Queenʼs
Men Editions

Para1The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth is one of several Queen’s Men’s plays printed by Thomas Creede. Between 1594 and 1616 Creede would become a significant printer of playbooks, ultimately producing forty-four editions of thirty-five different plays, including five by Shakespeare and four from the Queen’s Men’s repertoire. Creede acquired The Famous Victories near the beginning of his career; in the Stationers’ Register on May 14, 1594, he Entred for his copie vnder thand of mr Cawood warden / a booke intituled / the famous victories of henrye the ffyft / conteyninge the honorable battell of Agincourt (Greg, Bibliography 1:10).

Para2Creede did not print the play until 1598, when he produced a quarto, STC 13072. Two copies of this first quarto (Q1) are known to exist, one at the Huntington Library (shelfmark 12846) and one at the Bodleian (shelfmark Mal. 232 (4)). There are no press-variants between the two extant quartos. The Huntington copy, reproduced in the most recent facsimiles of the play, has been used as copytext for this edition.

Para3The title page of Q1 reads:

THE | FAMOUS VIC= | tories of Henry the | fifth: | Containing the Honou- | rable Battell of Agin-court: | As it was plaide by the Queenes Maiesties |Players. | device | LONDON | Printed by Thomas Creede, 1598.

The device, catalogued by McKerrow as 299, portrays a crowned woman with long hair being scourged by a heavenly hand, and represents Truth, as its Latin motto indicates: VIRESSIT sic VULNERE VERITAS (“Truth, wounded, flourishes”). Creede’s initials are placed between the woman’s feet.

Para4The quarto collates A-F4, G2. Most of the play is printed in pica blackletter font, a size corresponding to a modern 12-point font (Blayney 405, 420 n.48). This font was an unusual choice for Creede’s playbooks, and indeed for playbooks in general in the period. Of Creede’s forty-four playbooks, he set only four in blackletter: Q1 of Famous Victories and three editions of A Looking Glass for London and England (1594, 1598, 1602) (Hanabusa xv). He thus used it for less than ten percent of his play output. By comparison, as Zachary Lesser notes, only 12.4% of plays published between 1595 and 1608 were blackletter (114). A printer’s choice of font might correspond to the anticipated audience and content of the play. Blackletter, also known as English letter, could mark a text off for popular readership; it was often used for English vernacular works such as primers, hornbooks and ballads, texts directed at beginning readers (Lesser 104). Certainly the clowning content and some performance history for The Famous Victories of Henry V might have led Creede to target a popular readership. However, blackletter was also used for weighty English-language documents such as proclamations, lawbooks, Bibles, and chronicle histories. The font’s semiotic range thus includes state authority, the English language, and the established English church (Lesser 107). In this way, the typography of Q1 might alert a buyer to the historical and nationalistic qualities of The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, a historiography given royal authority through performance by the Queen’s own company.

Para5In contrast with the overall use of blackletter in Q1, Roman type is used for much of the paratext—running titles, speech headings, and stage directions—as well as for personal/place names and words in other languages within dialogue. Three instances of Roman italic include the attribution to the Queen’s Men on the title page, the first stage direction for the play, and one exclamation in corrupted Spanish: Basilius Manus (D4V).

Para6At 1705 lines, The Famous Victories is quite a bit shorter than many other late sixteenth-century plays; for example, another Queen’s Men play, The Chronicle History of King Leir, runs to 2666 lines, and Shakespeare’s shortest play, The Comedy of Errors, is 1920 lines long. The printers used 36 lines of text per page (including catchwords, but not including the running title). This decision, the size of the type, and the fact that the last signature consists of only two pages suggests some generosity with the paper; a quarto using this size of type would use at most 39 lines of text (Blayney 405). The lineation of the quarto also means that more paper was used than strictly necessary, since most of this prose play is printed as verse. Indeed, only fifteen pages of fifty (B1r-C4r) are correctly formatted as prose. Like some repetitions and misspellings, such mislineation probably derives from the copy that the printers were working from. Aside from these characteristics, discussed below, the quality of printing itself is generally good, with only a few compositorial errors (Hanabusa x). Scholars agree that the text was set by only one compositor, likely Creede himself (Yamada 122, Hanabusa xii).

