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Notes
W. W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text (third edition, 1954), p. xxx.
Hasker, 'The Copy for the First Folio Richard II', Studies in Bibliography, 5 (1953), 53-72; Pollard, A New Shakespeare Quarto: The Tragedy of King Richard II (1916).
Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (1974), p. 838; Black, Richard II, in The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (Pelican, 1969), p. 636.
For Compositor A's responsibility for this passage in Richard II, see Charlton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, 2 vols. (1963), II, 74-79; for the latest investigation of Compositor A's work elsewhere in the Folio, see Gary Taylor, 'The Shrinking Compositor A of the Shakespeare First Folio', SB, 34 (1981), 96-117. The latter also contains a description of the computer concordances from which the evidence of A's quantitative preferences has been compiled; all statements about qualitative preferences are based on manual counts, assuming that Richard III was set from Q3 or Q6 copy, and the rest of A's Richard II stints from Q3.
The slight unevenness is caused by the fact that A did not set dlv; the sample therefore includes all of d2 before the added scene, and material from d2v and d3 after it. The order of setting was d3, d2v, d2 (Hinman, II, 76-77).
If we extend the limits of the passage from which A was setting from manuscript copy, then we expand the size of the disputed passage and contract the size of the control. In order to rectify this we would need to include TLN 2334-47 in the control. However, these lines contain no anomalies.
It also strikes another severe blow at the older hypothesis, that F was set throughout from a copy of Q5—an hypothesis still endorsed, inexplicably, by Kenneth Muir, in his Signet edition of the play (1963), p. 148. If Q5 were Folio copy, there would have been no conceivable reason for resorting to manuscript for this passage.
One might conjecture that if the annotator's copy of Q3 happened to be defective, he might have patched it with the last two leaves of Q5. But if Q5 was available, why not use it throughout—as the later edition, and one with the abdication episode? The accidentals evidence in any case militates against this conjecture, as does the fact that the clearest links with Q5 are not at the end of the play, or even confined to a single Q5 leaf.
Greg, Editorial Problem, p. 15, n. 1; Dover Wilson, Richard II, New Shakespeare (1951), p. 113; Hasker, pp. 56-57; Ure, p. xxv.
Professor Bowers now believes that the hypothesis of a marked-up quarto promptbook is too speculative to entertain. Hasker argued that his hypothesis provided a 'much simpler' explanation of the Folio cuts: 'because these passages were scored out of the promptbook which the compositor was using, he likewise left them out of the Folio as a result of a too scrupulous following of copy'; this seemed to Hasker more desirable than supposing that 'the editor, confronted with both a complete text and an abridged one, had chosen to follow the latter' (p. 70). But this second, 'less desirable' assumption must be embraced in the cases of Richard III, Troilus and Cressida, and King Lear (to mention only the most striking examples), and unless one is prepared to argue that all of these were set from quarto-based promptbooks, the argument from omissions carries no weight in Richard II. Moreover, the use of the word 'editor' betrays Hasker's bias: though a modern editor might assume that the fuller text was necessarily more desirable, printers and theatrical producers are well aware that the 'abridged' text often represents the final form of a work. Whether the author himself made the deletions is none of the printer's business. If the collator were told that the manuscript was more authoritative than Q3, he would have had no reason for treating cuts differently from additions or variants.
See the Shakespeare Quarto Facsimile Richard II, edited by W. W. Greg and Charlton Hinman (1966), pp. xv-xvi, and Alan Craven, 'Simmes' Compositor A and Five Shakespeare Quartos', SB, 26 (1973), 37-60, especially 57-58.
For an extensive discussion of the general issue of 'actors' departures from the text' being incorporated into promptbooks, see Gary Taylor's 'King Lear: The Date and Authorship of the Folio Version', in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of 'King Lear', ed. Taylor and Michael Warren (1983), pp. 405-410.
W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (1955), p. 237. Compare Hasker's assessment: 'although the editorial work of the Folio was in some respects exceedingly good, it was not, however, performed without some degree of carelessness' (p. 58).
The variants in the two lines immediately following the abdication episode are so closely tied up with the Folio text of the episode itself that discussion of these is held over; these lines do not figure in any of the statistics given.
The more obviously deliberate emendations are introduced by Compositor B. Compositor A is responsible only for 1601, 1706 and 1834. F's emendation at 1706 may, of course, be authoritative: certainly in this instance Q1 is wrong. But Sisson argued plausibly (apart from his failure to account for Q1's missing article) that Q1 is more likely to arise from a misreading of prince and than prince is (New Readings in Shakespeare, 2 vols. [1956], II, 24). One may suspect an error of composition which was miscorrected in proof.
Thomas is the historical name as given in Holinshed's Chronicles. The error arises from graphically similar abbreviations, and was sufficiently easily made for the same error to occur at Henry V 4.1.92. See the note in J. H. Walter's new Arden Henry V (1955).
