The First Folio and the Invention of Serial Shakespeare – Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3
Résumés
L’une des innovations les plus remarquables des “éditeurs” du Folio concerne l’organisation en trois genres, comédies, histoires et tragédies, qui crée une symétrie entre trois ensembles presque équivalents. Cette division en genres a durablement affecté notre réception des pièces de Shakespeare, mais c’est peut-être la fortune critique des “histoires” qui a été le plus influencée par les choix éditoriaux du Folio. Se concentrant sur l’histoire médiévale tardive de l’Angleterre (à l’exclusion de la Rome antique, de la Bretagne et de l’Ecosse), les “éditeurs” ignorent l’ordre de composition et de publication originel, et publient les pièces en série, de King John à Henry VIII, selon l’ordre chronologique des événements. La conséquence fut de faire de Shakespeare un historien de la nation anglaise et de dévoiler au lecteur une série de huit pièces couvrant les événements historiques d’un siècle en continu, depuis la fin du règne de Richard II jusqu’à la chute de Richard III, ensemble qui pouvait se scinder en deux segments symétriques. Cette stratégie éditoriale encouragea les lecteurs à voir ces pièces comme des parties multiples d’un tout et créa l’illusion d’une narration continue. Elle fut à l’origine d’un Shakespeare sériel. Pourtant, la question de l’intentionnalité auctoriale doit une fois en encore être posée, car les pièces ne furent jamais représentées de manière consécutive, ni écrites dans l’ordre du Folio. Shakespeare écrivit seulement deux pièces en diptyque: The History of Henrie the Fourth (1598) et la suite, The Second part of Henrie the fourth (1600); enfin, The First Part of the Contention (1594), suivie de The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole contention betweene the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke (1595). Ces deux dernières pièces, ensuite rassemblées par Thomas Pavier sous le titre The Whole Contention between the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke (1619), donnèrent Henry VI, 2e et 3e parties dans le Folio. Cet article revient sur les trois parties d’Henry VI. Réexaminant leur histoire théâtrale et textuelle, il propose en particulier de réexaminer la question du délai de publication de Henry VI, 1re partie. En mettant en perspective la notion de sérialité, on essaiera de mieux cerner l’intervention du ou des compilateur(s)-éditeur(s), et peut-être d’un adaptateur, qui n’est pas forcément l’auteur.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
Henry VI 1re partie, Henry VI 2e partie, Henry VI 3e partie, drame historique, Pavier Thomas, Marlowe Christopher, Rose Theatre, sérialité, Shakespeare WilliamKeywords:
Henry VI Part 1, Henry VI Part 2, Henry VI Part 3, history plays, Pavier Thomas, Marlowe Christopher, The Rose Theatre, seriality, Shakespeare WilliamTexte intégral
- 1 Emma Smith even describes this generic division in the folio as “one of its most important critical (...)
- 2 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays, London, Chatto & Windus, 1944. For a reexamination (...)
1Among the many innovations of the 1623 Folio, one of the most remarkable concerns of course its organization of Shakespeare’s plays into three genres, “Comedies,” “Histories,” and “Tragedies,” a move which creates a neat symmetry between three roughly equivalent sets of plays.1 This was not an obvious strategy to follow: the Jonson 1616 Folio, a significant precedent, adopts a roughly chronological order for the works it includes. The division in dramatic genres has durably affected our reception of Shakespeare’s plays, although in some cases the labelling was problematic. Why are Richard II or Richard III, formerly printed as tragedies in quarto format, listed among the histories once published in the Folio, while a play like Macbeth is treated as a tragedy, although it could equally have been integrated into the histories? It is probably the critical fortune of the histories that has been most dramatically impacted by the Folio’s editorial choices. Focusing on late medieval English history (to the exclusion of Ancient Rome, Ancient Britain, Scotland or Denmark), the Folio’s editor or editors ignored the order of composition and publication, and published the histories as a sequence beginning with King John and ending with Henry VIII, following the chronology of events. The effect was to emphasize the impressive number of plays written on English history in respect to the rest of his works (ten plays out of thirty-six), and thus made of Shakespeare a historian of the English nation. It also highlights the existence of a central eight-play series covering a continuous historical sequence of one century (between 1399 and 1485), from Richard II’s last years to the fall of Richard III, a set which has, since the 1940s (and Tillyard, in particular), been conveniently broken up into two symmetrical “tetralogies.” The notion of “tetralogy” – a term originally used in connection with Ancient drama – is a dated critical concept, although it has been endorsed by most critics: whether Shakespeare himself wrote the plays in sets of four is of course debatable.2
2But by highlighting a set of eight plays on the medieval history of England, the Folio’s editors encouraged readers to read these plays as multiple parts of a whole, and literally invented the notion of a serial Shakespeare which contemporary stage directors have found so inspiring in recent years. But editors have argued since Malone that this is an a posteriori construction which does not reflect the order of composition or of performance, since it seems established that these eight plays were written and first performed over a period of nine or ten years between 1590 or 1591 and 1599. The question of the author’s intentionality behind this “masterplan” can thus legitimately be raised once again. Intentionality has often been dismissed as irrelevant: the end-result is a series of plays which does more or less cover the material of the chronicles in a continuous manner; but it matters because it determines the subsequent amount of editing and rewriting that was involved to make the series glide more or less smoothly from one episode to the next – not to mention whether any of these plays must be read as a number in a series.
- 3 Seriality can be defined as the relationship of contiguity between plays that can be numbered seque (...)
- 4 Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare, Malone and the Problem of Chronology, Cambridge, Cambridge University P (...)
3In light of the current scholarship on the histories, the Folio’s emphasis on a smoothened-out, seemingly unproblematic historical series, is looking more and more like the product of an editorial, rather than an authorial, tour de force. To try and evaluate the extent of the Folio editors’ agency, we need, however, to be more specific. This article proposes, modestly, to reexamine the nagging question of seriality,3 by reconsidering the trilogy of plays numbered sequentially in the Folio, The first part, second part and third part of Henry the sixt. After looking again at the available evidence, and what can reasonably be inferred about the performance and publication history of these plays, I will return to the textual strategy followed by the Folio editors. In light of Tiffany Stern’s recent invitation to look for traces of “earliness” and “lateness” in early printed versions of Shakespeare’s plays,4 this essay will return to the question of the delayed publication of 1 Henry VI, a collaborative play which the New Oxford Shakespeare editors present as “revised” by Shakespeare, but written by others including Marlowe and Nashe to become The first part of Henry the Sixt, thirty years after its first performance in March 1591/2. By looking at some textual revisions of episodes 2 and 3 in the Folio (for which there are previous editions extant), it is possible to glimpse at the agency and intentionality of the compiler-cum-editor, and perhaps envisage the intervention of a reviser, who could, or could not be the author. From these revisions, it is hoped we can infer some of the revisions applied by the Folio editors to The first part of Henry the Sixt to turn the sequence into a series of three plays rather than two.
