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V. Censorship and the Abdication Episode

The most important single difference between Q1-3 and F is F's inclusion of the abdication episode, which the texts printed in Elizabeth's reign omit. This has implications for the stage history as well as the textual history of the play. Was the Folio-only passage a later addition —as most critics believe that the 'fly scene', present only in the Folio, was

an addition to Titus Andronicus? Or was it always part of the original play, which should have been printed in Q1?

Although in other respects the superiority of Q1 over F is now generally accepted, few critics have been satisfied that Q1 here gives Shakespeare's original text intact. The most serious objection lies in Westminster's reference—found in all texts, just after the inserted episode—to A wofull Pageant (4.1.321; TLN 2246). It is difficult to apply this convincingly to any action that has just been staged according to Q1. The most obvious suggestion would be that the Pageant is Bolingbroke's ascent of the throne (4.1.113; TLN 2033). But does this actually happen? Q1-3 indicate only that Carlisle interposes and tries to prevent him. Here one must guard against accidentally using the F text in support of Q1. If we are familiar with the idea that Bolingbroke does ascend the throne, in spite of Carlisle's intervention, it is probably because nothing could be more dramatically effective (and in keeping with the pathos of the scene that follows) than for Richard to enter to find the accomplished fact, Henry on the throne. If Q1 is understood as an unbroken text, the circumstances are very different. Carlisle's intervention and arrest would lead directly into Bolingbroke's abrupt if not angry announcement of his intended coronation, dismissal of the lords, and exit. The potential Q1 text ends on a note of frustration. It would be consistent with this for Carlisle effectively to prevent Bolingbroke from ascending the throne: the scene would seem to require that an effective Pageant should be delayed to a more fitting time. Pageant is not, to judge from other instances, a word used casually by Shakespeare. It suggests something distinct, visual and theatrical: almost a play within a play. It can also imply a representation with allegorical meaning. All these qualities are appropriate to the abdication episode itself, and in particular to Richard's self-conscious and allegorizing mime with the crown and the mirror. Richard deliberately dramatizes, in symbolic form, his own fall. Moreover, it is Richard above all else who is wofull. These rich associations make the Q1 text look like an empty jar waiting to be filled.

Q1 thus appears to have omitted a passage; whatever the mechanism of that excision (and several are possible), the motive seems to have been anxiety about the political content of an episode in Shakespeare's foul papers.[52] But the inclusion of the episode in the first Jacobean edition of

Richard II, Q4 (1608), both illustrates the acceptability of its printed text after Elizabeth's death and gives evidence that the abdication episode was, eventually at least, played in the theatre in the form F preserves: the title-page of Q4 was reset during the course of printing to read: This form of phrasing may or may not imply that the additions were new to the acted text as well as the printed text. Two possibilities immediately suggest themselves: either (a) the Folio abdication episode was politically acceptable in 1608, as it had not been in 1597, or (b) the Folio abdication episode was always politically acceptable, but what stood in the foul papers was not. This second possibility of course assumes that the scene in F is different from what should have been printed in Q1 had there been no issue of censorship in Q1.

The lines immediately following the cut in Q1 are significantly different in Q1 and F:

The variants are in themselves a sufficient demonstration that the promptbook was consulted here in preparing F. But the most obviously directed change is Q1's introduction of Let it be so, and loe: if the abdication episode was cut in Q1, the context determines that the part-line cannot have been cut in F. In other words, it is possible that Q1's phrase was introduced to bridge over the gap created by the omission of the abdication episode. But as the other variants in these lines retain the same overall sense, they cannot, like Let it be so, and loe, have been introduced in Q1 specifically to mend the censorship gap; indeed they are of a kind such as has now been established as often indicating authoritative variants resulting from changes introduced in the promptbook. The bridging phrase mends the broken text in a contextually plausible and metrically invisible way; it is reasonable to suppose that blatant but equivalent substitutions would not be introduced at the same time, especially as no perceptible advantage is gained by them.

