The chronicle history of Henry the fift

Abstract

This text is one piece of a highly-discussed and debated new series that highlighted fundamental questions about the authenticity of Shakespeare's texts as moderns readers have come to know them. Making an extreme departure from existing texts, this book conveys the oldest-known edition of Shakespeare’s play. The first created original text of Henry V is dramatically different from the play now in common circulation. The first edition published in 1600 does not include the Chorus, a dramatic device which modern criticism has interpreted as a surprisingly modern view of history and politics. If the Elizabethan audience watched in performance something more alined to the First Quarto than the 1623 Folio text, then their dramatic engagement with history was hugely different to that of the contemporary interpreters. This new edition makes the original text of Henry V available as a newly dynamic and commanding instance of Elizabethan comic-historical drama.