- 5 John Barton, who is perhaps an extreme, cut 6,300 lines and added 1,100 new ones when he adapted th (...)
- 6 Henry VI + Richard III, Le Quai Centre dramatique national, Angers, France, 4-22 June 2022. Directo (...)
- 7 The New Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete Works, ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, Gabriel (...)
4This essay proceeds from the conviction that seriality, which is routinely invoked today, must be problematized. Recent productions of the plays as a sequence have shown that they stand the test of performance as a continuous sequence, with a certain amount of tinkering to smoothen-out some inconsistencies.5 In France, the latest production to date is Thomas Jolly’s marathon performance of the three parts of Henry VI followed by Richard III over twenty-four hours (but only eighteen hours of performance proper) in Angers in June 2022.6 Yet there is still no evidence that the plays of the series were ever performed on consecutive days, not even as “tetralogies.” Besides, as has been established, the plays were not written in the order of historical events, with the “first tetralogy” being about later events than the “second.” After three centuries of poring over the same fragmentary evidence – Henslowe’s Diaries, various testimonies and bibliographical records –, no consensus has emerged about the dates and order of composition, or performance, of Shakespeare’s plays, given how little is known about his London years. The latest two editions of Shakespeare’s complete works, the New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works (published in 2016-2017) and the latest RSC Complete Works (2022) still provide slightly different chronologies, including for the histories (Table 1).7
Table 1: Chart comparing projected dates of first performances and first publications of the two “tetralogies” in The New Oxford Shakespeare and the new RSC Complete Works of Shakespeare.
Titles |
2016-7 NO Shakespeare |
2022 RSC Complete Works |
Company |
First edition |
|
Date range |
Best guess |
||||
harey vj (1 Henry VI?) |
3 March 1591/2 |
1592 |
Lord Strange’s Men |
1623 (F) |
|
2 Henry VI |
1587-91 |
1590 |
1591 |
Strange’s / Pembroke’s Men? |
1594 |
3 Henry VI |
1588-91 |
1590 |
1591 |
Pembroke’s Men |
1595 (O) |
Richard III |
1590-6 |
1592 |
1592 or 1594 |
Strange’s / Pembroke’s? |
1597 |
Richard II |
1595-7 |
1595 |
1595-6 |
Lord Chamberlain’s |
1597 |
1 Henry IV |
1596-7 |
1597 |
1596-7 |
Lord Chamberlain’s |
1598 |
2 Henry IV |
1597-1600 |
1598 |
1597-8 |
“sundry times publicly acted” / Lord Chamberlain’s? |
1600 |
Henry V |
1598-9 |
1599 |
1599 |
Lord Chamberlain’s |
1600 |
- 8 Walter W. Greg, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, London, A. H. Bullen, 1904, p. 13.
- 9 The first part of the contention betwixt the two famous houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the dea (...)
- 10 The Whole Contention between the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke. With the Tragicall ends of (...)
5Yet both editions agree, as most critics nowadays, that 1 Henry VI was written as a prequel for 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI, although this relies on the identification of the play Henslowe mentions as “harey the vj” as being the Ur-version of what was to become 1 Henry VI in the Folio.8 What immediately stares us in the face, however, is the existence of two diptychs that were immediately presented as such: The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey (a quarto first published in 1594) was followed by The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole contention betweene the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke (an octavo, first published in 1595),9 and The Second part of Henrie the fourth (first published in 1600) was written as a sequel for The History of Henrie the Fourth (published in 1598). The two parts of the Contention were later gathered by Thomas Pavier as a ten-act play in quarto with a new title, The Whole Contention between the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke (1619).10
- 11 Paola Pugliatti, “Shakespeare Disintegrated. Authoriality, Textuality, Co-Authorship, Biography”, J (...)
- 12 Idem, p. 2.
6But how do we bridge the gap between these pairs, and the slick eight-play series that is presented in the Folio? We have gone a long way since Tillyard, but after the recent heated debates among “dinsintegrators” – to use a polemic term coined by E. K. Chambers in the 1920s and recently taken up by Paola Pugliatti to designate scholars who have consistently questioned Shakespeare’s authorship (and shown, often with great acumen, the contingency that lies behind early modern authorship)11 –, how far can we still “trust” the Folio to give us Shakespeare “according to the true original Copies” and “his true original form”? Pugliatti summarizes the paradox resulting from the new textual scholarship: “the attempts to construct a reliable, firm and durable canon ended up by producing a multiplication and a dispersal not only of texts and parts of texts, but also of authorial images and identities”.12 Where does the philological “disintegration” leave us in respect to our perception of the Folio today, and what bearing does it have on the construction of a serial Shakespeare? The current critical discourse, with its emphasis on collaborative authorship and its scrutiny of early texts and issues of early performance, can only lead us to question the “authenticity” and credentials of the posthumous Folio text – finalized seven years after the author’s death –, and of the underlying editorial planning that went into it.
- 13 Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. (...)
- 14 Idem, p. 9.
- 15 Idem, p. 22.
- 16 Because The True Tragedie of Richard was performed by the Pembroke’s Men, it is usually assumed tha (...)
- 17 Henslowe’s Diaries, op. cit., p. 13. It seems that all “ne” openings yielded particularly high prof (...)
- 18 Greenes Groats-worth of Witte, London, 1592, sig. F1r. For a suggestion about the role Shakespeare (...)
- 19 See also Nashe’s comments about Talbot in Pierce Peniless, entered on 8 August 1592 in the Statione (...)
