The most useful information that can be obtained from this account of the compositors’ method of working is a plausible explanation of the scene heading confusion in Act 2. Two compositors, identified by Hinman as ‘B’ and ‘C’, set King John,1 which is the first play in the section of the Folio devoted to the Histories;2 it occupies 22 pages signed a1r– b5v.3 Let us trace the compositors’ work in the play. Compositor B set (in the following order) a3v and a4r; a3r and a4v; b3r and b4v; b2v and b5r; b2r and b5v; b1v and b6r (Richard II, first page); and br and b6v (Richard II, second page). Compositor C, working at the same time as B, began with a2v and a5r; then a2r and a5v; a1v and a6r; ar and a6v; and b3v and b4r.

  Now for our problem. On a4v, Compositor B set ‘Actus Secundus’ (no full stop, no ‘Scæna’ anything) near the foot of the first column. Meanwhile C, on a2r, set ‘Scæna Secunda’ at the top of the second column, and on a5r, his next page, at the top of the first column, set ‘Actus Tertius, Scæna Prima’ without a following rule (the page is fairly full). Every page in the Folio has a catchword at the foot of the second column to remind the compositor of what the first word of the next page should be (a way of checking up on the casting-off among other things). B set ‘Actus’ as catchword at the foot of a4v, which means that both he and C, who set ‘Actus Tertius, Scæna Prima’ at the top of the next page, saw something in the copy that they both interpreted as a new act. So we can acquit the compositors of any error on this division, which as noted above, reflects a decision made by the scribes who prepared the manuscript.

  Both B and C were experienced in the Folio by this time (the Histories follow the Comedies, in which both worked). We must presume, then, that both B, when he set ‘Actus Secundus’ on a4v, and C, when he set ‘Scæna Secunda’ on a2r, saw something in the manuscript that they interpreted in these ways. There is no reason to suppose that the manuscript contained these elaborated Latin formulae; it is more likely that either numbers alone, or some abbreviated word and a number were used (judging by the surviving manuscripts of pre-production transcripts). As Braunmuller says, ‘Having already set a full heading for Act 3, Compositor C would be predisposed to accept a scene-only heading since… his earlier experience taught him that plays with full headings at the start of any act but the first were overwhelmingly likely to include scene-headings as well’ (30). If the break for Act 2 was marked in the manuscript merely with a numeral (e.g. ‘II’), then C’s ‘Scæna Secunda’ (instead of Actus Secundus) is not too difficult to account for. This explanation, however, cannot be invoked to account for Compositor B’s error, or the other anomalies associated with it (no full stop, no rule on a page with room for them). Braunmuller sums up: ‘The traditional account seems correct in proposing that some mark(s) indicating “two” (in numerals or letters, Latin or English) appeared in two places in the copy: Compositor B surprisingly interpreted the marks he saw as “Actus Secundus”; Compositor C, less surprisingly, interpreted the marks he saw as “Scaena Secunda” ’ (40).

  To conclude: while there are problems in the text of King John, their extent and difficulty should not be exaggerated. The careful bibliographical work done on the play by recent scholars leaves us with solutions to almost all these problems, a rare and fortunate condition for the editor of a Shakespeare play.

  * * *

  1The political topicality of the play has long been a focus of scholarly attention. Richard Simpson, ‘The politics of Shakespeare’s historical plays’, The New Shakspere Society’s Transactions (1874), 396–441, argues that the play deviates from its source material in ways designed to heighten parallels between King John and Queen Elizabeth. A similar argument is made by Lily B. Campbell and is subsequently developed at length in Honigmann’s edition (Ard2), which provides a précis of moments in which historical fact has been manipulated in order to advertise the similarities between John and Elizabeth (xxix).

  2Robert Lane, ‘ “The sequence of posterity”: Shakespeare’s King John and the succession controversy’, SP, 92 (1994), 460–81.

  3For the early years of the reign, see Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 2002); for the later years, Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes, Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester, 2014).

  4Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford, 1996), 68.

  5If ‘Angevin’ is limited to English kings who actually ruled over Anjou, then John is the last. However, John’s descendants continued to claim the territory, and regular patrilineal descent gives Richard II a claim to this distinction.

