Johnson continues: “He gives him only passive fortitude, the virtue of a confessor, rather than of a king. In his prosperity we saw him imperious and oppressive; but in his distress he is wise, patient, and pious.”

By concentrating on the inner life of Richard, Shakespeare diminishes some of the major elements of the play that was his structural model, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. The flatterers Bushy, Bagot, and Green are given very small roles and the exclusion of the queen from the king’s affections is not fully developed. In Marlowe’s dramatization of the fall of a weak king and the rise of his rival, the minions—first Gaveston and then Spencer—are central not only to the politics but also to the sexuality of the play. They are explicitly the king’s lovers. The abused queen becomes a lead player in the rebellion against the king. Shakespeare’s Richard by contrast seems too self-absorbed to be powerfully driven by sexual desire. Coleridge spoke intriguingly of the character’s feminine friendism, but that is not quite a euphemism for homoerotic feeling.

As the man who rises when Richard falls, Bullingbrook’s story remains unfinished. But Shakespeare anticipates the civil war that will wrack his reign. The role of Northumberland, who cooperates with Bullingbrook but will eventually turn against him, is greatly expanded from its seed in Holinshed’s Chronicles. Richard delivers a prophecy that “The time shall not be many hours of age / More than it is ere foul sin, gathering head, / Shall break into corruption” and predicts rightly that Northumberland will seek to pluck King Henry IV from his usurped throne. As he wrote these words, Shakespeare must have been thinking of how he was going to continue the story in another play. He was getting ready for a sequel: Henry IV Part I.

ABOUT THE TEXT

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of a few plays there are hundreds of differences between the Quarto and Folio editions, some of them far from trivial.

If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rushlight and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.

But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a reasonably well-printed Quarto was available, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare’s will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater.