THE QUARTO

  Qa

  A copy of the play was entered by Andrew Wise and William Aspley in the Stationers’ Register on 23 August 1600 and printed that year by Valentine Simmes as a quarto bearing the title ‘THE / Second part of Henrie / the fourth, continuing to his death, / and coronation of Henrie / the fift. / With the humours of sir Iohn Fal- / staffe, and swaggering / Pistoll’. The text shows signs that have been used in the past to claim that it was copied from a draft of the play based on an authorial manuscript. Its inconsistencies – missing or inadequate stage directions, variant spellings and speech prefixes, ghost characters – are of the sort one finds in the quarto of Much Ado, a copy of which was entered by Wise and Aspley at the same time as Part Two; and generations of editors have speculated that the source of the Q text must have been a holograph kept by the Lord Chamberlain’s men as a safeguard against the theft of the play by a rival company until they were ready to sell that holograph to a stationer for publication.3 The company would have been reluctant to part with its annotated playbook, Greg reasoned, because that document alone would contain the licence from the Master of the Revels authorizing performance.4 Although, as Fredson Bowers countered, ‘There is no evidence whatever … that an author ever submitted for payment anything but a fair copy, or that the company required a dramatist to turn over his original foul sheets along with the fair copy’ (Bowers, 15), this narrative of textual transmission has continued to enjoy wide currency, and virtually all editors of the play since Wilson (Cam1), including the most recent Oxford and Cambridge editors, have subscribed to the theory that Q was based on Shakespeare’s uncorrected holograph. Thus it must be dealt with.

  The evidence that editors have found to support their argument that Q is based on a holograph rather than a playbook is predicated on the anachronistic belief that a copy used in the playhouse would, like a modern promptbook, record details of decisions made in rehearsal, especially stage directions. The stage directions in Q are infrequent and far less regular than one finds in a modern promptbook, but those that are included offer unusual descriptive detail, as if an author were writing notes to himself for staging or costuming: ‘Enter Rumour painted full of tongues’ (Ind.0); ‘Enter the Lord Bardolfe at one doore’ (1.1.0); ‘Enter sir Iohn alone, with his page bearing his sword and buckler’ (1.2.0); ‘Enter the King in his night-gowne alone’ (3.1.0). Authorial idiosyncrasy may account for unnecessary information provided in the opening stage direction of 4.1, which places the scene ‘within the forrest of Gaultree’ – a location established by the first two lines of dialogue – and for an odd reminder of a character’s function following his name at the entrance of ‘Thomas Mowbray (Earle Marshall)’ (1.3.0). A few sound cues, too, may conceivably indicate the author’s occasional attentiveness to stage practice, although they may just as well be annotations made by a theatrical bookkeeper. A ‘Shout’ of soldiers is indicated when peace is made at Gaultree (4.1.314), an ‘Alarum’ and ‘Excursions’ follow the arrest of the rebels (4.2.0), a Retraite is sounded to signal the end of fighting (4.2.25), and ‘Trumpets sound’ when the new King and his train pass over the stage on the way to his coronation (5.5.4), as they do again, according to Pistol (though without a stage direction), after the coronation (5.5.37).5

  The variety of speech prefixes in Q also was thought to be typical of a holograph but atypical of a playbook used for performance. As McKerrow asserted, a theatrical promptbook ‘would surely, of necessity, be accurate and unambiguous in the matter of character-names’ – so the variable naming of characters in speech prefixes and stage directions in Q indicates that it must have been set from Shakespeare’s ‘original MS’.6 Characters in Q are signalled by a profusion of designations. Falstaff has seven different speech prefixes: ‘Iohn’, ‘sir Iohn’, ‘Falstaffe’, ‘Falst.’, ‘Fal.’, ‘Fa.’ and, once, ‘Old.’, a vestige of his earlier incarnation as Oldcastle. The Lord Chief Justice is designated by four (‘Iustice’ and ‘Iust.’, ‘Lord’ and ‘Lo.’); Prince Henry by three (‘Harry’, ‘Prince’ and finally, ‘King’); and his brothers likewise by both their Christian names and their titles: Thomas of Clarence is ‘Clar.’ (or ‘Cla.’) and ‘Tho.’; Humphrey of Gloucester, ‘Hum.’ (or ‘Humph.’) and ‘Glo.’; John of Lancaster, ‘Prince’ and ‘Iohn’ and, to distinguish him from Prince Henry in 4.3, ‘Lanc.’. Shallow is designated by ‘Shallow’, ‘Shall.’, ‘Shal.’ and ‘Sha.’; Silence, by three unabbreviated forms, ‘Silence’, ‘Silens’ or ‘Scilens’. Designations for the women move even more fluidly between individuation and occupation or type. Mistress Quickly is called ‘Quickly’ or ‘Qui.’, but, far more often, ‘Hostesse’ (or three abbreviations of it), while Doll Tearsheet has no fewer than eight speech prefixes including, most generically, ‘Whoore’ in 5.4. Such variations may provide a glimpse into the mind of an author at work, conceiving each character in different ways as he writes; but, it is argued, they would not have survived the regularizing practices of those involved in preparing a playbook for performance. Recent scholarship, however, has shown this long-held assumption to be false. The eighteen playhouse manuscripts and three quartos with playhouse annotations surviving from this period are notably inconsistent in their use of speech prefixes and in the names used in stage directions,7 and the variable forms found in Q are fully consistent with those found in these manuscript playbooks.

