University of Virginia Library

The Copy for the First Folio Richard II
by
Richard E. Hasker

The appearance of Shakespeare's Richard II in the first Folio in 1623 was preceded by five quarto editions, one in 1597, two in 1598, and one each in 1608 and 1615, the first deriving ultimately from the author's manuscript and each of the others being a reprint of its immediate predecessor. It has been generally accepted that an exemplum of the last of these, prepared and corrected, served as copy for the First Folio compositors, since the Folio and the 1615 quarto have in common a small number of readings which none of the other quartos share. When, however, in the early part of the present century Henrietta C. Bartlett first showed that there were two 1598 editions instead of one and that the apparently unique copy then owned by W. A. White of New York represented the later of the two, Alfred W. Pollard, on the basis of certain similarities between the text of the newly identified edition and that of the First Folio, queried whether this new quarto, possibly with some leaves supplied from the 1615 edition, might have been the copy used for the Folio. After weighing the evidence on both sides, Pollard concluded that the traditional answer was the correct one, although he left the matter in some doubt.[1]

By a combined study of the agreements and differences in the substantives and accidentals in the First Folio and the two quartos in question I propose to show that Pollard's rejected supposition, that the copy for the Folio was an exemplum of Q3 containing some leaves from a copy of Q5, was indeed correct.

Q1 was entered in the Stationers' Register by Andrew Wise on August 29, 1597, and was printed for him in the same year by Valentine Simmes. Since this represents a 'good' text, was regularly entered in the Register,

and shows no signs of having been surreptitiously acquired, Wise must have purchased his printing rights from the Lord Chamberlain's Servants, to which company of actors Shakespeare belonged, and the quarto must be derived, either directly or through intermediate transcriptions, from the author's own manuscript. In 1598 Wise brought out a second edition (Q2), which is shown to be a reprint of Q1 by its repetition of most of the ostensible errors of the 1597 quarto, and which, by Pollard's calculation, introduced 123 new errors of a substantive nature. Q3, a line-for-line reprint of Q2 printed in the same year, was distinguished by Miss Bartlett as a separate edition rather than a variant state or reissue of Q2 by the discovery of dissimilarities on every page of the two quartos and by the fact that the type was entirely reset. That the two editions of 1598 are not independently derived from Q1 is evidenced by the fact that they share on the one hand most of the errors introduced by Q2 (Q3 corrected a few obvious Q2 errors) and on the other all of the corrections of Q1 substantive errors which Q2 had made. To show that Q3 is the later of the two 1598 editions, Pollard called attention first to two passages (b6rb 32-36 and c2va 60 ff.)[2] which were corrupted in Q2 and which Q3 tampered with in an effort to restore meaning to them, and secondly to another (c4vb 51), bibliographically more important, in which Q1 reads for, Q2 reads for with the f so poorly printed that little remains of it, and Q3 reads or through the compositor's failure to recognize the existence of the broken letter in Q2.

The Stationers' Register shows that on June 25, 1603, Andrew Wise "by consent of the Company . . . sett over" to Matthew Lawe his rights to Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV (Part I), and two religious or moral items. Lawe did not have Richard II printed until 1608, at which time he added the scene of Richard's forced abdication, the so-called "deposition scene," which had been censored from the play for political reasons before the printing of Q1 in 1597. The question of Lawe's copy for this new matter will be discussed later. The title-page of this 1608 quarto (Q4), which was printed for Lawe by William White, is found in two states, the original making no mention of the material now published for the first time, but the cancellans heralding these "new additions" and noting the change of name of the company of players from the Lord Chamberlain's Servants to the King's Majesty's Servants. The perpetuation in Q4 of errors originated by Q3 establishes Wise's last quarto as the printing source of Lawe's 1608 edition, and the same sort of evidence

proves Lawe's 1615 quarto (Q5), perhaps printed by Thomas Purfoot,[3] to have been derived from Q4.[4]