7Plays about the history of England were obviously very popular in Elizabethan England. Between 1562 and 1642, Schelling estimated that about 150 plays dealt with the history of England, with more than half of these written and performed in the 1590s.13 Seven of the eight plays of Shakespeare’s two “tetralogies” had appeared in print before 1600, out of the 10 plays now attributed to him that were published by that date. In his 2002 Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays, Nicholas Grene, basing himself on external as well as internal evidence, argued more specifically that the four plays of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy were “designed with serial production of the plays in mind,” but that the second tetralogy was more loosely organized and did not follow that pattern.14 He added that the first tetralogy constituted an interlocking series and the plays would “almost certainly have been performed as a series in the 1590s”.15 There is no evidence, however, that the four plays of the first tetralogy were ever performed on consecutive days, or even as a loose series, at any point. A close examination of the theatrical records simply rules this out. The two plays published as The First part of the Contention (1594) and The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke (1595) (the future Folio 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI) were first performed by the Earl of Pembroke’s Men,16 probably before the Lord Strange’s Men acquired what is believed to be their prequel, the play Henslowe calls “harey the vj,” which was performed at the Rose Theatre between March and June 1592. Although “harey the vj” appears to have been very successful on the stage, it was not published then. Marked in Henslowe’s Diaries (which are still our main source of information about Elizabethan theatrical life) as “ne” – which has been interpreted alternatively as “new” or “newly licensed”17 –, the play was performed 15 times at the Rose between 3 March 1591/2 to 19 June 1592, shortly before the theatres closed down because of the plague (they were closed between 23 June 1592 and May 1594, with a brief interruption between late December and early February 1593). We know that the True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke was well-known by the summer of 1592, which is when Robert Greene (who died on 3 September) accused Shakespeare of plagiarism in Greenes Groats-worth of Witte (1592), paraphrasing a line of the play. He famously described Shakespeare as “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.”18 This comment suggests that The True Tragedie of Richard, and probably The First Part of the Contention too, were performed before March 1592, which is when “harey the vj” opened, and possibly the year before. The extraordinary success of “harey the vj” at the Rose in the spring of 1592, when it yielded £ 33 12 s 8 d (if we interpret Henslowe’s records correctly),19 did not prompt joint or consecutive performances of the plays of which it was allegedly a prequel – although, to be fair, this information might not be available to us because the texts of The True Tragedie of Richard and The First Part of the Contention were owned by a different company, Pembroke’s Men. What we know for a fact, though, is that Pembroke’s Men went on tour with The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedie of Richard when the plague epidemics broke out in June 1592.
- 20 Roslyn L. Knutson, “Pembroke’s Men in 1592-3, Their Repertory and Touring Schedule”, Early Theatre (...)
- 21 See Henslowe’s Diary, op. cit., p. 27. This section is based on this edition of Henslowe’s papers.
8Whatever happened, the hypothesis that the three plays might have been conceived as a trilogy, or performed as such, seems compromised, since The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedie of Richard had an independent life as a diptych. Roslyn Knutson intriguingly suggests that the title of The First Part of the Contention was not its original title, but was altered so as to mark the play’s precedence, presumably so it would appear to be firmly dissociated from the Lord Strange’s Men’s alleged “prequel”.20 This might indicate that “harey the vj”, if indeed it is the play that eventually became 1 Henry VI in the Folio, was originally written for Lord Strange’s Men perhaps by a different team of authors (like Marlowe, Nashe and a third unidentified author, as suggested among others by the editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare) as an opportunistic attempt to capitalize on the recent success of the diptych performed by a rival company. While the young Shakespeare might have had a hand in this early play, his collaboration with fellow authors was obviously fraught, since this was when he was accused by Greene of having indelicately “borrowed” from his fellow authors – among whom was Marlowe – for the other two Henry VI plays. This scenario of a competition between two rival companies is conceivable, as is obvious from Henslowe’s diaries themselves. Although his records concern only two theatres, and cover just a few years, they give a solid sense of how the business was organized. Henslowe, as a theatrical entrepreneur, acquired texts for his company in two ways, either by buying them upfront, or by commissioning them from teams of authors, more rarely from one author. His papers record a whole series of advance payments to authors for plays which are very often follow-ups or sequels of plays that had proved successful on stage, as a way of capitalizing on a previous theatrical success. The Rose, and then the Fortune, hosted several playing companies over the years, Lord Strange’s Men (1592-1593), the Earl of Sussex’s Men (1593-1594), the Queen’s Men (1594), and then the Admirals’ Men for seven years: not unsurprisingly, their repertories included a fair number of plays that are about the history of England, and two in particular that have connections with the reign of Henry VI and antedate Shakespeare’s versions: the first one is the anonymous The True Tragedy of Richard III, performed by the Queen’s men in 1594 (and entered into the Stationer’s Register on 19 June 1594), and the other is another anonymous play, performed by the Lord Admiral’s Men, “harey the v,” i.e. The Famous Victories of Henry V, first performed on 28 November 1595, which was obviously a theatrical success, since it went through thirteen performances.21 Writing his own Richard III and Henry V after these two plays, Shakespeare appears as a follower, if not a copy-cat, rather than a trail-blazer. This competitive context confirms that Henslowe’s “harey the vj” was indeed probably written to cash in on the popularity of The First Part of the Contention and The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of York; but this does not rule out the possibility that Shakespeare could later have revised the play for a re-run, with or without the authorization of all the parties involved.
- 22 Lyons, op. cit., p. 187. Also Grene, op. cit., p. 10. For a different perspective on the serial his (...)
9Henslowe’s papers confirm, however, that planned seriality was not the norm for histories in the late sixteenth century, but they suggest two concomitant phenomena: first, the great number of related plays and of plays on similar topics, and secondly, a great number of pairs or diptychs. In the competitive environment of the London playhouses it seems clear that any play that met with public applause was likely to generate sequels, analogues, or spinoffs, including with rival companies, which created a sense of seriality that was contingent (and retrospective), rather than the result of a premeditated plan. As consensus goes, the sounding success of the two parts of Marlowe’s Tamberlaine (performed by the Admiral’s Men) in 1587-8 created somewhat of a vogue for plays in pairs. According to Tara Lyons’s estimate, forty-one pairs were performed between 1588 and 1616.22 From Henslowe’s records, we learn that in 1594 and 1595, the two parts of Tamberlaine were performed seven times on two consecutive days – about once a month in the playing season –, although both parts were also performed separately over the period. Most successful plays were given a sequel. Henslowe’s papers record several instances when he commissions authors to write a second part for plays that have just been performed: he thus pays for a second part for Robin Hood (paid to Chettle and Munday in 1597), Tamber Cam or Cham (in April 1592), Hercules (1595), Seaser [sic] (Caesar?) (1596), The Angry Women of Abington (1598), Henry Richmond (1599), etc. Sometimes the spin-off has a title unrelated to the first play, which makes the relationship with a previous play not immediately self-evident: the most famous example of this is Jeronimo (1592), which was written as a prequel to The Spanish Tragedy, one of the greatest successes in the period. In most cases, the play written as follow-up was performed within weeks of the first play, a few times on its own, then in alternation with the first play, and occasionally both of them on two consecutive days: the two parts of Hercules were thus performed three times on consecutive days in 1595, and Caesar twice. Public demand seems to have been what determined such occurrences.
- 23 See Henslowe’s Diaries, op. cit., p. 134, 137.
- 24 Idem, p. 97, 98, 100.
