Edition: King LeirKing Leir: Bibliography

Editions Collated

The true chronicle history of King Leir, and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella. London: John Wright, 1605. STC 15343. ESTC S111094.
Steevens, George, ed. The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters. Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare: Being the Whole Number Printed in Quarto During his life-time, or before the Restoration. Vol. 4. London: J. and R. Tonson, 1766. 2K5r–2P8r. ESTC T140378.
Lee, Sidney, ed. The Chronicle History of King Leir. Chatto & Windus, 1909.
Michie, Donald, ed. A Critical Edition of the True Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordella. Taylor & Francis, 1991.
Stern, Tiffany, ed. The Chronicle History of King Leir. Nick Hern Books, 2002.

Secondary Sources

The Chronicle History of King Leir. Ed. Sidney Lee. Chatto & Windus, 1909.
A Critical Edition of the True Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordella. Ed. Donald Michie. Garland, 1991.
Capell, Edward. The Play’s of William Shakepeare from the Text of Dr. S. Johnson. Dublin: Thomas Ewing, 1771.
Chambers, E.K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Clarendon Press, 1923; rpt. 1967.
Cushman, Robert. 2014 is the Year of King Lear. National Post. 26 May 2014.
Fitzpatrick, Joan. Irish Demons: English Writings on Ireland, the Irish, and Gender by Spenser and his Contemporaries. University Press of America, 2000.
Foakes, R.A., ed. Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2002. WSB aah397.
Furness, H.H., ed. King Lear. By Shakespeare, William. London: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1880.
Greg, W.W. The Date of King Lear and Shakespeare’s Use of Earlier Versions of the Story. The Library 4.20 (1940): 377–400.
Henslowe, Philip. Henslowe’s Diary. Ed. R.A. Foakes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.
Ioppolo, Grace. A Jointure more or less: Re-measuring The True Chroncicle History of King Leir and his three daughters. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 17 (2005): 165–179.
Jewkes, Wilfred Thomas. Act Division in Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays, 1583–1616. Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press, 1958.
Jones, James H. Leir and Lear: Matthew 5:33–37, The Turning Point and Rescue Theme. Comparative Drama 4.2 (1970): 125–131.
Knowles, Richard. How Shakespeare Knew King Leir. Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002): 12–35.
Law, Robert Adger. Holinshed’s Leir Story and Shakespeare’s. Studies in Philology 47 (1950): 42–50.
Law, Robert Adger. On the Date of King Lear. PMLA 21.2 (1906): 462–477.
Lee, Sidney, ed. The Chronicle History of King Leir. Chatto & Windus, 1909.
Lynch, Stephen J. Sin Suffering, and Redemption in Leir and Lear. Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986): 161–174.
Malone, Edmond, ed. The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare. 10 vols. London: J. Rivingston and Sons, 1790. ESTC T138858.
McMillin, Scott, and Sally-Beth MacLean. The Queen’s Men and Their Plays. Cambridge University Press, 1998. WSB aw359.
Michie, Donald, ed. A Critical Edition of the True Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordella. Taylor & Francis, 1991.
Mueller, Martin. From Leir to Lear. PQ 73.2 (1994): 195–217.
Oberer, Karen. Appropriations of the Popular Tradition in The Famous Victories of Henry V and The Troublesome Reign of King John. Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing. Ed. Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin. Ashgate: Farnham, 2009, 171–182. WSB aay90.
Ostovich, Helen, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin, eds. Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. WSB aay90.
Palmer, Barbara. On the Road and On the Wagon. Locating the Queen’s Men: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing, 1583–1603. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. 27–40.
Pearson, Jacqueline. The Influence of King Leir on Shakespeare’s Richard II. Notes and Queries 226/29.2 (1982): 113–115.
Pearson, Jacqueline. Much Ado about Nothing and King Leir. Notes and Queries 226/28.2 (1981): 128–129.
Perrett, Wilfrid. The Story of King Lear from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Shakespeare. Mayer & Müller, 1904.
Pinciss, Gerald. Thomas Creede and the Repertory of the Queen’s Men 1583–1592. Modern Philology 67.4 (1970): 321–330.
Roberts, David. Henry VIII and the True Chronicle History of King Leir. Notes and Queries n.s. 48.3 (2001): 302–303.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. H.H. Furness. London: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1880.
Symonds, John Addington. Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English Drama. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1884.
Tolstoy, Leo. Tolstoy on Shakespeare: A Critical Essay on Shakespeare. Trans. V. Tchertkoff and I.M.F.. Funk and Wagnalls, 1906.