The claim of the First Folio editors that their plays were "Published according to the True Originall Copies" is interpreted by Sir Walter Greg to mean that playhouse manuscripts either were used as copy or were consulted to verify the readings of other editions from which the compositors were working.[5] The text of Richard II supports this theory. As it appears in the Folio, this play reprints errors and variant readings accumulated during the entire history of the quarto editions. Yet the Folio version introduces many new readings throughout and supplies a number of omissions in the "deposition scene," and despite the errors it retains from all five quartos and the new ones which it inevitably introduces itself, it corrects for the first time 24½ of the presumable errors[6] of Q1, 58 of Q2, 15 of Q3, 14 of Q4, and 33 of Q5 (Pollard, p. 51). These circumstances indicate that some source in addition to the quartos as we know them influenced the readings of the Folio text. Pollard (pp. 89ff.) suggested that this source was a copy of Q1 which had been used by the players as a prompt-copy and annotated accordingly. First of all, this would explain the restoration of Q1 readings which had been corrupted by the later quartos. In addition, exclusive Folio readings other than manifest errors could be considered notations and changes made in the prompt-copy in accordance with the players' practice, and the fifty lines omitted by the Folio, except the two instances of the omission of a single line, which are most likely the compositor's eye-skips, would thus probably represent cuts scored out in the annotated quarto. However, a prompt-copy in manuscript, derived ultimately from the same source as the copy for Q1, and thus having many of Q1's readings, would likewise explain these characteristics of the Folio, the chief difference being that the exclusive Folio readings then might be changes made in accordance with the actors' habits, as Pollard believed, differences introduced in the copying of the manuscript, compositors' variants, or original readings corrupted by Q1 or its copy. But Pollard felt that a manuscript prompt-copy would be

abandoned for a printed quarto as soon as the latter was available, for, he thought, the printed copy would be easier to handle and to read. In either case, the retention in the Folio of so many errors from the quartos would indicate the imperfect care with which the additional source and the copy were compared. As evidence in support of the use of Q1 in this respect, Pollard noted the restoration in the Folio of Q1's archaic reading of brothers for brother in the phrase "my brothers Edwards sonne" (c3ra 39), but this could have come from a manuscript text having the same source as Q1.

Greg, arguing that a printed quarto would not ordinarily have been used in the theatre as a prompt-copy, finds it unlikely that "a prompter, accustomed to a manuscript 'book' with fifty to eighty lines on a page, would have found much convenience in a printed quarto of about half the size,"[7] for the larger manuscript would put more of the play, including coming entrances, exits, and other stage business, before the eyes of the prompter at one time. However, there is now specific evidence that printed quartos were indeed used as prompt-books. C. J. Sisson has shown that many early plays were printed with the prospect of use as prompt-copies by their purchasers and that a provincial company in the reign of James I, whose repertory included King Lear and Pericles, customarily used printed quartos as prompt-books. He cites also an extant copy of A Looking Glass for London and England (1594) which has been annotated with manuscript notes and stage-directions for such a use by a London company on tour in the early seventeenth century.[8] Berta Sturman has found that the second quarto (1625) of A King and No King, already an old play by the time it was first published in 1619, was set up from a copy of the first quarto which had been used in the theatre as the official prompt-book by His Majesty's Servants.[9] Here then is an example of Shakespeare's own company using a printed quarto for its official book. Finally, Pollard many years ago pointed out evidence in the Folio stage-directions in Much Ado About Nothing and Midsummer-Night's Dream which suggests that the quartos used as copy for the Folio text of these plays had been employed in the theatre as prompt-books.[10] An important fact to be noted in connection with these examples of printed prompt-books is that none of them seems to have been in use until the play was old. Since most plays were not at this time printed before they were acted, the original prompt-book

would have to be a manuscript. It does not seem likely that a company would abandon a satisfactory manuscript and go to the trouble of transferring its annotations to a printed copy as long as the manuscript was in good condition. Thus it is improbable that Q1 of Richard II, published when the play was still not very old, would have been taken over immediately as the prompt-book. It is perhaps safest, therefore, to assume that a manuscript, rather than a printed, prompt-copy was used in the comparison of official book with printed quarto which undoubtedly lies behind the Folio text of Richard II. Pollard believed that the collation was made at the instance of the Folio editors when copy was being prepared for their edition, but another hypothesis, to be proposed later, may displace this traditional theory.

Pollard was certainly correct in his belief that the prompt-book which was collated with the printed quarto chosen as copy for the Folio was not available for use in Jaggard's printing-house, but that the quarto had been compared with it in the theatre. "We have first the fact that while some 120 of its readings[11] were restored, about 100 others were left in the state to which the subsequent Quartos had reduced them; and, secondly, we have a little handful of instances (I.i.77; II.ii.3; V.iii.63) where we find the Folio editor wrestling with the bad readings he found in Q5 and botching them as best he could, in a way which forbids us to suppose that he had a copy of the First Quarto[12] at his elbow all the time. I.i.77 reads in the First Quarto 'What I haue ſpoke, or thou canſt worfe deuiſe'. Q2 spoilt it by omitting 'worſe'; Q3 mended it by repeating 'what' before 'thou', and the Folio editor varied the botching by omitting this second 'what' and changing 'ſpoke' to 'ſpoken'.[13] In II.ii.3, where the First and Second Quartos have the phrase 'life-harming heauines' the Folio reads 'ſelfe-harming', and this seems to have originated in a gallant attempt to improve on the absurd 'halfe-harming' of the three later Quartos. So again, in V.iii.63, where the First and Second Quartos read 'held his current' and the Folio 'had his current', this very poor variant is clearly due to puzzlement caused by the three later Quartos spelling 'held' as 'hald'."[14]