At 964 Q2 and Q3 follow the corrected state of Q1, which is here cited; the compositor originally set At . . . at. The context strongly suggests that the wrong at was corrected: 'my inward soule, / With nothing trembles, at something it grieues, / More then with parting from my Lord the King'. One trembles at something; with agrees with the following line. Most editors adopt the transposition at 1090 ('The hateful commons will'), but this is unlikely, since Will is prominently positioned at the beginning of the line; on the other hand, commoners could easily be displaced by the similar term used just nine lines previously. At 2556, the omission of thy was conjectured by Craven; it emends the metre as well as strengthening the sense.
Paul Werstine, in 'Line Division in Shakespeare's Dramatic Verse: An Editorial Problem' (AEB, forthcoming), argues that mislineation creating 'irregular verse patterns' is characteristic of Compositor A, who set this passage; however, Werstine finds only one other example in Richard II (2022-4), and it also probably began with the compositor's inability to fit the first line ('Sweet . . . Bosome') into his measure.
See Shakespeare Quarto Facsimile Richard II, pp. ix-xiii. Hinman does not cite this example, but he attributes to space-shortage both the uncorrected lineation at 1014 and the corrected instance at 1003.
As an example of what such unassisted metrical emendation of Q1 might have produced, see Vaughan's insipid conjecture, 'terrible hel [do thou] . . .'
Possible complications are that: a) the promptbook may have been unaltered, and the variants introduced in the printing house without authority; b) the promptbook may have been unsystematically altered; c) the variants may originate partly in the promptbook and partly in the printing house. The occurrence of God(s) in clusters in Q may also confuse the issue.
On the general issue of Shakespearian cutting, see Taylor's discussions in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Modernizing Shakespeare's Spelling, with Three Studies in the Text of 'Henry V' (1979), pp. 155-6; Henry V, Oxford Shakespeare (1982), pp. 312-315; The Division of the Kingdoms, pp. 415-422.
In fact the four single lines omitted in F, 1031a, 1404a, 1541a and 2600a, would, if deliberate cuts, conform with the overall pattern of annotation established below: three of the four lie in well-annotated areas of the text. The exception, 1031a, was, with 2600a, set by Compositor B, who rarely omitted full lines when working from printed copy. A profanity is emended in 1031, an alteration which could be associated with a deliberate cut in the following line.
Parlee/parle (201) might be regarded as an emendation, a sophistication, or a spelling variant. Editors have treated the variant as substantive; their procedure is followed here.
This excludes, as well as the abdication episode and the two lines following, the 53-line passage in 5.5 without independent authority, and F's act and scene headings.
One Folio page, c2v, entirely avoids 'Rich.' in favour of shorter 'Ric.' or 'Ri.'. This anomaly is explained by the order of work on F. Compositor B had previously set 'Rich.' only once (863 on c3v), and evidently did not settle on this as his standard form until after setting c2v. His next page, c3, has 'Ric.' twice (731, 875) and 'Rich.' eight times.
The unchanged 'King' prefixes in Folio 1.1 are an inconsistency. The annotator may at first have thought the variant insignificant, or the inconsistency may be that of the playhouse scribe. A late printing-house correction would have been impossible as, after the printing of quire b, on which 1.1 appears, there was a substantial interruption before work was resumed on Richard II; type for quire b had, by then, already been distributed.
According to Wilfred T. Jewkes, plays acted before 1607 in the popular theatres would not have act divisions marked in the promptbook; if such a play was printed after 1616, the act divisions may have been introduced in the course of late theatrical revivals or in the printing house (Act Division in Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays, 1583-1616 [1958]). G. K. Hunter argues less plausibly that the change of practice took place only in the printing house, and that act pauses were generally observed in the theatre throughout Shakespeare's working lifetime ('Were There Act Pauses on Shakespeare's Stage?', in English Renaissance Drama, edd. Standish Henning, Robert Kimbrough, and Richard Knowles [1976], 15-35). For a reply to Hunter, with an expansion and modification of Jewkes's findings, see Taylor's 'The Structure of Performance: Act Intervals in the London Theatres, 1576-1642' (forthcoming).
For the first of these, see Stanley Wells, 'The Copy for the Folio Text of Love's Labour's Lost', RES 33 (1982), 137-147.
For a detailed analysis of such rhythms in one text, see MacD. P. Jackson's 'Fluctuating Variation: Author, Annotator, or Actor?' in Taylor and Warren, The Division of the Kingdoms, 313-349.
Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683-84), edd. Herbert Davies and Harry Carter (1962), pp. 228-229 (marginal notes). Proof-correction was also carried out in stages: 'Having Read the Matter of the Proof he examines again if the Form be right Impos'd, for though he before turn'd the Pages in the Proof as he read them according to their orderly places, yet he will scarce trust to that alone, but again examines them on purpose, and distinctly . . . [new paragraph] He examines that all the Signatures are right, and all the Titles and Folio's' (pp. 249-250). For the pertinence to Jacobean printing of Moxon's remarks on proof-correction, see Peter W. M. Blayney, The Texts of 'King Lear' and their Origins, Vol. I: Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto (1982), 188-218. (It is of course still true that collation—of which proofreading is a subdivision—is often most economically and accurately carried out by stages.)
