ABSTRACT
In an earlier essay, I argued that the folio text of Shakespeare’s Henry V was more likely to date from 1602 than from 1599.1 If that is so, the status of the 1600 quarto of the play (The cronicle history of Henry the fift) changes materially. It is no longer an inadequate redaction of the much larger folio text, the role it enjoys almost universally in the editorial tradition: as Andrew Gurr puts it, ‘a cheap paste copy of the Shakespearean diamond’.2 It is a (version of a) play that was almost certainly performed in its own right in 1599. That being so, it deserves more attention in its own right than it has generally received. And here I want to focus on one specific issue: its debt to the old Queen’s Men’s play, the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry V, a text of which was published in 1598. Part of my point in so doing is to reinforce the dating argument I have already made, by demonstrating that Q (as I henceforth designate the 1600 quarto) is highly indebted to The Famous Victories (FV), while none of the material in F (The Life of King Henry the Fift, in the 1623 folio text) that does not pre-exist in Q derives from it at all.3 This strengthens the
likelihood that the new materials in F (especially the Choruses, 1.1, 3.1 and most of 3.2, 4.2, and much of 5.2) are additions to the 1599 play, not restored excisions from it.