In the absence of the actual prompt-copy from which certain Folio readings must originally derive, one can estimate the extent of its use only by an examination of the readings of Q1 which the Folio either succeeded in restoring or failed to restore, because the manuscript can be presumed to have been closer to Q1 than to any of the reprints, though of course it cannot reasonably be held to resemble that quarto in every respect. The number of errors originating in each of the quartos and later cleaned up by the Folio has already been given above.[15] There then remains the accumulation of 100 or so of these uncorrected errors from quartos subsequent to Q1 to show that although the editorial work of the Folio was in many respects exceedingly good, it was not, however, performed without some degree of carelessness. Thus when the Folio reproduces a reading that first occurred in a quarto other than the First, then in a critical edition the reading of Q1 must be followed; but when the Folio has a reading which has not appeared before, an editor must determine from the evidence accompanying each individual case whether he is confronted with a compositor's or editor's corruption[16] or with some other type of variant. If the latter appears to be the case, he must then decide from the same evidence which reading is more likely to be authorial.[17]

With the establishment of Q3 among the quarto reprints it was discovered that despite the Folio's retention of a considerable number of errors originated by the first three quartos, it does not reproduce most of those introduced by Q4 and Q5. Pollard showed that the Folio text has inherited 20 of the 69 presumable errors of Q1, 59 of the 123 errors of Q2, and 18 of the 35 in Q3, but only 1 of the 18 variants of Q4 and only 4 of the 38 of Q5.[18] Previous to the differentiation of Q3, this quarto's errors were necessarily believed to originate with Q4, and the Folio was therefore thought to embody a large number of errors from the 1608 edition as well as from the earlier ones, although the remarkable freedom from Q5 errors was recognized. Although he rejected the hypothesis (if somewhat

uncertainly), Pollard felt that "the unusually complete success with which the First Folio succeeded in evading the new errors introduced by Q4 and Q5 would be very prettily explained if it could be shown that it was in fact set up from an edition in which these errors do not occur," namely Q3. He presented the case as follows:

A collation of the substantive readings of Q3 and Q5 with those of the Folio, excluding for the moment all considerations of spelling as in unpruin'd and percullist, shows that of the 62 times that Q3 and Q5 disagree between themselves the Folio agrees with Q3 in 47 cases and with Q5 in 13.[19] On the remaining two of these occasions it agrees with neither. One of these cases is of no concern here because the Folio is not emending one quarto as opposed to the other;[20] but the second, although not a clearcut case, may suggest that the editor was working from a copy of Q3. The Folio reading (c3ra 27)

corrects the metrics of the line that appears in Qq 1-3 as and in Q5 as The Folio reading is here slightly closer to Q3 than to Q5 and thus occurs more easily as an emendation of the earlier quarto.

The instances in which the Folio shares a reading with one of these quartos, but differs from the other, include agreements in the correction of obvious misprints[21] [F-Q3 it, Q5 is (d4va 52); F-Q5 thy, Q3 they (c3ra 20)], agreements in readings which are manifestly right from the context [F-Q3 my, Q5 thy (c4vb 34); F-Q5 sits, Q3 sits not (d2ra 52)], and agreements which seem to be neither more nor less correct than the variant of the other quarto [F-Q3 a word, Q5 one word (c2ra 30); F-Q5 thine owne, Q3 thy owne (c1ra 32)]. However, the significance of these figures—especially their overwhelming preponderance in favor of Q3 as the copy-text —is very badly shaken as positive evidence when it is found that in all but one of the Folio-Q3 agreements and in 5 of the 13 Folio-Q5 agreements, Q1 has the same reading as the Folio. These Q1 readings being the variants that the manuscript prompt-copy undoubtedly contained, they could as easily appear in the Folio by way of that document as by the use of one quarto instead of the other for the copy-text. Therefore, since they are not significant, an exhaustive list of them is not given here.

