In an analogous spirit of pedantry, F duly expands the various forms of contractions found in Q. Apart from the comic characters’ use of the colloquial ‘’a’, which F invariably translates as ‘he’, contractions of two or more words are most common in Q, numbering at least eighty. Most typically, F expands Q’s ‘’tis’ to ‘it is’, ‘Ile’ to ‘I will’, ‘heele’ to ‘he will’, ‘theres’ to ‘there is’, ‘too’t’ to ‘to it’, ‘an’t’ to ‘if it’, and the like. Often such expansions result in regularizing the speech of more idiosyncratic characters, so that the Hostess’s colloquial ‘an ’twere’ becomes the more formal ‘if it were’; her ‘t’other’, ‘the other’; the Page’s ‘A’ calls me enow’ becomes the more grammatical ‘He call’d me euen now’; Pistol’s insistent ‘giues [give us] some sack’ becomes the more polite ‘giue me’; Falstaff’s ‘thou’t’ is expanded to ‘thou wilt’, and his ‘he’d ’a’ to ‘he would haue’. F also tends to print the full spelling of Q’s one-word contractions, such as ‘neuer’ for ‘nere’, ‘taken’ for ‘tane’, ‘Victuallers’ for ‘vitlars’ and ‘Sherife’ for ‘shrieve’.

  The scribe who prepared the manuscript on which F was based also appears to have completed with his own words incomplete verse lines and otherwise fixed metrical irregularities found in Q. A brief survey of Act 4 in F reveals the extent of such scribal intervention. In the first scene, for example, Prince John’s admonition to the rebels, ‘look to taste the due / Meet for rebellion’ – the second line a hemistich which allows a dramatic pause after John’s judgement – was rounded out to make a complete iambic line with ‘and such Acts as yours’ (4.1.344 – 5); yet earlier, the word ‘talking’ in John’s castigation of the Archbishop as ‘an iron man talking’ in Q (4.1.236) was expunged, apparently for making the line hypermetrical. In 4.3, ‘Canst thou tell that?’ was added to 52 to turn a hemistich into a regular verse line; ‘and will breake out’ was added to 120 and ‘how fares your Grace?’ to the second half of 180 for the same reason. To accommodate the change of ‘tolling’ to ‘culling’ in 205, a direct object is provided at the opening of the next line, ‘The vertuous Sweetes’, thus requiring a re-lineation of 206 – 9.

  Finally, F includes a peculiarly large number of round brackets which set it apart from Q and therefore would not seem to be traceable to a common source. Taylor has analysed the portion of the play set by Compositor A – just short of twelve pages – and discovered in it 136 pairs of round brackets, only twenty of which coincide with brackets in Q.38 This compositor’s work on previous plays, including Part One, suggests that he followed his copy closely with regard to round brackets. Taylor thus concludes that these brackets originated not with the F compositor, but in the copy from which he worked. All of this evidence suggests the intervention of a scribe who, with habits similar to those of Ralph Crane, if not Crane himself, sought to correct what he perceived to be imperfect copy for F and to impose his own sense of decorum on it. The problem confronting an editor, then, is what to make of a Folio text which, with its inclusion of eight passages omitted from Q, seems to be based on a copy-text of some authority, yet also bears unmistakable marks of scribal contamination that render it unreliable.

  Was F indebted to Q?

  The relationship of F to Q makes the choice of text even more problematic. Some of the alterations, corrections and clarifications detailed above – unless one attributes all of them to a scribe – suggest that F originated in a source text different from that used for Q and, further, cast in doubt whether the scribe who prepared copy for F made any use at all of Q. Conceivably, Q and F derived from entirely different copy. Nevertheless, a few errors or idiosyncrasies in Q, some of which may have resulted from compositorial error, are repeated in F and thus, according to some editors, offer evidence that the manuscript for F was based at least in part on Q or, at the extreme, may have been a heavily annotated copy of Q itself.39 Those who espouse a connection between Q and F argue that some errors shared by the two are too coincidental to be accounted for in any other way. For instance, a few words common to Q and F – ‘hole’ instead of ‘hold’ at Ind.35, ‘inuincible’ instead of ‘invisible’ at 3.2.312 and ‘rage’ instead of ‘rags’ at 4.1.34 – are all seen as evidence that F borrowed from Q. But this supposition holds only if one regards the QF words as erroneous; and, as I argue in the commentary, a good case can be made for ‘hole’, ‘inuincible’ and ‘rage’ as defensible word choices. Therefore, their appearance in F could be accounted for by their presence in Shakespeare’s holograph and any subsequent copies made from it, not necessarily by their presence in Q alone.