  Ghost characters – intended for inclusion in a scene, but then apparently forgotten – are similarly thought to reveal a writer at work and, it is believed, would have been purged from a text used for theatrical performance. Part Two is haunted by such characters. Fauconbridge (1.3), Kent (4.3) and Sir John Russell (2.2), all named in stage directions, remain mute and presumably were abandoned, though not erased, in the course of composition. Sir John Umfrevile is given a line at 1.1.161 but otherwise is not heard from, his role apparently conflated with that of Lord Bardolph but his one speech prefix overlooked. Other characters are more problematic because, though mute, they may serve a function. Sir John Blunt enters twice (3.1.31, 5.2.41) when his presence seems only to swell a scene; yet, though unnamed, he apparently accompanies Prince John when the latter enters at 4.2.23, for the Prince instructs him to guard Collevile fifty lines later. The presence of the mute Surrey at 3.1.31 is required too, in response to the King’s calling for him at 3.1.1. And both Lord Bardolph (4.1) and Lord Westmorland (5.2) are listed to enter scenes where they have no lines. One other anomalous name has been said to attest to the unfinished nature of the copy for Q: that of the actor John Sincklo, whose name substitutes for the character he plays – ‘Beadle’ – in both the initial stage direction and the speech prefixes of 5.4. Repeated reference to the Beadle’s emaciated appearance suggests that Shakespeare wrote the role with a comically thin member of his company in mind; and apparently, in his holograph, the name of the actor loomed larger for him than the character did. This does not provide proof, however, as has commonly been held, that Q was based on an uncorrected holograph rather than on a copy of playhouse provenance. As William Long has demonstrated (‘Precious’), ghost characters repeatedly appear in the surviving manuscript playbooks of this period, and there is no evidence that scripts prepared for performance would have been systematically purged of them.

  If ghost characters reveal Shakespeare having second thoughts or simply being inattentive, imprecise or inadequate stage directions for those characters who do speak may suggest that he finds their entrances and exits implicit in the dialogue and not worth noting for performance purposes. Indeed, actors could be counted on to work out their own comings and goings in rehearsal: such things would not need to be recorded in a playbook. Some unnoted entrances and exits in Q, however, are not so self-evident: among them, the entrance and exit of the Porter at 1.1.1 and 6; the entrance of an attendant for the Lord Chief Justice at 1.2.55; in 2.4, the Drawer’s exit at 34, Pistol’s at 208 and Bardolph’s comings and goings in that same scene at 109, 208, 212 and 373; the various entrances and exits of the recruits in 3.2; Collevile’s entrance at 4.2.0; Warwick’s exit at 4.3.193; Davy’s exits at 5.3.29 and 71 and Bardolph’s at 131; the entrance of Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet at 5.4.0; and the entrance of officers attending on Prince John and the Lord Chief Justice at 5.5.89. Other stage directions are misplaced. For example, at 2.1.163, the Hostess and Sergeant are signalled to exit before her last exchange with Falstaff; Enter Will makes no sense at 2.4.18 and should probably come six lines earlier; and in 5.2 the initial stage direction mistakenly lists ‘Humphrey’, ‘Clarence’ and ‘Prince Iohn’, whose entrance is repeated at 13. Still other stage directions imperfectly correspond with speech prefixes: 2.1.132 instructs ‘enter a messenger’, who is immediately named ‘Gower’; and ‘the wife to Harry Percie’ listed at the top of 2.3 speaks as ‘Kate’.8

  Even more symptomatic of a holograph, editors have argued, are so-called permissive stage directions, whose indeterminacy suggests an author making up a scene as he writes or leaving details to be worked out by the actors. The opening of 2.4, ‘Enter a Drawer or two’, is the most problematic of these, for the ensuing division of speeches among the Drawers – one of whom is named Francis, and another, who enters later, Will – is far from clear. But other stage directions are equally permissive: 2.1 brings on the Hostess with ‘an Officer or two’; in 2.2 the Prince and Poins are accompanied by the phantom ‘sir Iohn Russel, with other’; in 3.1, the King enters ‘alone’ but at once addresses his Page; at 3.2.54, ‘Enter Bardolfe, and one with him’; at 4.2.23, ‘Enter Iohn Westmerland, and the rest’; at 5.4, ‘Enter Sincklo and three or foure officers’; and 5.5 opens with the indeterminate ‘Enter strewers of rushes’.