Prosopography

Andrew Griffin

Andrew Griffin is an associate professor in the department of English and an affiliate professor in the department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is general editor (text) of Queen’s Men Editions. He studies early modern drama and early modern historiography while serving as the lead editor at the EMC Imprint. He has co-edited with Helen Ostovich and Holger Schott Syme Locating the Queen’s Men (2009) and has co-edited The Making of a Broadside Ballad (2016) with Patricia Fumerton and Carl Stahmer. His monograph, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, History, Catastrophe, was published with the University of Toronto Press in 2019. He is editor of the anonymous The Chronicle History of King Leir (Queen’s Men Editions, 2011). He can be contacted at griffin@english.ucsb.edu.

Anonymous

Helen Ostovich

Helen Ostovich, professor emerita of English at McMaster University, is the founder and general editor of Queen’s Men Editions. She is a general editor of The Revels Plays (Manchester University Press); Series Editor of Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama (Ashgate, now Routledge), and series co-editor of Late Tudor and Stuart Drama (MIP); play-editor of several works by Ben Jonson, in Four Comedies: Ben Jonson (1997); Every Man Out of his Humour (Revels 2001); and The Magnetic Lady (Cambridge 2012). She has also edited the Norton Shakespeare 3 The Merry Wives of Windsor Q1602 and F1623 (2015); The Late Lancashire Witches and A Jovial Crew for Richard Brome Online, revised for a 4-volume set from OUP 2021; The Ball, for the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley (2021); The Merry Wives of Windsor for Internet Shakespeare Editions, and The Dutch Courtesan (with Erin Julian) for the Complete Works of John Marston, OUP 2022. She has published many articles and book chapters on Jonson, Shakespeare, and others, and several book collections, most recently Magical Transformations of the Early Modern English Stage with Lisa Hopkins (2014), and the equivalent to book website, Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: The Three Ladies of London in Context containing scripts, glossary, almost fifty conference papers edited and updated to essays; video; link to Queen’s Mens Ediitons and YouTube: http://threeladiesoflondon.mcmaster.ca/contexts/index.htm, 2015. Recently, she was guest editor of Strangers and Aliens in London ca 1605, Special Issue on Marston, Early Theatre 23.1 (June 2020). She can be contacted at ostovich@mcmaster.ca.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Karen Sawyer Marsalek

Karen Sawyer Marsalek (Famous Victories of Henry V, early modern text) is an associate professor of English at St. Olaf College. She has edited, directed and performed in several early English plays. Her publications include essays on true resurrections in medieval drama and The Winter’s Tale, false resurrections in the Chester Antichrist and 1 Henry IV, and theatrical properties of skulls and severed heads. Her current research is on remains and revenants in the King’s Men’s repertory. She can be contacted at marsalek@stolaf.edu.

Kate LeBere

Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.

Mahayla Galliford

Project Manager, 2025-present; Assistant Project Manager, 2024-2025; Research Assistant, 2021-present. Mahayla Galliford (she/her) graduated from the University of Victoria with a BA (honours with distinction) in 2024, and an MA English in 2026. Mahayla’s undergraduate research explored early modern stage directions and civic water pageantry. Her SSHRC-funded MA thesis project focuses on transcribing, editing, and encoding early modern girls’ manuscripts, specifically Lady Rachel Fane’s May Masque in collaboration with LEMDO.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

