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Notes
See Gary Taylor, ed., Henry V (1982) and Henry V in Stanley Wells and Taylor, eds., William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1986). Taylor developed his views in Modernizing Shakespeare's Spelling, with Three Studies in the Text of "Henry V," Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (1979). Several have disagreed with certain details of Taylor's position, including, for example, Annabel Patterson in "Back by Popular Demand: The Two Versions of Henry V," Renaissance Drama, 19 (1988), 29-62. Patterson suggests that Q, rather than originating as a touring script for a reduced cast (Taylor's view), "may very well be closer than the Folio to what the London audiences actually saw on the stage at the absolute turn of the century" (p. 32). See also Patterson's Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (1989), pp. 71-92.
Certain features of Q point toward a simpler production appropriate for touring; for example, the "Scaling Ladders" (TLN 1082) specified in F for the scene at the gates of Harfleur (3.1) are omitted in Q. The Quarto also seems to require a smaller cast, as Taylor has pointed out in "We Happy Few: The 1600 Abridgment," in Three Studies (1979). Further research is needed, however, into the requirements of companies on tour. A recent report by researchers with the Records of Early English Drama project, U. of Toronto, suggests that tours were much more regular and widespread than earlier research had indicated, implying a level of sophistication in audiences that might match that of London audiences. These findings were presented at the 1990 Shakespeare Association of America meeting (Philadelphia), in a session devoted to touring entitled "Horses, a Wagon, and Apparel New-Bought," with Roslyn Knutson, J. A. B. Somerset, Sally-Beth MacLean, William Ingram, Paul Werstine, and Laurie Maguire. Early results of the REED project indicate that some tour stops may have been lengthy enough for players to reconstruct a play they might not have brought with them, in response to a special request. Or Q may have been designed as a reading rather than a playing text even though stage directions in Q Henry V are almost always confined to simple entrances and exits: detailed stage directions like those in certain other "bad" quartos, such as Q1 Hamlet, are missing from Q Henry V. Peter Blayney ("Shakespeare's Fight with What Pirates?" The Folger Institute, May 11, 1987) drew attention to Moseley's advertisement for the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio (1647), which implies that private transcripts reconstructed by actors may have been common: "When these Comedies and Tragedies were presented on the stage, the actors omitted some scenes and passages (with the author's consent) as occasion led them; and when private friends desired a copy, they then (and justly too) transcribed what they acted." It is possible that another person later adapted and abridged the reconstruction, but I believe, as the Moseley quotation implies, that experienced actors could have made the changes without the help of a playwright/adapter or "hack poet."
I have described this analysis in more detail in "Shakespeare on a Spreadsheet: Design for a New Analysis of the "Bad" Quartos," SAA Research Seminar "Using the Computer in Shakespeare Studies," April 1990. See also my "Origins and Agents of Q1 Hamlet," in The "Hamlet" First Published (Q1, 1603), Thomas Clayton, ed. (U. of Delaware Pr., forthcoming).
The computer typescript of the Folio is from the Oxford University Computing Service, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN; most of the quartos are also available from Oxford, though I needed to type Q Henry V myself. Since I returned to the photocopies of the facsimiles for detailed analysis of the text, any undetected errors in individual lines of the typescripts did not affect my analysis. It was sometimes difficult to decide whether to mark a line with P or X; similarly, the difference of a single word could determine whether a line would be marked P or S, S or M, or even M or A. But because of the large number of lines, the system allowed a good measure of the degree of correlation for various speakers and the lines they witnessed. Lines spoken by a different character in each version were also marked to identify reattributions discussed in Section 2; stage directions were coded as well, for retrieval by the database program.
Discrepancies between Tables A and B are the result of differences in lineation in the two texts, making the number of lines in the FA category of Table A, for example, different from those in the QA category of Table B. The database program I used is the textbase component of Nota Bene, version 3.0, from Dragonfly Software. The program allows me to isolate and examine any combination of coded lines, including, for example, lines in the "A" category of either text spoken by Exeter when Gower is on stage. The spreadsheet I used is Microsoft Excel, version 2.1 for IBM compatibles, essentially a sophisticated calculator.
H. T. Price in The Text of "Henry V" (1920) first proposed that the actors playing Exeter, Gower, and the Governor of Harfleur were in part responsible for Q. He believed that they supplied their parts to a scribe in the audience who used shorthand to record the rest of the play. G. I. Duthie's Elizabethan Shorthand (1949) laid to rest the shorthand theory. Duthie supported the view that actors playing Exeter and Gower reconstructed the play from memory in "The Quarto of Shakespeare's Henry V," Papers Mainly Shakespearean (1964), pp. 106-130; see also Alfred Hart's Stolne and Surreptitious Copies (1942); J. H. Walter's Arden edition of Henry V (1954), p. xxxv; Gary Taylor's 1982 edition, pp. 22-23, and especially Taylor's "Corruption and Authority in the Bad Quarto," in Three Studies (1979), pp. 129-142.
