For those of you being introduced to the American Shakespeare Repertory for the first time with our production of William Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece in the 2011 Minnesota Fringe Festival, one of the distinguishing traits of the company is our “foundational” approach to Shakespeare.

As part of the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare, we go back to the original scripts as they were published during (and shortly after) Shakespeare’s lifetime. We then build up our performance scripts by re-exploring and re-establishing the scholastic traditions of the last 400 years while following a principle of least interference. The process has not only given us a deeper appreciation of the texts themselves, but also — in our opinion — resulted in more accurate and useful scripts for the purposes of rehearsal and performance.

We first performed the epic poem Lucrece as part of the Complete Readings in February 2010 with Emma J. Mayer in the title role. For that performance we used a complete version of the poem based on the original 1594 Quarto:

LUCRECE – FULL TEXT

Unlike many of Shakespeare’s works, there is not much to say about this text: It is remarkably clean and free from errors. One point of potential interest is that the poem was originally published as Lucrece and only later became popularly known as The Rape of Lucrece.

CUTTING SHAKESPEARE

When it came time to revisit the show for the Fringe Festival, it was necessary to cut the text so that it could be performed within the festival’s 60 minute time limit.

Cutting Shakespeare is a difficult and daunting task at the best of time. Before you can even begin, you must first have a deep understanding of the work: Otherwise you’ll have no idea what valuable dramatic beats and textual clues you may inadvertently and ignorantly discard.

Fortunately, having edited the text and previously performed the piece, I was intimately familiar with it. But, of course, there were still mysteries. (For example, I’m still not entirely sure why Shakespeare so frequently emphasizes the image of a honey bee over the course of the poem. Each individual piece of imagery makes sense; but I haven’t fully grasped its pervasive totality. Since I was uncertain what Shakespeare was trying to accomplish, I erred on the side of caution and left every honey bee allusion intact.)

Once the process of cutting actually begins, I find it most effective to perform multiple passes through the text. This allows one to gently massage the text instead of feeling the need to cut huge chunks out of it. I can identify the extraneous while also preserving the essential. And it generally makes me more successful in maintaining as much of the text’s original structure and content.

In the case of Lucrece, for example, I performed six passes through the text — each refining the result. (And later a seventh when we were still running a couple minutes too long.) I am very pleased with the result: The only element of the original poem which is entirely missing from this cut is the character of Lucrece’s maid (who fetches her pen and paper to write). And the success of the cut seems testified by those who have seen the show and, having read the poem, feel nothing in its absence.

Here’s the final version of our script as it is being performed:

RAPE OF LUCRECE (MINNESOTA FRINGE FESTIVAL – DRAFT 7)

This script also shows how the lines have been assigned to the two actors for the purposes of performance.

TEXTUAL PRACTICES

Source Text: First Quarto (1594)

1. Original emendations in [square brackets].
2. Spelling has been modernized.
3. Punctuations has been silently emended (in minimalist fashion).
4. In the Fringe 2011 script, lines have been assigned to the two actors for the purpose of performance.

As with the other ASR scripts prepared for the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare, the full script presents the complete play. The conflated script, on the other hand, is what we use in actual performance. The conflated script is uncut, but does contain the role conflation which allows us to perform plays which have 30-50 roles with casts of 10-15 actors.

MERCHANT OF VENICE – FULL SCRIPT

MERCHANT OF VENICE – CONFLATED SCRIPT

The textual history of The Merchant of Venice, while paling in comparison to the tangle of Hamlet, is nevertheless something of a muddle. The confusion in this case arises almost entirely from the relationship between the First Quarto and Second Quarto of the play, both of which, according to the title pages, were printed in 1600:

Editors studying both of these quartos noted that the text we now refer to as the Second Quarto (Q2) appeared to be a superior text in that it corrected several errors found in the First Quarto (Q1). Two theories were postulated to explain the relationship between the texts: First, that Q1 was published first and, when the book went back to press for Q2, errors were corrected. (Possibly a fresh print run was ordered because of the errors.) Second, that Q2 was published first and, when it sold out, a new print run was either hastily ordered, typeset from Q2, or both (introducing fresh errors).

(In order to maximize the confusion, the Q2 -> Q1 version of the theory proved most popular and so, for a very long time, the texts were actually referred to using the opposite numbers: The text we now refer to as Q1 was called Q2; the text we now refer to as Q1 was Q2.)

