But he had other techniques for expansion as well. The scribe who prepared copy for F omitted formal titles in his stage directions, but Compositor B occasionally inserted them in order to extend the stage direction to another line, as at the opening of 5.2: ‘Enter the Earle of Warwicke and the Lord / Chiefe Justice.’ If such additions are innocuous, his expansion of lines with words of his own is not. Three times on this page, he added words that have been widely adopted by editors. In one instance, his addition of the phrase ‘the other day’ between ‘the Sacke he lost’ and ‘at Hinckley Fayre’ forces ‘Fayre?’ onto a new line (5.1.23). Shortly thereafter, his expansion of Davy’s appealing the case of William Visor with the words ‘a very litle’ before ‘credite’, and the repetition of ‘your Worship’ in place of ‘you’ in the next line, caused the final syllable of ‘Countenanc’d’ to be given its own line (47 – 9). In these ways, Compositor B altered the scribal text he was charged with reproducing to make it fit the space it was allocated. His practices are often condemned as ‘corruptions’ (Hinman, xviii), as of course they are; but given the difficult circumstances of printing Part Two, ‘he had no choice but to tamper with his copy’, and he did so with a ‘high degree of professional skill’ (Prosser, 115).

  Expedience and necessity thus may account for significant textual variants between Q and F. Resourceful as they were, the compositors of the F text introduced a new level of error, exacerbating the instability of textual transmission to a far greater degree, apparently, than was the case with Q. Despite evidence that F may have been based in part on an authorial copy more complete than the copy-text for Q, the level of scribal intervention and later compositorial intervention makes the F text ultimately more sophisticated and compromised than Q, which quite probably was based on the playbook used by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1597. Q, therefore, despite its shortcomings, is the more reliable text on which to base an edition.

  * * *

  1 Paul Werstine, in ‘Post-theory’, demonstrates that W.W. Greg’s use of the term ‘foul papers’ to refer to completed plays rather than separate sheets is a violent departure from the term’s use in the seventeenth-century documents he cites.

  2 William Long challenges the use of the term ‘promptbook’ – a term first recorded in the nineteenth century – for the playbooks used by Elizabeth theatre companies in ‘Stage’, 124 – 5, and ‘Precious’, 415. See also Werstine’s refutation of Greg’s anachronistic use of ‘prompt-book’ in ‘Plays’, 484 – 5.

  3 The idea that acting companies secured holographs to guard against theft was first advanced by Pollard, Shakespeare, 53 –7.

  4 Werstine, ‘Editing’, 33, cites Greg’s argument in First Folio.

  5 For the presence of descriptive stage directions in playhouse manuscripts and in quartos annotated in the playhouse, see Werstine, Manuscripts, 132. He notes, moreover, that sound calls were added to all but two of the twenty-one extant playhouse texts (243).

  6 McKerrow, 464, cited by Werstine in ‘McKerrow’s’, 154, and also in Long, ‘Perspective’, 26 –7.

  7 W. Long counts sixteen such manuscripts in ‘Stage’ (135), and increases the number to eighteen in ‘Precious’ (414). Werstine, in Manuscripts, adds the three annotated quartos to that number and collects all the examples of multiple designations of roles in these texts (359 – 64).

  8 For many comparable instances of inconsistencies in other playhouse texts – missed or indefinite entrances and exits, omission of necessary characters from entrances, stage directions either permissive or misplaced or imperfectly corresponding to speech prefixes, etc. – see Werstine, Manuscripts, 359 – 88.

  9 Cited in Werstine, ‘Post-theory’, 104. In ‘Plays’, Werstine deems the Oxford editors ‘uncritically enthralled by Greg’s general theory’ of textual transmission (492).

  10 Long, ‘Perspective’, argues that McKerrow’s ‘requirements for the stage much better fit alterations made for readers’ (27).

  11 Cited by Werstine, ‘Shakespeare’, 133. Werstine observes that ‘the slightly more common spelling of Justice Silence’s name is “Silens”, which is not a Hand-D spelling’ (141–2, n. 4).

  12 Woudhuysen, 320, quoted in Werstine, ‘Editing’, 35.

  13 See Berger (Second Part, v). A twenty-second copy is a fragment of Q which cannot be identified as a first or second issue.