Mathew Martin

Dr. Mathew R. Martin is Full Professor at Brock University, Canada. He is the author of Between Theatre and Philosophy (2001), Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (2015) and Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory (2023), and co-editor, with his colleague James Allard, of Staging Pain, 1500–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theatre (2009). For Broadview Press he has edited Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second (2010), Jew of Malta (2012), Doctor Faustus: The B-Text (2013) and Tamburlaine the Great Part One and Part Two (2014), and Robert Greene’s Selimus (2022). For Revels Editions he has edited George Peele’s David and Bathsheba (2018) and Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (2021). For Queen’s Men Editions he has edited The Famous Victories of Henry V (2016). He has published two articles of textual criticism on the printed texts of Marlowe’s plays: Inferior Readings: The Transmigration of Material in Tamburlaine the Great (Early Theatre 17.2 [December 2014]), and (on the political inflections of the shifts in punctuation in the early editions of the play) Accidents Happen: Roger Barnes’s 1612 Edition of Marlowe’s Edward the Second (Early Theatre 16.1 [June 2013]). His latest editing projects are a double-play Revels edition of Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and John of Bordeaux and a Digital Renaissance Editions edition of Dido, Queen of Carthage.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Peter Cockett

Peter Cockett is an associate professor in the iArts (Integrated Arts) program at McMaster University. He is the co-editor, with Melinda Gough, of Engendering the Stage in the Age of Shakespeare and Beyond (University of Toronto Press, 2025) which publishes the findings of their 2018 Performance as Research (PaR) workshop at the Stratford Festival Lab. He is the general editor (performance), and technical co-ordinating editor of Queen’s Men Editions. His PaR directing credits include King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006), Clyomon and Clamydes (2010), and Three Ladies of London (2015) for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM). The process behind the 2006 productions is documented in depth on the project website Performing the Queen’s Men. For the PLS, the University of Toronto’s Medieval and Renaissance Players, he has directed the Digby Mary Magdalene (2003) and the double bill of George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale and the Chester Antichrist (2004). He also directed An Experiment in Elizabethan Comedy (2005) for the SQM project and Inside Out: The Persistence of Allegory (2008) in collaboration with Alan Dessen. Peter is a professional actor and director with numerous stage and screen credits. He can be contacted at cockett@mcmaster.ca.

Tracey El Hajj

Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life. Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.

