Poor Tom in and out of Focus

The structure also illuminates Palfrey's special method and his almost musical composition: after a Prelude about the author's personal inspiration for the book and an Introduction, the analysis of Edgar-Poor Tom is distributed between twelve "Scenes" with an added metaphorical short title, which depict the linear progression of events from Poor Tom's first appearance to the ending of the tragedy, and interspersed we find an even number of "Interludes," opening up the more regulated and academically more traditional interpretation in the "Scenes," variously offering meditative, theological, political, philosophical, or catechism-like reflections (or rather free associations) on the topic at hand. [...]a Conclusion and a personal note in the Afterword act as a theatrical finale for the progress of both author and reader through the wide vistas of ideas. Authorial license is extended to the ardent philological debate with relation to the contested textual state of Shakespeare's King Lear, instead of addressing and complaining about the great number of differences in the two major extant versions of the play (1608 quarto, 1623 First Folio), Palfrey welcomes this "happy coincidence," which contributes to the multifaceted nature of this particular tragedy, cutting the Gordian knot of textual instability in an easy-going way: "I think of King Lear not as two distinct works but as a single playworld enterable via two phantom versions" (7). [...]when he supports his persuasive argument about the significance of life in death and death in life in King Lear saying that the 1608 quarto title page advertises such an "existential impasse" (8), it seems easy to forget that such a "hetero-generic" mode and presentation was never unique to the King Lear title page but was an accepted and frequent way of highlighting the crowd-ticklers of the play, and the Pied Bull quarto puts a special emphasis on the entertaining value of Tom's "sullen and assumed humour"; therefore, the actual historical emphasis fell elsewhere.