As it happens, neither of these theories were true.

The truth was ferreted out in the early 20th century by Alfred W. Pollard, W.W. Greg, and William J. Neidig. In 1619, the publishers William Jaggard and Thomas Pavier printed new editions of 10 Shakespeare plays. For reasons which are not entirely clear, but which probably have a lot to do with the fact that they didn’t actually have legal right to publish all of these plays, Jaggard and Pavier printed many of these books with false title sheets claiming earlier publication dates and different publishers.

You can see where this is going: The Q2 of The Merchant of Venice was, in fact, one of the books published as part of the “False Folio” or “Pavier Quartos” (as these volumes have come to be known).

Once the truth came out, the textual history of The Merchant of Venice became a lot easier to figure out: Q1 had been published in 1600 (from either an authorial draft or a scribal copy); Q2 had been published in 1619 (from Q1); and the First Folio text had been published in 1623 (most likely from Q1, but including additional stage directions suggesting the copy may have been used as a theatrical prompt book).

LEGACY OF THE PAVIER QUARTOS

Intriguingly, the Pavier Quartos may have been responsible for the First Folio getting published. William Jaggard, responsible for printing the Pavier Quartos, was contracted just two years later to begin work on the folio. But why would you select a printer who had just attempted (or succeeded?) in pirating Shakespeare’s work?

Possibly because Jaggard had one of the few print shops capable of handling a book of the First Folio’s size. But also possibly because people who wanted to see Shakespeare’s works back in print didn’t care if Jaggard was ripping off somebody who owned the printing rights to a play but hadn’t done anything with it for nearly two decades. (For example, J. Heyes owned the printing rights to The Merchant of Venice… but it hadn’t been reprinted since 1600.)

The Pavier Quartos were also likely the first attempt to publish a collected edition of Shakespeare’s work. (One theory is that the works were released as separate volumes only after the project collapsed. All of the title sheets, for example, were printed at the same time.) Although Ben Jonson’s complete works had been published as a folio volume in 1616, attempts to collect the works of other playwrights had failed (and would continue to fail until Shakespeare’s First Folio was published in 1623). In fact, it may have been the exact same people coordinating both attempts.

Or even if that isn’t true, the publication efforts around the Pavier Quartos did have the effect of concentrating the printing rights of many Shakespeare plays into Jaggard’s control. Without that first step, the final collection of printing rights which allowed the First Folio to exist at all might not have been possible.

The truth is that we will probably never have the facts necessary to untangle what, exactly, was going on in 1619. But the few documentary trails which remain paint a delightfully convoluted picture of intrigue, conspiracy, and literary piracy.

LEGACY OF THE MOBY SHAKESPEARE

The muddled textual history of The Merchant of Venice, however, does highlight a modern oddity of Shakespeare’s plays.

If you search the internet for a Shakespeare play, you’ll find versions of it scattered around on hundreds of different sites. But virtually all of these texts are derived from the Moby Shakespeare.

The Moby Project is a collection of public domain lexical resources, many of which are now mirrored by Project Gutenberg. In 1995, the Moby Project released an ASCII text version of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This text, in turn, was derived from the 1866 Globe Shakespeare. The Globe Shakespeare was selected because (a) it was in the public domain and (b) it served as a standard reference document for Shakespearean studies for more than 100 years due to its immense popularity. (For example, its line numbering was used by the Norton Facsimile Edition of the plays, which means it’s still the standard line numbering used in virtually all scholastic papers.)

But the Globe Shakespeare naturally couldn’t benefit from any of the advances in scholastic techniques or bibliographic knowledge in the 150 years since it was published. And therefore the Moby Shakespeare didn’t benefit from them. And because the Moby Shakespeare is now all-pervasive on the internet, it’s having the interesting effect of rolling back decades of scholastic research.

Take The Merchant of Venice, for example: When the Globe Shakespeare was published, it was believed that Q2 was the most accurate of the original source texts in representing Shakespeare’s original text. We now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this isn’t true, but we don’t have time machines, so the Moby Shakespeare (based on the Globe Shakespeare based on Q2) is simply wrong.

