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I
I propose to argue that the First Folio text of Henry V was set up, so far as that was found feasible, from one or more corrected exemplars of the bad quarto.[1] To my knowledge this has not hitherto been suggested. In spite of the later developed evidence for Richard III and King Lear, Pollard's original belief[2] that no bad quarto served as copy in any sense for the Folio may be largely responsible for the reluctance of modern critics to follow out the consequences of certain QF similarities in Henry V that seemed to point in this direction. Sir Walter Greg, for example, called attention to a "minor problem of interest"—certain "alterations made in the text" of The Contention and The True Tragedy, Q3 (1619), which "anticipate the yet unpublished texts of 2 and 3 Henry VI," and added, "The same phenomenon is found less markedly in the 1608 (1619) edition of Henry V (Q3) . . . the exact origin and significance of the alterations have never . . . been explained."[3] Sir Edmund Chambers[4] noted Greg's point, but made no comment. He noted also (p. 391) that "a few marginal notes for action (II.i.103; IV.viii.9; V.i.30) are common to Q1 and F," and suggested a skeleton "plot" in the hands of the reporters of Q. Greg later[5] doubted the existence of this "plot." As for the "notes for action," or stage-directions, he though that "If anything these may point to some influence of Q upon F, an influence also suggested by the occasional appearance at the same point in both of anomalously divided lines, though there is no question of F having been printed from a copy
I propose to argue further that two editions of the quarto, Q2 and Q3, were used as basis for F, and—though this is independent of the use of Q copy in general, and much more tentative—that such use was due to the printers, and not to Heminge and Condell, or the theatre; that the use of Q2 at irregular intervals occurred at those points where correction of Q3—the main copy or basis—proved to be so heavy or complicated that some technique requiring the independent use of both sides of a quarto leaf—one from each quarto—was desirable; and that transcription, while not used for the whole of the "copy," was used, probably in the form of attached slips of paper, to supply the gaps, or "cuts," in the Q text, and perhaps (exceptionally) where a complicated rearrangement of Q material, especially from one Q page to another, made it necessary or convenient; that the whole procedure, in short, was flexible and contingent, and directed to the one aim of providing the compositors with copy, printed as far as possible, in the most convenient way. The practicability of the operation can be demonstrated from sample pages similarly corrected and illustrated below.
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