Thanks to the textual scholarship of the late twentieth century, the new answer is something like this. Ah: that’s a question over which Shakespeare himself seems to have had some uncertainty. In his original version of the play Albany speaks the final speech and thus rules the realm. But then Shakespeare changed his mind. In his revised version of the play Edgar speaks the final speech and thus rules the realm. We must posit two very different stagings. In the first one, Kent’s words of refusal of his half-share in the kingdom would have been accompanied by some gesture of refusal, such as a turning away, on Edgar’s part. In the second one, Edgar’s speaking of the final speech would have been staged so as to betoken acceptance of Albany’s offer. This alteration to the ending marks the climax of Shakespeare’s subtle but thoroughgoing revision of the roles of Albany and Edgar in his two versions of King Lear. We do not know exactly when the revision took place, but it is a fair assumption that it was as a result of experience in the playhouse and with the collaboration of the company. Presumably there was dissatisfaction on the part of dramatist and/or performers with the way in which the two roles had turned out, so various adjustments were made. Shakespeare’s plays were not polished for publication; they were designed as scripts to be worked upon in the theater. To be cut, added to, and altered.

Until recently, editors were remarkably reluctant to admit this. From the eighteenth century until the 1980s, editions attempted to recover an ideal unitary text, to get as close as they could to “what Shakespeare wrote.” There was a curious resistance to the idea that Shakespeare wrote one thing, tested it in the theater, and then wrote another. It was assumed that there was a single King Lear and that the editorial task was to reconstruct it. Generations of editors adopted a “pick and mix” approach to the text, moving between Quarto and Folio readings, making choices on either aesthetic or bibliographic grounds, and creating a composite text that Shakespeare never actually wrote.

How, then, did editors deal with the following awkward fact? King Lear exists in two different texts, the Quarto and the Folio. The Quarto has nearly three hundred lines that are not in the Folio; the Folio has more than a hundred lines that are not in the Quarto; there are more than eight hundred verbal variants in the parts of the play that the two texts share. The standard editorial response to this difficulty was the claim that the Quarto was some kind of “Bad Quarto,” that is to say a text based on memorial reconstruction by actors, not on Shakespeare’s own script (his “foul papers”) or the playhouse script (the “promptbook”). It was, however, a difficult position to maintain because the Quarto text of Lear, although corrupt in many places, does not have the usual characteristics of memorial reconstruction, the kind of features so apparent in the Bad Quarto of Hamlet, such as the actor remembering “The first verse of the godly ballad / Will tell you all,” where Shakespeare wrote “the first row of the pious chanson will show you more” (Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2). Getting the structure of a line just about right but the actual words nearly all wrong is typical of texts based on memory, but not typical of the textual anomalies in Quarto Lear.

In the 1970s the scholar Peter Blayney proved decisively by means of meticulous and highly technical bibliographic investigation that Quarto King Lear was not a bad text based on actors’ memories but an authoritative one, almost certainly deriving from Shakespeare’s own holograph (The Texts of “King Lear” and their Origins: vol. 1 Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto, published 1982). The poor quality of the text was the result of the personnel in the printing shop being unused to setting drama. Thus the fact that much of Shakespeare’s verse was set as prose was due to the printer running out of the blocks that were needed to fill in the margins where text was set as verse—Okes’ shop didn’t have the proper equipment, so the compositors resorted to prose.

Both Quarto and Folio texts are authentically Shakespearean, yet they differ substantially. Logic suggests that Quarto was his first version of the play, Folio his second. The textual variants give us a unique opportunity to see the plays as working scripts.

In the received editorial tradition, there is a very puzzling moment in Act 3 Scene 1 where Kent reports to the Gentleman on the division between Albany and Cornwall (3.1.13–23). The syntax halfway through the speech is incomprehensible and the content is contradictory: are there merely French spies in the households of great ones or has a French army actually landed in Dover? The confusion comes from editors having conflated alternative scenarios: in Quarto the French army has landed, whereas in Folio there are only spies reporting to France (thus lines 30–42 in conflated texts are Quarto only, 22–29 are Folio only: in the RSC text, compare and contrast 3.1.13–23 and Quarto Passages, 46–59).

The alteration seems to be part of a wider process of diminishing the French connection. In the Quarto we have a scene in which Shakespeare feels compelled to explain away the absence of the King of France—why isn’t he leading his own army?

KENT Why the King of France is so suddenly gone back, know you no reason?

GENTLEMAN Something he left imperfect in the state, which since his coming forth is thought of, which imports to the kingdom so much fear and danger that his personal return was most required and necessary. (Quarto Passages, 168–73)

It is, to say the least, a halting explanation, which is perhaps one reason why Shakespeare cut the whole of this scene, Act 4 Scene 3 in the received editorial tradition, from the Folio text. Theater audiences tend to think most about the things that are mentioned: by drawing attention to the king’s absence, the dramatist in a curious way establishes his presence. Better just to keep quiet about him, which is what happens in Folio—since he’s not mentioned, the audience forgets him.

Who, then, is to lead the French army? In Quarto, the Gentleman informs Kent that the Marshall of France, Monsieur La Far, has been left in charge. By omitting the scene in question, Folio obliterates Monsieur La Far; it compensates by altering the staging of the next scene (Act 4 scene 4 in the received editorial tradition, Act 4 Scene 3 in ours). In Quarto, the scene begins “Enter Cordelia, Doctor and others,” whereas in Folio it begins “Enter with Drum and Colours Cordelia, Gentleman and Soldiers.” Where in Quarto Cordelia is a daughter seeking medical attention for her father, in Folio she is a general leading an army. She has replaced Monsieur La Far. This alteration is part of a broad shift of emphasis from family to state in the revision—Folio makes less of the familial love trial and more of the fractured internal politics of the divided kingdom. So it is that the later version adds some crucial lines in the opening scene, giving a stronger political justification for the division of the kingdom:

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