SEE ALSO

• Merchant of Venice: The Three Sallies
• Merchant of Venice: Elizabethans and the Jews
• Merchant of Venice: The Pound of Flesh
• Merchant of Venice: The Great Conversion
• Merchant of Venice: The Soul of Shylock

TEXTUAL PRACTICES

Source Text: First Quarto (1600)

1. Emendations from First Folio in <diamond brackets>.
2. Original emendations in [square brackets].
3. Speech headings silently regularized.
4. Names which appear in ALL CAPITALS in stage directions have also been regularized.
5. Spelling has been modernized.
6. Punctuations has been silently emended (in minimalist fashion).
7. The characters of “Salanio”, “Solanio”, “Salarino”, and “Salerio” have been corrected and regularized.

Originally posted on December 1st, 2010.

Hamlet is almost universally acknowledged as Shakespeare’s greatest masterpiece. Among his plays it is also, without doubt, the most complicated of texts. (One might even say convoluted.) Some of its mysteries may never be truly unraveled, but I think we can achieve a fair degree of certainty in a great many matters. Doing so, however, is going to require a great deal of untangling. So before we tackle that seemingly overwhelming task, let’s get straight to the scripts:

HAMLET – FULL SCRIPT

HAMLET – CONFLATED SCRIPT

(If you want to follow along come Monday night, you want to grab the Conflated version. That’s the one we’ll be performing from.)

THE THREE TEXTS

We have three source texts for Hamlet. (More than any other play by Shakespeare.)

The First Quarto (Q1) was published in 1603. In addition to the date, its title page reads, in part: “As it hath been diverse times acted by his Highness’ servants in the City of London : as also in two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and elsewhere.” Although this text has been periodically identified as Shakespeare’s “rough draft” such theories seem to have little merit. Instead, this heavily corrupted text shows clear indications of memorial reconstruction: An actor (most likely one hired for the touring company) attempted to reconstruct the play from memory and possibly his sides (a written copy of his lines and his cues).

(The tour referenced on Q1′ s title page also may explain one of the most significant changes to the text: The characters of Polonius and Reynaldo are renamed Corambis and Montano. Robert Polenius was the founder of Oxford University and John Reynalds was the President of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. The similarity of the names might have been interpreted as a veiled insult at the universities, which could explain why the names would be changed.)

Although its heavy corruption and abbreviation may be largely the result of its memorial reconstruction, Q1 may also record the gross structure of a probable theatrical cut intended for the touring production. (The quarto text of Richard III shows evidence of being derived from a similar script cut and conflated for touring.)

One year later in 1604, the Second Quarto (Q2) was published. Also referred to as the “good quarto”, Q2 shows evidence of having been derived from the author’s foul papers. Whatever manuscript it was derived from, however, appears to have been difficult for the compositors at the publishing house to read. (This can be deduced from its many errors.) Q2’s text also shows evidence of the compositors referring back to the text of Q1 for certain passages, most likely as an independent reference whenever they were having difficulty reading the foul papers. (We can identify the Q1 influence whenever spelling and punctuation of the text suddenly matches Q1’s precisely. A similar practice can be found in the second quarto of Romeo & Juliet, which was similarly published after a first quarto based on memorial reconstruction was released.)

The fact that the good text of Q2 was published so rapidly after the appearance of Q1’s bad text has led many people to conclude that it was specifically published in response to Q1. There’s no supporting evidence for that theory, but it certainly sounds plausible.

Hamlet next appears in the First Folio of 1623. And this is where things get complicated: In virtually all cases, when a good quarto of a Shakespeare play existed, the First Folio text was typeset using the quarto text as its source. This isn’t the case with Hamlet: Punctuation, spelling, and even word choice varies considerably between the Q2 and F1 texts. The F1 text also includes 70 lines lacking from the Q2 text, but simultaneously omits 230 lines which can be found in Q2.

And to make matters even more complicated, there are points where F1’s compositors were clearly referring to the Q2 text in the same way that Q2’s compositors were looking at Q1’s text.

UNIQUE PASSAGES

During the 18th, 19th, and much of the 20th century, the standard editorial practice has been to conflate the Q2 and F1 texts into a single text. Recently, however, Hamlet has gotten swept up in a scholastic movement based around the premise that Shakespeare rewrote/revised his own plays. Under this interpretation, F1 is interpreted as a revision of Q2’s rough draft. (Or, occasionally, the reverse.) Most notably, the third edition of Arden’s Hamlet went so far as to print the Q2 and F1 texts as completely separate plays, editing them largely independently of each other.

