[In the following essay, Clare reviews the debate regarding the issue of the possible censorship of the deposition scene in Richard II, and maintains that strong and persuasive evidence exists to support the view that the scene was suppressed by the Master of the Revels due ot its “explicit portrayal of deposition and usurpation.”]

The question of Elizabethan censorship and its impact upon Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists is one which has evoked cautious responses of ‘not proven’. Apart from the clear evidence of Tilney's censorship on the manuscript of The Book of Sir Thomas More, proof of early theatrical censorship is scant. There are, however, strong grounds for claiming that Richard II also suffered from theatrical censorship in the 1590s. To date editors have tended to overlook the cumulative evidence of Tilney's interference with the scene of Richard's deposition and thence the conclusions to be drawn about the state's fear of the theatre as an arena for provocative spectacle.

In Richard II Shakespeare goes further than the anonymous author of Woodstock, who was also concerned with the revolt by the nobles and commons as a reaction against the moral deficiencies and political ineptitude of the King. Shakespeare not only dramatizes the grievances of the rebel Bolingbroke and the populace who endorse his violation of royal sacrosanctity, but lingers over the King's forced abdication. Such a scene, with its subordination of traditional ideology and its inversion of monarchical ritual, invited a strong reaction from the Master of the Revels when the play came before him in 1595.

It is well known that the deposition scene failed to appear in print in the Elizabethan editions of the play or in subsequent reprints and that it was not published until well into the reign of James I, in the fourth quarto of 1608. The inserted piece is different in kind from the remainder of Act IV which surrounds it. The fourth quarto, like its predecessors, seems to derive from a non-theatrical source, probably an authorial manuscript. The text of the deposition, on the other hand, seems to have been set from an imperfect transcript of the scene. Its corruption, manifested in mislineation, the omission of stage directions, and the omission of half-lines which upsets the metre and disturbs alignment, suggests that it was hastily recorded from dictation or from memory. Had the scene been performed on the stage at intervals since the play's composition as editors imply, it would surely have been possible for the publisher, Matthew Lawe, to have obtained a fair copy prepared for stage use.¹ The condition of the text of the deposition scene is, then, an indication that the printers did not have recourse to a playhouse text long in the possession of the King's Men and suggests that their copy must have been taken from an unauthorized source when the episode was recovered for performance. From the advertisement on the title-page of the 1608 quarto—the first Jacobean edition of the play—the reinstatement of the scene on the stage would seem to have taken place immediately prior to its publication. Whereas the scene would have been judged dangerous in the last decade of Elizabeth's reign, when the question of the succession loomed large but became a prohibited area of discussion, such fears would have been less predominant years after the uncontested succession of James I.

The title-page of certain copies of the fourth quarto advertises the additional material and draws attention to its recent staging: ‘With new additions of the Parliament Sceane, and the deposing of King Richard. As it hath been lately acted by the Kinges Majesties Servantes, at the Globe.’ If audiences had been familiar with the spectacle of the deposition on stage during the previous decade it seems unlikely that Lawe would have coupled fresh publication with its being ‘lately acted’. Lawe appears to have capitalized on a relaxation in theatrical censorship to promote sales of an old play by giving prominence to the restoration of controversial material.

What other factors might account for the scene's omission in the early quartos? A. W. Pollard's early view that the Lord Chamberlain's Men cut it for dramatic reasons because audiences might suffer from ‘too much Richard’ is not now convincing and has had few adherents.² Rather, its literary and dramatic qualities have been invoked to support the case for its inclusion throughout the play's early stage history. Ernest Talbert, notably, discusses the artistry and compelling lyricism of the scene and comments that this ‘may well have restricted any tendency toward delation on the part of those who watched its performance even in a year of official scrutiny and theatrical turmoil’ and that ‘Shakespeare could have expected his artistry to be supported by that of the Lord Chamberlain's actors’.³ But it is doubtful whether the actors’ recognition of the scene's lyrical qualities would in itself have persuaded them to take such risks. One may also assume that the Master of the Revels would hear from his sources if the players were to disregard his strictures so flagrantly as to perform the momentous episode.