10There are in Henslowe’s papers two more unusual cases which point to longer series: the play entitled Thomas Stroud (lost) was thus given two additional parts The Second Part of Thomas Stroud and The Third Part of Thomas Stroud. Records suggest, however, that only the success of an episode caused the following one to come into being: the final payment for the second part of Thomas Stroud was made in February 1600, and the third play was paid over a year later, in July 1601 (the text having been commissioned first to Samuel Rowley, then John Day and William Haughton).23 The most intriguing case, however, is an actual tetralogy, now lost, The Civil Wars of France, three instalments of which were ordered in quick succession for the Admiral’s Men between November 1598 and January 1598-9. Henslowe’s papers record payments for stage props for an October performance of the 1st sevelle warres of France on 8 and 11 October 1598. Then are mentioned, in quick succession, a payment to Drayton and Dekker for “a Boocke called the second pte of the syvell wares of fraunce” on 3 November 1598, and a down-payment to Dekker for the “3 pte of the syvell wares of france” on 18 November, with the rest paid to both Dekker and Drayton on 30 December. Finally, a prequel Henslowe calls “the 1st Introducyon of the syvell wares of france” was commissioned from Dekker on 20 January 1598-9.24 It seems likely that the unabating success of Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris had whetted playgoers’ appetites for more of the same, and that Henslowe was hoping for a repeat of an earlier success. Although the four plays are no longer extant, and we have no indication about whether they were performed on consecutive days at any point, they constitute the only instance of an Elizabethan tetralogy which was conceived as such, over such a short period of time – which was not the case with Shakespeare’s so-called “tetralogies”. Yet even in the case of The Civil Wars of France, Henslowe’s papers show that the first two parts were conceived as a diptych, and that the following instalments, again, were produced one at a time and only because the preceding part met with public approval. The various parts premiered with an interval of about six weeks between them each time. The absence of an overall planning can be inferred from the fact that the introduction came last, as a prequel. This would probably have been seen as an opportunity to rekindle interest in the first and second parts.
- 25 See in particular Amy Lidster, Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers S (...)
- 26 R. M. Wiles, Serial Publications in England before 1750, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 195 (...)
- 27 Lyons, op. cit., p. 185. The first play was printed by Thomas Creed, the second by P. S.
11It seems clear by now that the question of seriality must be considered from a different perspective from the one I started with – not from an authorial or artistic perspective, but from a more contingent, market-oriented one. In this highly competitive theatrical milieu, commissioning a sequel for a play was a commercially-motivated decision determined by financial aspects. In the late sixteenth century it looks like subject-matters came first, before the identities of the authors involved, which seem to have been considered secondary: in Henslowe’s papers, the names of the authors commissioned to write playtexts are not always mentioned. This is confirmed by the early printed history of Shakespeare’s serial histories. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century several London stationers took an active part in shaping the genre of serialized “history”, as recently shown by Amy Lidster among others,25 when they moved to buying titles that they would then be able to sell together as informal sets. For these stationers, seriality was seen in marketing terms as a way of multiplying the number of sales, and, as argued by R. M. Wiles, “to bring the same customers back repeatedly by publishing a cumulative series of little books, each one low in price, but collectively amounting to something.”26 Three stationers in particular invested in serial histories by Shakespeare or partly attributed to him: Thomas Millington, who capitalized on plays making up Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, Andrew Wise, who initiated the print serialization of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, and Thomas Pavier, who, as has been argued, himself paved the way for the Folio’s editors. Thomas Millington published The First Part of the Contention (1594) and the first edition of The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke (1595), which he bought from Pembroke’s Men, but both plays were a different format (the former was a quarto, the latter an octavo) which made them odd companion pieces. The two different formats might suggest that Millington initially envisaged selling the two parts separately;27 there was no mention of authors’ names, which is not surprising. The texts were entered into the Stationers’ Register for the former on 12 March 1594, and for the latter only seven years later, on 19 April 1602, when Millington transferred the two titles to Thomas Pavier. But in the meantime, Millington had issued a second edition of the two titles in 1600, this time both as quartos, and he had acquired another episode of the historical series with his joint publication, with John Busby, of Shakespeare’s The Cronicle history of Henry the fift, still published anonymously in 1600.
- 28 On Wise, see Lidster, op. cit., p. 86-131, and Adam G. Hooks, Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibli (...)
- 29 See Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 68.
12Andrew Wise published four histories in quarto format as a series between 1597 and 1602 (the plays later known as Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV and Richard III), after entering into business with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.28 It seems that Wise chose the plays primarily because of their subject-matter – histories of medieval English kings – rather than because they were by Shakespeare, since the first quartos of The Tragedie of King Richard the second (1597), The Tragedie of King Richard the third (1597), The history of Henrie the fourth (1598), The second part of Henrie the fourth (1600) were issued without an author’s name. However, the following editions of Richard II, 1 Henry IV, and Richard III, only one year later, advertised Shakespeare’s name, which suggests that Wise saw he could capitalize on it and that by the end of the century his name could become a selling asset.29
- 30 Erne, op. cit., p. 176 ; Lidster, op. cit., p. 187-89.
- 31 Lesser calls them “the Jaggard Quartos,” rather than the Pavier “False Folio” or the “Pavier Quarto (...)
- 32 For this important revision work, see in particular Massai, op. cit., chapter 4 or Lidster, op. cit (...)
- 33 As John Jowett remarked: “Surprisingly, the 1590s history plays Richard II, Richard III, and 1 Henr (...)
- 34 See Lyons, op. cit., passim.
13That publishing serial histories was becoming economically viable for booksellers is even more obvious with Thomas Pavier’s editorial enterprise. In 1619, working in association with William and Isaac Jaggard, Pavier reprinted ten plays which had already appeared in print as a collection under the name of the sole Shakespeare, although the playbooks were apparently sold bound together as well as separately.30 It seems that Pavier and Jaggard might have initially intended the collection as a serialized publication (the first three plays, The Whole Contention and Pericles, have continuous signatures), with a readership of more affluent collectors and readers in mind, although the design apparently changed in mid-publication. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to probe into the rights issue, let it suffice to say that Pavier had firmly secured the rights for only five plays: The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy, Henry V, 1 Sir John Oldcastle, and Pericles. He had acquired the rights to Henry the fift in August 1600, which he published separately in 1602, and then moved to acquiring those of “The First and Second parte of henry the vjt ii books.” Things were much less clear for the others (A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Lear, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream).31 The long-established narrative of piracy, which was motivated by Pavier’s use of false publication details for two of them at least, has recently come under scrutiny and it has been suggested that Pavier and Jaggard might have collaborated with other stationers to obtain the remaining titles, and that rights to The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night’s Dream were derelict.32 Pavier made the decision to merge the two parts of the contention as one play in two parts with a new title, The Whole Contention between the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke (STC 26101), presented as “newly corrected and enlarged” and “Written by William Shakespeare.” With his collection, the idea of seriality takes a new turn: the Pavier collection is the first one entirely dedicated to Shakespeare, although it paradoxically includes plays that were not his; and it also plays with different serial rationales, first with the trilogy Henry V and The Whole Contention, and then by creating a series with a focus on the character of Falstaff, suggesting we read Henry V together with Sir John Oldcastle, a play that is actually not by Shakespeare, but by Munday, Drayton and others, and with The Merry Wives of Windsor, which can itself be considered as a spin-off of the Henry IV plays. It is clear, therefore, that The First Part of the Contention and The True tragedie of Richard Duke of York, had a successful life in print – although far less so than plays like Henry IV, Part 1, which was published eleven times before 1642, Richard II or Richard III.33 Serial histories seem to have become popular among readers who collected playtexts, as is confirmed by the few surviving Sammelbände, such as the ones studied by Tara Lyons,34 which tend to show that readers who bought one history play were likely to buy more, and have them bound together, irrespective of their authors’ names. Seriality was obviously a criterion for ordering, buying, and gathering early modern playtexts for early collectors and readers.