The truth, however, I suspect lies somewhere inbetween.

Let’s start by looking at the sizable passages missing in one text or the other.

F1- ONLY: There are, according to the third Arden edition, three passages of 4 lines or more which are present in the First Folio but not in the Second Quarto: 2.2.238-267 (starting with “Let me question more in particular” and ending with “I am most dreadfully attended”); 2.335-399 (starting with “How comes it? Do they grow rusty?” and ending with “…Hercules and his load, too.”); and 5.2.68-5.2.81 (starting with “… to quit him with this arm?” and ending with “Peace, who comes here?”).

The last of these passages is clearly a mistake in the Q2 text: It leaves behind a dangling and unresolved sentence fragment.

But what of the first two? They were topical allusions to the acting companies of children that were popular at the time Shakespeare was writing the play. It has often been assumed that they were cut from the play when they were no longer topical, but this only raises the question of why they can be found in F1 and not Q2 (when F1 is the shorter script which appears to have been cut). Thankfully, there’s a solution. James Bednarz in Shakespeare and the Poet’s War argues convincingly that the references were specifically cut from the Second Quarto for its publication in 1604 because the allusions were too topical. By 1604 the Children of the Chapel had become the Children of Her Majesty’s Chapel under the patronage of Queen Anne. Moreover, Queen Anne was from Denmark. Lines that had been harmless fun 5 years earlier could now be seen as political attacks on England’s new Queen.

If we accept that as a plausible explanation, we can now explain the absence from Q2 of all three major F1 “additions” to the text: Two were cut for political reasons, and one was cut by mistake.

Q2-ONLY: According to G.R. Hibbard’s Oxford edition of the play, there are 18 passages of 3 or more lines found in Q2 which are not found in F1. I’m not going to cite them all here, but what I find interesting is that removing these passages from F1 requires “mid-line cuts”. While it seems unlikely that someone making additions to a play would split a single line and splice in a dozen new lines of verse, people cutting verse plays will often mend an incomplete verse line created by their cut by matching it up with another half-cut line later in the text.

Thus it seems very likely that the Q2 passages were removed from the F1 text, not added to the Q2 text.

CONCLUSION: So we can hypothesize that the F1-only passages were, in fact, present in the original Q2 text. And we can further hypothesize that the Q2-only passages were cut from the F1 text and not added to the Q2 text. From this a clear conclusion emerges: The F1 source text was created by cutting lines from the Q2 source text.

WHITHER THE Q1 TEXT?

How does the Q1 text fit in here?

Let’s again turn our attention to the large passages unique to either the F1 or Q2 text. Of the three F1-only passages, two of them can be found in the Q1 text. (The third is missing from a scene which is badly mangled and heavily abbreviated above and beyond the absence of this passage).

Even more notable, however, is that none of the eighteen Q2-only passages can be found in the Q1 text. In fact, many of the cuts are precisely mirrored. For example, after 1.1.107:

F1: “The source of this our watch, and the chief head / Of this post-haste and rummage in the land. [gap] But soft, behold, lo where it comes again.”

Q1: “Is the chief head and ground of this watch. [gap] But lo, behold, see where it comes again.”

And after 1.4.16:

F1: “… it is a custom / More honored in the breach than the observance. [gap] Look my lord it comes.”

Q1: “It is a custom more honored in the breach than the observance. [gap] Look, my lord, it comes.”

CONCLUSION: The source of the Q1 text was a touring script prepared prior to its memorial reconstruction and publication in 1603. Since it includes the F1-only passages and excludes the Q2-only passages, we can conclude that this touring script was prepared from the F1 source text. Furthermore, we can conclude that the cuts made to form the F1 source text were made to the Q2 source text and not the published version of Q2 (since, obviously, Q2 had not yet been published).

THE BIG LOOP

From this we can now draw a clear conclusion regarding the textual history of Hamlet: The Q2-source was cut to form the F1-source. And the F1-source was then cut to form the Q1-source.

The Q1-source was then published, through memorial reconstruction, as Q1. But now it gets tricky, because Q2 was published from Q2-source but was also influenced by the Q1’s text. And F1 was published from F1 source, but was also influenced by the Q2 text.

So Q2-source to F1-source to Q1-source to Q1 which influences Q2 which influences F1… The textual history of Hamlet is basically a big loop.