One possible explanation for this pattern has recently been offered by Paul Werstine, in 'Folio Compositors, Folio Editors, and Folio King Lear', in Taylor and Warren, The Division of the Kingdoms, pp. 248-260. From our own work on I Henry IV for the Oxford Shakespeare we agree with Werstine that many dialogue variants cannot be, as A. R. Humphreys suggested in the new Arden edition (1960), pp. lxxiv-v, the work of the compositors (though we do not agree with Werstine's overall hypothesis). We arrived at a conclusion similar to the one S. W. Reid independently reached in an unpublished article: that a manuscript must have been consulted and readings from it annotated on to the copy for F.
This reconstruction assumes that Henry V was set from manuscript copy, rather than a heavily-corrected quarto: see Taylor, Modernizing Shakespeare's Spelling, 41-71.
For new evidence that Hamlet and Othello were set from manuscript copy, see Taylor, 'The Folio Copy for Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello', Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983), 44-61. This article also provides new evidence that Folio Lear was set, in part at least, from Q2. T. H. Howard-Hill's 'The Problem of Manuscript Copy for Folio King Lear', in The Library, VI, 4 (1982), 1-24, argues that a transcript of Q2 was made, incorporating promptbook readings; we find this implausible, but it would not affect our argument here, since some combination of Q2 and an authoritative manuscript clearly underlies F.
See The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge), I (1966), xxvii-xxxv. The only text possibly set from a marked-up print is The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn; but see Bowers's textual introduction (I, 113-123).
If this explanation is correct, then problems of copyright account for four of the five Folio texts set from extensively-annotated quarto copy. The fifth is King Lear. The right to this was owned by Nathaniel Butter—the only play in the collection to which he could lay claim. He was not a part of the syndicate. Aspley and Smethwick (who were) owned Romeo, Love's Labour's, and Much Ado; Titus and Dream were derelict (Greg, First Folio, 61-9); all five plays were reprinted with minimal alteration.
This might explain why the Folio text of Richard II (like others set from quarto copy) contains some readings which look like miscorrections of quarto errors (see above, 'Compounded Error'). These might suggest that the manuscript, which had clearly been consulted at some stage in the preparation of F, was not readily available when the compositors noticed these errors in the print. However, press-variants in the Folio, and many other works of this period, clearly demonstrate that Jacobean printers often preferred to correct on their own initiative, even when a manuscript was clearly on hand somewhere in the shop.
Unless, of course, Jaggard merely faked variants. But the character of the variants themselves argues against this; so does the fact that the syndicate was apparently willing, at first, to abandon Troilus altogether when they ran into copyright difficulties, and only retrieved it, at the last minute, when a manuscript had clearly become available.
At 1502, Q1 has I, Q2 Ye, and Q3-F Yea. (Ye is a spelling variant of yea.) It is possible that the annotator regarded I/Yea as indifferent.
For the rather unusual p/f misreading, compare Q2 Hamlet 5.2.9, TLN 3508 (uncorrected 'pall', corrected 'fall'). Peter W. M. Blayney has pointed out to us that the same misreading is possible in Hand D of Sir Thomas More.
If we admit 1502-30 to be an uncorrected area, it still remains true that the readings fall in corrected areas.
Clarendon (1869) suggested that the substitution in F was 'to avoid the imputation of profanity'; Chambers (1891), on the other hand, considered that perhaps 'someone who objected to the Puritan habit of looking to the words rather than the spirit of the Scriptures' made the alteration.
In the New Cambridge edition (1951), Dover Wilson prints throwen in the belief that such a spelling indicates a disyllabic pronunciation. Ure is rightly sceptical about the validity of this assumption.
'Simmes' Compositor A and Five Shakespeare Quartos' (cited above); 'The Reliability of Simmes's Compositor A', SB, 32 (1979), 186-91; 'Compositor Analysis to Edited Text: Some Suggested Readings in Richard II and Much Ado About Nothing', PBSA, 17 (1982), 43-62.
'Folio Editors, Folio Compositors, and Folio King Lear', pp. 261-73. The usual quantities of compositorial error can be accounted for by variants in the corrected areas other than those discussed above.
This conclusion is based upon Gary Taylor's unpublished survey of unanimously-rejected readings in plays which A or B set from manuscript, or heavily-annotated, copy.
Possible agents for the excision are: (a) the actors, taking the easiest means to ensure that an offensive passage was not printed; (b) the Bishop of London, who censored books independently of the theatrical censorship exercised by the Master of the Revels; (c) the printer or publisher, taking his own preventative measures. The latter is not as improbable as it may at first appear: G. K. Hunter demonstrated in his Revels edition of The Malcontent (1957) that Simmes or his publisher must have cut potentially offending lines in that play on his own initiative (pp. xxviii-xxxi).
'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' (Hasker, p. 48).
As MacD. P. Jackson points out, Richard II differs from all the other 'good' quartos except Titus in preferring 'Oh' (28) to 'O' (8). See Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare (1979), p. 215. The evidence of 'Oh' in Richard II thus suggests that copy for Q Richard II may have been a transcript, rather than foul papers. The exceptional clearness of the text would support this.
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