Yesterday, we introduced Act Four, Scene One of Richard the Second, and its discussion of the succession from Richard to Bolingbroke. We also mentioned that the scene seems to jump about 160 lines, and I implied that not only did I skip those lines in my explication but so did Shakespeare. Here’s what I mean…
Those lines do not appear in the First Quarto printing of 1597, as well as the subsequent Quartos of 1598, 1608, and 1615. In fact, the lines did not appear in print until after Shakespeare’s death (1616), in the 1623 First Folio printing. But it’s not as if the lines hadn’t appeared in the play on stage (critical opinion is that they did).
So what’s in those missing lines?
Continue reading “The Deposition That Is”