Unless the edition is like the New Arden with a selection of textual
notes, readers of 1 Henry IV in modernized texts will be
unaware of a problem of staging that involves Poins and Peto. The facts are
these. In Act I, scene ii, Poins reports to Hal and Falstaff that travellers are
to come by Gadshill. After persuading Hal to join the hoax on Falstaff, he
makes his exit, whereupon the scene concludes with Hal's 'I know you all'
soliloquy. In II.ii the disguised Poins and Hal attack Falstaff and the others
and secure the booty. Back at the tavern, in II.iv Poins joins Hal first in
ragging Francis the drawer and then in exposing Falstaff. On the arrival of
the Sheriff, Hal orders Falstaff to conceal himself behind the arras and 'the
rest [to] walke up above.' In the Quarto there is no exit direction for
anyone, although the Folio (with whatever authority it may possess)
supplies the required but uninformative 'Exit.' The Prince
and
the Sheriff discuss Falstaff and
the robbery in guarded terms. Upon the Sheriff's exit the Prince's next line
is 'This oylie rascall is knowne as well as Poules' and he orders 'goe call
him forth.' In Quarto and in Folio it is not Poins but Peto who responds by
drawing the arras and ejaculating, 'Falstalffe: fast a sleepe behind the
Arras,
and snorting like a horse.' As they search Falstaff, Peto answers the
Prince's question of what he has found: 'Nothing but papers my Lord.' The
Prince reads off the list of Falstaff's expenditures, ending with the meager
halfpenny for bread. He announces: 'ile to the court in the morning. We
must all to the wars, and thy place shal be honorable'; and after proposing
a charge of foot soldiers for Falstaff he concludes, 'bee with me betimes in
the morning, and so good morrow Peto.' As the exeunt line Peto answers,
'Good morrow good my Lord.'
This scene poses a difficulty, for without motivation Peto has been
silently abstracted from Falstaff's party, with whom he entered, and
appointed Hal's servant as a substitute for the attendant and
part-companion, Poins. In staging, the dialogue forces us to take it that
Poins joins Bardolph and Gadshill in the unnoted exeunt before the Sheriff's
arrival but, inexplicably and with no prior arrangement or command, Peto
stays with the Prince in his place. Moreover, upon his exit, Poins
disappears from the play although he should have appeared in III.iii. Some
editors have considered that there has been compositorial confusion here
owing to the Quarto abbreviated speech-prefix Po. for Poins
that
could have been misread as Pe., and these have followed Dr.
Johnson by emending to remove Peto and to re-install Poins as the Prince's
companion at the end of the scene, this requiring a stage-direction that
includes Peto in the general exit before the Sheriff's arrival.
Nevertheless, whatever one may think of the emendation, compositorial
confusion is unlikely to have extended to the name Peto in the Prince's
farewell.[1]
The switch in the roles begun in the Quarto at the end of II.iv is
continued in Act III, scene iii, opening with Falstaff, Bardolph, and then
the Hostess in the tavern, these being joined by Hal in the following
stage-direction: 'Enter the prince marching, and Falstalffe meetes
him
playing upon his trunchion like a fife.' Peto has no speaking part,
but
it seems clear that he enters with the Prince, even though unmentioned in
the stage-directions,[2] for at the
scene's close Hal cries, 'Go Peto to horse, to horse, for thou and I | Have
thirty miles to ride yet ere dinner time'. This is the last of Peto on stage,
although we hear of him in IV.ii when Falstaff, on the march, orders
Bardolph, 'bid my Liuetenant Peto meet me at townes end.'
In this second tavern scene III.iii earlier editors once more were
likely to substitute Poins for Peto as Hal's companion despite the text, aided
by the assumption that Poins fits the metre as in 'Go Poins to horse, to
horse' better than Peto. However, the extra weak syllable is by no means
so unmetrical as to make this sufficient evidence for a mistake. Indeed, any
theory for compositorial or scribal error based on a confusion of
speech-prefixes breaks down on the occurrence of the name in the dialogue
in two different scenes, the more especially since in III.iii Peto appears in
the Quarto neither in stage-direction nor in speech-prefix.