See, for example, Urkowitz's "Good News About 'Bad' Quartos," in Maurice Charney, ed., "Bad" Shakespeare (1988), pp. 189-206; and Werstine's "Narratives About Printed Shakespearean Texts: 'Foul Papers' and 'Bad' Quartos," Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (1990), 65-86. I was equally skeptical concerning memorial reconstruction before I completed my analysis.
Such an abridgment is not impossible, however; my preliminary studies of Q1 Romeo and the Contention suggest that these two early quartos may have been reconstructed from intermediate abridgments of scripts linked to the familiar texts.
The earliest scholar to suggest that Q had its origin as a stage adaptation or abridgment was P. A. Daniel; see his introduction to Brinsley Nicholson's edition, "King Henry V": Parallel Texts of the 1600 Quarto and 1623 Folio (1877), pp. x-xii. Daniel believed that the Quarto may have been "vamped up from notes taken during the performance," presumably of an abridged version. Barbara Damon Simison ("Stage Directions: A Test for the Playhouse Origin of the First Quarto of Henry V," Philological Quarterly, 11 [1932], 39-56) suggested that Q was derived from the promptbook of a theatrical abridgment. Alfred Hart (1942) also saw deliberate abridgment as a factor (along with memorial reconstruction) in Q's origin; Hart concluded that each of the "bad" quartos was a "garbled abridgment of an acting version made officially by the play adapter of the company from Shakespeare's manuscript" (p. 437). Greg noted in 1955 that Q "is certainly an abridgement," but found that whether the report or the abridgment came first was "not immediately apparent," though he favored the view of Q as a shortened report rather than the report of an abridgment; see The Shakespeare First Folio, p. 282. Duthie (1964, p. 124) concluded that actor-reporters apparently reconstructed the Folio version, "and that their manuscript was probably abridged after they had originally written it out." Gerda Okerlund ("The Quarto Version of 'Henry V' as a Stage Adaptation," PMLA, 49 [1934], 810-834) had been more emphatic in her view of Q as a deliberate adaptation. Like W. J. Lawrence ("The Secret of the Bad Quartos," Criterion, 10 [1931], 447-461) and Hardin Craig ("The Relation of the First Quarto Version to the First Folio Version of Shakespeare's Henry V," Philological Quarterly, 6 [1927], 225-234), Okerland rejected the theory of memorial reconstruction in favor of deliberate adaptation, a view also shared by Robert E. Burkhart, Shakespeare's Bad Quartos (1975), pp. 70-74; Burkhart believed that the "bad" quartos were authorized abridgments for use by Shakespeare's company in the provinces. The most recent supporter of deliberate abridgment is Gary Taylor, especially in his Three Studies (1979). Taylor argues that Q is a memorial reconstruction of an abridged performance version, a view shared by many. J. H. Walter (1954, p. xxxv), for example, commented, "the Q version may well be based on a cut form of the play used by the company for a reduced cast on tour in the provinces."
Act and scene numbers correspond to traditional divisions. F through-line numbers correspond to Charlton Hinman's edition of The First Folio of Shakespeare (1968). Signature numbers for Q are from facsimiles in Michael Allen and Kenneth Muir's Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto (1981).
P. A. Daniel (1877, pp. xiii-ix) first suggested that Gebon might be the name of an actor; E. K. Chambers also mentioned this possibility in William Shakespeare (1930), I, 392.
Taylor (1979, pp. 137-138) pointed out this reattribution and transposition; Duthie (1964, pp. 110-111) had also discussed it.
Taylor (1982, p. 108), believing that Q has it right, assigns the lines to "A Lord" in his editions, since Ely's function is to second Canterbury, not contradict him; he sees Exeter as one of the two reporters, responsible for the accuracy of this scene and unlikely to forget the speaker here, since Exeter takes up his point in the next speech.
Duthie (1964, p. 119) also noted the reattribution of some of Exeter's F lines and suggested that the alterations "may well reflect, not inaccurate reporting, but rather a rearrangement made in the course of an abridgement."
Though F's 4.2 has no parallel in Q, Taylor, in both of his editions, assigns the Dauphin's lines to Bourbon in 4.2, as in Q's 3.7 and 4.5.
Taylor (1979, pp. 145-148) noted the transposition of the final two lines of 4.2; he acknowledged, "the adapter must have had access to a text of the full version," but made "little use of it."
P. A. Daniels (1877, p. xii) remarked on this transposition, seeing the couplet as evidence that the two scenes were deliberately combined by an adapter who failed to notice his blunder, which "brought in the sun at midnight!" Greg found Daniel's view "outrageously improbable" and credited the alteration wholly to the "dull reporter"; see Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor" (1910), p. xix.
