King John, page 12
14 Patrick Stewart as King John in Buzz Goodbody’s 1970 production of King John with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon
As New York entered the new millennium, King John appeared at The American Place Theatre. The production by Theatre for a New Audience, directed by Karin Coonrod, presented the play in spare, crystalline fashion. Coonrod’s commitment to Shakespeare’s language impressed John Heilpern, who declared: ‘Ms. Coonrod is an experimental director who begins and ends with the text, the narrative sweep, words.’1 The costuming was a modern–medieval hybrid, with unadorned modern clothes in sombre hues topped by coats of mail; Heilpern praised them for treading ‘the giddy line between history and modernity well’, but Ben Brantley, in the New York Times, felt the costumes ‘a little too self-consciously hip, suggesting a medieval-themed collection by Helmut Lang’.2 In keeping with the simple stage design and lighting (an underlit path was the major feature), the costumes encouraged a consideration of the play’s historicity but avoided both the reassurances of antiquarianism and the insistence of topicality. Brantley was, in fact, quick to make the topical connection between the play and the American presidential primaries then underway, but Heilpern points out that the production ‘doesn’t force topicality’. ‘An evening of energetic, stylized carnage and double-dealing kept at a cynical remove’, this was a King John for the new millennium. Coonrod presented the Bastard as the play’s hero, but with his concluding patriotism tamped down. According to Brantley, the Bastard is presented without ‘interior-probing portraiture in favor of an exaggerated everyman figure, a jaunty master of ceremonies who is part jester, part moral watchdog’. During the dispute between England and France, the Bastard briefly took a seat in the audience, and at the conclusion he left his armour onstage and once again joined the audience before giving his final speech. As Coonrod notes in the programme, ‘In the character of the outsider Shakespeare offers the humanity necessary for the health of the community, an antidote to the violence of self-interest.’ The optimism sounded here is tempered by a reference to Pandulph as ‘Ayatollah-like’, an analogy that either completely collapses or gains deeper resonance in the post-9/11 world. While not conspicuously global, Coonrod’s King John made no attempt to root itself in the particularities of time and place. One of the very few elements that displeased Heilpern was the decision to use a plain, stylized metal hoop for a crown. As he writes, ‘I like my crowns real. A real crown is worth fighting for. It is heavy.’
Heavy crowns and the importance of place featured prominently in James Dacre’s production of King John in 2015 (see Fig. 15). Initially staged at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Northampton, Dacre’s production was, in important respects, a return to the tradition initiated by Kemble–Planché: ‘He splices the text with excerpts from its source material, inserts processions and dumb shows (as well as a topical, although non-authentic reference to Magna Carta) and clothes everyone in splendid period costumes.… Sounds match sights: the air in the candlelit, pillared nave of this medieval church shimmers, shakes and trembles to the ecclesiastical chants, solo melodies, martial percussion and atmosphere-shivering horns.’1 The same reviewer comments on the effectiveness of the cruciform playing space, which highlighted the sequence of oppositions that shape the action. The play was also performed at the Temple Church in London’s Inns of Court and at Salisbury Cathedral before moving to Shakespeare’s Globe in London. The church performances were considered especially successful by reviewers, who commented on the intimacy and grandeur of these spaces. The architectural connection to an authentic medieval past is also remarked. As Mark Brown observes, King John may have visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Northampton, and, as the playbill for the Kemble–Planché production points out, the Earl of Pembroke’s effigy is in Temple Church and Salisbury’s is in Salisbury Cathedral.1
15 Daniel Rabin (Salisbury), Barbara Marten (Eleanor of Aquitaine), Jo Stone-Fewings (King John), Aruhan Galieva (Blanche of Castile) and Alex Waldmann (The Bastard) in James Dacre’s 2015 touring production of King John for Shakespeare’s Globe at Temple Church
The sepulchral element was further enhanced by Dacre’s decision to introduce the play with an interpolation: ‘As the audience enters the candlelit church via the great west door, cowled monks sing plainsong around a dead crusader laid out as though on a tomb. There is an immediate theatrical whack – we are plunged into the England of 1199 as it mourned Richard the Lionheart. And then comes the opening scene: a rousing Magnificat and a coronation of John.’1 The emphasis on pomp and pageantry, celebrated by many, caused Clare Brennan to insist that the production had not captured Shakespeare’s ‘richer drama’, the moments of psychological intensity that engage the ‘head and heart’ as opposed to the ‘eye and ear’. Dacre, in an interview, defended his approach in these terms: ‘We work to create a living sense of history, but also to interrogate the emotions evoked in audiences when they do watch these great political acts of ceremony. The tension within the piece is between an England which believes in the divine right of Kings, and an England that – as in Shakespeare’s own age – was beginning to question the monarch’s ability to make the right decisions for the people they ruled over. That tension between royalism and republicanism continues today. I hope the audience will feel both those emotions.’2 At the same time, Dacre’s ‘living sense of history’ involves topicality; he is quick to point out that the King John production was timed to coincide with a general election in the UK. It also happened to fall on the eight hundredth anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, and the poster for the Globe performance includes the official logo of the Magna Carta Trust that organized commemorative activities and exhibits in 2015.