- 35 The New Oxford Shakespeare only attributes 2.4, 4.2, and parts of 4.3-5 to Shakespeare (NOS Critica (...)
- 36 It is anachronistic because around 1425, which is the date of Mortimer’s death in the following sce (...)
14These precedents help us understand better the editorial packaging of the histories in the Folio, which enhanced in particular the sequentiality of the three Henry VI plays. But what inner evidence do we have of textual revisions to improve the continuity between the various “episodes,” and to enhance the unity of the whole? It is a vexed question for 1 Henry VI, because the Folio text is all we have. The editors of The New Oxford Shakespeare suggest that Shakespeare had initially little to do with the bulk of the text, which was authored by Marlowe, Nashe and an anonymous third author, although they argue that Shakespeare revised it for a subsequent revival – whether other hands had something to do with the resulting text is also quite possible.35 One of the scenes of 1 Henry VI that is, however, securely attributed to Shakespeare, is the Temple Garden Scene (2.4). This episode works as an almost detachable, self-contained pause in the action, and clearly looks forward to 2 Henry VI: it is an imaginative introduction to the later wars of the Roses, and to the symbolic badges of the belligerents, the white and red roses, although their significance only becomes clear in the following play. The scene shows a seemingly anodyne quarrel about an unspecified legal question, which forces the peers to choose their sides – and pluck a white rose to show their support of the Duke of York or a red rose for Somerset. It is possible that this was an episode added at a later stage by Shakespeare to explain the origins of the quarrel and introduce, rather anachronistically, its protagonists, with 2 Henry VI in mind, although this cannot be proved.36 The Inner Temple Gardens were revamped in 1591, which might have prompted the playwright to use it as a location. If indeed this scene was added at a later stage, it is impossible, however, to say at what date.
- 37 For a summary of the editorial history of the plays, see The New Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete W (...)
- 38 But even that statement should be qualified: Cyrus Mulready argues that the Quartos of Henry V show (...)
15Editors since Malone have tended to consider the first quartos of The First Part of the Contention (printed by Thomas Creede, then Valentine Simmes, for Thomas Millington, respectively in 1594 and 1600) and the octavo of The True Tragedy of the Duke of York (printed by Peter Short for Thomas Millington) as “bad quartos,” because they were believed to be based on memorial reconstruction, or to consist in corrupted, abridged versions of the plays later published in the Folio as 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI.37 In Early English Book Online, a note, which reflects a theory that is still routinely rehearsed, describes them both as: “A corrupt and shorter version, possibly a memorial reconstruction, of ‘Henry VI, part 2’ [or 3] by William Shakespeare, which first appeared in finished form in the First Folio.” The Folio text of 2 Henry VI is one third longer than the 1594 Quarto version, and the Folio text of 3 Henry VI is also considerably longer than the 1595 Octavo text; the Folio is thus used as copy-text for most modern editions of these plays, as representing what is considered as the most coherent, revised state of the texts. The recent work done by the New Oxford Shakespeare team has confirmed previous scholarship that suggested it was the product of a team of authors rather than a single author, but the relationship between the Quarto and Folio texts is not entirely clarified. It seems established, however, that the Folio versions are not derived from the earlier editions, but that the Quarto/Octavo and Folio texts represent alternative versions of the same play, written for different productions, then later revised. It has often been remarked that the Quarto and Octavo texts are on the whole more theatrically-oriented than the Folio, with slightly fuller stage directions, but that the Folio allows more time and space to character development.38
- 39 Tiffany Stern, op. cit., in particular p. 39-58. For the need to distinguish between a distinctive (...)
- 40 Idem, p. 46-47.
- 41 Among the many studies devoted to this question, see for instance James Hirsh, “Act Divisions in th (...)
- 42 See Gary Taylor, “The Structure of Performance: Act-Intervals in the London Theatres, 1576-1642”, i (...)
- 43 I will be using the New Oxford Shakespeare Critical Reference Edition for reference (unless specifi (...)
- 44 Tiffany Stern, “Inventing Stage Directions: Demoting Dumb Shows”, in Stage Directions and Shakespea (...)
- 45 For a discussion of the modes of narration of stage directions, see Emma Smith, “Reading Shakespear (...)
- 46 Incidentally the Quarto stage direction also explains out the pun on which the spirit’s prophecy is (...)
