![The Dering Manuscript](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/The_Dering_Manuscript.jpg)
The Dering Manuscript is the earliest extant manuscript text of any play by
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
. The manuscript combines
''Part 1'' and
''Part 2'' of ''Henry IV'' into a single-play redaction. Scholarly consensus indicates that the manuscript was revised in the early 17th century by
Sir Edward Dering, a man known for his interest in literature and theater. Dering prepared his redaction for an amateur performance starring friends and family at Surrenden Manor in
Pluckley
Pluckley is a village and civil parish in the Ashford (borough), Ashford district of Kent, England. The civil parish includes the nucleated village, adjacent hamlet of Pluckley Thorne.
Geography
The landscape of the area itself is the edge of a ...
,
Kent
Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...
, where the manuscript was discovered in 1844. This is the earliest known instance of an amateur production of Shakespeare in England. Sourced from the 1613 fifth quarto of ''Part 1'' and the 1600 first quarto of ''Part 2'', the Dering Manuscript contains many textual differences from published quarto and folio editions of the plays. Dering cut nearly 3,000 lines of Shakespearean text (including significant abridgment of the character of
Falstaff
Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare and is eulogised in a fourth. His significance as a fully developed character is primarily formed in the plays '' Henry IV, Part 1'' and '' Part 2'', w ...
) and added some 50 lines of his own invention along with numerous minor interventions. The Dering Manuscript is currently a part of the collection at the
Folger Shakespeare Library
The Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., United States. It has the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare material ...
in
Washington, DC
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan ...
(Folger MS V.b.34).
Description
Bibliography
The Dering Manuscript is a small folio (11.75 in x 7.75 in) of 55 extant leaves, composed of two large
quires
Various measures of paper quantity have been and are in use. Although there are no S.I. units such as quires and bales, there are ISO''ISO 4046-3:2002 Paper, board, pulps and related terms – Vocabulary – Part 3: Paper-making terminology'' (20 ...
with six
cancel leaves interposed in between. The six cancels come from different stock paper than the main quires. They are wider, cut more irregularly and slightly shorter at the spine than the main quires. Such differences suggest that these six leaves were inserted after the completion of the two main quires. The first and second quires correspond to ''
Part 1 Part 1 may refer to:
* ''Part 1'' (Twin Peaks), the first episode of the third season of the TV series Twin Peaks
* ''Part 1'' (EP), a 2016 EP by Guy Sebastian
*''Part 1'', a 2017 EP by O-Town. See O-Town discography
See also
* PART1 In molecular b ...
'' and ''
Part 2'' of Henry IV respectively, and the six cancel leaves in between contain transitional scenes that Dering reworked after the manuscript's initial preparation.
Two hands contributed to the composition of the Dering Manuscript, known as Hand I and Hand II. Hand I wrote page one of the manuscript and attached an eight line addition to the first scene on a piece of scrap paper. Hand II completed the remainder of the text. The manuscript also displays numerous modifications and corrections of Hand II's work by Hand I. Stylistic differences between the two show that Hand I was an unprofessional hand, but Hand II belonged to a professional scribe. Hand I has been identified as that of
Edward Dering, who began to compile a redacted version based on the quarto editions he owned before contracting the work out to a professional scribe. Hand II, therefore, belongs to the scribe, a man named Samuel Carington, who appears in Dering's "Booke of Expenses" in early 1623 for "writing oute the play of Henry the fourth". After outsourcing the transcription to Carington, Dering went through the text again and re-revised.
Text
Dering's source text for sections of the manuscript based on ''Part 1'' was the fifth quarto of ''The History of Henry IV'', printed in 1613. Scholars point to the manuscript's fidelity to the punctuation of the fifth quarto and to two textual errors unique to that printing as evidence (Dering MS 3.3.80, Globe III.iii.100; Dering MS 4.2.76, Globe V.ii.76). The scenes from ''Part 2'' are derived from the second issue of the first quarto, printed in 1600. This reasoning is substantiated by the presence of the King's soliloquy on sleep (III.i), which appears only in the second issue of the first quarto. Additionally, numerous small errors hold consistent across the two texts.
Although the manuscript spans both ''
Henry IV Part 1
''Henry IV, Part 1'' (often written as ''1 Henry IV'') is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written no later than 1597. The play dramatises part of the reign of King Henry IV of England, beginning with the battle at ...
'' and ''
Henry IV Part 2'', the majority of Dering's version comes from ''Part I''. Whereas only 347 out of some 2968 lines in ''Part 1'' are missing (approximately 11%), Dering cut 2374 lines of the 3180 in ''Part 2'' (approximately 75%). Major omissions from ''Part 1'' include scenes II.i and VI.vi as well as several other major abridgments of longer scenes. For the purposes of his amateur performance, Dering tried to decrease the size of his cast. His cuts eliminate several characters, including two Carriers, Ostler, Gadshill, Chamberlain, the Archbishop, Sir Michael, musicians, and Westmoreland. Only four scenes remain of ''Part 2'': Northumberland hearing of Hotspur's death, the death of the king, Hal's rebuke of Falstaff, and a comic scene between Falstaff and Mistress Quickly. Peter Holland notes that Dering's playtext "places its emphasis on Part I and turns to Part 2 only as needed to end its action".