  14 Jowett & Taylor discuss the link between Daniel’s poem and the play, arguing that 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’ (35 – 6).

  15 GWW conjectures that during the printing of Q, when the compositor had set as far as into sheet F and possibly to the end of 3.2, he discovered the misfiled manuscript sheet bearing 3.1. By that time both formes of sheet E had gone to the printer and had perhaps been printed. Using persuasive evidence of damaged types, John Hazel Smith argues that upon discovering the misplaced scene, Valentine Simmes, determined to correct the error for which his shop was responsible, interrupted the printing of Much Ado to print the new sheet E, copies of which replaced copies of the original E in the yet unbound sheets of the Quarto. GWW suggests that half the print run remained unbound and could therefore incorporate the additional scene (Qb); the other half had already been bound and possibly sent to the booksellers (Qa). Smith’s hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that the cancel is printed on paper stock with a watermark not known to Qa but standard for Much Ado. It appears, then, that the issue of Qb followed not long after the discovery of the missing scene. There is no evidence to support Humphreys’s speculation that Qb was not issued until copies of the defective Qa ‘had been sold off’ (xii).

  16 Pollard was the first to propose that Shakespeare wrote about 54 lines per page, so that the scene would have fitted neatly on the two sides of a single sheet (‘Variant’). Numerous scholars have attempted to confirm Pollard’s hypothesis by examining the pages in Sir Thomas More thought to be in Shakespeare’s handwriting (Hand D), but such attempts have been successfully challenged: see Werstine’s account in ‘Shakespeare’.

  17 This anecdote has met with scepticism, most recently from Jonathan Bate (256 – 86), though a thorough appraisal of historical evidence by Jason Scott-Warren restores credibility to the account of Elizabeth’s conversation with Lambarde.

  18 Richard Dutton argues that ‘the most compelling explanation’ for why the murder of a king was allowed to be shown while the ‘non-inflammatory abdication’ scene was censored ‘is that the scene specifically shows Richard’s abdication being sanctioned by Parliament, suggesting that parliamentary authority might outweigh that of the monarch’ (‘Licensing’, 382 – 3).

  19 G.W. Williams argues that 3.1 preserves Qb’s reference to Richard only ‘because the leaf containing the reference was misplaced at the time the political cuts were made in the quarto’ (‘Text’, 177).

  20 See W. Ferguson, 19 – 29, and Williams, ‘Text’, 173 – 4.

  21 The most thorough analysis of the compositorial resetting of Q is provided by Berger & Williams, ‘Variants’.

  22 Weis, 85 – 6, cites Clare, 68, who argues that the fact that ‘the rebellion gains respectability from the leadership of a righteous Archbishop would have been an immediate reason for the censor’s intervention’.

  23 This conjecture was first made by Alfred Hart (191), reinforced by Humphreys (lxxi) and subsequently taken up by Jowett and Taylor (‘Three texts’, 41 – 2).

  24 Clegg’s caveat is instructive: ‘Furthermore, given that the kinds of books that were actually censored did not merely refer to political matters but libeled government officials (either at home or abroad), denied the ruling monarch’s ecclesiastical or political authority or the authority of Parliament, or advocated successors to the monarch, it seems unwise to credit the press censors with eliminating even sensitive topical allusions unless all other possibilities have been ruled out’ (‘Liberty’, 477). Clegg surveys Elizabethan press censorship more fully in Press Censorship: see especially her discussion of the 1599 Bishops’ Ban, 198 – 217.

  25 Dutton speculates that by 1600, the younger Henry Cobham, son of the deceased Lord Chamberlain and ‘brother-in-law of Robert Cecil, and so by definition an opponent of the Earl of Essex’, may have detected ‘uncomfortable political connotations’ involving Essex in the play and therefore intervened in its publication (Mastering, 109 – 10).

  26 For a full account of the Oxford editors’ argument, see Jowett & Taylor, ‘Three texts’.

  27 In ch. 6, ‘Why size matters’, Erne discusses the relationship between the length of Shakespeare’s plays and what we know about the length of performances in London’s theatres. He argues that information about how much of a play was performed can best be gleaned not from printed texts but from extant dramatic manuscripts (155 – 97).

  28 The belief that there was any upper limit on how long a performance could be has been ably challenged by David Klein, Michael Hirrel and Steven Urkowitz.

