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Every piece of evidence surrounding the authorship of Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock points to one of two truths:

(1) If the play was written in the early 1590’s, then Shakespeare must have written it. (If not, then its deep similarities to later Shakespearean plays would indicate that Shakespeare spent the bulk of his career cribbing from the work of an anonymous and apparently forgotten playwright.)

(2) If the play was written after 1600, then Shakespeare probably did not write it. (The relative crudity of the play coupled to such a late date makes it unlikely as the sequel to the polished Richard II, and makes it far more plausible that the play’s similarities are the result of someone cribbing from Shakespeare’s mature works.)

But in the absence of any certainty regarding the play’s authorship, why should it be included in the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare?

Partly because we believe that staging the apocrypha gives a unique and exciting opportunity to see plays which are rarely or never performed. If an apocryphal play like Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock was, in fact, written by Shakespeare, then it’s an important part of the project’s goal to include it. But even if it is not, such plays are an important part of the American Shakespeare Repertory’s mission to provide the rich, Elizabethan context in which Shakespeare’s plays were originally staged.

Which is the other reason we believe it’s important to stage Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock. Amidst all the uncertainty, there is one thing we can be sure of: There was a play on the London stage dramatizing the events surrounding Thomas of Woodstock’s death. If it wasn’t Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock, then it was some other play covering the same ground.

Whether or not that play was by Shakespeare, it would have been fresh in the minds of those who saw the premiere of Richard II — a part of the cultural gestalt created by Elizabethan theater. It’s a context which has been largely, if not entirely, inaccessible for the past 400 years. But it’s a context which the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare is uniquely suited to restore.

Originally posted September 18th, 2010.

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In considering Richard II and Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock we continue to struggle with the question: Which came first?

In the case of Richard II we know that the play was definitely written by August 29^th, 1597, when it was entered into the Stationers’ Registry. (It was first published later that year.) Internal evidence has suggested dates ranging anywhere from 1592 to 1596 for its composition, but common consensus is that Shakespeare used The First Fowre Bookes of the Civil Warres by Samuel Daniels (written in 1594 and published in 1595) as one of his sources and conclude that the play was most likely written in 1595 or 1596.

For R2: Woodstock, we have no external evidence of a date. The style, genre, form, and even politics of the play have all been used to suggest a date in the late 1580’s or early 1590’s. (If you see a movie featuring primitive video games and the threat of nuclear war in a “ripped from the headlines of today” style, chances are you’re watching a movie from the early 1980’s.) More recently, however, a great deal of interest has been given to stylometric studies which attempt to pinpoint the play’s use of language in relation to general linguistic trends. (If you see a movie with people talking about bumping off the big cheese because he’s all wet, you’re probably watching a movie from before 1960.)

In 2001, Macd. P. Jackson published “Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Anonymous Thomas of Woodstock”, presenting a fresh stylometric study of the play which suggested that the play must have been written after 1600.

For example, Jackson looks at the number of feminine endings in the play (verse lines with 11 instead of 10 syllables):

Moreover, the percentage of feminine endings within blank verse lines would be thoroughly anomalous in a play composed around 1592 or 1593. Some basic data was meticulously accumulated by Philip W. Timberlake for his study entitled The Feminine Ending in English Blank Verse (1991), which covers plays 1580-95. […]

Timberlake shows that George Peele’s The Old Wives’ Tale is the only undoubted play by Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Lodge, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, or George Peele, in which the percentage of feminine endings, on a strict count, rises about four, and in The Old Wives’ Tale it is only five. […] Most of the many anonymous plays yield single-figure percentages. Those with 10 percent or more are A Larum for London (10), Soliman and Perseda (10), King Leir (11), Alphonsus Emperor of Germany (11.5), John a Kent and John a Cumber (14), Jeronimo, Part 1 (19), Sir Thomas More (21), and Woodstock (21). […]

The high proportion of feminine endings in Woodstock — and the play is remarkably homogeneous in this regard — strongly suggests that the verse belongs to the seventeenth century, when many dramatists were making quite liberal use of this metrical variation.

Such arguments are meticulous. Unfortunately, many of Jackson’s conclusions are based on excluding Shakespeare’s work during the 1590’s specifically because his was the style which would later be widely imitated:

Only one play considered by Timberlake, namely Sir Thomas More, employs feminine endings as frequently as Woodstock, and only five others approach this rate, with percentages of fourteen or more. Three of the five are by Shakespeare, who is obviously not a candidate for the authorship of Woodstock.

In other words, 4 out of the 6 plays which contain such a high percentage of feminine endings pre-1600 were either contributed to or written by Shakespeare. Shakespeare was leading the pack, and if one considers Shakespeare to be a viable candidate for writing R2: Woodstock, then not only is the confidence of Jackson’s thesis badly damaged, but his research actually contributes substantially to a very different picture which is being painted by all of the evidence we’ve considered:

The Two Truths of the authorship of Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock.

Go to Part 4

Originally posted on September 17th, 2010.

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Given the deep connections between the two plays, it would be logical to assume that either Richard II was written as a sequel to Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock or that R2: Woodstock was written as a prequel to Richard II.

Since it’s comparatively more common for authors to write sequels rather than prequels, let’s start with that hypothesis. If Richard II was written as a sequel to R2: Woodstock, we would expect to see callbacks to the earlier play. In just such a fashion, Shakespeare in Henry V has the king pray to God to forgive the deposition of Richard II by his father; and in Richard III he explicitly builds upon the murders seen onstage during the Henry VI plays.