Bibliography

A Critical Edition of the True Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordella. Ed. Donald Michie. Garland, 1991.
Capell, Edward. The Play’s of William Shakepeare from the Text of Dr. S. Johnson. Dublin: Thomas Ewing, 1771.
Chambers, E.K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Clarendon Press, 1923; rpt. 1967.
Cushman, Robert. 2014 is the Year of King Lear. National Post. 26 May 2014.
Fitzpatrick, Joan. Irish Demons: English Writings on Ireland, the Irish, and Gender by Spenser and his Contemporaries. University Press of America, 2000.
Foakes, R.A., ed. Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2002. WSB aah397.
Furness, H.H., ed. King Lear. By Shakespeare, William. London: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1880.
Greg, W.W. The Date of King Lear and Shakespeare’s Use of Earlier Versions of the Story. The Library 4.20 (1940): 377–400.
Henslowe, Philip. Henslowe’s Diary. Ed. R.A. Foakes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.
Ioppolo, Grace. A Jointure more or less: Re-measuring The True Chroncicle History of King Leir and his three daughters. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 17 (2005): 165–179.
Jewkes, Wilfred Thomas. Act Division in Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays, 1583–1616. Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press, 1958.
Jones, James H. Leir and Lear: Matthew 5:33–37, The Turning Point and Rescue Theme. Comparative Drama 4.2 (1970): 125–131.
Knowles, Richard. How Shakespeare Knew King Leir. Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002): 12–35.
Law, Robert Adger. Holinshed’s Leir Story and Shakespeare’s. Studies in Philology 47 (1950): 42–50.
Law, Robert Adger. On the Date of King Lear. PMLA 21.2 (1906): 462–477.
Lee, Sidney, ed. The Chronicle History of King Leir. Chatto & Windus, 1909.
Lynch, Stephen J. Sin Suffering, and Redemption in Leir and Lear. Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986): 161–174.
Malone, Edmond, ed. The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare. 10 vols. London: J. Rivingston and Sons, 1790. ESTC T138858.
McMillin, Scott, and Sally-Beth MacLean. The Queen’s Men and Their Plays. Cambridge University Press, 1998. WSB aw359.
Michie, Donald, ed. A Critical Edition of the True Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordella. Taylor & Francis, 1991.
Mueller, Martin. From Leir to Lear. PQ 73.2 (1994): 195–217.
Oberer, Karen. Appropriations of the Popular Tradition in The Famous Victories of Henry V and The Troublesome Reign of King John. Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing. Ed. Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin. Ashgate: Farnham, 2009, 171–182. WSB aay90.
Ostovich, Helen, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin, eds. Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. WSB aay90.
Palmer, Barbara. On the Road and On the Wagon. Locating the Queen’s Men: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing, 1583–1603. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. 27–40.
Pearson, Jacqueline. Much Ado about Nothing and King Leir. Notes and Queries 226/28.2 (1981): 128–129.
Pearson, Jacqueline. The Influence of King Leir on Shakespeare’s Richard II. Notes and Queries 226/29.2 (1982): 113–115.
Perrett, Wilfrid. The Story of King Lear from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Shakespeare. Mayer & Müller, 1904.
Pinciss, Gerald. Thomas Creede and the Repertory of the Queen’s Men 1583–1592. Modern Philology 67.4 (1970): 321–330.
Roberts, David. Henry VIII and the True Chronicle History of King Leir. Notes and Queries n.s. 48.3 (2001): 302–303.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. H.H. Furness. London: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1880.
Steevens, George, ed. The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters. Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare: Being the Whole Number Printed in Quarto During his life-time, or before the Restoration. Vol. 4. London: J. and R. Tonson, 1766. 2K5r–2P8r. ESTC T140378.
Stern, Tiffany, ed. The Chronicle History of King Leir. Nick Hern Books, 2002.
Symonds, John Addington. Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English Drama. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1884.
The Chronicle History of King Leir. Ed. Sidney Lee. Chatto & Windus, 1909.
The true chronicle history of King Leir, and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella. London: John Wright, 1605. STC 15343. ESTC S111094.
Tolstoy, Leo. Tolstoy on Shakespeare: A Critical Essay on Shakespeare. Trans. V. Tchertkoff and I.M.F.. Funk and Wagnalls, 1906.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

QME Editorial Board (QMEB1)

The QME Editorial Board consists of Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text); and Janelle Jenstad General Editor (Text).

Queen’s Men Editions (QME1)

The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text; until 2026); and Janelle Jenstad, General Editor (Text; 2026–)

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title King Leir: Bibliography
Type of text Bibliography
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Queen’s Men Editions
Source
Born-digital, peer-reviewed document compiled by Andrew Griffin. First published in the QME 1.0 anthology on the ISE platform. Converted to TEI-XML and remediated by the LEMDO Team for republication in the QME 2.0 anthology on the LEMDO platform.
Editorial declaration n/a
Edition Released with Queen’s Men Editions 2.0
Sponsor(s)

Queen’s Men Editions

The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text; until 2026); and Janelle Jenstad, General Editor (Text; 2026–)
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published, peer-reviewed
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
McMaster University
Poculi Ludique Societas
University of Waterloo
University of Toronto
Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies
University of Victoria
Friends of the ISE
License/availability
Intellectual copyright in this edition is held by the editor, Andrew Griffin. The critical paratexts, including this Bibliography, are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that they are freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the editor, QME, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and/or data; (2) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (3) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of QME, the editor, and LEMDO. This license allows for pedagogical use of the critical paratexts in the classroom.
Production photographs and videos on this site may not be downloaded. They appear freely on this site with the permission of the actors and the ACTRA union. They may be used within the context of university courses, within the classroom, and for reference within research contexts, including conferences, when credit is given to the producing company and to the actors. Commercial use of videos and photographs is forbidden.