University of Virginia Library

The Three Texts of 2 Henry IV
by
John Jowett and Gary Taylor

Disagreements abound about the textual history of 2 Henry IV, but a consensus does exist over some of its more elementary features. We have two substantive editions, the Quarto printed by Valentine Simmes in 1600 (Q) and the 1623 Folio (F). Q seems to have been set from Shakespeare's foul papers.[1] Recent studies have been more concerned with F, which was set from (or with extensive reference to) a manuscript whose characteristics are usually summed up as 'literary'.[2] The history of this manuscript, and the question of how it was used in the printing house—whether directly as printers' copy, or indirectly as a secondary source of readings—will not concern us here.[3] Instead we will begin by considering a curious bibliographical feature of Q which may be a key that unlocks the entire textual problem of the relationship between the two printed texts, and opens a door onto the literary and political interpretation of the work.

Q was printed in two issues, Q(a) and Q(b). Q(a) collates A-K4, L2; but Q(b) has been expanded to collate A-D4, E6, F-K4, L2. The added material is a complete scene, present in F, and there identified as 3.1. In order to accommodate this passage, equivalent to 113 type lines, E3 and E4 were reset with two additional leaves, E5 and E6, the second half of the original sheet E was cut out, and the additional sheet (E3-E6) stitched with E1 and E2 of the first printing.[4]

This procedure stimulates a number of obvious questions. Why was the material not included in Q(a)? How did it come to be included in Q(b)? And why, if extant copies are representative, was about half the stock of sheet E in its original state used, even though the printer had gone to considerable trouble to replace it?[5] These questions are inter-linked. Alfred Hart believed that the existence of numerous Q(a) copies showed that sheet E was not reset with additional leaves until some time after original publication: these copies, he suggested, could not have had the revised pages inserted, because they had already been sold.[6] Hart believed that 3.1 was originally suppressed through censorship. The fact that the scene was printed and published in Q(b) led Hart to conjecture further that 3.1 was not printed until after Queen Elizabeth's death, by which time the scene was allowable; the large quantity of stock that was available for the cancel resulted from slow sales.

Hart's hypothesis seems intrinsically improbable, in terms of the normal actions of author, printer, and publisher. Fortunately, bibliographical evidence enables us to show that the sequence of events Hart postulates almost certainly did not take place; for it seems possible to date the cancel. In 1946 James G. McManaway showed that the cancel must have been set after the remainder of the quarto.[7] Simmes is known to have begun replacing his stock of what Ferguson identifies as his 'Roman 1a' type in 1604;[8] since none of the replacement types are detectable in the cancel, it was presumably printed at some time prior to 1605, at the very latest. Different copies of the cancel sheet make use of two different states of paper, with related but clearly distinguishable watermarks. McManaway

had identified only one watermark, which he found also in some copies of Sheet F of Q; he therefore concluded that the cancel dated from approximately the same period as Q(a). Although this was a reasonable inference, it could hardly in itself constitute proof, for McManaway's identification of the watermark was inexact, and similar watermarks might be found in Simmes's books of later periods. We have therefore examined at least one copy of all extant Simmes's titles for the years 1600-1604 (inclusive)—that is, for the years between Simmes's printing of Q(a) and his acquisition of new types in 1604.[9] We have found either cancel watermark in only two books: Q 2 Henry IV (1600, Sheet F), and Much Ado About Nothing (1600, Sheets D, E, F, G, H, and I).[10] In 2 Henry IV the watermarks have been found only in one sheet, and are not present in every copy; by contrast, in Ado every copy examined has one of the watermarks in at least two sheets of the last six.

Of the two books, Q 2 Henry IV must have been printed, as McManaway showed, before the cancel. Much Ado had been entered in the Stationers' Register at the same time; it was printed for the same publishers, by the same single compositor, and its title-page re-used standing type from 2 Henry IV. The two plays were clearly companion jobs. Greg thought it likely, from the evidence of type-wear, that Ado was printed second of the two; John Hazel Smith observed that there was an interruption in the printing of Ado after Sheet G and conjectured that the cancel was printed during that interruption.[11] Such a conjecture could

be verified only by a comprehensive examination of the evidence of recurring type in both quartos; for the moment, what matters is the established proximity of the printing of the two books. The watermarks in themselves thus date the cancel to the period 'late 1600'. In order to account for the apparent conflict between the censorship of 3.1 in Q(a) and its restitution in Q(b), Hart posited a date of '1604 or even later' (p. 218). As this dating is untenable, the case for censorship of 3.1 collapses.