Since another explanation must be sought, it behooves an editor to
account for the abrupt substitution of Peto for Poins at the end of the first
tavern scene, and on the basis of this explanation to decide what he should
do in the text: whether to emend to Poins in both scenes, which has not
been done since Dyce except for Dover Wilson and Charles Sisson; or to
split the ticket with the old Oxford and Kittredge by retaining Peto in II.iv
but emending to Poins in Hal's 'to horse, to horse' in III.iii; or to retain
Peto in both scenes according to the Quarto and Folio authority, as in
Alexander, the New Arden, the New Penguin, and other modern editions
like the Pelican and New Riverside. In my opinion this latter has been a
course influenced more by an inability to explain the anomaly of the names
than by any conviction that the Quarto text offers a basically desirable
assignment.
So far as I have been able to investigate, a satisfactory explanation for
this odd switch in characters has not been offered. I suggest that such an
explanation is important: those who emend either in both scenes or,
unreasonably, in the second only, have taken it that compositorial or scribal
error has somehow occurred, whereas those who decline to emend
presumably do so on the ground that even against their better judgment they
are following in the Quarto the only evidence they have for Shakespeare's
intention. Either school of thought poses its difficulties.
I propose a relatively simple theatrical explanation. In Julius
Cœsar I think it is now established that Dover Wilson's old guess
was right and that the same actor doubled the lean and hungry Cassius and
the emaciated sick man Caius Ligarius recruited to the conspiracy by
Brutus.[3] As a consequence, it is
Ligarius, not Cassius, who waits on Cæsar with the other conspirators
to escort him to the Capitol even though Cassius had stated that he would
be present; yet it is Cassius who enters with the procession at the Capitol,
and Ligarius not only does not appear in this stage-direction but is not
mentioned in the assassination. This disruption is readily explained by the
doubling, an expedient also reinforced by other evidence which indicates
that the part of Ligarius was added in a revision of the text after it had been
copied out. What we have in 1 Henry IV, I suggest, is the
same
situation: because of an assignment of actors
decided upon during the early planning for production, or even during
rehearsal, the actor of Poins had to be withdrawn
before the end of II.iv in order to double the part of another character. The
abrupt expedient of attaching Peto to Hal instead of Hal's continuing with
Poins can scarcely have resulted from any literary consideration, for
nothing occurs in II.iv to lead Hal to shift his favor from the quick-witted
Poins to the stupid and cowardly Peto. To follow this favor by elevating
such a Falstaffian hanger-on to a place of honor in the wars (implying a
rank of officer) though appropriate for Poins is to violate all propriety for
Peto.
[4]
If Poins could not be permitted to finish the scene, the only reason
must have been that the actor was to double a role in the very next. The
next scene is Act III, scene i, marked by the entrance of Hotspur,
Worcester, Mortimer, and Glendower in the opening stage-direction. As a
doubled part Hotspur must be excluded because his immediate entrance at
the start of II.iii had followed directly after Poins's exit in the Gadshill
robbery scene. Worcester is a possibility. The closest that his entrance ever
comes to an exit by Poins is at the beginning of I.iii which follows the
plans for the robbery in I.ii but with Hal's 'I know you all' soliloquy
intervening for twenty-three lines between Poins's exit and Worcester's
entrance. This soliloquy might have provided somewhat less time to change
costume than the action of discovering Falstaff at the end of II.iv, but it
could have been enough if Worcester were the part doubled.[5] However, both Mortimer
and Glendower are candidates as well, perhaps more attractive in some
respects than Worcester,[6] even
though Poins's continued absence in Acts IV and V could be explained by
Worcester's important role in that section. But since Peto is not present in
these acts either, I think it clear that once the battle is forward the
seriousness of the action prevented Hal from carrying along a low-life
companion like Peto, or even Poins: such an incongruity would have
interfered with Shakespeare's efforts to show that the Prince has detached
himself from the tavern milieu and is now committed to the chivalric life.
The brief interludes with Falstaff are enough to continue the comic subplot
without diminishing Hal's glory. Moreover, it should not be held against
either
Mortimer or Glendower as a candidate that after III.i they do not again
appear in the play, and thus that there is no theatrical reason why Poins
should not have replaced Peto in III.iii even if there were reasons why he
should have been dropped later.
[7] It
must be emphasized that once Peto has been assigned as Hal's companion
in II.iv after the departure of the Sheriff, Shakespeare was bound to retain
him whether or not Poins was physically able to resume his role in
III.iii.
