3.3 Six Recopied Leaves

As has been seen already, Dering or his scribe Carington started the task of making the manuscript by setting aside quires of paper into which it could be written. The quire devoted wholly to 1 Henry IV seems complete in the sense that the first leaf containing the Spanish Curate slip would probably have been conjugate with the last leaf of the quire. If lost leaves containing Carington’s first transcription of the end of 1 Henry IV had belonged to this quire, there would have been an additional four unused leaves, now lost, at the beginning of the manuscript. 

Perhaps instead the end of 1 Henry IV overflowed onto a second quire, where, assuming that the text was roughly the same, it, along with the opening of 2 Henry IV, would have taken up six leaves. Might this second quire be the one that is, in the current state of the manuscript, devoted entirely to 2 Henry IV? The implication would be that there were six unused conjugate leaves at the end of the manuscript before it was revised. 

From Carington’s point of view, it would have been very lucky if all the leaves that he replaced happened to have been conjugate with blank leaves. Another explanation would be that in Carington’s first transcription the cancelled leaves would have made up either a short quire of their own, or a two-sheet quire containing the end of 1 Henry IV followed by a single sheet with the opening four pages of 2 Henry VI. The latter would have made it easier for Carington to copy out 2 Henry IV while Dering started to review 1 Henry IV. But the fact that sections of both plays were replaced leads one to suspect that there were conjugate leaves containing lines from both plays.  

Recopying implies an unsatisfactorily messy base manuscript, and Dering’s alterations mainly involved cutting. It is therefore reasonable to speculate that the copied leaves originally, before Dering’s further alterations, contained a significantly longer text than the transcription of them. In support of this line of thought, it may be noted that by Yeandle’s calculation Carington was paid to prepare one more sheet than can be counted by adding together the leaves of the extant manuscript and an assumed six further leaves that were discarded after Carington recopied them. 

Yeandle’s figure of fifty-six leaves includes the otherwise blank leaf holding the scrap that contains Dering’s additional lines for the opening scene, and the first full page of the manuscript, which was also inscribed by Dering rather than Carington. Dering, however, probably counted actual sheets, whether fully inscribed or not, rather than sheet-equivalents of text. 

The difference in length between the text of the quartos and that of the second-stage transcription is equivalent to about 1.25 sheets, of which most of one sheet relates to 2 Henry IV. There is clearly scope for cutting to have been introduced between the first and second transcription. The extent of it must be measured in sheet units, and second-stage reduction by the equivalent of a single sheet is possible. Dering was perhaps slow to adopt the far more severe reduction of the text that characterized his work on 2 Henry IV, and so returned to this part of the adaptation. He may have reviewed the end of 1 Henry IV at the same time. 

Carington had some difficulty in inscribing the revised text in such a way that the pages joined up with the preceding and following text without him omitting lines that needed to be copied. This difficulty is not reflected in the four-leaf quire of fols. 40-43, where the writing is fairly regularly spaced. However, as compared with typical pages elsewhere in the manuscript, in fols. 38-39 Carington squeezed in the equivalent of about two-thirds of a page of extra text, principally by making fuller use of the top and bottom of the page. The presence of multiple scene breaks and extended stage directions in this part of the script may be a factor here. Nevertheless, quite possibly the single sheet of fols. 38-39 was prepared after the two-sheet quire of fols. 40-43, making it necessary to fit all the outstanding text into the available space. 

The main conclusion is that this part of the adaptation underwent a second round of revision that involved drastic shortening, probably equivalent to about a single sheet. It may be added that the act divisions do not militate against this conclusion, because Dering wrote them into the manuscript after Carington had handed over the final transcript.