In an article devoted to the deposition scene, David Bergeron states what modern editors have ignored, that if the ritualistic deposing of Richard was too scandalous for the printed page, it is unlikely to have been permitted on the stage.⁴ However, Bergeron goes on to reject the relevance of Elizabethan censorship, theatrical or literary, asking what there is about the missing part of the deposition scene that is dangerous. Yet this view ignores the subversive language and iconography of the scene. Bergeron's argument that lines 154-317 of Act IV are a later addition ultimately comes to rest on the conviction, similar to Talbert’s, that ‘no actor, director, spectator, or reader would truly want to be deprived of this new appearance of Richard at his formal abdication’.⁵ But, we must ask, when have a censor's sensibilities been so attuned?

Editors have generally favoured a plausible alternative to theatrical censorship, namely, that the scene was cut by ecclesiastical censors who, under the Star Chamber decree of 1586, were responsible for press censorship.⁶ The Arden editor, Peter Ure, commented that the scene was likely to have been performed on the stage but was cut from the printer's manuscript ‘probably because political conditions towards the end of the century made dethronement of an English monarch a dangerous subject for public discussion’.⁷ It is difficult to see why what was ‘a dangerous subject for public discussion’ was not equally hazardous when represented in the theatre, where its impact would have been felt across a wider range of public opinion. Andrew Gurr in his edition tends towards Ure's view: ‘Perhaps the stage version of the play never lost the deposition scene, so that the playhouse always had a full version of the text’; and remarks that Tilney's record as a censor is undistinguished in comparison with press licensers.⁸ But details pieced together from the Sir Thomas More manuscript and anomalies in other texts suggest that Tilney was anxious to have potentially seditious events abridged, or reported rather than enacted.⁹ Nor is there evidence to indicate that ecclesiastical censorship was more stringent than censorship of dramatic performance by the Master of the Revels. John Hayward's The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry the Fourth, which was as much concerned with the deposition of Richard II as Shakespeare's play, was licensed initially without any objection by the Bishop of London's chaplain in 1598. Most significant, however, is that the 1597 quarto of Richard II was amongst a small number of plays printed on the strength of the sole authorization of one of the wardens of the Stationers’ Company without specific ecclesiastical sanction.¹⁰ It is extremely improbable that a warden, concerned with copyright not censorship, would have taken it upon himself to censor heavily a scene which the Master of the Revels had earlier judged innocuous. What would seem to have been the case is that the play was taken to the Stationers’ Hall with Tilney's markings and his licence for performance and this enabled the officiating warden to satisfy himself that the book had already been officially perused and reformed. It is significant that a decade later, Tilney's deputy, Sir George Buc, was licensing plays for print as a regular part of his duties. In actuality, the procedure had probably commenced earlier when the wardens would occasionally grant copyright to publishers for plays authorized not by ecclesiastical censors but for performance by Tilney.

One further possibility remains as an alternative to theatrical censorship, that is, self-censorship by Shakespeare, realizing that in his dramatization of Richard's deposition he had trespassed beyond the bounds of the permissible. The scene is cut from the moment when the Earl of Northumberland accuses the Bishop of Carlisle of treason for his support of Richard (IV. i. 150-3) and resumes with Bolingbroke's announcement of his intended coronation (IV. i. 319-20). Richard's abdication becomes a fait accompli; his entry and his attempt to upstage Bolingbroke before his histrionic surrender of power are lost. There is nothing incongruous about the early, compressed version of the scene; even the Abbot's words, ‘A woeful pageant have we here beheld’, which in the full textual version refer to Richard's abdication, arrest, and conveyance to the Tower, can now be taken to refer to the arrest of Carlisle on Northumberland's trumped-up charge of treason. Nevertheless, ‘pageant’ most obviously refers to Richard's abdication, and the fact that the line was left to stand does suggest that responsibility for the excisions lay with the censor, who would not have concerned himself with the dramatic consistency of whatever survived his attentions.