Which goes rather a long way towards explaining why the text has been confusing editors for four hundred years.

TEXTUAL PRACTICES

Assumptive Conclusion 1: We know that cuts were made to Q2-source to form the F1-source. Those cuts may have been made by Shakespeare, but there’s really no way to know. On the other hand, we know that there was a Q2-source which was almost certainly in Shakespeare’s hand (or as close to that as we will ever get). Ergo, we use the Q2 as our source text, but we also conflate in the F1 text to more accurately reflect the original Q2-source (since we know those passages were removed from the publication of Q2, but not from the Q2-source text).

Assumptive Conclusion 2: Q1 is a corrupted text and Q2 was known to reference it. Ergo, a Q1/Q2 agreement against F1 is paradoxically more likely to indicate that F1 is correct and that Q2 is copying an error from Q1. On other hand, an F1/Q1 agreement could contra-indicate Q2, but could just as easily reflect a change made during the cuts to the F1-source and so are generally not followed unless the Q2 text is nonsensical. (Where the texts of Q2 and F1 agree with each other, of course, there’s no problem at all.)

Assumptive Conclusion 3: Q1 is based on memorial reconstruction of a touring production. Ergo, it reflects actual stage practices contemporary with Shakespeare (but not necessarily Shakespeare’s direction in all cases). Thus, its directions are generally useful. (In addition, some of its new scenes, perhaps written for the purposes of tightening the play, might provide some clues to original interpretation on key questions of character.)

See Also:

• Hamlet: Disasters in the Sun
• Hamlet Writes (Never Trust an Editor)
• Hamlet: Of Acts and Scenes
• In a Web of Tragic Flaws: Hamlet as the Anti-Tragic Hero

Special thanks to the Enfolded Hamlet, without which it would have made a full comparison of Q2/F1 readings too time-consuming for the limits of this project.

Source Text: Second Quarto (1604)

1. Original emendations in [square brackets].
2. Emendation from Q1 in [italicized brackets].
3. Q2-only passages in <diamond brackets>.
4. Emendation from F1 in {curled brackets}.
5. F1-only passages in {italicized curled brackets}.
6. Speech headings silently regularized.
7. Names which appear in ALL CAPITALS in stage directions have also been regularized.
8. Spelling has been modernized.
9. Punctuations has been silently emended (in minimalist fashion).
10. Act and Scene divisions corrected.

Originally posted on November 18th, 2010.

The First Folio of 1623 is our only original source for Cymbeline, and so naturally the ASR script for the play is based upon it.

CYMBELINE – FULL SCRIPT

CYMBELINE – CONFLATED SCRIPT

In working with the script, it quickly became apparent that a heavier hand than usual would need to be employed with emending the punctuation of the text: At some point there was either a scribe or a typesetter who was passionately enamored with commas, and Cymbeline became dedicated to their love. In addition to a wide practice of what can only be described as random commatization, one can be ensured upon finding an “and” or a “but” in the original text that a comma will be strategically inserted immediately before it (even if it renders the sentence into utter nonsense).

This love affair with the comma is strewn everywhere, and their use is so frequently contrary to any sense that even when they can be hammered into some semblance of sense, I feel there is good cause to doubt them.

NOT-SO-LOOSE VERSE

Another aspect of the Cymbeline text to note is the ease with which a great quantity of seemingly irregular verse in the play can be trivially regularized. For example, the text beginning on page 2 reads, in the original Folio text:

By her election may be truly read, what kind of man he is.
2 I honor him, euen out of your report.
But pray you tell me, is she sole childe to’th’King?
1 His onely childe:

Which virtually all modern editions (including the ASR script), regularize to:

By her election may be truly read
What kind of man he is.

2 GENTLEMAN I honor him
Even out of your report. But pray you tell me,
Is she sole child to the king?

1 GENTLEMAN His only child:

But there are longer passages as well. For example, his passage from Act 3, Scene 7 (pg. 41):

In our script you can read the corrected scansion as:

IMOGEN To Milford-Haven.

BELARIUS What’s your name?

IMOGEN Fidele, sir:
I have a kinsman who is bound for Italy;
He embark’d at Milford, to whom being going,
Almost spent with hunger, I am fall’n in this offense.