  For generations of editors, this accumulation of evidence pointed to the likelihood that Q was based on an uncorrected authorial draft insufficiently detailed or reliable to have been used for theatrical performance. McKerrow and Greg first advanced the theory that a playbook (or promptbook, as they called it) would have included more complete and accurate stage directions, uniform speech prefixes and consistent entrances and exits; further, it would have tied up loose ends and would not have allowed permissive directions to stand. These assumptions have been embraced by the Oxford editors, who in their Textual Companion affirm that in playbooks, ‘stage directions tend to be more systematically supplied … [and] more practically, and laconically worded’ and ‘characters tend to be more consistently identified in speech-prefixes’ (12).9 Following this logic, it is reasonable to conclude with Humphreys, as all subsequent editors of the play have done, ‘that Shakespeare’s manuscript was not used as the prompt-copy, and that the printer received it … in an interestingly original condition’ (lxx).

  Recent textual scholarship, however, has discovered that the assumptions underlying this hypothesis do not bear scrutiny, for those playbooks of this period that have survived in manuscript form all manifest the same inconsistences and irregularities that Greg and his followers attributed to ‘foul papers’. Playbooks used by acting companies were not scrupulously shorn of their irregularities: stage directions often were minimal, speech prefixes typically inconsistent, ghost characters common, permissive stage directions the norm and entrances and exits often not accounted for. Nor were there consistent annotations for stage properties, music and other effects (Long, ‘Stage’, 123). The standards for regularity and accuracy in playbooks imposed by modern editors disregard Elizabethan practice, wherein a playwright could assume ‘the abilities of the players to handle his play’, trust them to translate the text into stage action, have confidence in their ability to figure out when to enter and exit, know that they would recognize their own speech prefixes (players having been given only part copies anyway) and accept that they would ‘add or delete according to their needs’ with no requirement for a playhouse bookkeeper to record such changes in the script (Long, ‘Stage’, 127). The persistence in playbooks of those characteristics long thought to be exclusive to holographs, therefore, erases a distinction that is fundamental to the claim that Q of Part Two was based on an untidy authorial manuscript. Indeed, the quest for consistency, accuracy and completeness, qualities one expects of a modern promptbook, would have benefited readers more than actors in the Elizabethan age, so that those very regularities that Greg argued were characteristic of a ‘prompt-book’ may have been provided by a scribe preparing the play for publication instead.10

  This same logic works to dispel the final evidence that Q was based on an uncorrected holograph: that it preserves what are thought to be characteristically Shakespearean spellings of ‘Scilens’ for Silence, ‘mas’ for mass, ‘on’ for one and ‘yeere’ for ear. If these spellings are indeed peculiar to Shakespeare, it is nevertheless prudent to remember that apart from three pages in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More said to have been written in Shakespeare’s hand (Hand D) – and evidence for this identification has been widely disputed – no Shakespearean holograph (apart from six signatures and the words ‘By me’ in his will) exists, so any identification of idiosyncratic spellings must remain highly conjectural. Furthermore, two peculiar features of the spelling of ‘Silence’ as ‘Scilens’, common to Hand D in Sir Thomas More and the quarto of Part Two, as Wilson and Pollard observed in 1919,11 though highly unusual, were not unprecedented during this period. Most spellings of ‘silence’ recorded in the OED begin with sci or end with lens; and moreover, the spelling ‘Silens’ occurs more often in Q than ‘Scilens’. There is no compelling evidence, then, that an uncorrected holograph served as the copy-text for Q. Any editor examining the evidence must acknowledge the difficulty of trying to identify what kind of manuscript served as the copy-text for Q. As H.R. Woudhuysen has observed, ‘Of the surviving theatrical manuscripts of the period, none exactly conforms to the generally established definition of “foul papers”’; furthermore, ‘if compositors were capable of setting in type “foul-paper” features … scribes were equally capable of copying and reproducing them by hand. The only way by which scholars could be absolutely certain that a text was set from some kind of authorial draft or fair copy would be if the printer’s copy and the resulting print were both to survive. Unfortunately, no scribal let alone authorial manuscript copy for a printed play survives from this period’.12 Thus it is equally plausible, I would argue, that the playbook of Part Two for Shakespeare’s company served as the copy-text for Q, and that it might, in addition to preserving authorial idiosyncrasies, bear the marks of theatrical annotation as well.

