INTRODUCTION

Summary

The First Folio gives us the only authoritative text for Henry V, and it is happily a good one, being printed as we shall see almost certainly from the author's manuscript; while a ‘bad quarto’, which is helpful now and then to an editor, has also come down to us. In general, the play has received scant attention from scholars, and has not yet appeared in the invaluable American Variorum. I stand the more indebted, therefore, to Dr Duthie, who has prepared for me elaborate notes on the play, often approaching variorum fulness, together with a text based upon a fresh examination of the folio original. For what follows I must take full responsibility. But the fact that he had first traversed every step in the road greatly added to my speed and confidence; I have helped myself to his comments, as my Notes indicate; and I have adopted his text practically without change, the more readily that it is virtually a reprint in modern spelling of the folio text, punctuation and all, though with the addition of editorial stage-directions, mostly of my invention. Lastly, a comprehensive and masterly account of the historical events traversed in the play is now available in the three volumes of J. H. Wylie's monumental Reign of Henry V, 1914–29, the reading of which encourages us to believe that Shakespeare's account of the French campaign is substantially true to fact.