Hart's theory about the cancel is part of a larger hypothesis about the relationship of the Quarto and Folio texts. Hart attempted to explain why 3.1 was put back into the text, in Q(b); but he also needed to explain why it had been left out, in the first place, in Q(a). But his explanation of the omission is no more satisfactory than his explanation of its rectification. Prior to the publication of Q(a), Hart argued, 3.1 suffered at the hands of two independent excisers. He suggested that maybe 42 lines of 'undramatic' verse would have been cut by a 'play-adapter' in the theatre who was entrusted to make a suitably theatrical and performably short play out of Shakespeare's full draft. What remained of 3.1 after the 'heavy abridgement' which would be 'certain' was further attacked by the press censor in 1600. Censorship is indeed a fact of Elizabethan theatrical and book production which we cannot ignore, and it is true that at the end of 1600 (old style) the Essex rebellion may have made the censors particularly vigilant about references to insurrection or to the deposed monarch, Richard II—though what the King and Warwick actually say about Richard would not normally be accounted dangerous. Hart's first postulated stage of excision is open to more serious objections. First, one should be sceptical of 'theatrical' adaptation by any agent other than Shakespeare himself.[12] Secondly, Hart's explanation rests on a larger hypothesis: that the quarto text of this play—and most of Shakespeare's others—was set not, as is usually accepted, from foul papers, but from a prompt-book. This view has not been accepted by any editor of 2 Henry IV (or indeed any other implicated play), and we may be excused from refuting it again here. Foul papers are not likely to contain non-authorial 'theatrical' cuts, even if Shakespeare's company regularly engaged in such mutilation of a sharer's work. By Hart's account, it was only the combination of both theatrical and censorial cuts which debilitated the scene to such an extent that it was not worth printing. Take away the theatre adapter and there is no reason for the printer to omit the entire scene.

It thus seems highly probable that the scene was not deliberately omitted in the printing house. There are two alternative possibilities: that it was added as an afterthought, or that it was accidentally omitted. We need not seriously entertain the idea of Shakespeare rushing new copy to the printing house in 1600 and instructing the printers to reset part of the text to accommodate it.[13] It is far more likely that the scene was included in the manuscript sent to the printers, but that something unforeseen happened to it in the printing house.

The latter view has been advanced in any detail only by Alfred Pollard.[14] He identified a particular problem: how an omitted section of a play manuscript came to coincide with the theatrical unit of a scene. Pollard suggested that there was a direct correlation between manuscript leaves and quarto pages, the two sides of a single leaf being set as three printed pages. To support his conjecture he claimed that alternating compositors could be seen working in units of three pages. But more recently, Ferguson has established that a single workman, Simmes's Compositor A, set all of 2 Henry IV. In fact, Pollard's theory is not particularly helpful even in its own terms. It would lead one to suppose that if 3.1 occupied a single manuscript leaf, as he suggests, then it should have begun in Q(a) at the top of a page. It actually begins one-third of the way down a page.

But Pollard's most important premise is that a single scene occupied a single leaf of manuscript. If the play was drafted in sequence, Pollard asks us to accept three coincidental circumstances:

• 1. that the beginning of 3.1 coincided with the beginning of a manuscript leaf;
• 2. that the end of 3.1 coincided with the end of a manuscript leaf; and
• 3. that of all the leaves which might have been omitted in Q(a), the one that was omitted happened to be the same as the one with a single scene exclusively occupying both leaves.

The coincidences multiply. The omitted scene owes almost nothing to Shakespeare's historical sources. The portrait of the sick, ageing, sleepless King derives—here and throughout the play—from Samuel Daniel's 'First Fowre Bookes of the Civile Wars Between the two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke' (1595).[15] All but one of Daniel's post-Shrewsbury stanzas are concerned with the King's death-bed, and in Q(a) the King's first

appearance in the play (4.4) includes his swoon, his declaration that he is 'much ill', and the expectation of those present that 'This apoplexy will certain be his end'. Without 3.1, Shakespeare would take up the King's role at exactly the point where it is taken up in the source which most influenced his presentation of the King. The play would remain entirely coherent without the scene; 3.1 itself connects with no other scene and is a self-contained unit which can be amputated without leaving a wound.[16]

