THE NEW CAMBRIDGE SHAKESPEARE

GENERAL EDITOR
Brian Gibbons, University of Münster

ASSOCIATE GENERAL EDITOR
A. R. Braunmuller, University of California, Los Angeles

From the publication of the first volumes in 1984 the General Editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare was Philip Brockbank and the Associate General Editors were Brian Gibbons and Robin Hood. From 1990 to 1994 the General Editor was Brian Gibbons and the Associate General Editors were A. R. Braunmuller and Robin Hood.

KING HENRY Ⅴ

For this updated edition of Shakespeare’s most celebrated war play, Professor Gurr has added a new section to his introduction which considers recent critical and stage interpretations, especially concentrating on the ‘secret’ versus ‘official’ readings of the play. He analyses the play’s double vision of Henry as both military hero and self-seeking individual.

   Professor Gurr shows how the patriotic declarations of the Chorus are contradicted by the play’s action. The play’s more controversial sequences are placed in the context of Elizabethan thought, in particular the studies of the laws and morality of war written in the years before Henry Ⅴ. Also studied is the exceptional variety of language and dialect in the play.

   The appendices provide a comprehensive collection of source materials, while the stage history shows how subsequent centuries have received and adapted the play on the stage and in film. An updated reading list completes the edition.

THE NEW CAMBRIDGE SHAKESPEARE

All’s Well That Ends Well, edited by Russell Fraser
Antony and Cleopatra, edited by David Bevington
As You Like It, edited by Michael Hattaway
The Comedy of Errors, edited by T. S. Dorsch
Coriolanus, edited by Lee Bliss
Cymbeline, edited by Martin Butler
Hamlet, edited by Philip Edwards
Julius Caesar, edited by Marvin Spevack
King Edward Ⅲ, edited by Giorgio Melchiori
The First Part of King Henry Ⅳ, edited by Herbert Weil and Judith Weil
The Second Part of King Henry Ⅳ, edited by Giorgio Melchiori
King Henry Ⅴ, edited by Andrew Gurr
The First Part of King Henry Ⅵ, edited by Michael Hattaway
The Second Part of King Henry Ⅵ, edited by Michael Hattaway
The Third Part of King Henry Ⅵ, edited by Michael Hattaway
King Henry Ⅷ, edited by John Margeson
King John, edited by L. A. Beaurline
The Tragedy of King Lear, edited by Jay L. Halio
King Richard Ⅱ, edited by Andrew Gurr
King Richard Ⅲ, edited by Janis Lull
Macbeth, edited by A. R. Braunmuller
Measure for Measure, edited by Brian Gibbons
The Merchant of Venice, edited by M. M. Mahood
The Merry Wives of Windsor, edited by David Crane
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by R. A. Foakes
Much Ado About Nothing, edited by F. H. Mares
Othello, edited by Norman Sanders
Pericles, edited by Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond
The Poems, edited by John Roe
Romeo and Juliet, edited by G. Blakemore Evans
The Sonnets, edited by G. Blakemore Evans
The Taming of the Shrew, edited by Ann Thompson
The Tempest, edited by David Lindley
Timon of Athens, edited by Karl Klein
Titus Andronicus, edited by Alan Hughes
Troilus and Cressida, edited by Anthony B. Dawson
Twelfth Night, edited by Elizabeth Story Donno
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, edited by Kurt Schlueter

THE EARLY QUARTOS
The First Quarto of Hamlet, edited by Kathleen O. Irace
The First Quarto of King Henry Ⅴ, edited by Andrew Gurr
The First Quarto of King Lear, edited by Jay L. Halio
The First Quarto of King Richard Ⅲ, edited by Peter Davison
The First Quarto of Othello, edited by Scott McMillin
The Taming of A Shrew: The 1594 Quarto, edited by Stephen Roy Miller

KING HENRY Ⅴ

Updated edition

Edited by

ANDREW GURR

Professor of English, University of Reading

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521612647

© Cambridge University Press 1992, 2005

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 1992
Updated edition 2005

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13 978-0-521-84792-6 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-84792-3 hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-61264-7 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-61264-0 paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

Richard Burbage, the leading player of the Chamberlain’s Men in the late 1590s, was the original performer of the chief roles in most of Shakespeare’s plays. He almost certainly took the title parts both for Richard Ⅱ and Henry Ⅴ, and played Prince Hal in the two plays that came between them. If he did so, then the sun which set with Richard in Act 3 of the first play would have risen again, as promised by the young Hal at the end of Act 1, Scene 2 of 1 Henry Ⅳ, in the later plays and with the same face. Elizabethan audiences knew their players, and would see a dramatic if not a dynastic continuity with the resurrection of the dead sun-king Richard in the living sun-king Henry. As a play about the shining new king and his famous victory at Agincourt, Henry Ⅴ was thus a fitting finale, a grandly patriotic celebration, for the series of plays which began with an unjust king unjustly deposed and murdered. Agincourt ratified Henry’s rule, and settled, however temporarily, the question of the proper dynastic line for English kings which had begun with the deposition of Richard Ⅱ. Henry Ⅴ should have made a brilliant closure to the decade through which Shakespeare wrote his account of the history and politics of English monarchy. But the play that ended the sequence can sustain a far wider range of readings than the merely patriotic.

