Notes on "Back by Popular Demand"

The absence of the choruses from the quarto makes that text fundamentally different from the folio, and where critics like to point to the ambiguity of national politics and militarism that Henry V implies, the textual justification for those implications are found only in the folio text. The only reference to a contemporary event in the canon, the comparison to Essex's expedition, and the reminder that all of Henry's gains will be lost by his successor are both absent from the quarto text (315).

Despite the assumption that the folio text of Henry V is set from the "acting edition" of the play, there is no evidence to support this, and while we will never know what was actually acted on the London stages, it is quite probable that the quarto text actually represents a closer approximation to performance than the folio (316).

Greg's theory of memorially reconstructed texts does not adequately account for the gaps between the quarto and folio text: whole scenes and sense-changing speeches are completely left out, and the theory of an actor with a bad memory creating a transcription cannot account for the absence of such crucial material (317).

Wells and Taylor argue that the quarto of Henry V represents a memorial construction of a previously performed text cut for touring, and argue that the reduction in the quarto removes thirteen speaking parts (321 - 322). King, of course, disagrees.

Taylor himself admits problems with his theory: cast reduction cannot have been the motivation for the removal of the first scene, which casts a cynical eye on the military affair as the English Court tries to invent reasons to invade France, or of the Jamy/MacMorris scene, or of the substitution of Clarence for Bedford, or of some of the cuts in the Harfleur scene (322).

"No single hypothesis is likely to be able to explain all the instances of textual divergence; and... it is better to admit this in advance than be forced to introduce exceptions that shake the primary hypothesis at its roots" (322 - 323).

English monarchs were always interested in controlling the narrative of history, and Elizabeth was no exception. The printing of Q Henry V, coming as it did on the heels of the Essex rebellion, The LC's Men's involvement in the presentation of Henry IV the night before, and in the face of a 1 June 1599 Bishop's Order prohibiting the printing of histories, was likely to be censored if the LC's men did not censor the text themselves; removing the choruses and other controversial scenes turns the play into an unproblematic celebration of a popular monarch, whom audiences would  have likely instinctively linked with Elizabeth (325 - 330).

Summary

Theatrical considerations may not be the only ones that lead to the abridgment of a text, whether for print, performance, or both. Patterson succinctly demonstrates how the quarto version of Henry V could represent an edition of the text made for political expediency, and creates an implicit warning about trying to understand the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries outside of the political and professional context of the late 16th/early 17th century professional London playhouses.

Citation

Patterson, Annabel. "Back by Popular Demand: The Two Versions of Henry V." Shakespeare: The Critical Context. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen Ed. New York: Garland Publishing. 1999. p. 313 - 346. Print. Dual pagination is given for all works in this volume, but since the table of contents follows the pagination running at the bottom center of each page, this is the pagination that I have followed in my citations.

Notes on "Casting Shakespeare's Plays" - Chapter 4

Q1 of 2 Henry 6 has fewer spoken lines than appear in F, but does not require fewer actors, which contradicts the theory that Q1 is printed from a version cut for touring (for size requirements) (78).

The quarto of 3 Henry 6, like the quarto of 2 Henry 6, is shorter than its appearance in F, but does not require significantly fewer actors to play, and therefore should not be thought of as a version cut for touring (79).

"The casting requirements for F (Richard III) are almost the same as for Q1" (80). The idea of plays cut down so they could more easily tour is one of the center pieces of the new bibliographic concept of these pirated bad quartos, and while Gurr has presented some very good evidence to counter those theories, King sure is helping.

King takes the F stage direction from Midsummer "They sleepe all the Act" to mean the lovers sleep through an onstage musical interlude, but I think it is rather a sign to indicate that they remain on stage, even though they don't say anything. A signal to a reader, or perhaps even an actor, that they are not to go anywhere when they've run out of lines (84).

The quarto text of Henry V also requires a similar number of actors as the Folio text; 20 men and 4 boys in Q, 23 men and 5 boys in F. Even though F contains about twice as many spoken lines as Q, it is therefore unlikely, as Greg suggests, that Q is an adaptation for touring. Taylor's proposition that Q is a reduced cast version (for nine or ten men and two boys) is also inaccurate in light of this evidence (87).

King notes, of Troilus and Cressida, that "the fourteen men required in fifteen principal parts are significantly more than the average of ten men required in principal parts parts for other Shakespeare plays, and this lends support to the argument that the play was written for private performance" (89). But what about the 20 men and 4 boys that the shorter Q of Henry V requires? Why not commentary on that?

Citation
King, T. J. The Casting of Shakespeare's Plays: London actors and their roles, 1590 - 1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 1992. Print.