BELARIUS Prithee (fair youth) think us no churls,
Nor measure our good minds by this rude place
We live in. Well encounter’d, ’tis almost night;
You shall have better cheer ere you depart,
And thanks to stay and eat it: Boys, bid him welcome.

GUIDERIUS Were you a woman, youth, I should woo hard,
But be your groom in honesty: I bid for you,
As I do buy.

ARVIRAGUS I’ll [make it] my comfort,

Most modern editions will leave the first line as “To Milford Haven. / What’s your name?” (which is short at just 8 syllables). This also leaves the next line (“Fidele, sir, I have a kinsman who”) short at 9 syllables. These editions will attempt to correct the further error at the end of this passage (which in the Folio reads long at 13 syllables as: “I bid for you, as I do buy.” / “I’ll make’t my comfort”) by emending “I bid for you, as I do buy” to read “Aye, bid for you as I’d buy”.

But if we identify the colon after “Fidele Sir:” in the Folio as the indication of a line break, the rest of the passage quickly falls into remarkably regular verse.

TEXTUAL PRACTICES

Source Text: First Folio (1623)

1. Original emendations in [square brackets].
2. Speech headings silently regularized.
3. Names which appear in ALL CAPITALS in stage directions have also been regularized.
4. Spelling has been modernized.
5. Punctuations has been silently emended (in minimalist fashion).

SCENE NUMBERS: Modern tradition has conflated several of the Folio’s shorter scenes into longer scenes, frequently altering the dramatic structure of the play to achieve this. This script adheres to the original Folio scene breaks, which means that its scene numbers will not always correspond to modern texts.

Special thanks to Emma J. Mayer who worked with me in editing this text. Emma has recently moved away from the Twin Cities and her work on the project will be sorely missed.

Originally posted on October 25th, 2010.

ASR’s script for Richard II is based primarily on the first Quarto of the play as it was published in 1597 (Q1). The decision to use Q1 as the source text of the play is based primarily on the relationship between the original texts as described by A.W. Pollard in 1916.

RICHARD II — FULL SCRIPT

RICHARD II — CONFLATED SCRIPT

Pollard was able to demonstrate (by tracing the inheritance of typographical errors from one edition to the next) that each quarto after the first was based entirely on the printed copy of the previous quarto: Thus Q2 was printed from Q1; Q3 from Q2; and so forth. (Richard II actually proved to be one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays in quarto. Other than Pericles, it is the only play to receive two quarto printings in the same year.)

The exception to this rule is Q4 in 1608, which adds a version of the deposition scene to the play. The leading theory is that the deposition, despite its central importance to the structure of the play, was simply too controversial in the waning years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign for it to be printed. (Another book regarding the usurpation of Richard II’s throne by Henry Bullingbrooke had already become the center of a major political scandal.)

The other text to consider is the First Folio (F1). Textual evidence seems to indicate that the F1 text was based on one of the later quartos, but it also includes additional stage directions (suggesting access to the theater’s prompt script) and a superior version of the deposition scene than the one found in Q4 (which reportedly shows signs of memorial reconstruction). But the exact nature of F1’s source text is a matter of considerable debate which can basically be broken down into two separate issues:

(1) Which quarto is the F1 text based on? (Some point to Q3. Others to Q5. Many to some combination of Q3 and Q5. But was it a single text assembled from a part of Q3 and a part of Q5, or did the typesetters have both a Q3 and Q5 laying around and simply consulted whichever was most convenient?)

(2) Was the quarto text being used as a promptbook (with stage directions being added to the printed copy and, thus, added to the F1 text)? Or was the promptbook being consulted separately with its stage directions and perhaps other corrections being incorporated into a text being set from the printed quarto?

To these questions we can add:

(3) What was the source of the Q4 deposition? (Memorial reconstruction is often one suggestion, but not a completely compelling one.)

(4) From what source was F1’s deposition scene (and possibly other corrections) taken from?

I have accepted the general scholastic conclusion that F1 is the superior source for the deposition scene, but since the F1 text is at least partly derived from a quarto text we know to be derivative of Q1, I have decided to employ the following textual standard:

Q1 is used as a source text. F1 is used as the source text for the deposition scene. F1 is also used to provide necessary corrections to the Q1 text, although if the correction originated in quarto editions between Q2 and Q5 (likely making it no more than a typesetter’s best guess), I don’t give it any more weight than other emendations.

