable goal. A. R. Braunmuller prefaces his rebuke to editors who deny “the possible plural signification of the text” with this comment:
	One of the special pleasures of attending a performance of a Shakespearean play is
	watching and hearing a new group of theatrically trained minds and bodies find yet
	another of the embedded possibilities in a word, line, scene, and – if one is
	especially lucky – the entire performed play. (143)
In this way, the possible generation of unexpected meanings will always exceed the capacity of any annotator, however accomplished and erudite, to anticipate and encompass it. It is not only in the theatre that such moments of illumination may occur. The solitary reader too can perceive and discover fresh possibilities of this kind. 
What if the practice of annotation were to be grounded in an explicit acknowledgement of these everyday truths? Its role might then be openly conceived of as an enabling one. The editor’s task would not be to delimit and tie down meaning, in the restrictive way we have repeatedly seen happening in our Lear example, but, instead, to help create the conditions for the emergence of fresh readings, which individual editors, and the scholarly tradition behind them, have not yet envisaged. The key aim would be to provide all possible support and aid, while taking maximum care not to impede the generation of meanings not yet foreseen.
In the current case, this might entail offering a concise sampling of alternative meanings for our Gloucester sentence of the kind Weis starts to do, but in the overt understanding that these are offered illustratively, and not with any aspiration to be exhaustive. They would identify the richness of the play of signification in the passage, and exemplify some of the renderings which this makes possible, but also act as an invitation to the reader, whether comfortably settled in an armchair or exploring with others in a rehearsal room, to delve further, if so inspired, in the confidence that the possibilities exceed any list an edition can provide.  
This is clearly not something which could be principally negotiated at the level of the individual note, since it involves a substantial reformulation of the nature of the treaty between edition and user. It would accordingly need to be explicitly identified, and unpacked, as a foundation principle around which the whole edition – and, where apt, the series to which it belongs - have been shaped. If these priorities were to be adopted and put into practice, a note like the Foakes one on “charge” would, by definition, be ruled inadmissible. Until a rethinking of this kind is achieved, the danger will remain that the unsatisfactory practices we have observed will continue, and that editions of early modern drama will, as a result, risk shortchanging their readers as to the interpretative largesse of the masterpieces they seek to serve.

NOTES

1	Act/scene/line references to quotations from Shakespeare plays are taken from the Wells/Taylor Complete Works.
2	Adelman’s analysis here is, in fact, problematic. She stresses Gloucester’s annoyance at “this young fellow’s mother” growing “round-womb’d” without having “a husband for her bed” and contrasts this with his succeeding statement that he has “a son, Sir, by order of law, some year elder than this” (105). In itself, this seems slender grounds for a claim that Gloucester conceives of Edmund as the mother’s child, and of Edgar as his own. In addition, however, Adelman fails to note that this second quotation continues with the statement that the legitimate son “yet is no dearer in my account” (1.1, 19-20). The phrase plays on two meanings of “account” - “calculation” and “narrative, reporting” - and affirms that, at the very least, Gloucester’s feeling for Edgar is no stronger (may be less strong) than his feeling for Edmund. This then triggers his formal introduction of Edmund to Kent, an opening of an important potential court connection for his bastard offspring, and hence a significant favour. I am accordingly sceptical about the justice of the distinction Adelman draws.
3	This is a license which annotators often grant themselves; but it brings perils with it, as this example illustrates. Once a paraphrase no longer mirrors the shape of the phrase glossed, it is only too easy for its accuracy and precision to slacken in the way that Hunter’s note evidences.   
4	Questions about the way in which modern Shakespeare editions are normally organised represent a subject too large for treatment on this occasion. But, in my view, it is more than time that there was serious debate about what the priorities guiding the design of annotation in them should be. I am aware of no systematic and up-to-date discussion of what should be included in the notes, as opposed to being potentially dealt with somewhere else in a particular edition. As a result, we can come upon evocations of arbitrarily recollected moments from a play’s recent performance history, detailed comments on how a source has been remodelled by Shakespeare, or lengthy expositions of the numerous ways in which the modernisation of particular proper names have been treated in sequential editions. All of these are potentially of interest, if to varying degrees; but what would the rationale be for handling them in the annotation? For me, the first call on space there has to be the elucidation of tricky or challenging moments in the dialogue, which, for one reason or another, are likely to cause difficulty to readers and performers now. A firm enforcement of that priority would free up a great deal of space, so that the full complexity of these texts’ reverberations could be more adequately addressed in the way this article goes on to explore. But this is, as I mentioned above, a topic which requires fuller, and separate, treatment, and I intend to return it in a later article. It would also be profitable to ask whether the current default lay-out of editions – notes in smaller print at the bottom of the same page as the dialogue they address – could be improved on. But, again, that is a subject for another occasion.
5	This latter possibility could be reinforced if we bring into play an early modern meaning for “knave” I have not seen cited in a Lear edition. Gloucester goes on to say that although “this knave came something saucily to the world before he was sent for”, yet “the whoreson must be acknowledged” (1.1, 22-23). Martin Ingram has demonstrated that, in popular usage, “knave” was twinned with “cuckold” in a regular pairing. A “knave”, therefore, was a male who was sexually energised and invasive, and, accordingly, a natural cuckold-maker, in opposition to the cuckold, the male victim of his predations (156). So, Edmund is someone likely to repeat his father’s history in this respect, and, hence, in Gloucester’s terms, indeed a “chip off the old block”.
6	In his 2007 edition of the play, Douglas A. Brooks offers, qualified by a “perhaps”, a related gloss for “charge”: “expense, and perhaps a bawdy joke – the discharge of semen” (42). The latter suggestion presumes that “charge” could be heard as an elided form of “discharge” - something for which I have found no authority, though it is not inherently improbable. OED and Williams (391-392) list “discharge” as a verb meaning “to ejaculate”, but provide no matching entry for its use as a noun, as in Gloucester’s sentence. So, Brooks’ gloss remains, at the time of writing, intriguing, but unproven.

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