Richard II similarly seems to build upon R2: Woodstock. Take, for example, the Duchess of Gloucester. She appears in the second scene of Richard II, laments the loss of her husband in commiseration with the Duke of York, and then disappears from the play entirely. Why? From a dramatic point of view, her brief presence seems to contribute very little (if anything) to the narrative of Richard II.

On the other hand, the scene serves admirably as a bridge between Richard II and R2: Woodstock, where the Duchess is an integral and pervasive character throughout the play. Viewed in this light, her appearance neatly ties off the plot of the previous play and helps transition the audience into the new circumstances of the sequel.

The frequent references to Richard as the “landlord of England” in R2: Woodstock might also be an example of this. The epithet is deeply tied into the narrative of R2: Woodstock (which revolves around the “renting” of the kingdom to Bushy, Bagot, Green, and Scroop). In Richard II, where the “leasing” of the kingdom is barely mentioned, the “landlord” reference is used only once, by the Duke of Lancaster:

Why, cousin, wert thou regent of the world,
It were a sharm to let this land by lease;
But for thy world enjoying but this land,
Is it not more than shame to shame it so?
Landlord of England art thou now, not king.

The line is a memorable one, and its power and meaning can certainly be carried through performance even when an audience doesn’t really know what Lancaster is talking about. But can’t it also be read as a dramatist reminding his audience of the events they saw in the previous play?

On the other hand, there are aspects of the play which make Richard II‘s role as a sequel seem doubtful. The most egregious example is the character of Greene, who dies dramatically in the closing scenes of R2: Woodstock only to “reappear” without explanation in Richard II (only to be executed by Bolingbroke).

The death of Greene in R2: Woodstock is completely unhistorical (he was, in fact, executed by Bolingbroke), but that’s of little consequence. (Elizabethan history plays, like modern Hollywood movies “based on a true story”, are studded with historical inaccuracies for the sake of dramatic necessity.) What seems impossible, however, is that an author would write a sequel to their own work featuring a character they had killed off in the previous installment!

… right?

Actually, it’s not quite so clear-cut. Consider the example of Jurassic Park: In the novel written by Michael Crichton the character of Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum in the movie) dies. In the movie, on the other hand, Ian Malcolm survives. And when Steven Spielberg went to make the sequel, he wanted it to star Jeff Goldblum. But he also wanted it to be based on a novel by Crichton. Which is why Crichton’s The Lost World stars the formerly dead Ian Malcolm and never really bothers explaining how that could be true.

Am I saying Shakespeare had a film deal? No. I’m just pointing out that continuity errors ““ even a continuity error as significant as ignoring the death of a character ““ aren’t enough to prove that Michael Crichton didn’t write The Lost World.

In the case of Greene, there are any number of hypothetical possibilities: The actor playing Green could have proven popular enough to bring back the character. Our copy of R2: Woodstock could have been altered to include Greene’s dramatic death at a point where continuity with Richard II had become irrelevant. Or it could predate a rewrite which would have made R2: Woodstock more consistent with its sequel. Or perhaps the Shakespeare simply discovered he needed the character of Greene in Richard II and decided he didn’t care about the continuity problems.

Unfortunately, all of this speculation still leaves us at an impasse: Was Richard II written as a sequel to R2: Woodstock, building on its predecessor while recalling its dramatic arcs? Maybe. Was R2: Woodstock written as a prequel to Richard II, deliberately fleshing out material left undeveloped or merely evoked by the earlier play? It seems just as likely.

Go to Part 3

Originally posted on September 16th, 2010.

Last January, the Alexandrian swapped over from its previous existence as a cobbled-together morass of HTML to a WordPress installation. This meant that I needed to hand-convert over 500+ posts which existed on the old site. This went at a fairly brisk pace until I hit the mid-point of 2010, which is when I started getting experimental with my HTML coding. This greatly improved the look of the old site; but made converting things over to the new site a bit of a headache (as old formatting would break and new formatting needed to be figured out).

But as of today the Great Conversion is over! All of the old posts and as many of the old comments as survived the slow death of HaloScan can now be found on the WordPress installation (which is what you’re reading now).

Since I’ve just wrapped up the conversion of 2010, here are some highlights from the posts that year:

Node-Based Scenario Design: The manifesto of non-linear adventure design.

Xandering the Dungeon: The manifesto for non-linear dungeon design.

Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock – Script and Ending: An apocryphal play sometimes ascribed to Shakespeare. I edited and made available on the ‘net the first decent edition of the text. It’s missing most of the last scene, so I wrote a replacement.

Hard Limits in Scenario Design: Inspired by an analysis of the GUMSHOE system, this look at hard limits in system design and how they affect (or should affect) your scenario design has played a surprisingly large roll in my thinking about roleplaying games over the past two years.

You Can’t Do That Here: Another GUMSHOE-inspired analysis. Sometimes systems actively prevent certain things from happening. Other times, players get stuck when they start thinking exclusively in terms of the system’s paradigms.

Werewolf Templates: A re-organization of the werewolf templates from 3rd Edition which make them much, much easier to use. (Plus: Bradoch the Wererat, the Spider Weird of Hollow’s Deep, and the Totem Giants.)

UA-Style Rumors for D&D: Originally a thread on RPGNet, these rumors twist your common understanding of the D&D universe. For example: “Underdark? There’s no such thing. The dark elves just live on the other side of the planet.”

Size Does Matter?: A somewhat informative look at the escalating bloat of the D&D system (or lack thereof) over the years.

Fanal the Swordbearer: A three-part series originally written for John Wick’s Orkworld.

The Long Con of DRM: Pretty much everything I said here is coming true.

OD&D in the Caverns of Thracia: The collected edition of the campaign journal from my OD&D megadungeon campaign.

(The highlights from the conversion of 2009 can be found here.)