Both the difficulty in explaining how a single complete scene was omitted and the coherent sufficiency of the play without that scene encourage the same hypothesis: that Shakespeare added the scene as an afterthought.[17] This does not mean that the play went beyond the foul-paper stage without 3.1 in it; indeed such a postulate hinders more than it helps. But if, at some time before Shakespeare 'finished' the foul papers, he decided to add a scene to his original scheme, then such a scene would probably have been composed on a separate manuscript leaf—inserted (one may surmise) into the main body of the foul papers at the appropriate position. In this respect the addition to 2 Henry IV would have been treated similarly to the additions to Sir Thomas More—and the situation becomes closer to that in More than Pollard, who made some reference to Shakespeare's practice in that manuscript, realized. We can also see, not only how the scene came to be a detachable unit, but how it was detached. The compositor, working through the previous manuscript leaf (which we will call 'm'), would have passed the point at which the scene should have been inserted without noticing anything amiss. Like Q, the manuscript probably did not number act or scene divisions, so the compositor could not have been alerted by a correction to the numbering. Some time later he would have discovered, as he turned to the following inserted leaf (which we will call 'x'), that there was a break in continuity. Noting the continuity between leaf m and leaf n (the leaf immediately below x) he might easily identify leaf x as an inserted or misplaced section, without realizing where it should appear. If he were relatively conscientious he might keep it beside him as he moved on to leaf n and continued with the play, keeping an eye out for the proper place to insert it; if he were less scrupulous, he might simply set it aside, without bothering to investigate further.

This reconstruction is of course conjectural, but it at least explains in

simple physical terms how the passage might have been omitted. Pollard presumes that, for unknown reasons, the leaf was misplaced; this unexplained misplacement cannot be disproven, but it simply adds to the burden of assumptions Pollard's conjecture must bear. By contrast, we suggest that the leaf in question may well have been where it belonged—or rather, as close to where it belonged as it is physically possible for such an added leaf to be.

Whether Q was set by formes or seriatim, 3.1 might have been omitted because, by the time the compositor reached it, the preceding quarto pages—among which it rightly belonged—had already been set. If the compositor kept the anomalous leaf beside him during the remainder of his setting, then he would have been looking for a place in the manuscript in which a new scene began on a new page; if no such combination presented itself, then he would eventually come to the end of the play without finding a place for the material. At this point it would have become obvious that a whole manuscript leaf, clearly belonging somewhere in the play, was left over, and the printer could discover where it belonged only in one of two ways: by asking the author (or his representatives), or by re-examining the text himself. It seems to us relatively unlikely that Shakespeare or the Chamberlain's Men were consulted—though this possibility cannot be ruled out. A cursory reading of the scene would make clear that it belongs somewhere before the King's death (4.5); closer inspection reveals that it occurs after the King has 'sent foorth' his powers against the rebels (2.4), but before they encounter the enemy (4.1). On this basis the printer could in retrospect deduce that the scene had to be placed either before or after 3.2. In other words, he need only consult the manuscript at two points, in order to look very particularly for any signals of an intended insertion. Obviously, an eye specifically looking for some cryptic mark in the margin—it may have amounted to no more than a cross or slash—is much more likely to find it, and appreciate its significance, than an eye which does not expect any such signal. Consequently, there is a good chance that the printer could have discovered where the page belonged, even though the compositor did not. And even if the printer found no such marks, he had a 50/50 chance of choosing the right position—as, on the evidence of F, he did.[18] In fact, if the compositor remembered that he came across the extra leaf at the end of

setting sheet E or the beginning of setting sheet F—that is, closer to the end than the beginning of 3.2—then in retrospect anyone might have inferred the new scene's proper position, whether marked or not.

We therefore conjecture that the omission of 3.1 from Q(a) resulted from its being Shakespeare's addition to his own foul papers, and was therefore contained on a separate manuscript leaf which was, as an almost inevitable result, at least minimally out of text sequence. This conjecture explains why the omitted page consists of a self-contained literary unit which could be removed without damage to the play's coherence or plot. Pollard pointed out that the scene contains as many lines as we would expect a single leaf to contain, if it were written by the same playwright who wrote Hand D's addition to Sir Thomas More; like Pollard then and most scholars since, we believe that Hand D was Shakespeare's, and hence that the material omitted from Q(a) would neatly fit a leaf of Shakespeare's manuscript. We differ from Pollard only in offering an explanation of why this leaf contained a single detachable episode, and in explaining why it was 'misplaced' in the papers given to Simmes. Pollard's theory relies too much on coincidence; ours does not depend upon coincidence at all. Or rather, it depends on the assumption that, if Shakespeare did decide to add an interleaved scene, he might approximately fill both sides of the added leaf. He might have indicated on the original papers where the insert should go; on the other hand, if he intended to make his own fair copy of the play he need not have left any such mark at all. He might not even have bothered to fit the leaf into the appropriate place in the manuscript, but simply have left it at the end, or wherever he happened to have reached in the play when he actually wrote it. In these circumstances a compositor could not have come upon, or expected, the added leaf until he had already passed the point where its text should have been inserted: if any effort were made to incorporate it, some resetting was inevitable. Fortunately for us, the resetting took place only after the remainder of the play had been set; consequently, we can see what happened; consequently, we can 'see', in the purely bibliographical difference between Q(a) and Q(b), a curious feature of Shakespeare's own papers, which is most economically explained by the assumption that 3.1 was an addition to Shakespeare's original plan. An addition made, it is true, in the foul papers themselves, even before a fair copy had been made—but an addition nonetheless.