  Similarly, it is believed that F shares with Q the common misattributions of 3.2.150 to Shallow instead of Falstaff and of 5.5.17 and 19 to Pistol instead of Shallow; but again, as I argue in the commentary, the attribution of these lines in Q and F is perfectly defensible and could have come from any copies derived from Shakespeare’s holograph. Other evidence of F’s connection to Q may seem more compelling: an intriguing absence of single lines of verse following 4.1.92 and 94 common to corrected copies of Qa and F (see 4.1.93, 95n.), the erroneous use of ‘imagine’ rather than imagined at 4.1.247 and the idiosyncratic spellings of the words ‘downy’ and ‘down’ as ‘dowlny’ (Q), ‘dowlney’ (F) and ‘dowlne’ (QF) at 4.3.163 – 4. Unless one is willing to posit that the idiosyncrasies of Shakespeare’s holograph were replicated in the source manuscript for F without going through Q, these shared deviations, few though they are, suggest that the scribe may have consulted Q in preparing the text for F.

  On the other hand, striking differences in spelling and other deviations may indicate that Q was not a source for the manuscript on which F was based. Variations in the spelling of proper names suggest that the F scribe misread manuscript copy rather than Q, which, as print, would have been much easier to decipher: for instance, ‘Dombledon’ for Q’s ‘Dommelton’ at 1.2.30, ‘Dombe’ for ‘Dumbe’ at 2.4.88, ‘Bare’ for ‘Barnes’ at 3.2.20 and ‘Amurah’ for ‘Amurath’ twice at 5.2.48. Even more striking, at 5.3.102 the name Cophetua, printed as ‘Couetua’ in Q, appears in F as ‘Couitha’: F’s variant bears the unmistakable signs of a scribal misreading of manuscript, with substitutions of i for e and th for tu graphically easy to make. Likewise, at 4.3.308 F prints the word ‘ioyne’ for Q’s ‘win’: the difference may be most logically explained by the F scribe’s misreading of ‘winne’ in a manuscript and suggests that he was not working from Q (Humphreys, lxxviii). Other substitutions of words in F suggest an independent source because they are inferior to Q’s: ‘them’ for ‘men’ (Ind.8), ‘head’ for ‘hard’ (1.1.36), ‘Speake’ for ‘Spoke’ and ‘aduenture’ for ‘a venter’ (1.1.59), ‘tucke’ for ‘tickle’ (2.1.59), ‘pernitious’ for ‘virtuous’ (2.2.72), ‘heart-deere’ for ‘hearts deere’ (2.3.12), ‘wee’ for ‘one’ (2.4.28) and ‘huisht with bussing Night, flyes’ for ‘husht with buzzing night-flies’ (3.1.11). Such substitutions are unlikely to have been made by a scribe conflating Q with a manuscript because, in Humphreys’s words, ‘they look wrong, unnecessary, or odd’ (lxxviii). Rather, they seem to provide evidence that the copy-text for F was prepared independent of Q.

  On balance, the evidence that copy for F was made independent of consultation with Q outweighs evidence of its dependence on it. Nevertheless, coincidence ruled out, F shares just enough idiosyncrasies and errors with Q to hint that the scribe may have consulted Q as a secondary source. The fact that copies of Q were likely to have been widely available – more Q copies of Part Two have survived than for any other Shakespeare play – makes it reasonable to assume that the scribe would have had access to one. I would suggest, therefore, though without certainty, that the scribe who prepared the manuscript for F did so by collating Q with a literary transcription of the play, such as the one I have speculated might have been prepared at the insistence of Edmund Tilney in 1597, which included those passages not found in Q and many of the significant variants listed above.

