THE COPY FOR RICHARD III, 1597 AND 1623

Summary

Six quartos of Richard III were printed before the play appeared in the First Folio (1623), viz. Q1 (1597), Q2 (1598), Q3 (1602), Q4 (1605), Q5 (1612), and Q6 (1622); and such is the complexity of the situation that a modern editor cannot afford to ignore any one of these seven texts entirely, though the two principals are of course Q1 and F1. By the end of last century we had come to know a good deal about F1. P. A. Daniel, for example, claimed that the bulk of it was printed from a copy of Q6 which had been extensively, though by no means thoroughly, corrected and supplemented from a playhouse manuscript, while Alexander Schmidt proved that two portions of it, viz. 3. 1. 1–164 and everything after 5. 3. 47, together amounting to over 520 lines or about a sixth of the whole, were printed from a copy of Q3, which had served as a prompt-book in the theatre. Yet while the copy for Q 1 remained undefined, editors were left at sixes and sevens, since though some 200 lines shorter than F. and differing from it in almost every line, the Quarto text was on the whole so respectable that it seemed the better of the two in the eyes of many. Thus Aldis Wright adopted it as his basis in the classical Cambridge Shakespeare (1864); so did Her ford in The Eversley (1900) and M. R. Ridley in The New Temple (1935).