One can easily imagine why Shakespeare added the scene. As Hart said, 'without it, the King would not present himself to the audience till more than two-thirds of the play were over; he would appear but to die.'[19] Furthermore, without this scene the stretch of the play which the

Folio identifies as acts 2 and 3 would devote a mere 68 lines to the 'main' plot; the heart of the play is in Q(a) given over to a succession of comic scenes.[20] The insertion of 3.1 reminds us of the developing insurrection as well as expanding the King's role, introducing him earlier—and introducing too, in the meditative verse of this scene, 'the accent of Hamlet' and 'the troubled style of the later tragedies'.

But the textual critic will notice something else. The lines on insurrection and the recollection of Richard II can now be seen, not as material excised in 1600 in the wake of the Essex rebellion (as recent editors assume), but as material added by Shakespeare c. 1597-98, and later, in 1600, added by the printer after sheets for the play had been run off the press. The allegedly censorable material seems not to have been censored after all—for the printer not only printed it, he went out of his way to do so.

Both of these inferences have profound consequences for any analysis of the relationship between Q and F. When he finished the first rough draft of the play Shakespeare was apparently dissatisfied with the balance between its comic and serious material, and set out to expand the political plot by means of a major addition, largely taken up with reflections upon past historical events. Material not present in Q(a) was introduced in later texts in two stages: first in Q(b); and then in F. All of these passages expand the political plot. At least one of them—the scene inserted in Q(b)—seems to be a genuine addition to the foul papers, not a passage omitted from Q(a) because of censorship. We must therefore begin to suspect that some of the other material not present in Q(a) is absent from that text not because of interference by the censor, but because it had not yet been written when Shakespeare finished the foul papers which were eventually handed over to the printer. If one of the passages not in Q(a) is a belated revision, might not all of them be?

The Folio text contains eight substantial passages present in neither Q(a) nor Q(b). A. R. Humphreys discusses all of these under the prejudicial heading, 'The Cuts in the Quarto'. However, he admits that the absence from Q of four of these passages (1.1.166-179, 1.3.21-24, 1.3.36-55, and 2.3.23-45) cannot possibly be due to censorship. Beyond that, he says almost nothing about these passages, merely conjecturing that these Quarto 'cuts' may 'reflect an attempt to shorten the play for

performance' (p. lxx). Humphreys here reverts, without comment, to Hart's unsubstantiated belief that theatrical cuts were indicated in Shakespeare's foul papers.

The first three passages all concern 'Coniecture, Expectation, and Surmise'; the first and fourth reflect upon Northumberland's desertion of his allies at Shrewsbury; the second and third anticipate Northumberland's desertion of his new allies at Gaultree. All four can be omitted without damage to their immediate context; all four occur in the first third of the play; all four expand the role of the rebels. Similarly, 3.1 expands the role of their opponent, the King; it falls within the first half of the play; it meditates at length upon Northumberland's betrayals; it, too, looks back to the events of Richard II and Part One, and meditates upon 'how chances mockes, / And changes fill the cup of alteration, / With diuers liquors!'. Surely it is difficult to believe that the sustained interrelationship of these five passages, all absent from Q(a), is accidental, or the unintended by-product of some theatrical busybody inexplicably interfering with Shakespeare's foul papers in order to 'shorten the play' by excising 61, or even 103, lines (out of 3326). What we see here, it seems to us, is Shakespeare elaborating on the theme of his political material, and strengthening the links between Part Two and its predecessors in what we have come to regard as the second tetralogy.

There should be nothing surprising about this conclusion: in this respect, at least, 2 Henry IV reveals yet again the hand of Shakespeare revising, a hand we are increasingly accustomed to seeing in King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and Hamlet. But there is an important difference. In those other plays we are confronted by two distinct artifacts, two layers of text at an unknown distance from each other: at least in King Lear, the revision seems to have occurred years after the original composition. But in 2 Henry IV the revision seems, on the evidence of Q(b), to have begun as soon as Shakespeare completed the foul papers—if not before. We possess three layers of text, not just two, and we can see the play develop from Q(a) to Q(b) to F. It seems unlikely that there was any great delay between the addition of 3.1 and the completion of the four Folio passages in question: we are probably dealing with a continuum from rough draft, to supplemented rough draft, to authorial fair copy.

