Bizarrely, modern-day editors, who ought to know better, have followed suit

This unusual epilogue survives by accident – or rather, due to carelessness. The Second Part of Henry the Fourth was published less than two years after this. When the manuscript was passed along to the printing house, both versions of the epilogue were bundled with it. The compositor setting type, unsure of what to do, printed both but left an extra bit of space between the Whitehall and Curtain versions. Had he thought about it more, he might have realized that it made no sense for the speaker to kneel to the Queen midway through the epilogue and then spring up again. When the compositor of the 1623 Folio came upon this crux he too decided not to choose between the two but also melded them into a single epilogue, though he at least tried to mend things by moving the prayer to the Queen to the end of the epilogue. Bizarrely, modern-day editors, who ought to know better, have followed suit, leaving the confusion intact and obscuring why and how Shakespeare redirects his art at this time.

J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), 41