Duthie (1964, pp. 126-129) also discussed this stage direction, coming to a similar conclusion.
For a discussion of the "law of reentry" that apparently governed entrances and exits, see Irwin Smith, "Their Exits and Reentrances," Shakespeare Quarterly, 18 (1967), 7-16; Smith dismisses sixteen possible reentries (out of 750 scenes in Shakespeare's plays). Andrew Gurr discusses the only likely reentry, occurring in The Tempest, as evidence of act divisions in that play; see "The Tempest's Tempest at Blackfriars," Shakespeare Survey, 41 (1989), 93.
Taylor discussed this Q addition (1982, pp. 65-66). He includes Pistol's line in both of his editions.
G. P. Jones argued that the Choruses may have been designed for court performances, while a shorter version—like Q, without choruses—was meant for the Globe; see "'Henry V': The Chorus and the Audience," Shakespeare Survey, 31 (1978), 93-104. For other views see esp. W. D. Smith, "The Henry V Choruses in the First Folio," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 53 (1954), 38-57; R. A. Law, "The Choruses in Henry the Fifth," University of Texas Studies in English, 35 (1956), 11-21; Lawrence Danson, "Henry V: The King, Chorus, and Critics," Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), 27-43; and Annabel Patterson (1988, 1989). The consensus of most editors and scholars is that the Choruses were cut in Q rather than added to F.
Gary Taylor (1979, esp. 94 and 106-108) devoted two of his Three Studies to the view that Q is a memorial reconstruction of a deliberately abridged intermediate version, not a reconstruction based on a script linked to the Folio version, supporting his view with evidence that each key difference between the two texts is related to Q's need for a reduced touring cast of 11 players. His theory works well except for one important role: Bourbon. Taylor must conclude that in order to avoid a twelfth actor, Bourbon was played by two actors, one in 2.4, where he has no lines, and a different actor in the later scenes with the French nobles, highly unusual theater practice, as Taylor himself admits. William A. Ringler, Jr. ("The Number of Actors in Shakespeare's Early Plays," in The Seventeenth-Century Stage, Gerald Eades Bentley, ed., 1968), found that F can be played by "14 men and 2 boys, or 12 men and 4 boys" (p. 123). Thomas L. Berger ("The Disappearance of MacMorris in Shakespeare's Henry V," Renaissance Papers, 1985/6, pp. 13-26) found evidence of cast-cutting in even the Folio version; he expanded his argument in "Casting Henry V," Shakespeare Studies, 20 (1988), 89-104. Two very recent studies cast doubt on the view that the "bad" quartos were adapted for a reduced company, presumably for touring: Scott McMillin's "Casting the Hamlet Quartos: Longer is Smaller" in The "Hamlet" First Published, and Thomas J. King's study of casting requirements, both forthcoming. But without more information on the practices of companies on tour, it is difficult to tell if cast estimates of 12 players (as in McMillin and Taylor) would have precluded Q1 Hamlet or Q Henry V from use on tour.
The early-draft theory, supported by many until this century, has largely been discredited in favor of memorial reconstruction and theatrical abridgment. For a representative discussion of the early-draft theory, see Brinsley Nicholson, "The Relation of the Quarto to the Folio Version of Henry V," Transactions. New Shakespere Society, 1880-1882, 1, pp. 77-102. Pollard and Wilson suggested that the "bad" quartos were based on a pirate's recollections of Shakespeare's early drafts (A. W. Pollard and J. D. Wilson, "The 'Stolne and Surreptitious' Shakespearian Texts. Henry V [1600]," Times Literary Supplement, 13 March 1919, p. 134.). In his recent studies of some of the "bad" quartos, Steven Urkowitz, dismissing memorial reconstruction, has again raised the possibility that the flawed quartos might have originated as early drafts of the plays; see esp. "Good News About 'Bad' Quartos" (1988).
For detailed discussions of possible revision in Lear, see The Division of the Kingdoms, Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds. (1983). Concerning Hamlet, critics are still divided on the question of whether the "Denmark's a prison" and the "War of the Theatres" passages in F (2.2) were added to the Folio version or deleted from the Second Quarto. See Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet (1982), p. 44, and George Hibbard, ed. Hamlet (1987), p. 110, for representative opposing opinions; the view that these passages were added to F is favored by most.
As Taylor notes (1982, p. 15), King James ordered the imprisonment of two of the authors of Eastward Ho, Chapman and Jonson; Taylor also points out that James was high on the list of successors to Elizabeth by 1599 or so.
The transposition is a strong indication that the quarto was ultimately based on a version similar to the Folio rather than on an early draft preceding the Folio version, for it seems unlikely that Shakespeare would bother to write a new scene to accommodate a two-line reference to the (wrong) time of day.
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