If proclaime/set downe and be ready all/prepare your selues are very similar in kind to other variants introduced in F from the promptbook, they too may be attributable to the revising hand of Shakespeare. As such they are consistent with a known stage in the development of the Folio

text. Furthermore, reasons for the introduction of each alteration become evident. In the case of proclaime/set downe, the reading as preserved in Q1 is potentially ambiguous. It hovers between the interpretation 'we (now) proclaim that Wednesday next will be our coronation' and 'on Wednesday next we will proclaim ourselves crowned'. Set downe conveniently avoids this difficulty.

In the 1955 New Variorum edition (p. 278), Matthew Black conjectures that be ready all was emended to prepare your selues in order to avoid a repeat of the all/fall rhyme of 2242-43 (ll. 317-318). Black's word 'avoid' suggests that he believes that the all/fall/all chime was never allowed to stand in the text. But if, as he believes, the abdication episode was cut in Q1, and if the substitutions were introduced in the promptbook (as his conjecture presupposes), Shakespeare must have originally written something like this:

The repeated rhyme must, according to the logic of Black's conjecture, have stood in Shakespeare's original text, and it is necessary to suppose that its removal was a later, presumably authorial, change.

But is this conflated text likely to be what Shakespeare really wrote? We can see that he apparently revised the lines immediately after Q1's Let it be so, and loe. But we have no direct way of knowing what the text preceding this phrase was originally like, simply because Q1 does not print it. The conflated text rests on a large assumption: that F preserves what Shakespeare first wrote. As has been suggested, this is not necessarily the case. It is in fact decidedly awkward to suppose that the variants just after the abdication episode are unconnected, and that it is mere coincidence that we find two alterations introduced in the promptbook in close proximity to the only significant alteration introduced in Q1. By chance, it seems, the conjectured repeated rhyme in Shakespeare's original text was removed deliberately in the promptbook and also, quite fortuitously, in Q1. One must add to this circumstance the supposition that Shakespeare would write such an obvious but presumably unintended repetition of all in the first place. And, moreover, that he would make another misjudgement in the immediately preceding line. All of these difficulties would disappear if we assumed that the Folio text of the episode represents a text which has undergone—like other parts of the play—at least some verbal revision. If so, then even Let it be so, and loe might be part of Shakespeare's unrevised original, rather than a mere botched transition interpolated by whoever censored the text.

We would not claim that any of this reasoning 'proves' that Shakespeare's original version of the abdication scene differed from that present in F: no one can legislate about the the exact content of the passage apparently missing from Q. But that very fact should make us sceptical of the assumption, hitherto almost universal, that F prints (unaltered) what originally appeared in Shakespeare's foul papers. The text cut from Q1 may well have been an earlier version of the episode, sporadically or even fundamentally different from that eventually printed in F. At the least, no one can rule out this possibility. The proposition is lent some support by a detail in the opening direction for 4.1. The Quarto calls vaguely for Bolingbroke to enter '. . . with the Lords to parliament', but usefully places 'Enter Bagot' after Bolingbroke's 'Call forth Bagot'; in the Folio, in promptbook fashion, the lords are named, and the direction ends '. . . Abbot of Westminster. Herauld, Officers, and Bagot'. The unexpected addition here is 'Herauld', for in neither text is a herald required. If the promptbook was originally prepared with a different text for part of the scene, the herald's presence is easily explained. When the substitution took place, the opening direction might not have been emended, leaving evidence of a character who would have spoken in the lost original text, but has no part in the extant version which replaced it. A herald would have an obvious role in a more explicit abdication. His omission in Q is merely typical of the authorial style of its directions: the heralds similarly are absent in Q's directions for 1.3 (Bolingbroke's banishment: a scene loosely parallel with Richard's abdication). Shakespeare's first draft may have been censored, and the text as it stands in F may be a rewritten version which actually avoids political controversy. Such an hypothesis is consistent with the view, sometimes expressed, that nothing in the episode as it stands would arrest the attention of the censor.[53] The Folio version of the episode might well have been used in the earliest performances of the play; but this does not mean it appeared, in its Folio form, in the play's earliest manuscript.