  6The pragmatism of the citizens resembles the attitude of Hobs, the Tanner of Tamworth, in Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV. Asked by the disguised King Edward to declare his dynastic allegiances, Hobs replies, ‘I am just akin to Sutton Windmill, I can grind which way so ere the wind blow, if it be Harry I can say “Well fare, Lancaster”, if it be Edward I can sing, “York, York for my money” ’ (Jesse M. Lander, ‘ “Faith in me vnto this commonwealth”: Edward IV and the civic nation’, Renaissance Drama, 27 (1998), 47–78, 65).

  7John Watkins, ‘Losing France and becoming England: Shakespeare’s King John and the emergence of state-based diplomacy’, in Curtis Perry and John Watkins (eds), Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2009), 78–99.

  8Felix E. Schelling, The English Chronicle Play (New York, 1902).

  9Willy Maley, ‘ “And bloody England into England gone”: empire, monarchy, and nation in King John’, in Willy Maley and Margaret Trudeau-Clayton (eds), This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard (Farnham, Surrey, 2010), 49–61, 61.

  10Helgerson, 8.

  11Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570), ed. Ronald B. Bond (Toronto, 1987), 242–3.

  12G.R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1982), 427.

  13Thomas Clancy, ‘English Catholics and the papal deposing power, 1570–1640: Part I. The Elizabethan period’, Recusant History, 6 (1961), 114–40.

  14Richard Wilson cites as evidence for Shakespeare’s Catholicism the fact that in King John he ‘toned down an anti-Catholic source’ (Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester, 2004), 62). David Bevington also affirms that Shakespeare ‘consciously toned down the earlier play’s anti-Catholic excesses’ (Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th edn (New York, 2004), A–38). Alternatively, Kastan sees little reason to take these elements of the play as ‘evidence of Shakespeare’s secret Catholicism or even much lingering sympathy for it’ (Kastan, Will, 60).

  15Brian Cummings, ‘Shakespeare and the Inquisition’, SS 65 (2013), 306–22.

  16David Womersley, ‘The politics of Shakespeare’s King John’, RES, n.s. 40 (1989), 502.

  17Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY, 1990), 182.

  18Tom McAlindon, ‘Swearing and forswearing in Shakespeare’s histories: the playwright as contra-Machiavel’, RES, 51 (2000), 208–29; Jonas Barish, ‘King John and oath breach’, in Shakespeare: Text, Language, Criticism (Hildesheim, 1987), 1–18.

  19Oxf1 adds a SD (‘Philip takes John’s hand’) at 190 and again (‘He releases John’s hand’) at 262. Oxf does not include a SD for the initiation of the handclasp, but includes one for its termination: ‘He takes his hand from King John’s hand’ (3.1.246). See p. 124.

  20Howard Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry, and Power in Renaissance England (Stanford, Calif., 1990); Tim Thornton, Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2006).

  21Paulina Kewes, ‘The Elizabethan history play: a true genre?’, in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: Volume II, The Histories (Oxford, 2003), 170–93.

  22Kastan describes the history plays as ‘meta-history’: they ‘may be undependable registers of historical fact, but they are brilliant meditations on the nature of history itself’ (‘Shakespeare and English history’, in Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2001), 167–82).

  23Forker, 6–30. Forker draws on Brian Vickers, ‘The Troublesome Raigne, George Peele, and the date of King John’, in Brian Boyd (ed.), Words that Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson (Newark, NJ, 2004), 78–116. Vickers builds on the case first made by H. Dugdale Sykes, ‘The Troublesome Reign’, in Sidelights on Shakespeare (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1919), 99–125.

  24Adolphus William Ward, A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne, vol. 1 (1875), 124.

  25Thomas Merriam, ‘King John divided’, Literary and Linguistic Computing, xix (2004), 181–9, argues that the linguistic evidence suggests that King John was co-authored; we are also grateful to have received his most recent unpublished work presenting additional evidence of collaboration.

  26Dover Wilson attests to the presence of ‘innumerable little verbal echoes in King John’ (xxxiii–xxxiv); Chambers finds ‘some 150 places’ where phrases from Troublesome Reign appear in King John (1.367; quoted in Bullough, 5).

