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Notes
See The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, ed. Matthias A. Shaaber (New Variorum Shakespeare, 1940), pp. 488-494; W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (1955), pp. 266-267; The Second Part of King Henry IV, ed. A.R. Humphreys (Arden Shakespeare, 1966), pp. lxviii-lxx. Act-scene-line references are keyed to Humphreys's text.
See, however, Gary Taylor's 'Zounds Revisited: Editorial, Theatrical, and Literary Expurgation' (forthcoming), where it is argued that Q could not have been used as printer's copy for F. This was also the view taken by Shaaber ('The Folio Text of 2 Henry IV', Shakespeare Quarterly, 6 [1955], 135-144), J. K. Walton (The Quarto Copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare, 1971), and George Walton Williams ('The Text of 2 Henry IV: Facts and Problems', Shakespeare Studies, 9 [1976], 173-182).
For the fullest description of the resetting see Thomas L. Berger and George Walton Williams, 'Variants in the Quarto of Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV', The Library, VI, 3 (1981), 109-118.
Eleanor Prosser, in Shakespeare's Anonymous Editors: Scribe and Compositor in the Folio Text of '2 Henry IV' (1981), infers that 'the error was not caught until about half the edition had been printed. At that point, presumably, presswork was stopped and the new lost scene added' (p. 9). Probably unintentionally, this statement suggests that the entire play was printed in a single process, rather than forme by forme. Even if Prosser meant that 'half the affected pages' had been printed, the situation she envisages is unlikely, since the affected pages fall on both the inner and outer forme of sheet E: unless one press was printing the outer forme while another printed the inner, it would not be possible to stop the presswork when 'half the edition' of both formes had been printed.
Shakespeare and the Homilies (1934), pp. 175-218. In part, Dover Wilson supported this view: see his edition of Part Two (New Shakespeare, 1946), pp. 119-123.
'The Cancel in the Quarto of 2 Henry IV', Studies in Honor of A. H. R. Fairchild, ed. Charles T. Prouty, University of Missouri Studies, 21 (1946), 67-90. The compositor McManaway identified has since been identified in other quartos: see W. Craig Ferguson, 'The Compositors of Henry IV Part Two, Much Ado About Nothing, The Shoemakers' Holiday, and The First Part of the Contention', Studies in Bibliography, 13 (1960), 19-29; Alan E. Craven, 'Simmes' Compositor A and Five Shakespeare Quartos', SB, 26 (1973), 37-60.
W. Craig Ferguson, Valentine Simmes (1968), p. 40. On 25 June 1603 Wise abandoned his career as a stationer, transferring most of his rights to Aspley; as McManaway notes (p. 74), a re-issue of 2 Henry IV, with Wise's name intact on the titlepage, is unlikely after that date.
This task would have been impossible without the assistance of Katharine F. Pantzer, who gave us advance access to the 'Printers' and Publishers' Index' data for Simmes from the revised Short Title Catalogue. We are also particularly grateful to A. L. Braunmuller (UCLA), G. B. Evans (Harvard), Andrea Immel (Huntington), Nancy Maguire (Newberry, Folger), J. L. Steffenson (Dartmouth), Eugene Waith (Yale), and to the librarians of Magdalen College (Cambridge), the University of Durham, Glasgow University, Winchester College, the John Rylands Library (Manchester), the National Library of Scotland, and the Boston Public Library, who have examined for us copies of books which we could not check for ourselves.
There are some superficially similar watermarks in Hotman's Ambassador (1603; Bodleian), STC 13848; Dekker's I Honest Whore (1604; BL), STC 6501; and Smith's Three Sermons (1601; Bodleian), STC 22736; but on examination all proved to be demonstrably distinct. We have examined, or received reports upon, all copies of 2 Henry IV except those at Princeton, Geneva, and Lambeth. The Lambeth Palace copy is lost. Berger and Williams based their collation of press variants on a microfilm; the original had disappeared by the mid-1950s, when Dr. E. G. W. Bill became Librarian. One of the British Library copies (C.34.k.12) was falling apart; we were fortunate to be allowed to examine it in a disbound state before it was removed for restoration. For Ado we have examined, or received reports on, all but the Geneva copy, and the four 'seriously defective' copies which have never been collated.