Furthermore, half of the eight Folio-Q5 agreements which remain can be dismissed as having little more significance than the readings for which there is precedent in Q1. Com'st (c1rb 50) is only a correction or modernization of comes; night (c2ra 37) corrects the obviously wrong nights, since it should rhyme with light in the preceding line; and the addition of the article in the phrase as a moate (c2vb 25) regularizes the meter. Any editor (and most compositors) could be expected to make these changes without consulting a source. Finally, the phrase Let it be so, and loe occurs in the first three quartos immediately after the cut which removed the "deposition scene" and would seem to have been added to Q1 to achieve transition after the deletion. The censored text has:

The passage in the Folio reads: When the "deposition scene" was restored in Q4, the introductory phrase was struck out, presumably on the authority of the source from which the restored passage was acquired. The same origin applies also to the Folio readings set downe (for proclaime) and prepare your selues (for be ready all), which occur in the words immediately following. All of these Q5 readings one might expect to find in the Folio, whatever the quarto used as copy.

Thus there remain in significant support of Q3 as the copy for the Folio Richard II the one substantive reading of the old-fashioned mine for my (d1vb 65), which Pollard did not take into account, and the fact—negative evidence, it is true—that the Folio repeats 97 errors that had accumulated by the time Q3 was published, but only four variants that first occurred in the later quartos. To these may be added the emendation in c3ra 27 which seems to be based on the Q3 reading. In contrast to this there are the Folio-Q5 agreements: formerly for formally (c1rb 46), euer for neuer (d4vb 44), wer't for art (d5ra 9), and thine for thy (d5ra 18). If, as Pollard suggests, formerly can be written off as a common error, it is found that the Folio-Q5 readings cluster together in the last three columns of the Folio edition in lines which in Q3 occupy the two final leaves, I3 and I4, and which in Q5 are found on the last three type-pages, K1v-K2v. This grouping suggested to Pollard the possibility (even though he rejected it) that the copy was Q3 with the last two leaves supplied from an exemplum of Q5.

At this point the spelling variants can be considered. The form percullist near the beginning of the play (c1vb 48), which the Folio has in common with Q5 and which is the only variant originating in Q4 to appear in the Folio, is not the obstacle that Pollard felt it to be, for the NED records it as a variant, especially in the noun form percullis, of the more usual portcullist. This is also true of the Folio-Q5 impresse for impreese (c5rb 44). Conversely then, the Q3 spelling unpruind (d1rb 57), occurring in the major section of the play in which there is the great lack of Q5 variants, is evidence (especially since it is the repetition by the Folio of a unique Q3 error) that the Folio compositors were here following Q3. It is not necessarily surprising to find the Folio avoiding other unusual Q3 spellings, for the orthography of that quarto is archaic in comparison with the consistently more modern First Folio. One other instance of spelling further suggests a made-up copy. In d4vb 27, which precedes the first of

the cluster of Q5 agreements by just seventeen lines and which falls within the lines which Q5 would have supplied if the two final leaves of Q3 had been missing, the Folio has the later quarto's abnormal tels, whereas Q3 has tells, the normal spelling in all three editions. The proximity of this variant to the group of Q5 substantives is very convincing. In general, however, other spelling variations do not occur in such a way as to indicate which quarto the compositors were using.

If the copy for the Folio Richard II was indeed a mixed quarto, it is necessary to attempt to determine the point at which the compositor began to set up his text from Q5, though one cannot with absolute certainty fix the precise line which was the first to be taken from that quarto. If the last two leaves (I3 and I4) were missing from the copy of Q3, three leaves (K1-3) would have to be supplied from a copy of Q5, since the last line of I2v in Q3 is line 9 on K1v of Q5. Admittedly, it would be awkward for a compositor to pick up within the verso of a leaf; yet since there is no evidence that more than the last two leaves of Q3 were missing from the copy being used, it is more logical to believe that he would follow this quarto as far as it went and then pick up at the following line in the Q5 leaves, rather than that he would leave off in Q3, say after line 32 of I2, in order to begin at the top of the recto of the first leaf taken from Q5. It would have been even more awkward to leave Q3 at line 29 of I2v in order to begin at the top of K1v in the Q5 leaves. In the absence of more exact evidence it seems best, therefore, to assume that d4va 56, which corresponds to the final line of I2v in Q3, was the last Folio line to be set from Q3.

Support for the evidence supplied by the substantives and spelling that the copy for Richard II was a made-up quarto comes primarily from the punctuation. Capitalization and italicization are of no help. The Folio makes extensive use of capitals and is fairly consistent in italicizing titles and proper names. On the other hand, Q5 makes considerable use of capitals and italics, though not so extensively as the Folio, whereas Q3 makes little use of either. The system in the Folio seems to be due to the compositors' habits and to bear no relation to either quarto, for not even in the Folio's lapses is there any indication of quarto influence.