  27David Scott Kastan, ‘“To set a form upon that indigest”: Shakespeare’s fictions of history’, Comparative Drama, 17 (1983), 1–15, 15.

  28Sir Philip Sidney’s phrase, in The Defence of Poesie (1595), D3v.

  29King Henry VIII, ed. Gordon McMullan, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (2000), 7, 96.

  30Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, vol. 1 (1784), 31.

  31Elizabeth Inchbald, The British Theatre, vol. 1 (1808), pt 4, 4.

  32For examples, see Dessen & Thomson.

  33Oxf1 treats Hubert and the Citizen as one character; Oxf, as we do, presents them as distinct.

  34Igor Djordjevic, King John (Mis)Remembered: The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory (Farnham, Surrey, 2015), 10, n. 20. See also Thomas L. Berger et al., An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500–1660, rev. ed. (Cambridge, 1998), 59.

  35G.E. Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson, Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared (Chicago, 1945), 108.

  36Quoted in Ingleby, 230.

  37Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Restoration Drama (Cambridge, 1923), Appendix B.II.3, 315–16; Braunmuller, 81–2.

  38Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford, 1992), 146–61.

  39Dawson; Robert B. Hamm Jr, ‘Walker v. Tonson in the court of public opinion’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 75 (2012), 95–112.

  40William Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John (1734), 72. It should be pointed out that both Tonson and Walker included six apocryphal plays in their series (Dawson, 66).

  41John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, vol. 4 (Bath, 1832), 158.

  42Emmett L. Avery, ‘Cibber, King John, and the students of the law’, Modern Language Notes, 53 (1938), 272–5.

  43A chronological list of performances can be found in Hirvela.

  44Henry Irving, The Works of William Shakespeare: King Richard III, King John, Merchant of Venice, King Henry IV, Pt I–II (New York, 1890), 155.

  45McGirr, 32. John defends his claim: ‘Are we not there his Successor approv’d? / Adopted? By the general states confirm’d? / And is a Nation’s Act responsible to thee?’ (Cibber, 6).

  46Pedicord; Hirvela, 33; Braunmuller, 84; Beaurline, 6.

  47Holland; W.J. Lawrence, ‘Art in the theatre, the pioneers of modern English stage mounting: William Capon’, Magazine of Art, 18 (1894–5), 289–92.

  48D.R. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003).

  49Moody, 118; Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions (Oxford, 1989), 204. See also Nicola J. Watson, ‘Kemble, Scott, and the mantle of the Bard’, in Marsden, 73–92.

  50Schoch, Victorian Stage, provides a nuanced account of the multivalent medievalism encouraged by theatrical antiquarianism.

  51Quoted in George C.D. Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving (New York, 1920), 2.172.

  52The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 20 May 1837, 189, which appears to have reprinted material from p. 174 of a contribution by Planché, ‘The history of stage costume’, in Charles MacFarlane (ed.), The Book of Table-Talk, vol. 1 (1836), 143–75.

  53Planché, 60; Moody, 119.

  54Gilbert Abbott A’Beckett, King John (With the Benefit of the Act), A Burlesque (1837), 6.

  55Schoch, Not Shakespeare, 31. See also Best.

  56Examiner, 29 October 1842, 693.

  57Pedicord; cf. Shattuck, who includes ‘Sweep off these base invaders from the land’ (10).

  58Steevens2, 5.3–4.

  59Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford, 1991), 129.

  60Malone, 563.

  61Valentine Green, An Account of the Discovery of the Body of King John, in the Cathedral Church of Worcester, July 17th, 1779 (1779), 7.

  62Athenaeum, 23 September 1899, 427, quoted in Beaurline, 21.

  63Robert Davenport, King John and Matilda (1655), B4v, D4r; Cibber, 42. The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, written by Anthony Munday perhaps with Henry Chettle in 1598 and published in 1601, celebrate Robin Hood and his chaste love Matilda/Maid Marian, but they do not refer to Magna Carta.

  64Henry Hallam, View of the State of Europe During the Middle Ages, new edn, 3 vols (1872), 2.326. Quoted in Schoch, Victorian Stage, 118.