While Dacre is reticent about his own politics and is explicit about his desire to create theatre that challenges audiences to make their own judgements about the world, it is fascinating to find one reviewer commenting on Pandulph: ‘In a modern reading, you could almost see the Cardinal as the embodiment of the European Union or the Banking World: he is an enemy to some, a friend to others, and backed by tremendous, well funded power.’1 Roughly a year after King John opened at the Globe in London, combining the production’s spectacular medievalism with the neo-Elizabethan architecture of Sam Wanamaker’s theatrical reconstruction, in a historical irony that would have been at home in the world of the play itself, the people of Britain elected to leave the European Union.
TEXTUAL NOTE
The manuscript source
King John is one of the eighteen Shakespeare plays which were printed for the first time in the First Folio of 1623. Of these eighteen, the publishers Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard paid for licences to print sixteen: the two for which they did not trouble themselves with this formality were King John and The Taming of the Shrew. These facts have given rise to all sorts of tortuous scholarly speculations, but little of consequence has emerged.
The business of the editor is first and foremost to determine the nature of the manuscript which was used as printers’ copy by Jaggard’s compositors to set the text of the play in type.2 In the absence of the actual manuscript, or of any of the collateral information that might be obtained from a different text of the play (there is no quarto edition of King John, for example), we are driven to the internal evidence in the Folio text itself.3 An examination of this evidence yields the following points, presented summarily first, with details subsequently:
1The dialogue text of King John is relatively free from obscurity, error or ambiguity. On the whole, editors have found it unnecessary to make many emendations in the dialogue, and some of those made by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors have been abandoned as unjustified by more recent scholars.
2The directions text is seriously incomplete and often misleading and inconsistent (though no more so than that of many other Shakespearean plays).1 Its most-debated difficulties are (1) concerning the Citizen of Angiers and Hubert (whether they are one person or two); and (2) the act and scene divisions in Acts 2 and 3. Editors have found themselves obliged to add substantially to the directions text in order to make the play performable and to make substantive judgements concerning these two major difficulties and several lesser ones. For example, the speech prefixes, especially in Act 2, are notoriously volatile, and there is an apparent confusion as to the Bastard’s name.2
3There are elements in the dramaturgy which are rather surprising. Let us give four examples. (1) The curious way in which the Faulconbridge brothers are introduced. The Earl of Essex, in his only speech in the play, introduces to the King an unnamed Sheriff who has, so Essex says, news of a strange controversy from the country. The Sheriff does not speak and is not given an exit (1.1.43.1–46/7). (2) The Bastard’s mother appears with a retainer, James Gurney (1.1.219.1), who is dismissed by the Bastard ten lines later, never to reappear. (3) The Earl of Salisbury is required in 3.1, and there is a strong implication that he is present in 2.1, but he is not named in any direction in 2.1. And (4), the prophet Peter of Pomfret is brought on in 4.2; he gets a single line before being dragged off to imprisonment. Minor characters are common enough in Shakespeare, but they usually serve a definable role or purpose.1 It is very difficult to see the dramaturgical purpose of the Sheriff, James Gurney or Peter (though see 1.1.230n.). There are several other oddities: for example at 3.4.68, where Constance’s line ‘To England, if you will’ seems to be an answer to a question no one has asked, but it may be a delayed response to King Philip’s earlier request, ‘I prithee, lady, go away with me’ (20).
