THE COPY FOR HENRY VIII, 1623

Summary

The Folio text of Henry VIII is, in the main, extremely tidy, and affords little help towards solving the problem of authorship discussed in the Introduction. The accepted view about it is cautiously summarized by Sir Walter Greg: ‘The copy for F was clearly a carefully prepared manuscript, in whose hand or hands there is no evidence to show. It could have been used as a prompt-book, but there is no indication that it was.’ No evidence for more than one scribal hand has been found, and, as will be seen, the case against use as a prompt-book is perhaps stronger than Sir Walter allows. If the evidence for divided authorship drawn from pronominal forms and from colloquial abbreviations is valid, the scribe cannot have gone far in imposing his own preferences, if any, on his original. On the other hand, there are very few odd spellings or irregular punctuations to suggest the persistence of authorial characteristics. There are, however, a few variations in speech-prefixes, though not of an elaborately ‘functional’ kind. Wolsey is ‘Cardinall Wolsey’ in the stagedirection for his first entry (1. 1. 114), and ‘Car.’ in his three speeches in the first scene. In 1. 2 and 1. 4 he enters as ‘The Cardinall”, and is then ‘Card.’, but in 2. 2, where confusion with Campeius must be avoided, he is ‘Wolsey’ in his entry and ‘WoL’ in prefixes.