  65Kachur, 38. An alternative account of the production’s immediate political context is provided by James Ellison, ‘Beerbohm Tree’s King John (1899): a fin-de-siècle fragment and its cultural context’, Shakespeare, 3 (2007), 293–314.

  66Anselm Heinrich, ‘Reclaiming Shakespeare 1914–1918’, in Andrew Maunder (ed.), British Theatre and the Great War, 1914–1919: New Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2015), 76; Ailsa Grant Ferguson points out that the Bastard’s lines were used ‘prolifically in morale-boosting and patriotic materials such as postcards and memorial plaques’ (‘Performing commemoration in wartime: Shakespeare galas in London, 1916–19’, in Clara Calvo and Coppélia Kahn (eds), Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory (Cambridge, 2015), 210).

  67Observer, 14 June 1970.

  68Quoted in Geraldine Cousin, King John: Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester, 1994), 63.

  69Smallwood, ‘Unbalanced’; Holland, 217.

  70‘Remarks by the Vice President at Heritage Foundation President’s Club Dinner Presenting Lady Margaret Thatcher with the Clare Boothe Luce Award’, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/text/vp20021209.html.

  71John Heilpern, ‘Obscure Shakespeare, dusted off and glorious’, New York Observer, 14 February 2000.

  72Ben Brantley, ‘A Shakespearean take on the primaries, a Shakespearean take on the timeless political process’, New York Times, 31 January 2000.

  73Clare Brennan, ‘King John review – a stunning pageant’, Guardian, 3 May 2015.

  74Mark Brown, ‘Shakespeare’s Globe to stage King John for 800th anniversary of Magna Carta’, Guardian, 21 November 2014.

  75Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 16 April 2015.

  76Holly Williams, ‘James Dacre brings his acclaimed version of Shakespeare’s “King John” to the Globe Theatre’, Independent, 3 June 2015.

  77Stephen Collins, ‘Review: King John, Globe Theatre’, britishtheatre.com, 15 June 2015.

  78The compositors who worked on King John were the men known as ‘B’ and ‘C’. See pp. 132–3.

  79No completely authenticated Shakespearean dramatic manuscript survives, certainly not one of any of the plays published in the Folio. The only possible case is that of the collaborative play Sir Thomas More, a scene in which is thought by many experts to be by Shakespeare and in his handwriting. See Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (2011); T.H. Howard-Hill (ed.), Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the Play and its Shakespearian Interest (Cambridge, 1989).

  80The directions text is that part of the text which consists of stage directions, speech prefixes and anything that is part of the performance but not part of the dialogue.

  81He is Philip Faulconbridge until King John knights him: ‘Arise Sir Richard, and Plantagenet’ (1.1.162), which should mean his name is Sir Richard Plantagenet. But no one ever calls him this; they call him all sorts of rude names and variants on his original and later name, but never this (Salisbury comes closest, calling him ‘Sir Richard’ at 4.3.41). The Bastard himself seems remarkably reluctant to name himself in 5.6.

  82See M. Mahood, Bit Parts in Shakespeare’s Plays (Cambridge, 1992). She attempts briefly to make a case for James Gurney (44–5); the case is weak because he is onstage for so short a time, and has only half a line to speak.

  83The taxonomy of theatrical documents established by the New Bibliography was subject to revisionist critique in the later part of the twentieth century; see Paul Werstine, ‘Narratives about printed Shakespeare texts: “foul papers” and “bad quartos”’, SQ, 41 (1990), 65–86; William B. Long, ‘“Precious few”: English manuscript playbooks’, in Kastan, Companion, 414–33; Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and Their Contexts (Cambridge, 1996); Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford, 2000). For a recent defence of the legacy of New Bibliography, see Gabriel Egan, The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2010).

  84The bookholder of the King’s Men in the 1620s, Edward Knight, made a MS of John Fletcher’s play Bonduca, from which two and a half scenes are missing. Knight’s explanation of this is celebrated: ‘the occasion. why these are wanting here. the booke where by it was first Acted from is lost: and this hath beene transcrib’d from the fowle papers of the Authors wh were found’.This MS is in the British Library (Add. MS 36758.fol. 23a).