  The printing of F

  Differences between Q and F are compounded by the history of the printing of the Folio text by William Jaggard. There was a delay in printing the two parts of Henry IV, perhaps because Matthew Law, the bookseller who held the rights to Richard II and Henry IV, Part One, ‘made difficulties over the use of his copies’ until he and Jaggard ‘came to terms’ (Greg, Publishing, 89), or perhaps because scribal copy for Part Two was not yet ready. In any case, plays in the Folio were typically allocated no more than two quires, or 24 pages (a normal quire having three sheets folded in half and then stitched together to make 6 leaves or 12 pages); and certainly the two Henry IV plays, among the longest in the canon, should have been allocated at least that much space. The plays printed before them, King John and Richard II, filled three quires (a, b, c), with 9 pages of Richard II encroaching on quire d. Had the Henry IV plays been ready for printing when Richard II was finished, they might have been allocated the remainder of quire d and an additional four quires. Instead, however, compositors decided to set Henry V first; and in a serious miscalculation, they began casting-off at quire h, leaving just three quires (e, f, g) plus the 3 remaining pages of quire d – a total of only 39 pages – for the two parts of Henry IV (Prosser, 74). Realizing that this space was woefully inadequate, the printer apparently decided to insert an extra quire (gg) between g and h so that the Henry IV plays would now share a total of 51 pages. Assuming this to be a sufficient allocation, the compositors were ‘overly generous’ in their setting of Part One (Weis, 92), which runs to 26 pages, leaving just 25 for Part Two. Yet at 3,350 lines, Part Two is the longer of the two plays by 170 lines.

  Why would the compositors have made this error in judgement? If the scribal copy of Part Two was not yet available when they began casting-off for Part One, they may have calculated its length by counting the lines in Q instead, which, with so many passages deleted, has 267 fewer lines than F, and concluded that 25 pages would be ample for the printing. But when they began casting-off the scribal copy and realized that its greater length posed an almost insurmountable problem, their solution was to find any way possible to cram the text into the limited space remaining. In her magisterial study of the printing of the Folio text of Part Two, Prosser examines the process by which one of its two compositors, conventionally labelled Compositor B,40 worked assiduously to compress text typographically by condensing, abbreviating or omitting words, and even by eliminating entire lines in order to squeeze the scribal copy into 25 pages – in effect becoming an editor himself.

  Close scrutiny of just one page (g2r) set by Compositor B, equivalent to 1.2.76 – 230 in the present edition, will reveal the extent of his ingenuity in solving the problem of having too much text to set per page.41 With very few exceptions, an F page has 66 lines per column. Verse lines, of course, cannot easily be juggled or crowded together; but this page consists entirely of prose, which is more susceptible to manipulation. Compositor B took full advantage of his options to crowd prose into the least space possible. Two speeches, both in the second column, could be compressed by using legitimate typographical means: in one, at 154 – 5, he avoided an additional line by tightening the space around letters and by using a turn-up for the word ‘Wolfe’; in the other, at 157 – 8, he avoided putting ‘out’ on a second line by shortening the Lord Justice’s speech prefix to ‘Iu.’, eliminating spaces that should follow the speech prefix and the question mark after ‘What’, and neglecting a period at the end. His other means of compression were more radical. In the first column, he altered ‘an ague’ to ‘age’ (99) and cut the repetition of ‘in you’ (100) in order to end the speech without running on to another line. Shortly thereafter (110), he cut ‘you’ after ‘I pray’ and turned up the second ‘you’ (111) to keep the text on one line. In the following speech (112 – 14), he deleted seven words, ‘an’t please your lordship, a kind of’ to keep the speech to only two lines. He achieved a similar compression by replacing Q’s ‘doe become’ with ‘be’ at 125; more awkwardly, by replacing Q’s ‘himselfe’ with ‘him’ at 139; and by altering Q’s ‘meanes are’ to ‘Meanes is’ and then cutting ‘is’ after ‘waste’ at 141 – 2.