A comparison of the punctuation in the three editions is somewhat more helpful. It is, of course, true again that the Folio has its own heavy system, which is applied fairly consistently; that the punctuation of Q5 is somewhat lighter; and that the punctuation of Q3 is lighter still. There are, for example, 28 cases in which at the same point in the text a clause is ended in the Folio by a colon, in Q5 by a semicolon, and in Q3 by a comma. There are 14 in which the Folio has a period where Q5 has a

colon and where Q3 has a comma, and 6 in which a Folio period is paralleled by a semicolon in Q5 and a comma in Q3. In addition, where the Folio makes extensive use of commas, the quartos (Q3 more so than Q5) use them more sparingly, sometimes omitting them in connection with vocatives and interjections. Finally, the countless times that all three editions are in agreement naturally supply no information. Any information regarding the copy to be derived from the punctuation must therefore be concerned with variations and lapses within the punctuation systems of the three editions and must revolve largely around the heavier punctuation marks. As a result, nothing can be learned from the instances in which the Folio and Q5 have heavy punctuation (not necessarily the same) and Q3 has a comma, or from the cases in which heavy punctuation in the Folio and Q3 (again not necessarily the same) is paralleled by a comma in Q5, for here the Folio might well be editing according to its own practice.[22] It can be assumed that the early prompt-book, although it supplied certain readings, had no influence whatever on the Folio punctuation. If the collation were, as Pollard thought, a part of the Folio editors' preparation of copy, the punctuation of the prompt would hardly have been incorporated into that copy since an entirely different system was to be used in the new edition; or if, as will be suggested later, the quarto was annotated some years earlier for use in the theatre, no attention would have been given to punctuation as long as it did not radically alter the sense, for theatrical manuscripts were very lightly punctuated. In punctuation the manuscript prompt-book may not, then, have been very different from Q1, which is also very lightly punctuated. In contrast to the grammatical punctuation in all the subsequent editions, Q1 in its set speeches makes use of dramatic punctuation, which led Pollard (p. 64) to believe that it represents Shakespeare's own system.

The most significant fact a study of the punctuation yields is that on 48 occasions the Folio agrees with Q3 in using a comma where Q5 has a colon or semicolon and where the Folio would be expected to have heavy punctuation also. One of these cases is particularly meaningful because the punctuation determines the grammatical relationship of the words and hence the meaning of the line. Richard, realizing that all is lost, says in the Folio text:

In the third line of this passage the Folio and Q3 have a comma after haue, but Q5 has a semicolon, so that in the latter the words That power I haue form an independent clause referring to the preceding thought, whereas in Q3 and the Folio they are a dependent clause used as the object of discharge.

Since compositor's convenience has already indicated that the matter for which the substantives suggest Q5 as copy-text begins at d4va 57, it is to be noted that none of these Folio-Q3 agreements occurs after line 45 of the same column, although, it is true, there are also five earlier pages (c1v, c4v, c5v, c6v, and d3r)[23] on which none of these particular agreements is found. Individual examples are untrustworthy because of the possibility of coincidence, but the occurrence of two of these agreements in this column (d4va 3 and 45, which correspond respectively to I2:33 and I2v:27 in Q3) indicates further that Q3 was the copy through d4va 56. (It is true that in line 47 the Folio agrees with Q5 in using a semicolon where Q3 has a colon, which somewhat weakens the evidence of the two commas, but information derived from a choice among heavy punctuation marks is perhaps less conclusive than that from Folio commas standing in contrast to heavier punctuation in a given quarto. The evidence for the last line to be set up from Q3 is at best only suggestive.)

On the other hand, before d4va 57 there are only two instances in which the Folio shares a comma with Q5 as opposed to heavier punctuation (a colon in one case and a period in the other) in Q3. The first of these occurs on b6v, which has eleven of the Folio-Q3 agreements; the other, on c1, which has three of the Folio-Q3 agreements. In such a situation these two isolated cases are surely fortuitous. Although it is true that in view of the relationship of the punctuation in these three editions chance would make lapses in the Folio system agree more frequently with the much lighter punctuation of Q3, the totals and proportions in this instance cannot possibly be due to coincidence. Within these same pages the occasions on which the Folio and one quarto agree in the use of a colon or semicolon against the other punctuation mark in the differing quarto are

nearly balanced, but if added to the figures already given, they certainly do nothing to destroy their evidence. The Folio and Q3 twice have colons and twice have semicolons in common where Q5 has the other of the two marks, and the Folio and Q5 twice have colons and once have semicolons where Q3 disagrees by using the other mark. This makes a total of 52 Folio-Q3 agreements in comparison with 5 Folio-Q5 agreements in this major section of the play.

