Richard II Read Online Free Page A

handing over of power, as opposed to the presumption and hugger-mugger of the original version that was now tarred by association with the trial of Essex and his accomplices. Nor can we wholly rule out the possibility that, to freshen up the play and as a little treat for Sir Charles Percy and his friends in return for their forty shillings above the ordinary, Shakespeare dashed off the addition on the Friday and gave it to his actors to learn overnight, allowing them to rehearse it in the morning run-through before including it in the afternoon performance.
    Richard II
, then, is a play that nearly all modern editors print in a hybrid text that never appeared in print in Shakespeare’s lifetime. They base the text on the First Quarto of 1597, but insert into it the deposition (or abdication) scene that first appeared in print many years later. The Folio-based policy of the RSC edition means that we do not have to conflate different source texts in this way. The price for this choice is that our text prints the Folio’s watered-down oaths (typically “Heaven” instead of “God”) that were the result of a parliamentary act passed in 1606, whereby players were fined for blaspheming (i.e. mentioning the name of God) on stage. Modern producers wishing to restore the more robust oaths of the Quarto may reinsert them by consulting the list of variants that we include after the textual notes that follow the text.
    The following observations highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:
    Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including
Richard II
, so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus “John of GAUNT , Duke of Lancaster, Richard’s uncle”).
    Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays, not including
Richard II
. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations. Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before.
    Act and Scene Divisions were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse that the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a running scene count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention running scene continues. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.
    Speakers’ Names are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio. Thus BULLINGBROOK is always so-called in speech headings but “the