4On the other hand, the many huge rhetorical speeches of the play are masterly in their organization and structure, and many scenes seem brilliantly devised and executed, such as 4.1, in which Arthur talks Hubert out of blinding him.
All these features must have been present in the manuscript of the play which Jaggard obtained for the typesetting process. The kinds of dramatic manuscript that were made in the Elizabethan period were as follows: the foul papers (the author’s final complete draft of a play); the parts from which the actors learned their lines (consisting only of the character’s part and cues); the plot (showing the characters and sometimes properties required for a performance, scene by scene); the Book (the company’s official book of the play, containing the licence of the Master of the Revels); memorial reconstruction (a hypothetical class of manuscript, allegedly created by actors and/or others reciting what they could remember of the play’s lines to a scribe); and a large class called transcripts.1 Of these, so far as we know, no printer ever used either parts or plot as copy for a printed text. Memorial reconstructions have been hypothesized by scholars in the twentieth century to account for a number of Shakespearean and other dramatic texts that differ inexplicably in quality and quantity from the norm, but King John has none of the signs traditionally associated with a memorial text.
In the normal course of events, the dramatist sold his foul papers to the acting company, whose property they remained. There is evidence that the larger companies kept foul papers for years, even after the official Book had been prepared.2 There is no technical reason why Shakespeare’s foul papers of King John could not have still been available for the printer in 1623. There are, however, reasons why the foul papers are unlikely to have been the source of Jaggard’s copy.
The acting company’s collection of Books was, with their costumes, their most valuable stock-in-trade. There are examples of companies raiding each other’s repertory, but on the whole, the licensing system seems to have worked, at least as far as the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men were concerned.1 This being the case, the company would be unlikely to sell or lend their Book of a play to a printer, because the manuscript would be marked up by the printer for casting-off (see below), and probably dismembered for the compositors’ use. An exception might be if a play had been so long out of the repertory as to be unrevivable. Although we have no idea whether King John had been long out of repertory in this way, it scarcely matters: because of the irregularities in its directions text, King John cannot be based on the Book.
This leaves us with transcripts, which might be made for many reasons and by various persons. The foul papers would usually have to be transcribed in order to make the Book, for instance.2 Or a preliminary fair copy might be made before the Book was prepared. There were in fact many legitimate theatrical reasons for transcripts to be made, and private reasons too: to make a copy for gift, for instance. The evidence is strong that printers’ copy for King John was indeed a transcript: but of what?
Not of the Book, since the difficulties listed in 2 above would hardly all have survived into a Book. Not so long ago the idea flourished that the Book would correct all inconsistencies in speech prefixes, entrances and exits, and in the use of properties, a delusion that persisted despite the evidence of the surviving Books that the bookholder of the company was generally content to leave many such inconsistencies unresolved.1 Yet some of those in King John seem too gross to have been permitted to stand either in the plot or the Book. For instance, the opening direction to Act 2 (‘Scæna Secunda’) in F reads ‘Enter before Angiers, Philip King of France, Lewis, Daulphin, Austria, Constance, Arthur’; ‘before Angiers’ is an unusual direction, very characteristic of an author imagining a scene, not at all characteristic of a bookholder, since there would be nothing onstage that would either illustrate or name the town. The confusion ‘Lewis, Daulphin’ may be the compositor’s misunderstanding. More important than either of these is the absence of any supernumeraries, who would most certainly be present, since this is about to become a battle scene. After 83, F directs ‘Enter K. of England, Bastard, Queene, Blanch, Pembroke, and others’. The ‘others’ must include the English expeditionary force, and probably the Earl of Salisbury and other nobles too.2 Some lively business is taking place at the end of 3.2 (early in F’s ‘Scœna Secunda’). F directs ‘Exit’ (though it is obvious that the stage is cleared), then ‘Alarums, excursions, Retreat’. Alarums and retreat are trumpet calls; excursions meant soldiers running out of the tiring-house, maybe fighting, maybe not, and running in again. Then F directs ‘Enter Iohn, Eleanor, Arthur / Bastard, Hubert, Lords’. The battle is over, the English victorious, so perhaps no soldiers are needed, but which of the Lords should we have? There are other similar directions in the play; none of them seems attributable to scribal or compositorial error, and yet collectively they reveal a playtext less specific in its directions than are the surviving Books. The dramaturgical oddities might also have been modified or eliminated in the process of dramatic preparation, either during the casting (when the minor characters were doubled) or in rehearsal.
The foul papers, then, seem the only logical source of the transcript. But when was it made, by whom and why? The ‘when’ can be partly answered: after 1606 (actually after 1608 – see p. 128), when the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (3. Jac. I, c. 21) was passed. For the text of King John has been (rather haphazardly) expurgated in response to the requirement of the Act to avoid profanity. The best investigation of the expurgation is found in William H. Matchett’s edition of the play (150–1). Noting that at 3.1.155 F prints ‘heauen’ where the context clearly requires ‘God’ (‘But as we, under heaven, are supreame head’), and that the word ‘God’ occurs less frequently (5 times) in King John than in any other of the plays printed as Histories (1 Henry VI is next, at 16) whereas ‘heaven’ appears 51 times, Matchett rightly concludes that ‘each appearance of the word “heaven” in this play becomes suspect’ (150). There are certainly places where it is correct, as in phrases like ‘heaven and earth’ (2.1.173). There remain about 19 occurrences where ‘God’ is on all counts the probable reading, and 18 where it is possible but not certain. This expurgation implies at least an anticipated theatrical purpose for the transcript, since neither published texts nor private gifts were affected by the statute. At the very least, the foul papers must have been transcribed in anticipation of a possible revival after 1606. Gary Taylor (‘’Swounds’, 60–1) considers the transcript might have been specially produced for the Folio (and might also have been intended to serve as basis for a Book, in view of the anti-Catholic feeling in 1621–2 which could have justified a revival of the play). This seems not impossible, but if so, the strikingly reduced amount of anti-Catholic material and the use of source elements from the writings of the Catholic Robert Southwell would have been a disappointment for such a putative audience.1 The transcript had certainly not been worked over by the bookholder, since neither the speech prefixes nor the directions show signs of the bookholder’s intervention.
It is possible, however, to assert that two scribes were involved, since they had some identifiable spelling preferences, and one was more diligent over the expurgation than the other. Scribe X, as Gary Taylor calls him (‘’Swounds’, 59), transcribed lines 1–1893 (using the Through-Line-Numbering, or TLN, of the Norton Facsimile of the Folio; 1.1.1–4.2.171 of the present text); he preferred the form ‘O’ to ‘Oh’ by 42 to 7 for both the exclamation and vocative (this was also Shakespeare’s preferred form, judging from the plays thought to be set from foul papers copy).2 Scribe Y, who is manifest in TLN 1941–2729 (4.2.216–5.7.119) – evidence is wanting for the intervening lines – preferred ‘Oh’ to ‘O’ by 19 to 3. Y was more scrupulous about expurgation than X, who left 9 ‘God’ to 27 ‘heaven’, whereas Y left no ‘God’ but wrote 8 ‘heaven’; X left a ‘Zounds’ also.3 Taylor concludes: ‘The pattern of profanity in King John thus reinforces the existing evidence for mixed scribal copy, and exonerates the Folio compositors and editors of any responsibility for the text’s expurgation’ (‘’Swounds’, 59). We hope that this sensible observation will help to lay forever the tedious ‘literary-expurgation’ ghost.1
As New York entered the new millennium, King John appeared at The American Place Theatre. The production by Theatre for a New Audience, directed by Karin Coonrod, presented the play in spare, crystalline fashion. Coonrod’s commitment to Shakespeare’s language impressed John Heilpern, who declared: ‘Ms. Coonrod is an experimental director who begins and ends with the text, the narrative sweep, words.’1 The costuming was a modern–medieval hybrid, with unadorned modern clothes in sombre hues topped by coats of mail; Heilpern praised them for treading ‘the giddy line between history and modernity well’, but Ben Brantley, in the New York Times, felt the costumes ‘a little too self-consciously hip, suggesting a medieval-themed collection by Helmut Lang’.2 In keeping with the simple stage design and lighting (an underlit path was the major feature), the costumes encouraged a consideration of the play’s historicity but avoided both the reassurances of antiquarianism and the insistence of topicality. Brantley was, in fact, quick to make the topical connection between the play and the American presidential primaries then underway, but Heilpern points out that the production ‘doesn’t force topicality’. ‘An evening of energetic, stylized carnage and double-dealing kept at a cynical remove’, this was a King John for the new millennium. Coonrod presented the Bastard as the play’s hero, but with his concluding patriotism tamped down. According to Brantley, the Bastard is presented without ‘interior-probing portraiture in favor of an exaggerated everyman figure, a jaunty master of ceremonies who is part jester, part moral watchdog’. During the dispute between England and France, the Bastard briefly took a seat in the audience, and at the conclusion he left his armour onstage and once again joined the audience before giving his final speech. As Coonrod notes in the programme, ‘In the character of the outsider Shakespeare offers the humanity necessary for the health of the community, an antidote to the violence of self-interest.’ The optimism sounded here is tempered by a reference to Pandulph as ‘Ayatollah-like’, an analogy that either completely collapses or gains deeper resonance in the post-9/11 world. While not conspicuously global, Coonrod’s King John made no attempt to root itself in the particularities of time and place. One of the very few elements that displeased Heilpern was the decision to use a plain, stylized metal hoop for a crown. As he writes, ‘I like my crowns real. A real crown is worth fighting for. It is heavy.’
Heavy crowns and the importance of place featured prominently in James Dacre’s production of King John in 2015 (see Fig. 15). Initially staged at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Northampton, Dacre’s production was, in important respects, a return to the tradition initiated by Kemble–Planché: ‘He splices the text with excerpts from its source material, inserts processions and dumb shows (as well as a topical, although non-authentic reference to Magna Carta) and clothes everyone in splendid period costumes.… Sounds match sights: the air in the candlelit, pillared nave of this medieval church shimmers, shakes and trembles to the ecclesiastical chants, solo melodies, martial percussion and atmosphere-shivering horns.’1 The same reviewer comments on the effectiveness of the cruciform playing space, which highlighted the sequence of oppositions that shape the action. The play was also performed at the Temple Church in London’s Inns of Court and at Salisbury Cathedral before moving to Shakespeare’s Globe in London. The church performances were considered especially successful by reviewers, who commented on the intimacy and grandeur of these spaces. The architectural connection to an authentic medieval past is also remarked. As Mark Brown observes, King John may have visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Northampton, and, as the playbill for the Kemble–Planché production points out, the Earl of Pembroke’s effigy is in Temple Church and Salisbury’s is in Salisbury Cathedral.1
15 Daniel Rabin (Salisbury), Barbara Marten (Eleanor of Aquitaine), Jo Stone-Fewings (King John), Aruhan Galieva (Blanche of Castile) and Alex Waldmann (The Bastard) in James Dacre’s 2015 touring production of King John for Shakespeare’s Globe at Temple Church
The sepulchral element was further enhanced by Dacre’s decision to introduce the play with an interpolation: ‘As the audience enters the candlelit church via the great west door, cowled monks sing plainsong around a dead crusader laid out as though on a tomb. There is an immediate theatrical whack – we are plunged into the England of 1199 as it mourned Richard the Lionheart. And then comes the opening scene: a rousing Magnificat and a coronation of John.’1 The emphasis on pomp and pageantry, celebrated by many, caused Clare Brennan to insist that the production had not captured Shakespeare’s ‘richer drama’, the moments of psychological intensity that engage the ‘head and heart’ as opposed to the ‘eye and ear’. Dacre, in an interview, defended his approach in these terms: ‘We work to create a living sense of history, but also to interrogate the emotions evoked in audiences when they do watch these great political acts of ceremony. The tension within the piece is between an England which believes in the divine right of Kings, and an England that – as in Shakespeare’s own age – was beginning to question the monarch’s ability to make the right decisions for the people they ruled over. That tension between royalism and republicanism continues today. I hope the audience will feel both those emotions.’2 At the same time, Dacre’s ‘living sense of history’ involves topicality; he is quick to point out that the King John production was timed to coincide with a general election in the UK. It also happened to fall on the eight hundredth anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, and the poster for the Globe performance includes the official logo of the Magna Carta Trust that organized commemorative activities and exhibits in 2015.
While Dacre is reticent about his own politics and is explicit about his desire to create theatre that challenges audiences to make their own judgements about the world, it is fascinating to find one reviewer commenting on Pandulph: ‘In a modern reading, you could almost see the Cardinal as the embodiment of the European Union or the Banking World: he is an enemy to some, a friend to others, and backed by tremendous, well funded power.’1 Roughly a year after King John opened at the Globe in London, combining the production’s spectacular medievalism with the neo-Elizabethan architecture of Sam Wanamaker’s theatrical reconstruction, in a historical irony that would have been at home in the world of the play itself, the people of Britain elected to leave the European Union.
TEXTUAL NOTE
The manuscript source
King John is one of the eighteen Shakespeare plays which were printed for the first time in the First Folio of 1623. Of these eighteen, the publishers Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard paid for licences to print sixteen: the two for which they did not trouble themselves with this formality were King John and The Taming of the Shrew. These facts have given rise to all sorts of tortuous scholarly speculations, but little of consequence has emerged.
The business of the editor is first and foremost to determine the nature of the manuscript which was used as printers’ copy by Jaggard’s compositors to set the text of the play in type.2 In the absence of the actual manuscript, or of any of the collateral information that might be obtained from a different text of the play (there is no quarto edition of King John, for example), we are driven to the internal evidence in the Folio text itself.3 An examination of this evidence yields the following points, presented summarily first, with details subsequently:
1The dialogue text of King John is relatively free from obscurity, error or ambiguity. On the whole, editors have found it unnecessary to make many emendations in the dialogue, and some of those made by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors have been abandoned as unjustified by more recent scholars.
2The directions text is seriously incomplete and often misleading and inconsistent (though no more so than that of many other Shakespearean plays).1 Its most-debated difficulties are (1) concerning the Citizen of Angiers and Hubert (whether they are one person or two); and (2) the act and scene divisions in Acts 2 and 3. Editors have found themselves obliged to add substantially to the directions text in order to make the play performable and to make substantive judgements concerning these two major difficulties and several lesser ones. For example, the speech prefixes, especially in Act 2, are notoriously volatile, and there is an apparent confusion as to the Bastard’s name.2
3There are elements in the dramaturgy which are rather surprising. Let us give four examples. (1) The curious way in which the Faulconbridge brothers are introduced. The Earl of Essex, in his only speech in the play, introduces to the King an unnamed Sheriff who has, so Essex says, news of a strange controversy from the country. The Sheriff does not speak and is not given an exit (1.1.43.1–46/7). (2) The Bastard’s mother appears with a retainer, James Gurney (1.1.219.1), who is dismissed by the Bastard ten lines later, never to reappear. (3) The Earl of Salisbury is required in 3.1, and there is a strong implication that he is present in 2.1, but he is not named in any direction in 2.1. And (4), the prophet Peter of Pomfret is brought on in 4.2; he gets a single line before being dragged off to imprisonment. Minor characters are common enough in Shakespeare, but they usually serve a definable role or purpose.1 It is very difficult to see the dramaturgical purpose of the Sheriff, James Gurney or Peter (though see 1.1.230n.). There are several other oddities: for example at 3.4.68, where Constance’s line ‘To England, if you will’ seems to be an answer to a question no one has asked, but it may be a delayed response to King Philip’s earlier request, ‘I prithee, lady, go away with me’ (20).
4On the other hand, the many huge rhetorical speeches of the play are masterly in their organization and structure, and many scenes seem brilliantly devised and executed, such as 4.1, in which Arthur talks Hubert out of blinding him.
All these features must have been present in the manuscript of the play which Jaggard obtained for the typesetting process. The kinds of dramatic manuscript that were made in the Elizabethan period were as follows: the foul papers (the author’s final complete draft of a play); the parts from which the actors learned their lines (consisting only of the character’s part and cues); the plot (showing the characters and sometimes properties required for a performance, scene by scene); the Book (the company’s official book of the play, containing the licence of the Master of the Revels); memorial reconstruction (a hypothetical class of manuscript, allegedly created by actors and/or others reciting what they could remember of the play’s lines to a scribe); and a large class called transcripts.1 Of these, so far as we know, no printer ever used either parts or plot as copy for a printed text. Memorial reconstructions have been hypothesized by scholars in the twentieth century to account for a number of Shakespearean and other dramatic texts that differ inexplicably in quality and quantity from the norm, but King John has none of the signs traditionally associated with a memorial text.
In the normal course of events, the dramatist sold his foul papers to the acting company, whose property they remained. There is evidence that the larger companies kept foul papers for years, even after the official Book had been prepared.2 There is no technical reason why Shakespeare’s foul papers of King John could not have still been available for the printer in 1623. There are, however, reasons why the foul papers are unlikely to have been the source of Jaggard’s copy.
The acting company’s collection of Books was, with their costumes, their most valuable stock-in-trade. There are examples of companies raiding each other’s repertory, but on the whole, the licensing system seems to have worked, at least as far as the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men were concerned.1 This being the case, the company would be unlikely to sell or lend their Book of a play to a printer, because the manuscript would be marked up by the printer for casting-off (see below), and probably dismembered for the compositors’ use. An exception might be if a play had been so long out of the repertory as to be unrevivable. Although we have no idea whether King John had been long out of repertory in this way, it scarcely matters: because of the irregularities in its directions text, King John cannot be based on the Book.
This leaves us with transcripts, which might be made for many reasons and by various persons. The foul papers would usually have to be transcribed in order to make the Book, for instance.2 Or a preliminary fair copy might be made before the Book was prepared. There were in fact many legitimate theatrical reasons for transcripts to be made, and private reasons too: to make a copy for gift, for instance. The evidence is strong that printers’ copy for King John was indeed a transcript: but of what?
Not of the Book, since the difficulties listed in 2 above would hardly all have survived into a Book. Not so long ago the idea flourished that the Book would correct all inconsistencies in speech prefixes, entrances and exits, and in the use of properties, a delusion that persisted despite the evidence of the surviving Books that the bookholder of the company was generally content to leave many such inconsistencies unresolved.1 Yet some of those in King John seem too gross to have been permitted to stand either in the plot or the Book. For instance, the opening direction to Act 2 (‘Scæna Secunda’) in F reads ‘Enter before Angiers, Philip King of France, Lewis, Daulphin, Austria, Constance, Arthur’; ‘before Angiers’ is an unusual direction, very characteristic of an author imagining a scene, not at all characteristic of a bookholder, since there would be nothing onstage that would either illustrate or name the town. The confusion ‘Lewis, Daulphin’ may be the compositor’s misunderstanding. More important than either of these is the absence of any supernumeraries, who would most certainly be present, since this is about to become a battle scene. After 83, F directs ‘Enter K. of England, Bastard, Queene, Blanch, Pembroke, and others’. The ‘others’ must include the English expeditionary force, and probably the Earl of Salisbury and other nobles too.2 Some lively business is taking place at the end of 3.2 (early in F’s ‘Scœna Secunda’). F directs ‘Exit’ (though it is obvious that the stage is cleared), then ‘Alarums, excursions, Retreat’. Alarums and retreat are trumpet calls; excursions meant soldiers running out of the tiring-house, maybe fighting, maybe not, and running in again. Then F directs ‘Enter Iohn, Eleanor, Arthur / Bastard, Hubert, Lords’. The battle is over, the English victorious, so perhaps no soldiers are needed, but which of the Lords should we have? There are other similar directions in the play; none of them seems attributable to scribal or compositorial error, and yet collectively they reveal a playtext less specific in its directions than are the surviving Books. The dramaturgical oddities might also have been modified or eliminated in the process of dramatic preparation, either during the casting (when the minor characters were doubled) or in rehearsal.
The foul papers, then, seem the only logical source of the transcript. But when was it made, by whom and why? The ‘when’ can be partly answered: after 1606 (actually after 1608 – see p. 128), when the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (3. Jac. I, c. 21) was passed. For the text of King John has been (rather haphazardly) expurgated in response to the requirement of the Act to avoid profanity. The best investigation of the expurgation is found in William H. Matchett’s edition of the play (150–1). Noting that at 3.1.155 F prints ‘heauen’ where the context clearly requires ‘God’ (‘But as we, under heaven, are supreame head’), and that the word ‘God’ occurs less frequently (5 times) in King John than in any other of the plays printed as Histories (1 Henry VI is next, at 16) whereas ‘heaven’ appears 51 times, Matchett rightly concludes that ‘each appearance of the word “heaven” in this play becomes suspect’ (150). There are certainly places where it is correct, as in phrases like ‘heaven and earth’ (2.1.173). There remain about 19 occurrences where ‘God’ is on all counts the probable reading, and 18 where it is possible but not certain. This expurgation implies at least an anticipated theatrical purpose for the transcript, since neither published texts nor private gifts were affected by the statute. At the very least, the foul papers must have been transcribed in anticipation of a possible revival after 1606. Gary Taylor (‘’Swounds’, 60–1) considers the transcript might have been specially produced for the Folio (and might also have been intended to serve as basis for a Book, in view of the anti-Catholic feeling in 1621–2 which could have justified a revival of the play). This seems not impossible, but if so, the strikingly reduced amount of anti-Catholic material and the use of source elements from the writings of the Catholic Robert Southwell would have been a disappointment for such a putative audience.1 The transcript had certainly not been worked over by the bookholder, since neither the speech prefixes nor the directions show signs of the bookholder’s intervention.
It is possible, however, to assert that two scribes were involved, since they had some identifiable spelling preferences, and one was more diligent over the expurgation than the other. Scribe X, as Gary Taylor calls him (‘’Swounds’, 59), transcribed lines 1–1893 (using the Through-Line-Numbering, or TLN, of the Norton Facsimile of the Folio; 1.1.1–4.2.171 of the present text); he preferred the form ‘O’ to ‘Oh’ by 42 to 7 for both the exclamation and vocative (this was also Shakespeare’s preferred form, judging from the plays thought to be set from foul papers copy).2 Scribe Y, who is manifest in TLN 1941–2729 (4.2.216–5.7.119) – evidence is wanting for the intervening lines – preferred ‘Oh’ to ‘O’ by 19 to 3. Y was more scrupulous about expurgation than X, who left 9 ‘God’ to 27 ‘heaven’, whereas Y left no ‘God’ but wrote 8 ‘heaven’; X left a ‘Zounds’ also.3 Taylor concludes: ‘The pattern of profanity in King John thus reinforces the existing evidence for mixed scribal copy, and exonerates the Folio compositors and editors of any responsibility for the text’s expurgation’ (‘’Swounds’, 59). We hope that this sensible observation will help to lay forever the tedious ‘literary-expurgation’ ghost.1
