This project would not be possible without the painstaking efforts of generations of editors past, who somehow managed magisterial and imaginative feats of textual scholarship without the benefit of the Oxford English Dictionary, Google, or Early English Books Online. I am very grateful to them for haunting me in my familiar paths. I am likewise grateful to my fellow editors of the Internet Shakespeare Editions, particularly those happy few working on the English histories—Catherine Lisak, Rosemary Gaby, Adrian Kiernander, and Michael Best—without whose hard work and insightful correspondence I would have been unable to complete the edition, to Don Bailey, who can spot a blackletter comma at fifty paces, and to Lara Hansen for her able assistance with the quarto text. Many thanks are due to the General and Coordinating Editors of the ISE, Eric Rasmussen and Michael Best, at whose heels we crouch for employment. I am grateful to Eric for throwing this opportunity my way in the first place, for his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the history of every Shakespearean textual crux, and for his being an excellent departmental colleague and all-around swell guy. Michael Best’s name is synonymous with the ISE project, and without his unending patience, his thorough mastery of the technology and vision for what an electronic edition should be able to accomplish, and his bottomless reservoir of encouragement, this edition and those of my ISE colleagues could not exist. For their vision and hard work in bringing the series of print editions into being, I would like to thank Leonard Conolly, Marjorie Mather, and Tara Lowes, and especially Denis Johnston for his sharp-eyed copy editing and generous suggestions.

I would also like to thank the participants in Shakespeare Association of America seminars led by Jonathan Hart in 2009 and Brian Walsh in 2010 for helping me to develop my ideas and arguments about this star of England. Thanks to Irene Musumeci and the cast of the Warwick University Dramatic Society’s 2002 production of Henry V for first generating my unhealthy interest in the play, and to my friends and colleagues at Nevada for putting up with that unhealthy interest. Thanks to my erstwhile research assistant, Lara Hansen, for her assiduous examination of Famous Victories. Many thanks to the Huntington Library for their help with the textual collation and providing electronic texts of the supplementary materials, and to the staffs of the Victoria and Albert Theatre and Performance Archive and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, both for their able assistance and their permission to use images from their collections.

Finally, my utmost thanks to Emilie Meyer for her patience with my stress, and to our son Diggory Mardock, to whom I promise not to teach this story from this day to the ending of the world.