  29 Making these cuts alone, however, would not have been sufficient to reduce the text to Erne’s idea of an acceptable playing time. He speculates that although manuscript playbooks contained some cuts, actors’ parts probably contained even more made during rehearsals (187).

  30 Prosser makes this argument convincingly in her study of the roles of scribe and compositor in the F text (19 – 50). Jowett, making a case for a ‘prompt-book text’ incorporating Shakespeare’s revisions as the source of F, takes issue with some of Prosser’s findings in ‘Cuts’, passim. Taylor, in ‘’Swounds’, also takes on Prosser to confirm Jowett, claiming that F may ‘derive from a transcript of a late, expurgated prompt-book’ (69).

  31 Prosser posits a theatrical justification of the royal procession passing twice over the stage (48), but Jowett counters that the Third Strewer’s statement that the procession will come from the coronation (5.5.3 – 4), anticipating its arrival at 38, makes its entering twice ‘bewildering’ – and so, Jowett concludes, F sorts out the ‘staging problem’ in a manner ‘characteristic of a prompt-book’ (‘Cuts’, 284 – 5) by omitting both the first procession and, since there is now no reason for the strewers to hurry, the Third Strewer’s command to ‘dispatch’ (4). I would argue, however, that there is no problem to sort out, for the trumpets sound twice: first (4) signalling that the King and his party are on their way to Westminster Abbey, and after some time (37) signalling that the coronation is over and that they are returning. It is therefore likely that Shakespeare intended both processions to occur.

  32 In ‘’Swounds’, Taylor concludes that ‘with the probable exception of the omission of “zounds” in three plays set from annotated quarto copy, all of the Folio expurgation of profanity can be attributed to theatrical practice … profanity [having] been outlawed from public performances, not private manuscripts or printed texts’ (64).

  33 3 Jac I, c. 21. Statutes of the Realm, IV. See also Chambers, Elizabethan, 4.338.

  34 See Werstine, in Folger edn, 288 – 9, and Manuscripts, 326 – 7.

  35 In ‘Q2 Othello’ (97), Mowat quotes first from Greg, First Folio, 152, and then from Taylor, ‘’Swounds’, 77.

  36 Mowat, Q2 Othello, 101 – 2, citing the Williams and Evans facsimile edition of Dering, viii.

  37 As Kastan observes in Book, the 1623 Folio and the three that followed it introduced and developed the principle of modernizing Shakespeare’s text (82).

  38 See Appendix 1, ‘The printer’s copy for Folio 2 Henry IV’, in Taylor & Jowett, 245 – 7. Prior to Taylor, Alice Walker noted ‘the abundance of some 260 parentheses in the F text of the play’ as opposed to only 40 in Q (Textual, 107).

  39 A. Walker makes a case for Q as the most probable copy-text for F, based on their shared features, common errors, and typographical similarities (Textual, 94 – 120).

  40 Almost invariably, two compositors were assigned to each play. Compositor B, who textual scholars agree set case y of Part Two, was given the task of compressing the text while setting the first half of quire g. A. Walker was the first to identify Compositor A as responsible for setting case x, an identification with which Charlton Hinman concurred (xviii). Although Taylor (TxC, 148) subsequently made a case that B’s partner on Part Two was in fact a new compositor (J), Blayney (xxxvi) has, like Walker, identified him as Compositor A.

  41 All of the examples in this and the following paragraphs are drawn from Prosser, 51 – 121.

  42 Humphreys, lxxvii, n. 4, lists the prose passages in Q that have been divided into short, irregular lines in F, though he attributes their division to the F scribe, not to the compositor. They are: 2.1.182 – 3; 2.2.153 – 5, 157 – 9, 162 – 3; 3.2.143, 148, 153; 4.3.3 – 4; 5.1.6, 17 – 18, 24, 28, 36, 50 – 3, 55 – 7; 5.3.107, 109.