As has been stated, the occurrence of commas in relation to other commas or to a lack of punctuation is generally unreliable for information regarding the copy. Nevertheless, there is a handful of instances in which the Folio fails to use a comma where it would normally be expected to have one and in so doing agrees with the punctuation of one of the quartos against the other. Three times the Folio is in agreement with Q3. The first of these, by far the most significant, occurs in b6va 16, which begins the passage

A comma after Abels, which appears in Q5, immediately makes it clear that cries is a verb rather than a noun, but both the Folio and Q3 omit it.

For what they are worth two other lines may be given:

The Folio and Q3 have no comma after the interjection what in the first of these or before the parenthetical I say in the second, whereas in both cases Q5 does have a comma.

The only similar Folio-Q5 agreement is the omission of a clarifying comma before holliday in c5rb 63:

Here Q3 has the punctuation. This omission, however, is not nearly so serious as the one in connection with Abels, and that particular Folio-Q3 agreement remains by far the more significant.

All instances involving parentheses or hyphens occur well within the section set up from Q3. By themselves the parentheses show little, but in conjunction with the other punctuation they throw their weight in support of this quarto as the copy. It is, of course, true that there are many cases where the Folio uses parentheses though neither quarto does, and a few in which the Folio has other punctuation even though both quartos have parentheses. Nevertheless, on the five occasions when the two quartos

disagree in the use of these marks, the Folio always agrees with Q3 in omitting them.

The evidence of the hyphens is less conclusive, but argues for Q3 when added to other facts. Again, as in the case of all punctuation, the Folio uses hyphens more frequently than either quarto, and very occasionally it will omit them where both quartos have them. Where Q3 and Q5 are not in agreement, the Folio agrees with the latter seven times in having hyphens, which is what would be expected since it is in keeping with Folio practice. However, on seven other occasions the Folio agrees with Q3 in omitting them, although there too it might have been expected to use them in accordance with its general tendency.[24]

One group of contradictory evidence must be accounted for. On fifteen occasions, elsewhere than at the end of a speech, Q3 and Q5 disagree in the use of a period as opposed to some other punctuation mark and the Folio agrees with one of them—in nine of these cases with Q5; in only six, with Q3. This group needs to be considered by itself rather than to be included in other Folio-quarto agreements in heavy punctuation because it is a relatively infrequent type of punctuation. In the light of the evidence of the other punctuation, however, this one-fifth majority in favor of Q5 is undoubtedly due to the fact that the more frequent use of heavy punctuation in Q5 than in Q3 would make the still more heavily punctuated Folio more likely to agree with the later quarto in all cases where chance could be operating.

The Folio punctuation of c6ra 15 is similar:

Q3 has: Q5 reads: The difficulty lies in the Folio's failure to repeat the period after made if Q3 was indeed the copy. The Folio Heads for the quarto head must be a correction from the prompt-copy, for Q1 here agrees with the Folio.[25] Therefore, if the postulated manuscript prompt-book can be assumed to have had more or less the same punctuation as Q1, it is possible that this is an exceptional case of the influence of the prompt on the punctuation of the Folio copy. Q1 has only commas, but they give the same grammatical relationship as the stops found in the Folio: When in the collation of the prompt-book and Q3 the word head was made plural, the reader, noticing that the punctuation of the quarto disagreed with the sense of the prompt, could have struck out the period after made. It is perhaps significant that each compositor after Q3 tinkered with the punctuation at this point. Q4 has a comma, and Q5, as already shown, nothing.

Finally, in the passage (c4va 64-66)

the Folio agrees in line 64 with Q5 in the form thankes followed by a comma, where Q3 follows the earlier quartos with thanke's without a comma. As a correction or modernization, the Folio reading does not necessarily require precedent, and the comma is, of course, in keeping with normal Folio practice.

The evidence of the punctuation must be considered collectively, for individual cases, except those commented upon, are too subject to chance to mean much until they are seen in the aggregate. Taken as a whole, then, the punctuation of the Folio edition of Richard II shows in all but approximately the last three columns of the text the influence of Q3. That this major portion of the play was set from Q3 has already been indicated

by the repetition in the Folio of the Q3 error unpruin'd and the Q3 reading mine and by the lack of unexplainable agreements with Q4 or Q5. Added to this, the evidence of the punctuation makes it certain that up to approximately d4va 57 Q3 was the copy for the Folio.