16In a recent study, Tiffany Stern suggests that critics and editors studying the Folio text, which is composite, should look for traces of “earliness,” as reflecting moments of early performance and/or publication, as well as for traces of “lateness,” which, whenever perceivable, might indicate later revisions; but she suggests that we should distinguish, whenever possible, between traces that belong in “the work” from those that belong in “the text.”39 Even a cursory reading of the Folio versions for our three plays shows that they are entangled texts, which contain elements of “earliness” as well and “lateness,” inextricably intertwined. The names of actors of the Admiral’s Men in the Folio text of 3 Henry VI – Gabriel Spencer, John Sincler (Sincklo), Humphrey Jeffes – finding their ways into a stage direction and a speech point for instance towards an early performance, while more sophisticated and systematic sound effects, starting with the trumpets and hautboys of the first scene, testify to the more frequent use of musical instruments in Jacobean performances.40 The regularization of the text, and of its layout, the consistency with which the characters are treated, can be considered to be effects of lateness. This includes a division in acts and scenes, which was introduced in twenty-eight plays of the Folio,41 probably at composition stage, to align the plays onto neoclassical models; but as Gary Taylor has remarked, the division in acts also reflects “later” theatrical practice at the indoors Blackfriars’ (where The King’s Men performed in the winter seasons from 1608-9 onwards), where act breaks were needed to trim or change candles.42 In the Folio text of 1 Henry VI, however, the division in acts is problematic: the mention of act 5 was obviously introduced as an afterthought for the last scene of the play (renumbered 5.8 in NOS),43 which rules out an authorial intervention, and cannot reflect stage practice. Stage directions were also somewhat regularized throughout in the Folio, consistently abridged, often including some that might qualify as what Tiffany Stern calls “reader directions,” i.e. stage directions meant primarily for the reader rather than the actor44 – which point towards lateness. One example could be the Folio stage direction for the conjuration scene in 2 Henry VI (at 1.5.21 in NOS), which is narrative rather than strictly descriptive or prescriptive: “Here doe the Ceremonies belonging, and make the Circle, Bullingbrooke or Southwell reades, Coniuro te, &c. It Thunders and Lightens terribly: then the Spirit riseth.” Another example of a narrative “reader direction” can be found at the beginning of 4.1 (in NOS): “Alarum. Fight at Sea. Ordnance goes off. Enter Lieutenant, Suffolke, and others.” While here the conjuration scene is left for the reader to imagine, the corresponding stage direction in the Quarto is much more precise and factual: “Alarmes within, and the chambers be discharged, like as it were a fight at sea. And then enter the captaine of the shippe and the Master, and the Masters mate, and the duke of Suffolke disguised, and others with him, and Walter Whickmore” (sig. [F1v]-F2). Significantly, while evocative for a reader, who is left to imagine the sea fight,45 the Folio stage direction is incomplete in dramatic terms, as it leaves out two vital pieces of information, which are in fact crucial for staging the scene, Suffolk’s disguise and the entry of Walter Whitmore who, as prophesied earlier, will kill Suffolk.46
- 47 See Janette Dillon, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England, Cambridge, Cambridge Un (...)
- 48 In the Quarto it is Bullingbroke who reads the conjuration; the NOS opts for Southwell, but the Fol (...)
17It is also possible to trace lateness in the way the Quarto texts were revised in the Folio. Where we have alternative versions of the same scenes, some departures in the Folio point to “late” (i.e. Jacobean rather than Elizabethan) manifestations of political anxiety in relation to sedition, for instance. Some passages of the Folio version of 2 Henry VI thus seem to tone down passages that might have become by then politically sensitive. The scene of the conjuration in 1.4 (already mentioned) is much more detailed in the Quarto, with a seven-line invocation of the spirit by Bolingbroke (Bullingbrooke): “Darke night, dread night, the silence of the night… Askalon, Ascenda, Asconda” (sig. [B4v]). This invocation is excised from the Folio, but indirectly included in a vague, permissive stage direction, perhaps to avoid describing a priest conjuring spirits, a change which might have something to do with James I’s anxiety about witchcraft, especially when associated with political sedition.47 In the Folio, as seen above, the conjuration scene is allusive: “Here doe the Ceremonies belonging, and make the Circle, Bullingbrooke or Southwell reades, Coniuro te, &c.”48 Another example of a textual intervention can be detected in Warwick’s call to arms after he hears about York’s claim to the throne. In the Quarto Warwick alludes to the fact that York might easily win popular support for his uprising:
Claime thou the Crowne, and set thy standard vp,
And in the same aduance the milke-white Rose,
And then to guard it, I wil rouse the Beare,
Inuiron’d with ten thousand ragged-staues
To aide and helpe thee for to win thy right. (sig. C4v; NOS 2.2)
- 49 See Simon Adams’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), online.
18This passage is intriguingly left out in the Folio version. Since, as a rule, the Quarto and Folio texts follow a similar plot line fairly closely, but the Folio is generally more expansive, omissions of this kind might be significant. The omission might have something to do with the desire to tone down an allusion to political rebellion, but it might be for more specific, topical reasons, because of the contemporary scandal around the conflicting claims to the earldom of Warwick. Although this is purely speculative, to a contemporary audience Warwick might have evoked the colourful figure of Sir Robert Dudley (1574-1649), an explorer and the illegitimate son of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester and Warwick, whose legal battles with the countess of Leicester and Sir Robert Sidney to reclaim the title had aroused great popular interest. After he lost his suit in 1605 he went into exile and converted to Catholicism, styling himself earl of Leicester and earl of Warwick (a title that had been his uncle’s, who died without heir). He was declared an outlaw when he refused to comply with James’s summons to return to England and saw his estates confiscated; in 1618 James I sold the earldoms of Leicester and Warwick to Sidney and Lord Rich respectively.49
19Another effect of “lateness” in the Folio text (in comparison with the Quartos) is character development, which serves to reinforce a sense of continuity between the plays of the trilogy. The character of the duke of Gloucester thus gains in depth and density in the Folio version of 2 Henry VI. In 1.3 his abrupt exit, which is left unexplained in the Quarto (sig. B4r), is fully explained, which renders him more human: “Now Lords, my Choller being ouer-blowne, / With walking once about the Quadrangle, / I come to talke of Common-wealth Affayres” (NOS, 1.3.151-3). Such additions contribute to reinforcing the unity between episodes. This is even more visible in the treatment of Richard of Gloucester, which is more developed in the Folio thanks to the addition of speeches, which also strengthen the articulation between 3 Henry VI and Richard III. The emergence of Richard is of course prepared early on when, at the end of 2 Henry VI (both in the Q and F versions) Shakespeare and his collaborators anachronistically make of Richard of Gloucester the murderer of Somerset, although historically he would only have been three at the time. This is a way of introducing Richard as one of the main military players early on in the trilogy; in 3 Henry VI his brooding presence is highlighted by a number of asides and he is given two long soliloquies. One in particular, the “am I then a man to be belou’d” (3.2.163) soliloquy is much longer in the Folio (71 lines, 3.2.124-195) than in the Octavo (30 lines). This long speech anticipates Richard’s final soliloquy in 5.6 (35 lines, l. 61-94) (“I am my selfe alone,” l. 84), which is similar in the Quarto and the Folio. Both soliloquies serve to upstage a character who becomes the main protagonist in the following play. However, these two speeches are in fact closely echoed in the very similar opening speech of Richard III – modern performances of the plays as a series usually skip Richard’s last soliloquy of 3 Henry VI because the two speeches are almost contiguous. While the two soliloquies are necessary if the two plays are performed distantly in time – some repetition is even welcome in such cases –, if or when they are performed at close range, they constitute duplicate material that requires some trimming. The amount of repetition – which reflects “earliness” – suggests that 3 Henry VI and Richard III were most probably not performed, and not meant to be performed, in quick succession.
