Early Printed Texts Of Shakespeare Differ. Why Is It Important To Know This?

The significance of textual variations among early quartos, and between quarto and folio printings of Shakespeare's texts offer valuable insights into the ways in which the plays intersected with and responded to the shifting socio-political landscape of early modern England. They likewise illuminate the ways in which Shakespeare's plays were marketed, demonstrating the generic expectations that were encoded in early printings and suggesting the bearing they may have had on popular reception. This is particularly germane to a discussion of Richard II and 1 and 2 Henry IV, in which thematically and generically significant variations exist between quarto and folio printings. The question of generic alignment is central to Richard II, a play whose central character's political self-fashioning appears to be explicitly linked with their sub-textual sense of what kind of play they are appearing in. Quartos 1-5 of Richard II title the play The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, a title which foregrounds both Richard's centrality as the 'tragic' hero of the play, and his position as monarch. In contrast, the first folio titles the play The Life and Death of Richard the Second, soft-pedaling Richard's role as monarch, and positioning the play within a sequence in the new genre of English 'histories'. Richard's sense of himself as a tragic figure seems directly linked to his theatrical availability to the audience (in the soliloquy of 5.5, or his self-pitying lament in 3.2) and to his inability to engage in the pragmatic baronial realpolitik of Bolingbroke and the Lancastrians. Thus, Richard succeeds in gaining (or, at least, seeking) the sympathies of the theatre-going audience, but fails to engage the support of either the nobility or the population of England. This fact is reflected in Richard's transparent disdain for the 'common people' (1.4. 23), and Bolingbroke's desire to court their affection: 'What reverence he did throw away on slaves' (1.4. 27). This disregard manifests itself more broadly throughout the text in Shakespeare's uniform replacement of Holinshed's use of 'citizen' in the Chronicle source, with 'subjects', a word whose cognates appear 21 times in the play. In contrast, Bolingbroke functions as though he is appearing in a comedy, revealing himself in dialogue and company. He is consciously held at one remove from the audience, with Shakespeare failing to offer him the opportunity to lament his father's death following 2.1, or to reveal or explain his true political intentions in 2.3. Bolingbroke himself comments in this apparent generic shift following the domestic farce of 5.2 and 3, remarking: 'Our scene is altered from a serious thing, / And now changed to 'The Beggar and the King' (5.3. 78-9). Nevertheless, Bolingbroke shows himself to be a consummate political performer, shifting register and tone according to the political context in which he finds himself. Thus, when seeking to placate and recruit the angered York, his tone is forthright and his register pragmatic: What would you have me do? I am a subject And I challenge law. Attorneys are denied me And therefore personally I lay my claim (2.3. 132-5)

Likewise, his public execution of Bushy and Green in 3.1 allows him the opportunity to 'wash [his] hands' of responsibility for their death, while at the same time making accusations of homoeroticism and marital strife against Richard that are not borne out by the audience's experience of his marriage:

You have in manner with your sinful hours Made a divorce betwixt his queen and him [.] With tears drawn from her eyes by your foul wrongs. (3.1. 11-5)

The generic expectations that are encoded by the variant titling between quarto and folio thus have a wide-ranging impact on the audience's sensitivity to the modes of political structure and public image being constructed by Richard and Bolingbroke.

However, textual variation between quarto and folio printings render this interplay of genre and politics yet more vexed in light of the absence of 4.1 (the so-called 'deposition' scene) from quartos 1-3, and its truncated appearance in quartos 4 and 5. Richard's tour-de-force stage-management of 4.1 is often crucial to his position in an audience's sympathies, and to the curiously counterpoised politics of the play. Thus, paradoxically, it is in the non-'tragic' Folio 'Life and Death' rendering of the play that Richard is at his most theatrically powerful, even as he is at his most politically impotent. This is reflected in his magnificent blocking of the scene in progress, forcing Bolingbroke to acknowledge his usurpation of the crown by enacting its literal seizure:

Give me the crown Here cousin, seize the crown. Here cousin, On this side my hand, and on that side thine. (4.1. 181-3)

The absence of this scene in the early quartos removes a significant opportunity for Richard to air his 'side' of the debate, and thus to articulate fully the nature of the political shift that has occurred in moving from divine appointment and primogeniture to a Machiavellian world of de facto power:

Now is this golden grown like a deep well That owes two buckets, filling one another, The emptier ever dancing in the air The other down, unseen and full of water. (4.1. 184-7)

The apparently innocuous 'Now' in fact locates the precise moment (for Richard at least) at which a radical arbitrariness has entered the notion of kingship. The two buckets that cyclically fill one another are essentially interchangeable, with neither possessing an intrinsic quality that the other lacks which marks its position as superior. The absence of 4.1 from the early quartos thus removes both an important stage in the arc of Richard's growing insight into his own inability to cohere as an individual outside the ontological frame of monarchy, and a key moment of political interrogation in the play.

These politically charged textual variations are likewise inscribed in 1 and 2 Henry IV, in which an awareness of the textual traces of Falstaff's original appellation 'Oldcastle' has significant bearing on a critical understanding of his role in the political structure of the plays. The quarto edition of 2 Henry IV uses the prefix 'OLD' at 1.2. 114 to designate a speech by Falstaff. Hal plays on Oldcastle's name in 1 Henry IV, dubbing Falstaff 'my old lad of the castle' (1.2. 40-1). Likewise, the extended Epilogue actively disclaims Falstaff's identification with the historical figure: 'Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man'. Of course, the fact that the disclaimer need be made at all is telling in itself. These textual suggestions of 'Falstaff's original identification with the rebellious Lollard leader martyred during the reign of Henry V recalibrates the riot and license he embodies in explicitly subversive political tones. In this figuration, Falstaff presents a very real threat to Henry IV in the influence he appears to exert over Hal. This threat is likewise encoded in the marketing spiel of the full quarto titling of 1 Henry IV, an almost certainly non-authorial reflection on what might be deemed appealing to a contemporary audience:

The History of the Henry the Fourth, With the Battle at Shrewsbury, Between the King and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henry Hotspur of the North,

With the humorous conceits of Sir John Flastaff.

The mise-en-page explicitly isolates Falstaff from the main body of the title, as though his appeal is copious as to render it impossible to contain within the play as a whole. An awareness of the textual details of quarto editions allows this sense of the threat Flastaff's waxing body poses to the waning body of Henry IV both in Hal's and the audience's sympathies to be both emphasised and given a markedly subversive political charge. As in Richard II, attendance to textual variations between quarto and folio texts serves to add depth and nuance to a critical approach to the politics and affective structure of these plays.