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VOL. VII

THE LIFE OF

KING HENRY THE FIFTH

E

B

DRAMATIS PERSONE

KING HENRY the Fifth.

DUKE OF GLOUCESTER,

DUKE OF BEdford,

brothers to the King.

DUKE OF EXETER, uncle to the King.

DUKE OF YORK, cousin to the King.

EARLS OF SALISBURY, WESTMORELAND, and WARWICK.

ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.

BISHOP OF ELY.

EARL OF CAMBRIDGE.

LORD SCROOP.

SIR THOMAS GREY.

SIR THOMAS ERPINGHAM, GOWER, FLUELLEN, MACMORRIS,

JAMY, officers in King Henry's army.

BATES, COURT, WILLIAMS, soldiers in the same.

PISTOL, NYM, BARDOLPH.

Boy.

A Herald.

CHARLES the Sixth, King of France.

LEWIS, the Dauphin.

DUKES OF BURGUNDY, ORLEANS, and BOURBON.
The Constable of France.

RAMBURES and GRANDPRÉ, French Lords.

Governor of Harfleur.

MONTJOY, a French Herald.

Ambassadors to the King of England.

ISABEL, Queen of France.

KATHARINE, daughter to Charles and Isabel.

ALICE, a lady attending on her.

Hostess of a tavern in Eastcheap, formerly Mistress Quickly, and

now married to Pistol.

Lords, Ladies, Officers, Soldiers, Citizens, Messengers,

and Attendants.

Chorus.

SCENE: England; afterwards France.

DURATION OF TIME

Dramatic Time.-Ten days with intervals (P. A. Daniel, 'Time Analysis, Trans. N. Sh. Soc., 1877-79, p. 290 f.).

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Historic Time.-From 1414, the year after Henry's accession, to May 20, 1420, the date of his betrothal. Of this, five years (1415-20) pass between days 8 and 10.

1 Daniel assigns this scene (the princess's English lesson) to the time between the French king's offer of her hand to Henry and his rejection of it,both referred to in the Chorus

to Act III.

* This appears to be on the morrow of St. David's Day, i.e. March 2; hence after the battle, and before the betrothal (v. 2.).

INTRODUCTION

Editions.

THE earliest edition of Henry V. was printed in Quarto Early in 1600, with the following title:

The Cronicle | History of Henry the fift, | with his battell fought at Agin Court in | France. Togither with Auntient | Pistoll. | As it hath bene sundry times playd by the Right Honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. | LONDON. | Printed by Thomas Creede, for Tho. Milling-ton, and John Busby... 1600.'

Other editions of this Quarto (printed for Thomas Pavier instead of for Millington) appeared in 1602 and 1608.

All these texts, however, differed widely from that published by Shakespeare's executors in the Folio of 1623, and their relation to it was for long a burning question, as in the analogous cases of Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives, Henry VI., and Hamlet. But the problem is here a relatively simple one, and scholars are now almost unanimous in holding the Folio text to represent substantially Shakespeare's MS., and the Quarto to be a surreptitious version of the acting edition, 'hastily made up from notes taken at the theatre during the performance and subsequently patched together.' The variations in the Quarto are all, with the trifling exceptions noticed below, easily explicable from one of these two sources of corruption

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