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II
It is known and acknowledged that Henry V Q is a bad, or reported, text, much abbreviated, often inaccurate and unmetrical, and published, we may be certain, without the authority and consent of the author or his Company. The only passages with any claim to authenticity are those where players' "parts" are conjectured to have been available, such as those of Exeter, Gower, or the Governor of Harfleur (Chambers, op. cit., I, 391-2). F, which includes much material absent from Q and, naturally, corrects its faulty metre and arrangement, necessarily rests (at least in the main and in intention, with the qualifications that will appear presently) on a manuscript supplied by Heminge and Condell. Between Q and F, therefore, except in the "parts," no bibliographical or other textual links ought to exist, except by the merest coincidence, if an independent manuscript served as printer's copy for F.
Still less ought such links to exist between F and Q2 or Q3. For each of these, it is also agreed, was printed direct from Q1.[6] Both diverge, though in different ways, from Q1 in the introduction of a number of variants, especially misprints, and (particularly in Q3) of deliberate attempts, generally
A few chance coincidences could, of course, have occurred if the same compositors could be shown to have set exactly the same parts of Q2 and Q3 as each of them set in F. This is, on the face of it, highly improbable; and the suggestion is rendered further unlikely or irrelevant by the facts that most of the evidence offered below is beyond the scope of a compositor, and that Q2 was printed some twenty years earlier than F and in a different printinghouse.
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