W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of English Printed Drama to the Restoration, I (1939), 274; J. H. Smith, 'The Composition of the Quarto of Much Ado About Nothing', SB, 16 (1963), 11-12. Smith also identifies one of the types from the cancel running titles in the new skeleton used in Ado H-I (p. 14).
See Taylor, 'King Lear: The Date and Authorship of the Folio Version', in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of 'King Lear', ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (1983), pp. 415-422, and Taylor's introduction to his Oxford Shakespeare Henry V (1982), pp. 24-26.
But compare the textual histories of The Malcontent and A Fair Quarrel; for fuller information see George K. Hunter's edition of The Malcontent (1975), pp. xxiii, xxxviii, and R. V. Holdsworth's A Fair Quarrel (1974), pp. xxxix-xliv.
'Of all the scenes belonging to the main or serious plot this has the least importance and could be omitted without much injury to plot or play' (Hart, p. 196).
This too was first suggested by Hart in the paragraph on p. 196, only to be dismissed as implausible 'for certain reasons to be stated later'.
We do not believe Q served as primary copy for F or for the scribal transcript behind F, though a copy of Q was probably occasionally consulted by the scribe preparing the transcript. Even if a copy of Q(b) played a more active role, the strength of the input from an independent source is such that a scribe or compositor would have rectified such an obvious error in Q(b) as a mislocated scene.
Ludwig Tieck first noted that 'the serious part is entirely subordinate to the comic', and that Shakespeare 'himself feels the defects of his plan and consequently he brilliantly emphasizes certain passages, such as the king's monolog at the beginning of Act III . . .' (c. 1794; in Tieck's Das Buch über Shakespeare, edited by Henry Lüdeke (Halle, 1920), pp. 225 ff; cited in English by Shaaber, p. 568).
The Malcontent, pp. xxviii-xxxi; Jowett and Taylor, 'Sprinklings of Authority: The Folio Text of Richard II', SB, 38 (1985), 195.
I Sir John Oldcastle (STC 18795) was entered on 11 August; 2 Henry IV and Much Ado on 23 August; The Earl of Gowries Conspiracie (STC 21466) on 11 September. Of these four books the last entered was probably the first printed. Gowries Conspiracie narrates events which took place 'vpon Tuesday the fift of August 1600', and includes a deposition dated '22 August'. It was obviously a hot item: the revised STC identifies a second issue (21466.3), 'partially reset and reimposed', and Simmes would almost certainly have given the title his highest priority. The three plays were therefore probably printed after September, but before March; indeed, one suspects that if they were printed after December all, or at least some, of the copies would have been dated '1601'. As one might expect, there is considerable overlapping of watermarks between the three plays entered in August. Simmes's Compositor A set most, if not all, of Oldcastle (as he set all of Ado and 2 Henry IV), as is evident from his distinctive treatment of speech prefixes and stage directions. The watermarks of Simmes's reprint of The First Part of the Contention (STC 26100) overlap with both Oldcastle and The Shoemakers Holiday (STC 6523), but Holiday has no marks in common with the three plays entered in August. Moreover, Ferguson's watermark 10/2 appears in a deteriorated state in Gowrie, Oldcastle, and 2 Henry IV; the undamaged state, visible in 1599 books, appears also in Contention. One therefore suspects that the order of presswork on the five plays Simmes printed in 1600 was Holiday, Contention, Oldcastle, 2 Henry IV, Ado—though it is of course possible (indeed, likely) that the five plays were interrupted by other work, and not printed one after the other.
'Shakespeare's Revised Plays: King Lear and Othello', The Library, VI, 4 (1982), 142-174 (pp. 169-170).
The Lambeth Palace Library copy of Q did not reflect late Elizabethan interest in the publication: the book is not listed in the catalogue of Richard Bancroft (the library's founder; the catalogue was compiled on 15 October 1612), nor in that of his successor (compiled in 1632).
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