Similar evidence shows that from approximately d4va 57 to the end of the play the lines were set up from the last three leaves of Q5, from which fact it must be assumed that the two final leaves of Q3 were missing or mutilated beyond use. The major evidence here is the three Q5 substantives which come so close together: euer (d4vb 44), wer't (d5ra 9), and thine (d5ra 18). These are reinforced by the repetition in d4vb 27 of Q5's abnormal spelling tels. The punctuation variants in this section are uninformative. The two Folio-Q3 agreements in the use of a colon (d4vb 35 and d5rb 15), where Q5 has a period in one case and a semicolon in the other, are outweighed by the other evidence, although there is no similar Folio-Q5 agreement to balance them. It is quite true that this latter section of the Folio play contains four substantive readings in agreement with Q3, from which Q5 differs. However, not only are they all corrections which a careful editor might make: eare for care (d4vb 17), their for there (d4vb 24), haue for hath (d4vb 34), and Towne of Ciceter for towne Ciceter (d5ra 41); but more important still, they are also readings which are found in Q1 and thus most likely were in the manuscript prompt-copy. Thus for the last three columns, probably beginning actually at d4va 57, Q5 must have been the copy, and Pollard's suggestion that the Folio Richard II might have been set from a made-up copy proves to be true.

There remains to be briefly considered the "deposition scene," which begins in the Folio at d2rb 18 and ends on d2vb 56 and which comprises almost one-third of the single scene of Act Four. Political conditions at the end of the sixteenth century had made any suggestion of the dethroning of a monarch dangerous. Most literary historians believe that the passage was excised for this reason, though Richard technically abdicates and the lines actually enlist sympathy on his side. Pollard, who thought that the play gained dramatically from the omission, felt that artistic considerations also influenced the excision (p. 63). When Matthew Lawe acquired the rights to the play and brought out Q4 in 1608, he restored the long passage (calling it "new additions"), presumably because it was by then being acted in the play and he wanted his edition to be up to date. P. A. Daniel's suggestion (p. xi) that Andrew Wise had acquired these lines along with the rest of the play, had kept them in manuscript, and then handed them over to Lawe when the latter bought the play is highly speculative. It is unlikely that Wise would have kept such material if indeed he had ever had it.

Moreover, the condition of the passage in Q4 and Q5 indicates a memorial reconstruction, for the quarto text has a considerable amount of incorrect line-division and omits six half-lines and one complete line. The Folio corrects the lineation and supplies the omissions. There are also a number of variant readings in the texts of this scene, some of which occur in connection with the omissions in the quarto version. It is safe to assume that the quarto readings in these cases are also due to the memorial reconstruction of the text and that the Folio variants were supplied by the copy, but there is no direct bibliographical evidence to show whether the Folio text of this passage was set up from a manuscript or from corrected pages of Q5. Since the "deposition scene" occurs in the section of the play set from Q3, which lacks this passage, leaves could have been taken from the copy of Q5 which supplied the last leaves of the made-up copy-text, or a transcript of the lines could have been made when Q3 was compared with the manuscript prompt-book. The Folio and Q5 compositors each maintain their own policies regarding the accidentals, and the scene fails to shed the light on the rest of the play that one would hope for. One might expect that a few lines immediately before and after the material missing from Q3 would have been set from the same source as this material if the copy had been Q5 leaves and would have left traces of the nature of their copy. Not only is such evidence lacking, but in d2vb 60, only two lines beyond the last line supplied in connection with the "deposition scene," there is one of the Folio-Q3 agreements in the use of a comma as against a Q5 semi-colon. The absence of the evidence desired may be due to the convenience with which the extra material could be inserted into Q3. The deletion occurs within three lines of the bottom of H1r of Q3, and those three lines, being the ones that had been rewritten to cover the omission, had to be supplied anew with the rest of the "deposition scene." Hence the compositor could set from the quarto to what was thus in effect the bottom of H1r, then make the necessary additions, and finally take up again in Q3 at the top of H1v, exactly where he had left off.

It becomes necessary to explain why the copy for the First Folio Richard II should have been a made-up quarto, for it is fantastic to think that Jaggard was able to get hold only of two fragmentary quartos and had to piece them together. A mutilated quarto would have to be of some importance for anyone to bother to fill it out with leaves from another exemplum or for a printer to use it for copy when he presumably would have little trouble in finding another that was complete.