From his treatment of the events leading to the deposition it seems that Shakespeare was indeed conscious that he was dealing with intractable political issues which demanded cautious representation. There is much that is said elsewhere in Richard II to counter the subversive ideology of royal deposition. Thus, in the first act there is a scene, not in any of Shakespeare's sources, in which Gaunt refuses to respond to the pleas of the Duchess of Gloucester to revenge her husband's murder, stating the familiar belief in the King's sacrosanctity. Reminiscent of More's quasi-homily in the section of Sir Thomas More attributed to Shakespeare is Carlisle's outburst of orthodox sentiment immediately before Bolingbroke assumes power, in which he argues the heinousness of Bolingbroke's crime and predicts a pattern of nemesis:

And shall the figure of God's majesty,
His captain, steward, deputy elect,
Anointed, crowned, planted many years,
Be judg’d by subject and inferior breath,
And he himself not present? O forfend it, God,
That in a Christian climate souls refined
Should show so heinous, black, obscene a deed!

(IV. i. 125-31)

The lines reflect the Yorkist sympathies and interpretations of history expressed in some of Shakespeare's chronicle sources; but more pertinent is their articulation of the Tudor doctrine of non-resistance embodied in the Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion. Shakespeare could have found part of the content of the speech, without the augury, in Samuel Daniel's epic poem The First Foure Bookes of the Civile Warres; but by deviating from the source and placing the speech just before the actual deposition he appears to anticipate any counter-charge that the play upholds Bolingbroke's irregular seizure of power.

In the deposition scene itself there are signs of circumspection both in the representation of the event and in the selection of source material. Since Henry VII's claim to the crown was based on his descent from John of Gaunt, Bolingbroke was a direct ancestor of Elizabeth. Shakespeare's treatment of Bolingbroke combines a sure sense of theatre and political circumspection. Juxtaposed to and in contrast with Richard's loquacity is Bolingbroke's silence, and by allowing Richard to control the scene Shakespeare contrives to reduce Bolingbroke's apparent involvement in the conspiracy and to leave his motives and character oblique and obscure. There seems to be a deliberate policy by Shakespeare to keep much of Bolingbroke's direct participation in the background. Both the chroniclers Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed record thirty-three articles presented by Parliament which propound Richard's misgovernment. Holinshed attributes the King's fate to the grievances advanced in this form: ‘The articles objected to King Richard, wherby he was counted worthie, to be deposed from his principalitie.’¹¹ In the play Northumberland alone makes an oblique reference to the articles which goes unheeded. The corollary of justification in Richard's deposition is thus avoided by both Richard and Bolingbroke. Only in the staging of the actual dethronement, an elaboration from the bare mention in Holinshed, does Shakespeare abandon his cautious handling of material. As we have seen, the evidence that the scene was excised from performance until the early years of James I's reign is persuasive; the explicit portrayal of deposition and usurpation was a risk which elicited the interference of the Master of the Revels and the suppression of the most theatrical moment in the play.

Notes

1. Lawe obtained the copyright of Richard II from Andrew Wise in 1603. It is interesting that he chose not to print the play until 1608 although both Richard III and I Henry IV (which had also been named in the transfer) had been printed in 1604.

2. The Tragedy of King Richard II: A New Shakespeare Quarto, with an introduction by A. W. Pollard (London, 1916), 63.

3. Ernest William Talbert, The Problem of Order: Elizabethan Political Commonplaces and an Example of Shakespeare's Art (Chapel Hill, 1962), 194-5.

4. David Bergeron, ‘The Deposition Scene in Richard II’, Renaissance Papers (1974), 31-7.

5. Ibid. 37.

6. See Edward Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 5 vols. (London, 1875-94), ii. 807-12, iii. 609.

7. Richard II, ed. Peter Ure (London, 1956), p. xiv.

8. Richard II, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge, 1984), 9-10.

9. See Clare, “Greater Themes for Insurrection's Arguing”: Political Censorship of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Stage’, RES NS 38 (1987), 169-83.

10. Transcript of the Registers, iii. 89.

11. Holinshed, Chronicles, iii (London, 1807), 859-61.