The absence from Q of four other passages has generally been attributed to censorship. Political interference has been much more widely credited as an explanation of these 'omissions' than as an explanation for Q(a)'s omission of 3.1. Indeed, in two of the passages any editor of the Quarto would be bound to suspect a lacuna, even if the Folio had never been printed:

Mourton's sentence is incomplete; he never reveals what he has heard; yet Northumberland has heard the unrevealed 'this' before, and repeats the very idiom Mourton had used at the end of the preceding line (speake the truth / speake truth). This is, at the very least, very suspiciously awkward. Likewise, in Act Four, after a 22½ line speech by Westmoreland, asking 'Wherefore' he has rebelled against the King, the Archbishop replies: The cryptic declaration that 'we are all diseasde' is here followed by a vague, anticlimatically short and indeed inexplicably cryptic list of causes, where we might well expect something more specific. The causes for suspicion are not so blatant as in the earlier passage, but they exist nonetheless. Moreover, one might well suspect, even without the aid of F, that the two awkwardnesses are related. In one we expect an Archbishop to explain why he had lent his authority to a rebellion; in the other, what news could Mourton have to relate, except the Archbishop's opposition to the King? The suspect passage occurs at the end of 1.1; the next 'political' scene, 1.3, begins with the entrance of the Archbishop, saying 'Thus haue you heard our cause, and knowne our meanes' (1.3.1; B4v). While Northumberland eventually decides not to lend his military support, the Archbishop leads the insurrection, and it would be very odd if he were not mentioned in 1.1.

We ought therefore reasonably to suspect, even without F, that Q is defective at two points, and that in both places the missing material had to do with an Archbishop's initiation and defence of a rebellion against the King of England. In Q's speech-prefixes the character in question is consistently called 'Bish.' or 'Bishop'. As Hart pointed out, 'Early in 1600 Oviedo, a Franciscan monk, had come from Spain to Ireland with the title of Bishop of Dublin; in April he conferred with the native chieftains, gave them £6,000 in money and promised them Spanish military

aid' (Hart, p. 191). 2 Henry IV was entered on the Stationer's Register on 23 August 1600, and printed with the date '1600'.

Without accepting any of Hart' implausible conjectures about the omission of 3.1, or the general relationship between Q and F, one must immediately concede that the probability of political interference in 1600 would in these two passages have been particularly high. This is even clearer when we look at the material supplied by the Folio at those two points. In late 1600 TLN 248-68 (1.1.189-209) would have been almost unbearably topical: Morton does not spend much time on the pertinent historical specifics, but instead devotes most of the speech to the general issue of religion white-washing rebellion. Nor does this passage much resemble the others we have examined, where authorial revision seems so probable: it only refers to the past in two parenthetical lines about King Richard, and it does not dwell upon the themes of 'Surmise' or betrayal. It thus seems to us highly likely that something essentially similar to what F adds must always have stood in Shakespeare's foul papers—although it is possible that the two lines about Richard II are a later addition, since the passage runs more smoothly without them:

But whether or not the reference to Richard II is an addition, it cannot itself have been the cause of the passage's deletion, because that cause need only have affected two detachable lines out of twenty. Moreover, the excision of these lines in late 1600 need not have originated with the Bishop of London himself. Sir John Hayward's First Part of the Life and Raigne of Henrie IIII had, the previous year, been suppressed because it offended Elizabeth; not only the ecclesiastical authorities, but any publisher would have been conscious of the dangerous sensitivity of such a passage. G. K. Hunter has shown that Valentine Simmes was himself almost certainly responsible for certain omissions of sensitive material from The Malcontent (1604); we have suggested elsewhere that Simmes could have been responsible for the excision of the abdication episode from Richard II (1597).[21] Richard II was printed for Andrew Wise; The Malcontent for William Aspley; 2 Henry IV for both Aspley and Wise. The one figure common to all these instances, where there is omission of sensitive political material from texts believed to have been set from authorial manuscripts, is the printer, Valentine Simmes.

The second Folio-only passage (4.1.55-79; TLN 1922-47) is equally suspicious. The Archbishop's justification of his rebellion has little to do with Richard II, or Henry IV's usurpation: if these were the grounds of offence, only a line and a half need have been omitted. In this case, unlike the first, the line and a half seem likely enough to have formed part of the passage from the beginning; but in itself it can hardly have provoked excision. But Richard II is here alleged to have been 'infected'; a 'Bishop' justifies rebellion, first in the most general terms, and then by a specific complaint which would have been, late in 1600, even more embarrassing. The primary complaint of the Earl of Essex, and what eventually provoked his abortive 'rebellion', was that he was 'deny'd accesse vnto' Elizabeth, by the very people who were his enemies and had brought him into disfavour with the Queen. Again, we find it hard to ignore the unintended but obvious relevance of these lines to the political situation in England at the time Q was printed.

Neither of these passages would have been particularly objectionable in 1597-98, when the play was written and submitted to the Master of the Revels for licensing; therefore we have no reason to suspect that, as they stand in F, they are very different from the way they stood in Shakespeare's foul papers—with the possible exception of the two parenthetical lines about Richard II, which may be a late addition. We are therefore strongly inclined to regard them as an integral part of the play from its inception, excised in 1600 by the ecclesiastical censor or the printer because of their dangerous relevance to a contemporary political crisis. Two passages absent from Q thus appear to be wanting because of 'censorship'. By contrast, four other passages absent from Q but present in F appear to represent Shakespeare's own additions, made soon after completion of the foul papers. An editor would naturally prefer to find one explanation for all eight passages unique to F; but censorship can hardly be denied in two, and can hardly be maintained in four. Two causes therefore appear to be operating, and we must judge which of them is more likely to apply in each of the remaining cases. One of these passages occurs in 1.3, where we have already seen two additions which seem to result from authorial revision (ll. 21-24, 36-55). The text of Q gives us no reason to suspect a lacuna:

If suspicion attaches to any part of this passage, it affects Hastings's first speech, where the text has obviously broken down in some way, and verse has been printed as prose. Otherwise, the characters move naturally from the weakness and division of the King's forces, to an account of whom he plans to send against them, to a decision to collect their own 'numbers' and prepare themselves for an encounter with the army being sent to meet them. If Q has suffered censorship here, it has left no mark on the text, and we could only infer its operation by comparison of the Quarto with the Folio, which expands the end of the passage: The Folio addition completes Hastings's part-line, but this cannot be taken as evidence that anything has been omitted from Q, because uncompleted concluding part-lines are common enough elsewhere in the play, and in most of Shakespeare's plays. Humphreys objects that without this passage 'the Archbishop, in a scene where he should stand out as leader, speaks only four lines at the beginning and a final one-line query' (p. lxxi). Humphreys's summary is, in point of fact, false: as we have just seen, in both Q and F the Archbishop also has another speech at ll. 76-78; he has yet another at ll. 25-26. Moreover, in the text as printed by Q the scene is only 63 lines long, of which the Archbishop speaks 9½. Humphreys underestimates the proportion of the scene given to the Archbishop, and overestimates the role which the scene manifestly requires of him. The Archbishop begins by saying 'Thus haue you heard our cause . . . Speake plainely your opinions of our hopes' (ll. 1-3). In other words, he has already, offstage, made his own contribution; he now seeks their reactions. That he does not dominate the scene which follows should hardly surprise us. Of course, in retrospect the Folio material is a definite structural improvement, but judgements that material improves a scene can never be taken as presumptive proof that it always belonged there. Moreover, Humphreys himself points to another difficulty when he refers to the Archbishop's 'final one-line query (which the folio shows to have been transferred from Mowbray)'. This formulation begs the question, which is whether Q or F changed the attribution of the scene's penultimate speech. In Q it is entirely appropriate that the Archbishop be given something to say near the end; in F, he has instead been given a long speech, so it is appropriate and indeed desirable for the penultimate line to be spoken by someone else. In their own terms, both Q and F are acceptable. But if the Archbishop's long speech was omitted for political reasons when Q was printed, it becomes difficult to explain why Q 'transferred' the penultimate speech from Mowbray to the Archbishop. Since Mowbray does not speak the preceding speech, there is no obvious difficulty in his speaking the line which the Folio assigns to him. Why should anyone have bothered to make this change? Humphreys says that the person who censored the text 'enterprisingly' wanted to 'compensate' for the loss of the Archbishop's big speech, and so 'enable him to show some small signs of leadership at the end of this scene' (p. lxxii, note 2). This conjectural being looks more like a playwright than a censor, and it is hard to believe that the man who left gaping nonsense in 1.3 and 4.1 should have shown such an intelligent concern for dramatic niceties here. The variant prefix cannot be credibly attributed to those who prepared Q for publication, and hence appears to represent genuine authorial alteration—an alteration, moreover, which can hardly be disentangled from the Folio's added speech.

If we compare the added speech with the two passages where censorship

may reasonably be suspected, the differences seem more significant than the similarities. The Archbishop is speaking; but he does not—as both other passages do—refer to his ecclesiastical function, or in any way attempt to justify rebellion. Indeed, what he says implicity criticizes the very enterprise upon which the rebels have embarked. The Archbishop's contempt for the feeble London mob would of course have been uncomfortably pertinent after the Essex rebellion. But the two other censored passages would have been objectionable for most of the preceding year.[22]

The scene makes sense without the passage; the addition seems related to a dramatically-motivated change of speech-prefixes; it differs substantially from the two other 'censored' passages; it occurs in a scene with two other authorial expansions. Moreover, like the scene added in Q(b) and the four uncensored passages added in F, it dwells at length upon the past, upon the fickleness of fate, upon expectations of what is 'to come', and upon Richard II. Hart believed that passages were omitted from Q because they mentioned Richard II, but no such pattern can be defended. The scene added in Q(b) deals extensively with Richard II, and the other authorial expansions are much preoccupied with the earlier part of Henry IV's reign; the two censored passages, by contrast, refer to Richard II only in three-and-a-half lines, two of which may well be authorial expansions. It seems to us more likely that Shakespeare added references to Richard, than that anyone involved in printing Q subtracted them. In this respect, as in others, the Archbishop's speech belongs among the authorial expansions, not the unauthorized deletions.

Finally, it appears to us that Shakespeare was not sure quite what to do with the Archbishop, and that this uncertainty of purpose explains

both the original structure of the scene and its revision. The Archbishop's defence of treason is, prudently, left offstage; this leaves him little to do but invite the opinions of his colleagues (ll. 1-4), lamely confirm other people's speeches (ll. 25-26, 76-78), and initiate the exit (l. 109). Humphreys justly complains that the last of these speeches is 'colourless'; but in truth all of them are. The Archbishop plays a role here similar to Priam's in the great Trojan council-scene in Troilus and Cressida: technically he presides over the debate, but he makes little dramatic impression. Only at Gaultree does the Archbishop have a proper, interesting and dramatic part to play. It does not seem to us in the least surprising that, as originally written, the Archbishop's part in 1.3 should have been relatively feeble. By contrast, in expanding the scene Shakespeare used it as an anticipation of the disaster at Gaultree. There the rebels betray themselves when they surrender their actual physical power on the basis of promises, of 'Coniecture, Expectation, and Surmise'; Folio 1.3 greatly expands the thematic debate about whether they should trust in other people's promises (Northumberland's, in this case). Moreover, at Gaultree it is the Archbishop, as leader of the rebels, who accepts Lancaster's terms, and who is thus most directly responsible for the rebels' defeat. In 1.3 the Folio makes the Archbishop more openly responsible for the decision to go ahead without Northumberland: 'Let vs on: / And publish the occasion of our Armes'. The very length of the added speech makes it look like a summing up; though in fact it has relatively little to do with the preceding debate, it does, as Humphrey says, enable the Archbishop to dominate the scene, and clearly establish himself as leader of the rebel faction. In Q he finally asks his partners 'Shall we go draw our numbers, and set on?'; in F he simply declares, 'Let vs on'. The very similarity of phrasing, across this distance, suggests that the Folio's speech may be an addition: as E. A. J. Honigmann has shown, Shakespeare elsewhere integrates additions by having them begin with an anticipation of the point at which they will end, and rejoin the original text.[23]

We therefore strongly suspect that all three Folio additions to 1.3 are genuine authorial expansions. Only one major Folio addition remains as a candidate for censorship (4.1.103-39; TLN 1969-2005). These Folio lines seem even less objectionable than the Archbishop's speech in 1.3. They have no possible relevance to the 'Bishop of Dublin', and only the last 2½ lines could be interpreted in terms of the Earl of Essex—and they could, of course, be cut without damage to the remainder. Even if a particularly timid reader took exception to the middle of Westmorland's first speech ('Construe . . . Griefe on'), it too could have been cut,

leaving a transition so seamless that no one could have suspected corruption ('O my good Lord Mowbray, were you not restor'd . . .'). The remainder of the passage could only have been censored if objection were being taken to any reference to Richard II. Those who have proposed censorship as an explanation for Q's 'omission' have posited such a desire to remove all references to Richard; but, as we have said, this conjecture can hardly be reconciled with Q(b) addition of 3.1, and in any case reference to Richard seems to have played no part in the censorship of the two most suspect 'omissions'. Instead, references to the earlier plays in the tetralogy seem to have been added at a later stage by Shakespeare himself. In other respects, too, the content of this passage links it with Shakespeare's expansions: an elegiac preoccuption with the past, with the unpredictability and fickleness of fortune, with the irrational behaviour of the populace, with political betrayal (here, Richard's of Mowbray).