   Writing a sequence of plays over a period of years is a challenge to any author’s single-mindedness. The person writing Richard Ⅱ in 1595 was not quite the same person who wrote Henry Ⅴ in 1599. The process of writing in itself can change the concepts which initiate the writing, and new considerations always intrude to influence the development of story, character, and ideology. Outside pressures certainly affected the composition of the two plays that came between the first and the last of the tetralogy, sometimes called the ‘second Henriad’, that started with Richard Ⅱ ’s setting sun and ended with Henry Ⅴ ’s rising sun. The new Lord Chamberlain in 1596 forced the company to change the traditional name Oldcastle, which had been used for Prince Hal’s rude companion in the old Queen’s Men’s play about Henry Ⅴ, to Falstaff. The immediate success on stage of Shakespeare’s Falstaff may have called for a sequel that was not part of the original planning. That change of plan may consequently have altered the structure of the story of Prince Hal’s growth from prodigal into king. What probably started in 1596 as a fairly straightforward set of rewrites of the old stage play about riotous Prince Hal, his conversion when king and his famous victory at Agincourt, diverged radically from the well-known sources. Henry Ⅴ is a resetting of both the popular mythology about Henry and the standard ideology of its time.

   Given the two alternative readings of Henry’s character in the play, as patriotic hero or jingoistic bully, and the wealth of evidence that can be used to support either view, it has been suggested that reading the play is an exercise in seeing the same phenomenon as either of two quite different things. Its ambivalence makes it like the exercise in Gestalt psychology where the same outline can seem either a rabbit or a duck, depending on one’s preconception of the shape. More recent comment on the play has drawn attention to the bivalence in the debates of the time, where both the soldiers and the churchmen of Protestant England, involved in a long war against Catholic Spain, had to counter the Anabaptist argument against all war which they based on the Sixth Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ (Deuteronomy 5.17). In the context of that debate the play’s ambivalence reflects the ideology of its day. How precisely this apparent exhibition of the ideological ambivalence of its time is the main feature of the play, as the cultural materialists maintain, or how far it might display a more singular and original discomfort in its author over prevailing ideologies, is the chief question the Introduction to this edition addresses.

   In the last few years my friends and colleagues across the world have often run into my preoccupation with the peculiarities of Henry Ⅴ. To all of them I offer my grateful thanks for lending me not only their ears but their minds and the fruits thereof. T. S. Dorsch gave me the notes he had prepared for his edition of Henry Ⅴ. To him and to Brian Gibbons especially, General and particular Editor of this series, I owe much more than is writ down.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All editions of Shakespeare are built on their predecessors. More than twenty editors and other commentators have offered material about Henry Ⅴ that has been incorporated in this edition, starting with the players who put together the first quarto text in 1600, and most recently reaching an individual peak with Gary Taylor’s Oxford edition of 1982. To all of them I owe the kind of debt that it is normal only for scholars not to repay.

   There are many other works which can help editors in settling both text and notes. The books of reference which have provided the main help for this edition are those listed in the Abbreviations and Conventions. On the language, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in its new form, unrivalled for study of the lexical niceties, is backed by Abbott’s still-authoritative Shakespearian Grammar on Shakespearean syntax. Particular idioms and sayings of Shakespeare’s time are listed in M. P. Tilley’s A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1950. It has an appendix relating to Shakespeare which has been ably augmented and corrected by R. W. Dent’s three works, the most useful of which are Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index, 1981, and Proverbial Language in English Drama, exclusive of Shakespeare, 1495–1616, 1984. On pronunciation, Fausto Cercignani’s Shakespeare’s Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation, 1981, is generally reliable.

   The series in which this edition appears has adopted the practice of modernising the original all-too-variable spellings. This process entails some quite substantial editorial interventions, few of which will be apparent to the reader who does not consult the early texts in the First Folio and the 1600 Quarto. Stanley Wells, Modernising Shakespeare’s Spelling, 1979, a prolegomenon to the Oxford Shakespeare, offers a sound and intelligible set of guiding principles. Where I have not followed his preferences, as given in his book and in the Oxford text, I have sought to justify my choice.

   Citations of lines and line references from other plays of Shakespeare are taken from the other New Cambridge editions. References to the Bible are by book, chapter and verse. Quotations are taken from the Bishops’ Bible, for reasons given on p. 27, note 1.

   The pictures for this edition have been taken from a number of sources, most of which are acknowledged in the List of Illustrations. My thanks for help in obtaining them are due to the wonderful librarians at the Folger Shakespeare Library, to the archivists at York Minster and Westminster Abbey, and to the staff at the British Library. To Walter Hodges in particular, whose superb eye for the graphic portrayal of a stage scene first alerted me to the mysteries of the Shakespearean theatre, and whose acute and wonderfully inventive sense of the possibilities inherent in the original Elizabethan staging shines on the surface of his illustrations for this edition, I owe a lasting debt of gratitude for the benefits he has given me through more than thirty years.

ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS

1. Shakespeare’s plays

The abbreviated titles of Shakespeare’s plays used in this edition have been modified from those in the Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare. All quotations and line references to plays other than Henry Ⅴ are to New Cambridge editions of each play.

Full references to other works cited in the commentary in abbreviated form may be found in the Reading List.