Despite the popularity of the character
Falstaff
Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare and is eulogised in a fourth. His significance as a fully developed character is primarily formed in the plays '' Henry IV, Part 1'' and '' Part 2'', w ...
with contemporary audiences, Dering subjects him to significant abbreviation. The cuts redirect emphasis from the relationship between Falstaff and
Prince Hal
Prince Hal is the standard term used in literary criticism to refer to Shakespeare's portrayal of the young Henry V of England as a prince before his accession to the throne, taken from the diminutive form of his name used in the plays almost ex ...
and the latter's maturation to the political moments of Shakespeare's text. According to Michael Dobson in an essay on the history of amateur performance, "the performances Dering and his friends gave in the hall at Surrenden must have resembled a semi-public debate about the rival claims of aggrieved peers and a dubiously legitimate monarchy".
History and provenance
The Dering MS was discovered in 1844 by the Reverend Lambert B. Larkin while he researched the history of
Kent
Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...
in the collection of
Sir Edward Dering, the 8th Baronet of Surrenden Hall, Kent. The manuscript had been stored for nearly two centuries at Surrenden Hall in a library of charters, books and manuscripts compiled by the first
Sir Edward Dering (1598-1644), a man famously enthusiastic for literature, drama and book collecting (Dering boasts the earliest recorded purchase of a First Folio, in December 1623). Larkin immediately alerted the Shakespeare Society, which in 1845 published a transcription of the manuscript with an introduction by
James Halliwell-Phillipps
James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (born James Orchard Halliwell; 21 June 1820 – 3 January 1889) was an English Shakespearean scholar, antiquarian, and a collector of English nursery rhymes and fairy tales.
Life
The son of Thomas Halliwell, he ...
(named James Halliwell at the time of publication). Halliwell-Phillipps purchased the manuscript shortly afterwards, and in the 1860s conferred it to the collection of
George Greville, 4th Earl of Warwick
George Guy Greville, 4th Earl of Warwick, 4th Earl Brooke (28 March 1818 – 2 December 1893), styled Lord Brooke from 1818 to 1853, was an English Tory politician, bibliophile and collector.
Early life
Greville was born in Charles Street, Berke ...
in the 1860s. Following the Earl's death in 1893,
Henry Clay Folger
Henry Clay Folger Jr. (June 18, 1857 – June 11, 1930) was president and later chairman of Standard Oil of New York, a collector of Shakespeareana, and founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Early life
Henry Clay Folger Jr. was born in New ...
purchased the manuscript in 1897. The manuscript now resides in the
Folger Shakespeare Library
The Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., United States. It has the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare material ...
(V.b.34) in
Washington, DC
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan ...
.
Dating
In his introduction to the original transcription of the manuscript, Halliwell-Phillips notes that the since the corrections to the manuscript were written by a hand proven to be Dering's (based on letter samples), the manuscript must date to before 1644, the year of Dering's death. More recent scholarship has pinned the date of the redaction between 1622 and 1624. A piece of scrap paper which Dering attached to the first page of the manuscript displays the cast list from another amateur performance by Dering at Surrenden Park of ''
The Spanish Curate
''The Spanish Curate'' is a late Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. It premiered on the stage in 1622, and was first published in 1647.
Date and source
The play was licensed for production by Sir ...
'', a contemporary comedy by
John Fletcher. The play was licensed in the
Stationers' Register
The Stationers' Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including print ...
on 24 October 1622. Dering therefore prepared the redaction after October 1622, but before the summer of 1624, when one of the actors listed in the cast, Francis Manouch, left Kent. Since Dering's “Booke of expenses” lists the date of Samuel Carington's payment as February 27, 1623, Laetitia Yeandle asserts that Dering prepared the original redaction shortly before contracting the transcription to Carington, and then made another set of revisions to Carington's work shortly after its acquisition.
[Yeandle 1986, p. 226]
Notes
References
*Dobson, Michael. "Sowing the Dragon’s Teeth: Amateurism, Domesticity, and the Anglophone Audience for Shakespeare, 1607-2007." ''Shakespeare Worldwide and the Idea of an Audience'' 15 (2007).
*Evans, G. Blakemore. "The" Dering MS" of Shakespeare's" Henry IV" and Sir Edward Dering." ''The Journal of English and Germanic Philology'' (1955): 498-503.
*Halliwell, J.O., ed, ''Shakespeare's Play of King Henry the Fourth, Printed from a Contemporary Manuscript'' (London: Shakespeare Society, 1845).
*Hemingway, Samuel Burdett, and William Shakespeare. ''A New Variorum Edition: Henry the Fourth; Part I''. Ed. Horace Howard Furness. Lippincott, 1936.
*Holland, Peter. "Shakespeare Abridged." ''The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture'' (Cambridge, 2007): 26-46.
*Lennam, Trevor NS. "Sir Edward Dering's Collection of Playbooks, 1619-1624." ''Shakespeare Quarterly'' (1965): 145-153.
*Williams, George Walton and Evans, Gwynne Blakemore, eds., The History of King Henry the Fourth, as revised by Sir Edward Dering, bart. (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1974).
*Yeandle, Laetitia. "The Dating of Sir Edward Dering's Copy of The History of King Henry the Fourth." ''Shakespeare Quarterly'' 37.2 (1986): 224-226.
External links
Images of the Dering Manuscriptfrom the
Folger Shakespeare Library
The Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., United States. It has the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare material ...
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