We therefore doubt that the passage here printed in F should have suffered wholesale excision by the censor of Q. However, something may have gone wrong with the text of Q:

Westmoreland's 'But this is meere digression' certainly makes more obvious sense in F, where it occurs in the middle of one of his own speeches. On the other hand, it could simply represent Westmorland's desire to break off these unprofitable recriminations in order to make the offer he has come to deliver. If Q were our only text, this is how the line would be interpreted and defended; no actor would have any difficulty communicating that interpretation. If something has been lost from Q, it would be most easy to believe that what stood in the foul papers differed substantially from what stands in F: either because it was more objectionable than the extant text (and so was deliberately censored) or because it was much shorter (and so was accidentally omitted). It seems to us safest to assume that Q reproduces the foul papers accurately, and that the whole passage is another of Shakespeare's expansions of his political material.

Of the nine substantial passages not present in Q(a) it appears that only two have suffered deliberate excision because of their political content:

1.1.189-209 and 4.1.55-79. This is much less interference than Hart and Dover Wilson suspected.

The traditional explanation for the nine passages not present in Q(a) is that all nine stood in the foul papers, and were omitted for three separate reasons, through the actions of three separate agents: printing-house inadvertence (3.1), theatrical cuts marked in the foul papers (1.1.166-179, 1.3.21-24, 1.3.36-55, 2.3.23-45), censorship by the Bishop of London (1.1.189-209, 1.3.85-108, 4.1.55-79, 4.1.103-139). By contrast, we suppose that only three passages present in the foul papers were omitted from Q(a), and we have reduced the agents of deliberate cutting from two (editors and ecclesiastical authorities) to one (ecclesiastical authorities; or possibly printer).[24] We propose that 3.1 was omitted because of a confusion in the manuscript, a confusion virtually inevitable if 3.1 were an added scene written on a separate leaf.

This hypothesis not only produces a more economical account of Q; it also, we believe, usefully illuminates the relationship between Q and F. The multiple relationships of theme and content between 3.1 and six other passages added by F make it possible, and in our view likely, that all seven additions result from a closely-linked two-stage process of authorial expansion. Nor is it difficult to see why, in this particular play, expansion should have been called for. Harold Jenkins has plausibly conjectured that Shakespeare had originally intended to treat Henry IV's reign in a single play, and that his decision to write two did not come until fairly late in the composition of Part One.[25] More recently, attention has been drawn to how seriously Shakespeare's plans for Part Two may have been disrupted by the politically-imposed change of Oldcastle's name to Falstaff.[26] In beginning to write Part Two Shakespeare was therefore dealing with an enormously popular comic figure, but had little historical material left for development. By the time he finished his rough draft he seems to have decided that something must be done to expand the play's political material; he did so, in large part, by looking backward, emphasizing the links with his own earlier history plays. Hence all the additions come in the play's first 2000 lines (out of 3300), before John of Lancaster's entrance at Gaultree. From this point on, the play can look to the future: the defeat of the rebels, the death of Henry

IV, Hal's accession, his rejection of Falstaff (and of the past generally). Shakespeare's additions cannot have been made because his first draft was too short—it was already 3000 lines long. What apparently disturbed him was not the absence of sufficient matter, but the balance of different kinds of matter.

What should an editor do? One could edit Q(a), conjecturally emending the text where it seems corrupt on its own terms and conjecturally adding (from F) only the two passages apparently censored. The resulting text would represent a reconstruction, as far as possible, of Shakespeare's foul papers, before he commenced his expansion of the political material. It would be harder to justify adding 3.1, because the composition of 3.1 seems merely to have been the beginning of a unified and conscious process of revision which culminated in the addition of six other passages of a similar nature. But it seems equally misleading to accept these six added passages from F, without seriously considering every Folio variant as a possible authorial revision. Naturally, many of the 'literary' features of F—the Act division, the wholesale excision of profanity, the smoothing out of colloquialism—seem most unlikely to originate in a (conjectural) fair copy made by Shakespeare in 1597-98. The Folio text undoubtedly derives from a highly sophisticated scribal transcript, at some considerable remove from Shakespeare's papers. It probably also suffered from unusual circumstances in Jaggard's printing shop. Nevertheless, it seems to us hard to deny that it derives from a text which represented the culmination of a process of conscious revision initiated even before a fair copy was begun. Any editor who abandons F has decided to leave the text in a state Shakespeare himself found unsatisfactory.

Notes