- 50 See above, note 13.
- 51 For the Folio editors’ work on the titles of the histories and its organisation, see Emma Smith, “R (...)
20In spite of the tantalizing precedent of the four parts of The Civil Wars of France, which were written as a sequence over a relatively short period of time and might have been performed if not on consecutive days, at least at fairly close range, this was not the case for Shakespeare’s first “tetralogy,” not even for the three Henry VI plays. Their stage and publishing histories do not confirm Grene’s intuition that they must have been “designed with serial production of the plays in mind,”50 and their publication as a series in the Folio is a manifestation of “lateness” in the sense that Tiffany Stern gives to the term. While a reading of the texts makes us suspect the agency of the compiler(s)-cum-editor(s), and perhaps the intervention of a reviser, who could, or could not be the author, the Folio remains inscrutable. While the 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI make a pair, the other two plays have an independent history. Yet the publishing history of the Quartos shows how a few stationers promoted serialized history as a marketing strategy. So when the Folio’s editors, basing themselves on previous Quartos and perhaps on new manuscripts, produced the slick series that we know today, they could rely on the fact that readers had by then grown attuned to reading and, for some, collecting serial histories. For those readers who had bought some of the earlier instalments, the appeal of the Folio would have been irresistible: it seemed indeed to offer the final, “complete” series of English history plays for the first time published in the “right” order (that of chronological events), including one episode that had never appeared in print before (1 Henry VI). It is perhaps possible now to better understand the stroke of genius of the Folio editors, in particular the retailoring that went into their editorial presentation of the histories, if not into the texts themselves. The new focus in the titles on monarchical history, visible through the altered titles in the table of contents, constructs an illusion of coherence and unity. The “Catalogue” repackages and regularizes the set of histories as apparently uniform plays, either as episodes in a series (1, 2, 3 Henry VI, and 1 and 2 Henry IV), or as being about “the life of” or “the life and death of” a series of kings. These short titles are also used as running titles in the volume; they omit secondary characters and the plot details which the Quarto titles had used to advertise their contents.51 This impression of homogeneity, mainly cosmetic, shifts the focus onto the sole figure of the reigning monarch, although in a play like 1 Henry VI King Henry, a child, only has a minor part and speaks his first words at the beginning of act 3. By creating a massive, and homogenous series as the central section of the volume, the Folio consecrates the figure of “Shakespeare” the English historian, making apparent his systematic tapping into the chronicles as source material. It is sometimes argued that the Folio legitimized the minor genre of the histories by showing how extensively it was practiced by Shakespeare. A closer look suggests, however, that perhaps this central section dedicated to the histories constitutes the core of the editors’ project, and not a concession to his early career: out of a genre that has once been extremely popular emerged Shakespeare, the poet of England, even if that implied appropriating plays which he had written in collaboration, or perhaps even just revised.
Notes
1 Emma Smith even describes this generic division in the folio as “one of its most important critical interventions” of the Folio editors (Emma Smith, “Shakespeare’s Early Modern Books: Printing, Paratext and Text”, in The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Lukas Erne, London, Bloomsbury, 1988, 94-110, p. 98). See also Emma Smith, “Shakespeare Serialized: An Age of Kings”, in The Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008, 134-49, and Valerie Wayne, “The First Folio’s Arrangement and its Finale”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 66.4, 2015, 389-408, p. 391-2. I wish to thank the two anonymous readers of this article for their insightful comments; all remaining errors and approximations mine.
2 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays, London, Chatto & Windus, 1944. For a reexamination of the term, see Mary Thomas Crane, “The Shakespearean Tetralogy”, Shakespeare Quarterly 36.3, 1985, 282-99, p. 282.
3 Seriality can be defined as the relationship of contiguity between plays that can be numbered sequentially and provide “a continuous or sequenced narrative” or spin-off plots or characters of a different play (Tara L. Lyons, “Serials, Spinoffs, and Histories: Selling “Shakespeare” in Collections Before the Folio”, Philological Quarterly 91.2, 2012, 185-220, p. 209, n. 18).
4 Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare, Malone and the Problem of Chronology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023, p. 39.
5 John Barton, who is perhaps an extreme, cut 6,300 lines and added 1,100 new ones when he adapted the first tetralogy for the RSC as The War of the Roses in 1963, but 1 Henry VI is often largely cut (see Crane, “The Shakespearean Tetralogy”, art. cit., p. 296).
6 Henry VI + Richard III, Le Quai Centre dramatique national, Angers, France, 4-22 June 2022. Director: Thomas Jolly, Translators: Line Cottegnies and Jean-Michel Déprats. In 2015 the DruidShakespeare condensed the second tetralogy in seven hours, including intervals (accessible at https://www.druid.ie/productions/druidshakespeare, last accessed 13 March 2024).
7 The New Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete Works, ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, Gabriel Egan, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 3rd ed., 2016-2017, 3 vol.; The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, London and New York, Bloomsbury Publishing, rev. ed., 2022.
8 Walter W. Greg, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, London, A. H. Bullen, 1904, p. 13.
9 The first part of the contention betwixt the two famous houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: and the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of VVinchester, vvith the notable rebellion of Iacke Cade: and the Duke of Yorkes first claime vnto the crowne, London, printed by Thomas Creed for Thomas Millington, 1594, STC 26099; The True Tragedie of Richarde Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, With the whole contention betweene the two Houses, Lancaster and Yorke, London, Printed by W. W. for Thomas Millington, 1595, STC 21006a.
10 The Whole Contention between the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke. With the Tragicall ends of the good Duke Humfrey, Richard Duke of Yorke, and King Henrie the sixt, Printed at London, for T. P., n. d. [1619], STC 26101.
11 Paola Pugliatti, “Shakespeare Disintegrated. Authoriality, Textuality, Co-Authorship, Biography”, Journal of Early Modern Studies. Special Issue: Forms of Authorship in Early Modern Culture, 2023, 1-30.
12 Idem, p. 2.
13 Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 1-2.
14 Idem, p. 9.
15 Idem, p. 22.
16 Because The True Tragedie of Richard was performed by the Pembroke’s Men, it is usually assumed that the same goes for The First part of the Contention.
17 Henslowe’s Diaries, op. cit., p. 13. It seems that all “ne” openings yielded particularly high profit (Grene, op. cit., p. 21). Holger Schott Syme has recently suggested that “ne” should be read as a note Henslowe addressed to himself to remember not to retain his moiety (probably because the actors had paid for the licensing of the plays concerned themselves). See Holger Schott Syme, Theatre History, Attribution Studies, and the Question of Evidence, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023, p. 10-31.