[8]
Evidence is lacking, then, that might point to Worcester or to
Mortimer or Glendower as Poins's doubled part, although it must have been
one of the three. Nonetheless, once the probability of the hypothesis for
doubling is accepted, the two particular consequences that follow are of
greater import than the identification of the doubled character. As an
example, the recognition of Shakespeare's revision of Julius
Cæsar led to a reassessment of the nature of the Folio printer's
copy. Greg's generally accepted assumption that it was Shakespeare's own
holograph had to make way for the more probable hypothesis—given
the
characteristics of the text as well as the theatrically motivated
revision—that Jaggard's copy was a scribal transcript used for the
early
stages of rehearsal, or at least for the early planning of the production,
before a promptbook had been written up. An intermediate transcript, in
short, containing what might have been Shakespeare's own holograph
revisions in three and just possibly in four scenes. It follows that if an
exchange of roles for Poins and Peto to enable the Poins actor to double
another character in III.i were inserted in the manuscript of 1 Henry
IV, there could be a tug to forsake Greg's tentative leaning toward
a Quarto printed from Shakespeare's papers and to accept as somewhat
strengthened Alice Walker's assignment (made on other evidence) of the
printer's copy as a non-authorial fair transcript of the foul papers and
therefore a predecessor of the promptbook;[9] that is, an intermediate transcript
as in the
copy for Julius Cœsar.[10]
Between the two plays a real distinction must be drawn, however.
The doubling of Cassius as Caius Ligarius caused what can be described as
a major revision and amplification of one scene and minor revision in
another. No such evidence of textual expansion or thematic revision is
found in 1 Henry IV, nor is there any evidence for more than
minor textual change. In fact, except for the simple substitution of Peto's
name for Poins's, no other change may have been made in II.iv.[11] Since Poins was disguised, as was
Hal,
when they attacked Falstaff and his crew, he could not be identified by the
Carrier who accompanied the Sheriff and thus it is natural that in the
original version with no mention made he should have stayed with Hal
during the encounter, as a necessary attendant. This same action is difficult
to account for with Peto, who was identifiable and had not been requested
to remain in order to replace a Poins who had no reason to leave.
That the substitution creaks in this manner may be an indication that
Shakespeare (if it were indeed he who tinkered with this doubling problem)
made no
effort to motivate the change by rewriting. The case is slightly altered in
III.iii. Since in the original version Peto would not have been detached from
Falstaff in II.iv, it is reasonable to suppose that he would have accompanied
Falstaff's and Bardolph's entrance in III.iii and presumably he need not
have been mute even though his part would likely have been smaller than
Bardolph's, who was his superior. We may also speculate that in the fun
made with the Hostess and Falstaff, Poins would not have been mute but
would have joined in as he had in II.iv before he dropped from sight. On
the other hand, it is appropriate for Peto, as Hal's attendant, to play the
mute, for he has no wit and could take no part in the joke about the ring
and so on. Cutting, therefore, seems to have been the procedure in
adjusting III.iii to the changed circumstances.
If this is so, the editorial problem is somewhat sharpened although the
procedures to be adopted still remain similar to those advisable for
Julius Cœsar. The exigencies of doubling should have no
effect on the production (or reading) of Julius Cœsar as
it
ought to be performed (or read) without the necessity for doubling. To
establish a text of Julius Cœsar that does not include
Ligarius
in the procession at the Capitol and, though a mute, in the assassination
would now be, in my view, the height of pedantry. By the same logic, we
must distinguish between 1 Henry IV as Shakespeare
originally
intended it to be acted and the form in which we find it in the Quarto after
the doubling rearrangement of parts had been inserted. Any modern
producer who retains Peto instead of restoring Poins as Hal's attendant
throughout would be violating the clear intention of the author as he wrote
the play without doubling in mind. It follows that, as in Julius
Cœsar, an editor should ignore the changes later forced on
Shakespeare (or caused by company tinkering) because of a problem in
casting, perhaps because of the company's attempt to have each role played
by the most appropriate actor (as with Cassius-Ligarius), which would mean
that the actor of Poins might have been thought to be peculiarly suited for
some other part as well.[12]
Dr. Johnson's instincts were sounder than the present-day veneration
for a theatrically altered text that violates the propriety of character and of
situation as Shakespeare had conceived it. An editor cannot restore the
missing lines in III.iii but here and in II.iv he can at least give back to Hal
his proper companion Poins, and keep Peto exclusively where he belongs
in Part One, that is, as a member of Falstaff's party, to which in fact he
reverts in Falstaff's reference (presumably in the original version and never
altered to take account of the change in II.iv and III.iii) to "my lieutenant
Peto" who is to meet him at town's end when the characters
of
the comic underplot are on the way to the battle.
