King John & Henry VIII (3 page)

The voice that is absent from
Henry VIII
is the one that was so forceful in
Henry IV
and
Henry V:
the commoners, whose plain prose pricks the bubble of pretentious courtly language. As in
The Winter’s Tale
, gentlemen are brought on stage in the role of witnesses. But there are no equivalents to
The Winter’s Tale
’s lower-class characters of shepherd and clown. The only prose intervention belongs to a porter in the final act, who hears the hubbub of young gallants outside the closed door of the council chambers. “These are the youths that thunder at a playhouse, and fight for bitten apples,” he remarks, perhaps implying that of the three audiences for whom Shakespeare was writing—the court, the select company of the indoor Blackfriars theater, and the mass public who paid a penny to stand in the yard of the Globe—it is the first two who now interest him more. Insofar as the play does explore the consciousness of the low born, it is when a commoner such as Cromwell and above all Wolsey—son of a provincial butcher—becomes a “great” man, provoking the enmity of the dukes and earls born to ermine. At some level, Shakespeare—son of a provincial glover who had close links with butcher’s business—is reflecting upon his own extraordinary rise. Fletcher, by contrast, was born into a higher social echelon; he and Beaumont did write for the public stage, but always with a particular eye to the court audience.

There was, perhaps, a particular frisson when the play was performed at the Blackfriars, since this was the very location of the trial of Queen Katherine. But there is no doubt that
Henry VIII
was also played at the Globe soon after it was written. At a performance in June 1613, there was an accident when “chambers” (small cannon) were discharged in the fourth scene, resulting in the burning down of the theater. One of the several surviving accounts of the fire, by the diplomat Sir Henry Wotton, combines reportage with a perceptive reading of the play:

Wotton’s account reveals how much care the King’s Men took in their efforts to represent “pomp and majesty” on stage: from the matting on the floor to the garters and crosses of St. George on the costumes, everything is contrived “to make greatness very familiar.” Intriguingly, though, the effect of transforming royal processions through Whitehall and Westminster into passages of a play on the matted stage of a thatched theater in the margins of Southwark is also to make greatness seem just a little ridiculous. The representation of the intrinsic theatricality of state power hints at its flimsiness, its reliance on the same mechanisms of show as those of the theater. Wotton’s insight serves as an epilogue not just on
Henry VIII
but on Shakespeare’s whole sequence of English history plays: on his stage, the people of England became intimately familiar for the first time with the story of their great ones, and at the same time they learned—through laughter and through debate—to respect the structures of greatness just a little less. Having witnessed the fall of lords and even monarchs on the boards of the Globe, they were ready some forty years later to erect a scaffold in Whitehall and witness the fall of an axe on the head of a real king.

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of a few plays there are hundreds of differences between the Quarto and Folio editions, some of them far from trivial.

If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rushlight and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.

But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a reasonably well-printed Quarto was available, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare’s will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, “read him and again and again,” but they also wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to the theater-life for which Shakespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the
RSC Shakespeare
, in both
Complete Works
and individual volumes, uses the Folio as base text wherever possible. Significant Quarto variants are, however, noted in the Textual Notes.

Both
King John
and
Henry VIII
were first printed in the Folio. An anonymous two-part play entitled
The Troublesome Reign of King John
, first printed in 1591, was attributed to Shakespeare in both its 1611 and 1622 reprints, though his authorship is extremely unlikely. The Folio text of
King John
is very clean, which argues against it being set from authorial papers, though its lack of theatrical notation seems to suggest otherwise. There are problems with inconsistency of speech headings, though, and the whole picture seems to add up to the printer’s copy being a pre-theatrical text copied by multiple scribes. The text of
Henry VIII
is clean and well printed, and is generally considered to have been set from a carefully prepared scribal copy. It features unusually full and detailed stage directions that make large demands on the available cast, although they seem to have been carefully copied from Holinshed, the play’s chief source. It does not follow, therefore, that they necessarily reflect performance or that the copy from which the Folio text was set was theatrical.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts
are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including
King John
or
Henry VIII
, so the lists here are editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus “
BLANCHE
of Castile, John’s niece”).

Locations
are provided by Folio for only two plays, but not for either
King John
or
Henry VIII
. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (“
another part of the palace
” or similar). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before.

Act and Scene Divisions
were provided in Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a
running scene
count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention
running scene continues
. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.

Speakers’ Names
are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio.

Verse
is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as prose, and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction (“turnd” rather than “turned”) to indicate whether or not the final “-ed” of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus “turnèd” would be two syllables), but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it, and nor did actors’ cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker’s sentence.

Spelling
is modernized, but older forms are occasionally maintained where necessary for rhythm or aural effect.

Punctuation
in Shakespeare’s time was as much rhetorical as grammatical. “Colon” was originally a term for a unit of thought in an argument. The semicolon was a new unit of punctuation (some of the Quartos lack them altogether). We have modernized punctuation throughout, but have given more weight to Folio punctuation than many editors, since, though not Shakespearean, it reflects the usage of his period. In particular, we have used the colon far more than many editors: it is exceptionally useful as a way of indicating how many Shakespearean speeches unfold clause by clause in a developing argument that gives the illusion of enacting the process of thinking in the moment. We have also kept in mind the origin of punctuation in classical times as a way of assisting the actor and orator: the comma suggests the briefest of pauses for breath, the colon a middling one, and a full stop or period a longer pause. Semicolons, by contrast, belong to an era of punctuation that was only just coming in during Shakespeare’s time and that is coming to an end now: we have accordingly only used them where they occur in our copy texts (and not always then). Dashes are sometimes used for parenthetical interjections where the Folio has brackets. They are also used for interruptions and changes in train of thought. Where a change of addressee occurs within a speech, we have used a dash preceded by a full stop (or occasionally another form of punctuation). Often the identity of the respective addressees is obvious from the context. When it is not, this has been indicated in a marginal stage direction.