  24 Sig. g2r from the 1623 Folio

  In the second column, Compositor B resorted to even more draconian measures to save space. By cutting the word ‘times’ following Q’s ‘costar-mongers’ (170), he altered the line’s meaning; but that cut, in addition to the omission of ‘doe’ at 176, allowed him to shorten the speech by one line. Similarly, his cutting of Q’s ‘your chinne double’ and ‘yet’ at 184 – 6, along with short spellings of ‘wil’ and ‘cal’ and the elimination of spaces after two question marks and between the thrice repeated ‘Fy’s, enabled him to avoid running the speech onto an additional line. He then ‘slashed the equivalent of approximately three-quarters of a Folio type-line’ (Prosser, 84) by omitting Falstaff’s claim in Q that he was born ‘about three of the clock in the afternoone’ (187 – 8). At that point, mid-way down the second column and apparently concerned that his efforts to compress the text had not yet yielded a sufficient number of lines, he decided to blot, just ten lines from the bottom of g2r, a large portion of the speech in which Falstaff protests being sent to the wars: ‘but it was alway yet … perpetual motion’ (213–19). Cumulatively, then, Compositor B managed to reduce the number of lines that had been allotted to g2r by seventeen or eighteen. He performed similar surgery on g3 and, though to a lesser degree, on g1v and g2v, clearly assuming that ‘by cramping the text at every available opportunity’, he ‘could complete 2 Henry IV in the twenty-five pages available’ (Prosser, 90).

  At some point during the process, it must have become clear to the printer that despite Compositor B’s best efforts, the text of Part Two would not fit into the space remaining. Thus it was decided to add one more sheet – four more pages – to quire gg, and compositors suddenly found themselves with space to fill. The printing could now be more leisurely, and compression yielded to expansion. But this solution posed its own problem, for there was no way in which the yet-to-be-set text could be expanded to fill the 16 pages of gg. Allowing the Epilogue a page to itself (gg8) and using the final page to list characters’ names (gg8v) were ready, if unusual, expedients. But more needed to be done, so Compositor B ‘now exercised the same resourcefulness in expanding the text that he had shown in compressing it’ (Prosser, 93). An examination of one page, gg5v, equivalent to 4.3.359 to 5.2.8 in the present edition, will illustrate the methods he used to stretch the text by at least seventeen lines more than it would have required in a normal printing.

  One standard compositorial technique for expanding copy was to have single lines run over to a second line. In one case, at the end of the first column, he used wide spacing between words to force the final syllable of ‘knowledge’ onto the next line (5.1.39 – 40). Elsewhere he spelled out speech prefixes, usually abbreviated, in full – ‘Shallow’ (5.1.34) and ‘Warwick’ (5.2.1) – and used thick spaces to have the text run over onto another line. In Falstaff’s soliloquy about Justice Shallow, not only does Compositor B spell out the speech prefix, ‘Falstaffe’ instead of ‘Fal.’; he also expands his customary abbreviation ‘M.’ five times, not only to ‘Master’ but to the longer forms ‘Maister’ and ‘Mayster’, in order to justify an additional line for the speech. He does something similar at the end of 5.1, where he twice expands ‘M.’ to ‘Master’ in order to lengthen Falstaff’s line at 86 – 7, thereby requiring a separate line for ‘Exeunt’.

  Another common device used to expand copy was to divide one verse line into two. Compositor B made frequent use of it, usually dividing the opening line of a speech at a strong caesura, as at the King’s ‘Laud be to heaven: / Euen there my life must end’ (4.3.363), but also dividing lines more arbitrarily, as at Warwick’s ‘Exceeding well: his Cares / Are now, all ended’ (5.2.3). He was particularly adept at dividing lines of prose so that the division seemed logical, often at a transitional point, as in four of Shallow’s speeches: for example, when his repeated refusal to excuse Sir John from spending the night is followed by ‘Why Dauie’ on a new line (5.1.4 – 6; compare 24, 28, 57). If such lines occasionally look like verse, in some instances he prints them as if they actually were verse, capitalizing the first letter of each new line, as in Davy’s ‘Yes Sir. / Here is now the Smithes note, for Shooing, / And Plough-Irons’ (17–18; compare 36 – 7 and 50 – 3). By employing such sleight-of-hand divisions alone, Compositor B used nine additional lines of type on gg5v.42