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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.

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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.

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Originally posted on September 16th, 2010.

Is it by Shakespeare?

It’s the question that dominates any discussion of Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock. And it’s not merely a matter of the personal aggrandizement or exceptional excitement which would result from identifying a previously unknown work by Shakespeare: If Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock and Richard II are both cut from a single cloth (like Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV), then it holds profound significance for the interpretation of both plays as one can be used to inform the other.

But the play’s lost cover sheet has taken with it both title and author. Nor is there a reliable, contemporary reference to the play’s performance. Instead, the script seems to emerge almost spontaneously out of the haze of history, serving only to remind us of the slender slips and vast gaps out of which our knowledge of the Elizabethan theater is built.

In the complete absence of hard evidence, therefore, the question of Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock‘s authorship must be resolved entirely on the basis of internal evidence. Such evidence is, of course, inherently implicit rather than explicit, and the inferences drawn from it can never been considered fully conclusive.

With that being said, the deep connections between Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock and Shakespeare’s Richard II have been obvious to even casual readers of the players for the better part of at least two centuries. The similarities to history, of course, are expected. But what’s particularly relevant are the similarities between the narratives which contradict the history.

For example, in Act 2, Scene 1 of Richard II, when John of Gaunt describes the dead Thomas of Woodstock as “my brother Gloucester, plain well-meaning soul” he’s describing “plain Thomas” of Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock, not the proud, power-seeking Gloucester of history. And, in similar fashion, the characterizations of Richard’s other uncles seem to share a greater continuity with Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock than the historical record.

The plays also seem to share a rich verbal landscape with each other. Generations of scholars have produced hundreds of examples, but for the purposes of example let’s consider one of the most compelling: According to Macd. P. Jackson, the phrase “pelting farm” appears only twice in the entirety of English dramatic literature – Shakespeare’s Richard II and Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock. This is not a phrase drawn from the historical sources, and yet it nevertheless appears in nearly identical circumstances in each play.

From Richard II:

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:

And from Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock:

And we his son to ease our wanton youth
Become a landlord to this warlike realm,
Rent out our kingdom, like a pelting farm,
That erst was held as fair as Babylon,
The maiden conqueress of all the world.

All of these are merely examples drawn from the rich scholarship carried out by Frijlicnk (1929), Rossiter (1946), Jackson (2001), Corbin and Sedge (2002), and Egan (2005) – each of whom draws different conclusions regarding the authorship of Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock, while nevertheless uniformly confirming its deep connection to Shakespeare’s Richard II.

Such examples begin to weave the two plays together into a common tapestry. But Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock has also been shown to have deep and almost self-evident connections to many other works by Shakespeare as well: In Nimble we see a rough sketch of Dogberry. In Tresilian there are the outlines of Falstaff. Woodstock’s murder echs that of Clarence in Richard III. We could easily pluck the name of “Osric” from Hamlet and give it to the fop courtier who summons Woodstock to court. Woodstock’s conversation with that same courtier’s horse is drawn from the same comedic vein as Launce and his dog.

The examples are almost endless. And, as with Richard II, these large areas of common ground with Shakespeare’s other plays are also matched by countless textual parallels. Michael Egan cites more than a thousand of them in A Newly Authenticated Play by William Shakespeare, and while many of his selections may be dismissed as common poetics, he is not the first to connect the dots.

But if a connection cannot be denied, an important question remains: Which came first?

If Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock came first, then it served as the model for Shakespeare’s plays. And given the breadth and multitude of similarities, we must either suppose that Shakespeare is the author or conclude that Shakespeare spent his entire career plagiarizing this anonymous playwright.

On the other hand, if Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock came second, then the common ground can be easily explained by its author drawing inspiration from Shakespeare.

If we had a firm date for the composition or playing of Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock, of course, this question could be trivially resolved. But we don’t. And, unfortunately, this is not a problem which internal evidence seems capable of resolving: While we can demonstrate that one play seems indebted to the other, how could we determine which is the lender and which the debtor?

Peter Ure, in the Arden edition of Richard II, claims that the relationship can be deduced from analyzing the pattern of word usage. Specifically, he postulates that it’s more likely that multiple uses of a term in one work will conflate to a single, borrowed use in another work than that a single use of a term will be borrowed multiple times for another work.

In the case of the two Richard II plays, for example, Ure focuses on the description of King Richard as a “landlord”. This occurs once in Shakespeare’s Richard II (Act 2, Scene 1):

Landlord of England art thou now, not king.
They state of law is bondslave to the law.

Ure cites an example of the same from Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock, and goes on to say:

In four other places in Woodstock Richard is described as a landlord, twice by himself, once by Greene, and once by the Ghost of Edward III. There is no parallel in Holinshed or elsewhere to this five-times-repeated reproach. It is of course more likely that Shakespeare remembered the word because it is repeated so often than that the author of Woodstock expanded the single reference in Richard II into so abundant a treatment in his own work.

It certainly sounds like a plausible theory. But is it?

Consider the modern example of Robert E. Howard’s stories starring Conan the Barbarian. These proved so popular that dozens of authors have been hired to write new stories starring the same character. The result? Phrases, descriptors, and verbal tics unique in Howard’s body of work were repeated dozens of times, frequently multiple times within a single work, in endless variation.

It’s not too difficult to draw a hypothetical parallel to an anonymous Jacobean playwright seeking to capture the “authentic” feel of Shakespeare’s Richard; nor to imagine how a particularly memorable snatch of text could become lodged in the mind of an imitator.

Unfortunately, this moves us no nearer to answering our question: Just because Ure isn’t necessarily right dsn’t mean that he’s necessarily wrong: If a single evocative image can be regurgitated, I find it no less believable to suppose that a pervasive theme can be accidentally or deliberately recalled.

Perhaps the unique phrase “pelting farm” could give us some guidance? In the manuscript for Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock, the passage containing the phrase has actually been struck out, most likely by the original scribe. This means that it would never have been spoke on the stage, making it highly unlikely that Shakespeare could have encountered the phrase and re-used it in Richard II.

Unfortunately, this dsn’t actually provide any clarity. The manuscript for Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock is a scribal copy which may have been prepared for a revival many years after the play was originally written, leaving open (and perhaps even making likely) the possibility that the words “pelting farm” may have been said onstage during an earlier production of the play. Furthermore, if Shakespeare were the author of both plays, he would hardly need to hear the words spoken on stage to know what he had originally written.

In the end, we are left suspended between two possibilities by a subtle enigma which, as Tresilian says, “Janus-like may with a double face salute them both”.

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Originally posted September 13th, 2010.