Authors: William Shakespeare
Though the Folio text is entitled
The Life and Death of King Richard the Second
, the earlier Quarto edition was called
The Tragedy of King Richard the Second
. The structure of the drama answers to a very traditional idea of tragedy as a story in which a powerful figure falls from earthly prosperity and in so doing rises to greatness of soul. Pity for Richard is the prevailing tragic emotion in the closing scenes. “It seems to be the design of the poet to raise Richard to esteem in his fall, and consequently to interest the reader in his favour,” wrote Dr. Johnson. Note “the reader” there, not the
spectator
—this is a play that has been more admired on page than stage. Johnson continues: “He gives him only passive fortitude, the virtue of a confessor, rather than of a king. In his prosperity we saw him imperious and oppressive; but in his distress he is wise, patient, and pious.”
By concentrating on the inner life of Richard, Shakespeare diminishes some of the major elements of the play that was his structural model, Christopher Marlowe’s
Edward II
. The flatterers Bushy, Bagot, and Green are given very small roles and the exclusion of the queen from the king’s affections is not fully developed. In Marlowe’s dramatization of the fall of a weak king and the rise of his rival, the minions—first Gaveston and then Spencer—are central not only to the politics but also to the sexuality of the play. They are explicitly the king’s lovers. The abused queen becomes a lead player in the rebellion against the king. Shakespeare’s Richard by contrast seems too self-absorbed to be powerfully driven by sexual desire. Coleridge spoke intriguingly of the character’s
feminine friendism
, but that is not quite a euphemism for homoerotic feeling.
As the man who rises when Richard falls, Bullingbrook’s story remains unfinished. But Shakespeare anticipates the civil war that will wrack his reign. The role of Northumberland, who cooperates with Bullingbrook but will eventually turn against him, is greatly expanded from its seed in Holinshed’s
Chronicles
. Richard delivers a prophecy that “The time shall not be many hours of age / More than it is ere foul sin, gathering head, / Shall break into corruption” and predicts rightly that Northumberland will seek to pluck King Henry IV from his usurped throne. As he wrote these words, Shakespeare must have been thinking of how he was going to continue the story in another play. He was getting ready for a sequel:
Henry IV Part I
.
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.
Written and first performed in 1595 or 1596,
Richard II
was published in Quarto format in 1597 and reprinted twice in 1598. The printed text excluded a sequence of about 160 lines in which King Richard formally hands over his throne, inverting the sacred language of the coronation ceremony and smashing a mirror. Scholars usually assume that this omission was because the scene was too politically sensitive for print, but there is no evidence of active censorship. The idea that it must have been censored is an enduring misapprehension even among some distinguished Shakespeareans. The scene appeared as a “new addition” in the 1608 reprinting of the quarto and again, in a better quality text, deriving from the theater promptbook,
in the 1623 Folio version of the play. Arguably, the sequence in which King Richard says, “With mine own tears I wash away my balm, / With mine own hands I give away my crown …” makes the play
less
subversive, turning a deposition into an abdication.
This raises the possibility, generally neglected by scholars, that Shakespeare may have written it as an addition after the real-life drama of February 1601, in order to give the impression of a formal, stately handing over of power, as opposed to the presumption and hugger-mugger of the original version that was now tarred by association with the trial of Essex and his accomplices. Nor can we wholly rule out the possibility that, to freshen up the play and as a little treat for Sir Charles Percy and his friends in return for their forty shillings above the ordinary, Shakespeare dashed off the addition on the Friday and gave it to his actors to learn overnight, allowing them to rehearse it in the morning run-through before including it in the afternoon performance.
Richard II
, then, is a play that nearly all modern editors print in a hybrid text that never appeared in print in Shakespeare’s lifetime. They base the text on the First Quarto of 1597, but insert into it the deposition (or abdication) scene that first appeared in print many years later. The Folio-based policy of the RSC edition means that we do not have to conflate different source texts in this way. The price for this choice is that our text prints the Folio’s watered-down oaths (typically “Heaven” instead of “God”) that were the result of a parliamentary act passed in 1606, whereby players were fined for blaspheming (i.e. mentioning the name of God) on stage. Modern producers wishing to restore the more robust oaths of the Quarto may reinsert them by consulting the list of variants that we include after the textual notes that follow the text.
The following observations 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
Richard II
, so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus “John of
GAUNT
, Duke of Lancaster, Richard’s uncle”).
Locations
are provided by the Folio for only two plays, not including
Richard II
. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations. Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, 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 the 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 that 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. Thus
BULLINGBROOK
is always so-called in speech headings but “the Duke of Hereford” on occasion in entry directions.
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, 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 period (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.