William Shakespeare 
M. William Shak-Speare’s King Lear 
The First Quarto, 1608; A Facsimile (From the British Museum Copy, C. 34; K. 18;)

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Mr. W. G. Clark and Mr. W. Aldis Wright changed all that. Their complete collation of the old copies definitely settled that there were but two quarto editions of 1608 that the first of these is the Q0 commencing with Signature B and bearing on its title a reference to the place of sale, the Pide Bull in Pauls Church yard; the second, the Q(deg) commencing with Signature A, and having no reference to the place of sale on its title. In this order as Q1 and Q2 I shall hereafter refer to them but it must be borne in mind that in the Cambridge edition itself this nota tion is reversed accepting the decision of some preceding com mentators as to the order of precedence of the two quartos, the Editors noted throughout the second quarto as Qt and the first as Q2. It was not until their work was completed that they became aware of the true order of these quartos. In their Preface they pointed this out, and Mr. Aldis abt has smce in his Clarendon Press edition of the Play (1875) assigned them1v. Speculations AS TO printers OF the Q05.