18 Greenes Groats-worth of Witte, London, 1592, sig. F1r. For a suggestion about the role Shakespeare might have played here, see Bart van Es, “‘Johannes fac Totum’? Shakespeare’s First Contact with the Acting Companies”, Shakespeare Quarterly 61.4, 2010, 551-77.
19 See also Nashe’s comments about Talbot in Pierce Peniless, entered on 8 August 1592 in the Stationer’s Register, which makes a reference to the impact made by Talbot. There were fifteen performances of harey vj at the Rose Theatre between 3 March 1592 and 19 June 1592, shortly before all theatres closed because of the plague (Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays, op. cit., p. 12).
20 Roslyn L. Knutson, “Pembroke’s Men in 1592-3, Their Repertory and Touring Schedule”, Early Theatre 4, 2001, 129-138, p. 132.
21 See Henslowe’s Diary, op. cit., p. 27. This section is based on this edition of Henslowe’s papers.
22 Lyons, op. cit., p. 187. Also Grene, op. cit., p. 10. For a different perspective on the serial history plays which sees them as part of a much wider interest in historical writing, see Cyrus Mulready, “History in ‘Q Henry V’”, English Literary Renaissance 43.3, 2013, 478-513.
23 See Henslowe’s Diaries, op. cit., p. 134, 137.
24 Idem, p. 97, 98, 100.
25 See in particular Amy Lidster, Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre (Cambridge University Press, 2022), p. 16-21. Zachary Lesser argues that stationers invested in histories and “speculated” on trends in the book market (Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, chapter 1).
26 R. M. Wiles, Serial Publications in England before 1750, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1957, p. 15.
27 Lyons, op. cit., p. 185. The first play was printed by Thomas Creed, the second by P. S.
28 On Wise, see Lidster, op. cit., p. 86-131, and Adam G. Hooks, Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, chapter 2.
29 See Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 68.
30 Erne, op. cit., p. 176 ; Lidster, op. cit., p. 187-89.
31 Lesser calls them “the Jaggard Quartos,” rather than the Pavier “False Folio” or the “Pavier Quartos,” and suggests that the plays were sold as a set more frequently than was previously believed (Zachary Lesser, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021, p. 78). See also Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 106-35, Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 255-58, and Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 36-41.
32 For this important revision work, see in particular Massai, op. cit., chapter 4 or Lidster, op. cit., p. 187-88.
33 As John Jowett remarked: “Surprisingly, the 1590s history plays Richard II, Richard III, and 1 Henry IV made up the core of Shakespeare plays bought by Jacobean readers until 1623 and after” (Shakespeare and Text, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, rev. ed., 2019, p. 14).
34 See Lyons, op. cit., passim.
35 The New Oxford Shakespeare only attributes 2.4, 4.2, and parts of 4.3-5 to Shakespeare (NOS Critical Reference Edition, vol. 2, p. 2387).
36 It is anachronistic because around 1425, which is the date of Mortimer’s death in the following scene, Suffolk would have been 29, York 14, and Warwick 3 (Grene, op. cit., p. 20).
37 For a summary of the editorial history of the plays, see The New Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete Works. Critical Reference Edition, vol. 2, p. 2471-73 and 2559-61. For a different assessment, see for instance Lawrence Manly, “From Strange’s Men to Pembroke’s Men: 2 Henry VI and The First Part of the Contention”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 54.3, 2003, 253-87 and Paul Vincent, When 'Harey' met Shakespeare: The Genesis of the First part of Henry VI, Saarbrucken, VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller, 2008. For the early editions as reflecting acting versions, see William Montgomery, “The Original Staging of The First Part of the Contention”, Shakespeare Survey, 41, 1989, 13-22.
38 But even that statement should be qualified: Cyrus Mulready argues that the Quartos of Henry V show little concern for the details of performance (op. cit., p. 502). A thorough textual comparison between the quarto and folio texts would be beyond the scope of this necessarily limited essay. For more thorough studies, see among others: Manley, op. cit.; Roger Warren, “The Quarto and Folio Texts of 2 Henry VI: A Reconsideration”, The Review of English Studies 51, 2000, 193-207; Randall Martin, “The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and 3 Henry VI: Report and Revision”, The Review of English Studies 53, 209, 2002, 8-30; Peter Kirwan, “Marlowe’s Early Books: The Contention and a ‘Marlowe Effect’”, in Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade, ed. Kirk Melnikoff and Roslyn L. Knutson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, 134-48 and Richard Stacey, “The True Tragedy as a Yorkist Play? Problems in Textual Transmission”, Shakespeare Survey 74, 2021, 271-82.
39 Tiffany Stern, op. cit., in particular p. 39-58. For the need to distinguish between a distinctive editorial history for the work and one for the text, see p. 86.
40 Idem, p. 46-47.
41 Among the many studies devoted to this question, see for instance James Hirsh, “Act Divisions in the Shakespeare First Folio”, Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 96:2, 2002, 219–56, and Alan Dessen, “Divided Shakespeare: Configuring Acts and Scenes”, in Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (eds), Shakespeare and Textual Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, 332-41.
42 See Gary Taylor, “The Structure of Performance: Act-Intervals in the London Theatres, 1576-1642”, in Shakespeare Reshaped 1606-1623, ed. Gary Taylor and John Jowett, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, 3-50, p. 17.
43 I will be using the New Oxford Shakespeare Critical Reference Edition for reference (unless specified), but have retained the division in acts and scenes rather than the continuous scene numbering.
44 Tiffany Stern, “Inventing Stage Directions: Demoting Dumb Shows”, in Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre, ed. Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods, London, Bloomsbury, 2017, 19-43.
45 For a discussion of the modes of narration of stage directions, see Emma Smith, “Reading Shakespeare’s Stage Directions”, in Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre, op. cit., 93-114.
46 Incidentally the Quarto stage direction also explains out the pun on which the spirit’s prophecy is based (in 1.4), the possible homophony between the first name “Walter” (here spelt “Water”) and the common word “water”: “By Water shall he dye, and take his end” (1.4.32).
47 See Janette Dillon, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 108.
48 In the Quarto it is Bullingbroke who reads the conjuration; the NOS opts for Southwell, but the Folio offers a choice. For the contemporary fascination with stage conjuring, see Andrew Sofer, “How to Do Things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in Doctor Faustus”, Theatre Journal 61.1, 2009, 1-21.
49 See Simon Adams’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), online.
50 See above, note 13.
51 For the Folio editors’ work on the titles of the histories and its organisation, see Emma Smith, “Reading the First Folio”, in Emma Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 158-161.
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Line Cottegnies, « The First Folio and the Invention of Serial Shakespeare – Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 », Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare [En ligne], 42 | 2024, mis en ligne le 10 décembre 2024, consulté le 08 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/8872 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/137sz
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