Professor Fredson Bowers has recently suggested to me that if the copy of Q3 used by the Folio compositors were itself the official prompt-book

of the King's Company, it would fulfill this condition. Q5 leaves might be used to restore a lacuna either by a book-keeper who did not want to go to the trouble to annotate a whole new quarto (or transcribe extra leaves) or by an editor who wanted to uphold his claim that he was publishing "according to the True Originall Copies." This hypothesis also has the advantage of offering a much simpler history of the omission of certain lines from the Folio text: because these passages were scored out of the prompt-book which the compositor was using, he likewise left them out of the Folio as a result of a too scrupulous following of copy. According to Pollard's alternate theory, one would be faced with the less desirable circumstance that the editor, confronted with both a complete text and an abridged one, had chosen to follow the latter.

The use of Q1 as a prompt-book as early as 1597 has previously been rejected on the grounds that it seems unlikely that the prompter would have abandoned a good manuscript prompt-copy just because a printed quarto had appeared. Nevertheless, the manuscript would in time become too worn for use, and it would then be cheaper and easier to replace it by annotating a printed text already in existence than to have a new transcript made by a scribe. If this can be assumed to have happened in the case of Q3, then the collation of that quarto and the early prompt-book was made not, as Pollard believed, at the time of the preparation of copy for the Folio, but presumably some years before, and is thus one step removed in time from the editing of the Folio. It has already been suggested that the incompleteness and unevenness of the collation indicate that Jaggard did not have the early prompt-copy in his shop. As according to the new hypothesis no first-hand use of the original prompt-book would seem to have been made in the Folio, that early document may have been lost or destroyed after it was succeeded by an annotated copy of Q3.

Q3 would probably have been chosen for the prompt-copy because it was the most readily available edition when a new book was needed. One can speculate that the need arose before the publication of Q4 in 1608, for a copy of Q3 used as a prompt-book would involve the rather awkward circumstance of having to preserve or copy the "deposition scene" in manuscript and insert it in the presumably smaller quarto for performances in which these lines were restored. If Q4 or Q5 had been published by the time a new prompt was needed, one or the other would have been a far more convenient quarto to use by virtue of its already having the previously omitted material, although the state of this section of the text would have necessitated extensive and possibly cramped annotation. Therefore the theory that the made-up copy was a theatrical prompt-book

may carry the further implication that the "deposition scene" as it appears in the Folio was set up from a manuscript rather than from annotated leaves of Q5.

In speculating on the relationship of the time of the accident which mutilated the Q3 prompt-book to the time of the printing of the Folio, one is faced with several possibilities. The accident could have occurred in the theatre, or it might have happened after the quarto was brought to the printing-house. Although one would ordinarily expect the damage to be repaired as soon as it was done, it would even be possible, however, that the leaves were lost in the theatre, but through carelessness or the removal of the play from the active repertory were not replaced until the quarto became printer's copy. A stage-direction in the Folio may suggest a solution to this problem. In the margin at d4vb 10 the Folio has for its stage-direction the one word Musick, whereas the corresponding direction in Q5 reads Musicksplaies.[26] and occurs three lines farther along in the speech, at the point at which Richard first mentions that he hears music in the distance. Considerations of space do not seem to have dictated the change of position or of form. In the first place, because of the amount of text still to be set up, the compositor could have been entertaining no thought of finishing the play on this type-page. Furthermore, although other stage-directions in this part of the play have been shortened or reworded, the purpose does not in any instance seem to have been to save space. All of those that consist of more than one word are put into the column as separate lines rather than relegated to the margin, and one or two directions have been expanded beyond the quarto readings. Even if the compositor had abbreviated this particular stage-direction in order to put it into the margin, there is no reason for his having moved it to the line beside which it stands in the Folio. Not only is this line slightly longer than the one next to which the direction originally occurred in the quartos, but between the two there is a line much shorter than either of them, which would have been a much more likely choice if the compositor had thought that he did not have room for the stage-direction in its original place. Both the brevity and the anticipatory position of the Folio stage-direction

suggest as copy a prompt-book annotated in such a way that the prompter would be warned ahead of time that his sound effects must be ready. In the light of this example, the change of the Q5 direction Enter one to Richard with meat. to the Folio reading, Enter Keeper with a Dish. (d5ra 3), may also indicate a prompt-book. It may follow, therefore, that the other Folio variants of Q5 stage-directions are likewise due to the nature of the copy, although all the rest, including the removal of Enter Keeper with a Dish. and of Enter Northumberland. (d5ra 43) from their incorrect positions in Q5 to correct ones in the Folio, are well within the powers of an editor's independent emendation.

If this speculation is correct, then the Q5 leaves were supplied when the exemplum of Q3 was being used in the theatre as a prompt, and the accident antedates the use of the quarto as printer's copy. The theatrical use of this made-up prompt-book further implies that Richard II was still being acted as late as 1615, the date of the publication of Q5.

Notes