Going back to that well

From a certain point of view, it’s hard to write about the 160-odd lines of the “deposition scene” that do not appear in Qq 1–3 of Richard II, and do appear, in one form or another, in Q4 (1608) onwards. The textual phenomenon of this scene is particularly hard to write about at any length, once synonyms for the clumsy phrase “do not appear” are required. In the words of critics and editors who argue that the lines were written sometime before 1597, but did not appear in print (whether or not they were performed on the stage), the lines are “excised,” “cut,” “omitted,” “censored,” or “suppressed.” From the perspective of those who argue that the scene was written sometime after 1601 but before 1608, the lines are “added.” From the standpoint of those who remain as neuter and are instead interested in the ontological problems that arise from critical discussions of these lines, the writer of this essay included, are the lines “missing”? Are they “absent”? Critics turn to these terms as neutral ones, though I don’t find them entirely satisfying; if the lines are “missing,” the suggestion—faint, perhaps—is that they were there before, or could reasonably be expected to be there; “absent” suggests an absence of. “Missing” and “absent” evoke the positive state of which they are negations in a way things that do not yet exist do not. It is a struggle, then, simply to describe Richard II’s textual situation in language that keeps alive equally, in balance, the possibility that the lines existed prior to 1597, and were not printed for some reason, with the possibility that prior to 1601 the lines did not yet exist. One of the two versions of the title page of the 1608 quarto describes the material being printed for the first time in this way: “With new additions of the Parliament Sceane, and the deposing of King Richard.” That the previously absent lines are called “new additions” cannot confirm whether they are newly written or newly restored, but the title page’s language does give the scene a name—“the Parliament Sceane”—different from the name that has become commonplace in criticism—“the deposition scene,” or, often, “the so-called ‘deposition scene.’” The question of nomenclature around the scene, in its echo of Richard’s own lament in the scene—“I have no name, no title” (4.1.255) ¹ —offers a preliminary view of the vocabulary of loss and absence that resounds between these ontologically challenged lines and the ontologically challenged man who dominates them.