  Qb

  The insertion of 3.1 in the middle of sheet E was presumably the main reason for the new issue of Q. The survival today of nearly equal numbers of Qa and Qb texts, eleven of the former and ten of the latter,13 may suggest that the addition was made about half-way through the printing of the Quarto (Humphreys, xii). A scene of 114 lines in Qb in which the King first soliloquizes about the burdens of office and then entertains reports of rebel activity, it was probably a part of the copy-text from which Qa was printed: without it, the King would not appear until his deathbed scene at 4.3, and two long Falstaff scenes would be juxtaposed – 2.4 in the tavern and 3.2 on Shallow’s farm – allowing Falstaff to dominate the entire middle section of the play, some 658 lines in Qa, uninterrupted by any intervening chronicle history. The idea of Falstaff’s pre-eminence is theatrically attractive – the concluding lines in 2.4, ‘Come… . Yea, will you come, Doll?’ (394 – 5), are echoed by Shallow’s opening line in 3.2, ‘Come on, come on, come on; give me your hand, sir’ (1–2) – and in fact became a feature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century productions of the play, some of which moved the first appearance of the King to 4.3 and salvaged only his soliloquy from 3.1 with which to open that scene. Furthermore, Shakespeare may simply have been following his major source for the King’s appearance: Daniel’s Civil Wars moves from the Battle of Shrewsbury directly to the King’s deathbed, so Shakespeare’s delaying the King’s entrance to 4.3 – his deathbed scene – would not have been unprecedented.14

  It can be objected that the juxtaposition of 2.4 and 3.2 gives Falstaff scant time to journey from London to Gloucestershire (a mere 46 lines in Qa), yet this would not be an insurmountable leap of imagination for an audience to make. A more plausible argument is that it would have been unusual for Shakespeare to write a history play that keeps the eponymous King on the margins until Act 4. Positioned as a royal centre for the play, and illustrating the debilitation of the state and the ill health of the King, both physical and metaphoric, 3.1 balances earlier scenes with the rebels – indeed, the reports brought to the ill King echo those brought to the ill Northumberland in 1.1 – with a dramatization of the centralized power against which they chafe. More important, it continues the alternation of high scenes with low which was a structural hallmark of Part One and has been, up to now, of Part Two as well. Falstaff has anticipated the King’s meditation on sleep in 3.1 by wryly observing near the end of 2.4, ‘You see, my good wenches, how men of merit are sought after. The undeserver may sleep when the man of action is called on’ (379 – 82); so when the King laments that sleep lies ‘with the vile / In loathsome beds’ (15 – 16) but is denied ‘to a king’ (30), his sentiments have already been ironically glossed by Falstaff. It seems highly likely, then, that 3.1 was originally intended to be included in the play.

  22 Sig. E3v from Quarto A, 1600

  23 Sig. E3v from Quarto B, 1600

  Why, then, was it omitted from the printing of Qa and inserted soon thereafter? The simplest explanation is that during the printing a manuscript page had been misplaced and, when found, prompted the issue of Qb.15 The 114 lines of the scene in Qb are estimated to have been the normal length for a manuscript sheet, recto and verso;16 thus, if the sheet had been misplaced, there would have been no tell-tale signs in surrounding manuscript pages to alert the compositor to an omission. More speculatively, Melchiori argues that the sheet was retrieved from an early draft of a single play in which Shakespeare set out to dramatize the reign of Henry IV: when the material proved too unwieldy for one play and Shakespeare divided it after the Battle of Shrewsbury, he ‘decided at the last moment, when the printing of the foul papers [for Part Two] was already at an advanced stage, to insert among them the recovered leaf containing the scene [3.1]’, but too late for the first printing, since ‘the insertion was made when the reviser who had been at work on the rest of the foul papers had already completed his job, so that they escaped his attention’ (Melchiori, 201). Equally speculatively, Jowett and Taylor conjecture that Shakespeare wrote the scene as an ‘afterthought’ – part of an effort to expand the play’s historical material – because a scene composed in sequence would have begun on the leaf where the previous scene ended and not on a new sheet, unless it had been written at a different time; and further, that the compositor, finding no indication of where the new leaf should be inserted, might simply have ‘set it aside, without bothering to investigate further’ (‘Three texts’, 35 – 9). Each argument has merit; neither can be proved.