STAGE DIRECTIONS FROM HOLINSHED

One final point of interest in the text are the stage directions for Act V, Scene 5 (in which Richard is murdered). In the original Q1 text, the scene appears like this:

KEEPER My lord I dare not; Sir Pierce of Exton,
Who lately came from the King commands the contrary.

RICHARD The devil take Henry of Lancaster, and thee,
Patience is stale, and I am weary of it.

KEEPER Help, help, help.

The murderers rush in.

RICHARD How now, what means Death in this rude assault?
Villain, thy own hand yields thy death’s instrument.
Go thou, and fill another room in hell.

Here Exton strikes him down.

The First Folio provides us with the identities of the murderers (“Enter Sexton and Servants“), but still leaves us with a lot of unanswered questions: What prompts the Keeper to call for help? And should we interpret “Villain, thy own hand yields thy death’s instrument” as a dramatic invocation (and perhaps foreshadowing) of the fate that awaits those who murder kings?

The description of the scene found in Holinshed’s Chronicles, on the other hand, may help to shed some light on it:

King Henry, sitting on a day at his table, sore sighing, said, “Have I no faithful friend which will deliver me of him, whose life will be my death, and whose death will be the preservation of my life?” This saying was much noted of them which were present, and especially of one called Sir Piers of Exton. This knight incontinently departed from the court, with eight strong persons in his company, and came to Pomfret, commanding the esquire that was accustomed to sew and take the assay before King Richard to do so no more, saying: “Let him eat now, for he shall not long eat.” King Richard sat down to dinner and was served with courtesy or assay, whereupon much marveling at the sudden change, he demanded of the esquire why he did not his duty, “Sir” (said he) “I am otherwise commanded by Sir Piers of Exton, which is newly come from King Henry.” When King Richard heard that word, he took the carving knife in his hand, and struck the esquire on the head, saying, “The devil take Henry of Lancaster and thee together.” And with that word, Sir Piers entered the chamber, well armed, with eight tall men likewise armed, every of them having a bill in his hand.

King Richard, perceiving this, put the table from him, and stepping to the foremost man, wrung the bill out of his hands, and so valiantly defended himself that he slew four of those that thus came to assail him. Sir Piers being half dismayed herewith, leapt into the chair where King Richard was wont to sit, while the other four persons fought him and chased him about the chamber. And in conclusion, as King Richard traversed his ground from one side of the chamber to the other, and coming by the chair where Sir Piers stood, he was felled with a stroke of a pole-axe which Sir Piers gave him upon the head, and therewith rid him out of life.

The fact that Shakespeare drew directly from this passage can be seen in its many similarities to the text of the play. In addition, it is relatively easy to see how the action described by Holinshed can be fitted to Shakespeare’s verse:

KEEPER My lord I dare not; Sir Pierce of Exton,
Who lately came from the King commands the contrary.

[Richard takes the carving knife and strikes the Keeper on the head.]

RICHARD The devil take Henry of Lancaster, and thee,
Patience is stale, and I am weary of it.

KEEPER Help, help, help.

<Enter Exton and Servants.>
The murderers rush in.

RICHARD How now, what means Death in this rude assault?

[Richard takes a halberd from one of them, killing several of them.]

Villain, thy own hand yields thy death’s instrument.
Go thou, and fill another room in hell.

Here Exton strikes him down.

While consistent, however, it should be noted that the exact timing of them and perhaps even their details are open for negotiation in actual production.

As an interesting note, the Moby Shakespeare on which virtually all online versions of Shakespeare are based includes a stage direction for Richard which reads: “Snatching an axe from a Servant and killing him.” (This direction is from the 1864 Globe Shakespeare on which the Moby Shakespeare takes its text.) But there’s no textual basis for Richard ending up with an axe, and Holinshed makes it clear the opposite is true: Richard employed a bill (or halberd). He was in fact killed by an axe, not wielding one.

TEXTUAL PRACTICES

Source Text: First Quarto (1597)
1. Original emendations in [square brackets]; emendations taken from F1 in <diamond brackets>; emendations taken from Q2 thru Q5 in {curly brackets}.
2. Speech headings silently regularized.
3. Names which appear in ALL CAPITALS in stage directions have also been regularized.
4. Spelling has been modernized.
5. Punctuations has been silently emended (in minimalist fashion).