Q1 or F1? Which text is closer to Shakespeare's intention? : the case of Brakenbury in King Richard ＩＩＩ

For some time I have been comparing certain of Shakespeare’s plays with their source materials and trying thereby to discover his intention in dramatising them. In the process I have tended to use modern editions of Shakespeare for comparison, but in recent years I have been using early printed texts instead to investigate to what extent the authorial intention comes through in the respective early texts and to see which text seems to be closer to Shakespeare’s dramatic intention. In this paper I propose to study King Richard III by focusing in particular on Brakenbury, the lieutenant of the Tower of London and one of the minor characters in the play, and seeing how Shakespeare creates him in the substantive texts of the play — Q1(1597) and F1(1623) — by comparing them with their source. If di#erences in the handling of Brakenbury exist between these two texts and some authorial intention then becomes clear, we might be able to decide which text is closer to the author’s creative design.