  APPENDIX 2

  Performing conflated texts of Henry IV

  In 1995, BBC television broadcast what it called Shakespeare’s Henry IV in a radical abridgement and conflation of Part One and Part Two. Directed by RSC associate John Caird, this was the BBC’s most lavish and ambitious Shakespeare production since the conclusion of its marathon filming of all the plays ten years earlier (1978 – 85), and for a new generation of television viewers it set a high standard for how Shakespeare’s history plays should be performed.1 Caird focused his production on what he imagined to be Prince Henry’s long-standing relationship with Hotspur: the two are glimpsed together as children witnessing the deposition of Richard II, and their growing rivalry climaxes at the Battle of Shrewsbury, when the Prince defeats his former friend, winning his proud titles from him, and with them, the King’s paternal approval.

  Caird thus uses Part One to provide a structure for the whole, and most of the material in Part Two is jettisoned, both the historical (the flight of Northumberland to Scotland, the thwarting of the Prelate’s Rebellion at Gaultree) and the non-historical (most of the scenes at Justice Shallow’s farm and much of Falstaff’s comic banter with his tavern cronies). Instead, Caird ingeniously grafts speeches and snippets of scenes from Part Two onto Part One to reinforce themes or to create ironic counterpoints. For example, Hotspur’s farewell to Lady Percy is preceded by Falstaff’s farewell to Doll Tearsheet (an exchange that now occurs prior to Falstaff’s march to Shrewsbury); the King’s chastising his son in Part One is intercut with the Lord Chief Justice’s interrogation of Falstaff in Part Two; and the King’s soliloquy on the unease of wearing a crown is spoken immediately prior to the Gad’s Hill robbery, as a kind of meditation on political theft, while other lines spoken by the King later in that scene (‘O God, that one might read the book of fate, / And see the revolution of the times’, 3.1.45 – 6) are interpolated as ominous glosses on the play-extempore in which Hal and Falstaff each assume the role of king. Following the rebels’ defeat at Shrewsbury, Caird swiftly concludes the royal history with the death of the King, the accession of Henry V and the rejection of Falstaff – the only sequence from Part Two preserved without radical alteration.

  For audiences who had never seen the two parts of Henry IV in the theatre, Caird’s montage of disparate but thematically related moments offered a politically coherent interpretation of Henry’s reign.2 Those familiar with the complete texts of the two plays, however, would have been aware of what had been lost; for while the linear narrative of Part One was kept intact, Part Two was only mined for ‘bits’, its more episodic structure and un-historical characters sacrificed to the need for clarity and compression. As the reviewer in the Daily Mail objected, ‘Director John Caird brutally re-ordered Henry IV, changing the order of scenes to sharpen up the story line, and more or less abandoned Shakespeare’s wider historical perspective to concentrate on the father–son relationship’ (30 October 1995).3 The sacrifice of the ‘wider historical perspective’ offered in Part Two has a performance history of its own.

  The Dering manuscript

  An abridgement prepared by Sir Edward Dering, a Kentish gentleman and antiquarian, for a private performance in 1622 or shortly thereafter – but never finished – suggests that readers and performers have wanted to combine the two parts as one since shortly after Shakespeare’s death.4 The Dering manuscript foregrounds the royal history and the conflict between father and son at the expense of those marginalized characters whose ‘unofficial’ histories were no doubt seen as digressions from the narrative of the Prince’s reformation. Dering’s skilful conflation of quarto editions of the two plays – which together total 6,148 lines – to a playable 3,401 lines reflects a popular bias in favour of Part One. Of the 2,968 lines in Q5 of Part One, which was his source, Dering kept 2,621, or 88%; he omitted only two scenes in their entirety – one involving the carriers in Rochester, the other introducing the Prelate’s Rebellion, a plot he eliminated entirely from Part Two – and cut portions of other scenes, the longest of which was the exchange in which Lady Percy and Lady Mortimer are asked to sing (3.1.192 – 271).5 From Part Two, in contrast, Dering kept little more than those scenes involving the Prince or the King, a total of 806 lines, or 25%, of the 3,180 lines in the second issue of the Quarto. Scenes drawn from Part Two begin late in Dering’s Act 4 with a truncated version of Northumberland’s hearing news of Hotspur’s death at Shrewsbury – a direct connection to the scenes from Part One that precede it – and continue with Lady Percy’s persuasion of Northumberland to fly to Scotland. With the elimination of the Archbishop’s plot, Dering used these scenes to put a period to the rebellion that opened the play: news of Northumberland’s capture brought to the dying King ensures that rebellion will be given no chance to divert attention from the conclusion of the royal history.