Para7The play’s brevity, the printing of verse as prose, some repetition of jokes and speeches, its episodic nature, and inevitable comparisons to Shakespeare’s Henriad once led scholars to judge The Famous Victories an inept abridgement of another play, or possibly two plays, made for provincial performances. The play thus suffered from the assumptions of New Bibliographers and their hypotheses of bad quartos, memorial reconstructions, and corrupt texts cobbled together for provincial audiences. These unsupported guesses of previous editors cannot be accepted at face value, in light of current editorial thinking. Scott McMillin asserted that scholars who see bad quartos are people who read for poetry, not for performance (McMillin and MacLean 85, 98). Joseph Quincy Adams, for example, saw the text as cut down and otherwise mangled for travelling purposes (667), and even William Wells, otherwise fairly sympathetic to the play in his critical edition, sharply distinguished this bad quarto from the supposed lost text behind it: it is […] as manifestly unfair to judge the original by the extant perverted copy as it would be—possibly at least—to consider the first quarto of Hamlet as though it were Shakespeare’s own work (xxi). Of course, editorial views have now shifted, and most do consider Q1 Hamlet a valuable index of how Shakespeare conceived the play at some point in its compositional and performance history. Paul Werstine and Laurie Maguire, among others, have demonstrated the errors in the New Bibliographers’ narratives of bad quartos and slapdash touring texts, and the work of Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean has led to a scholarly and artistic reevaluation of The Famous Victories of Henry V. Recent study and performance has shown it to be an eminently playable text, one which may have been created by the Queen’s Men themselves, and which still maintains dramaturgical coherence and theatrical vigor.

Para8Rather than thinking of the play as a bad quarto, McMillin and MacLean suggest Creede’s copy was dictated to a scribe by company members in need of a new playbook, perhaps because they were dividing into two touring troupes. The mislineation could easily result from a scribe who ended a line when he heard a pause, unaware (or unconcerned) that the actor was speaking prose. Similarly, errors such as great seal Emanuel for great seal manual or forty for fourteen are easily explained as scribal mishearings (McMillin and MacLean 113–119). A passage in the trial scene including several repetitions has sometimes been identified as dittography on the compositor’s part (Maguire 250), but is probably a feature of the printer’s copy as well.

Der.

Heare you sir, I pray you, is it your mans quality
to rob folkes in iest? In faith he shall be hangd in iest

Hen. 5.

Well my Lord, what meane you to do with my
man?

Iudg.

And please your grace the law must passe on him,
According to iustice, then he must be executed.

(Sp151)

Rather than being an undesirable corruption or a textual weakness, this passage may record one instance of the famous improvisational clowning of Richard Tarlton, who played Dericke.

Para9The anecdote in Tarleton’s Jests documenting a scene between Tarlton and William Knell (see Supplementary Texts) indicates that some version of The Famous Victories was in the Queen’s Men repertoire between 1583 and 1587, the dates of the company’s formation and of Knell’s death, respectively. Even if we assume that the copytext originated as a script for touring, it is impossible to fix its date, since the company had made a practice of touring, and even of touring in separate groups, from its beginning. Furthermore, a touring playtext would be no less sophisticated than one for London stage, as regional audiences, particularly those at great houses, had high expectations of performances. Splitting the company for two different touring routes would have necessitated a portable, yet faithful, copy of the play.

Para10Creede’s acquisition of the text in 1594 coincides with the company’s departure from London in the summer of that year. Philip Henslowe, manager of the Rose Theater, records in his diary that he loaned his nephew Frances fifteen pounds to buy a share in the Queen’s Men when the company brocke & went into the countrey to playe (7). The term brocke may mean that the company divided to tour (Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies 23), or even that the company was negotiating the share purchase or other business (OED broke, v.1) Some scholars have interpreted the word as a reference to financial distress. In a memorable if unfounded phrase, Greg describes the company as fallen upon evil days in the early 1590s (Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements 127) and Melchiori has similarly posited that the Queen’s Men, in a phase of rapid decline, were selling off their plays in partial compensation for their losses (8). However, it is unlikely that Henslowe would have financed his nephew’s investment in a declining company, and indeed, the company enjoyed a robust touring career for another two decades (McMillin and Maclean 51–55). Assumptions that the Queen’s Men sold the play because their careers were waning make a tidy, but inaccurate, corollary to assessments of the play as a corrupt shadow of the lost original. If we revisit Q1 as a text created for touring performances by the hardest-working touring company in Elizabethan show business, it has more performance authority than earlier critics granted it. Interestingly, a similar case is now being made for the first quarto of Shakespeare’s Henry V, also printed by Creede. As Gurr argues, that quarto is probably closer to the version of the play that Shakespeare’s company first put on the stage in 1599 than any form of the play that modern audiences have seen (First Quarto 2). It is also the version most indebted to The Famous Victories, as Richard Dutton has demonstrated, and indicates the impact the Queen’s Men’s play had on Shakespeare’s earliest vision for Henry V (135–141).

Para11In 1617 The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth was reprinted by Bernard Alsop, who had partnered with Creede in 1616 and who appears to have taken over his printing shop later that year (Yamada 10–11). Alsop produced two issues of this second quarto; the imprint on the title page is the only substantive variation between the first and second issue.

Q2a	STC 3073	THE | FAMOVS VIC- | TORIES OF HENRY | The fifth. | CONTAINING | the Honourable Battell of | AGIN=COVRT. | As it was Acted by the Kinges Maiesties | Servants. | Ornament | LONDON | Imprinted by Barnard Alsop, dvvelling | in Garter place in Barbican. | 1 6 1 7.
Q2b	STC 3074	THE | FAMOVS VIC- | TORIES OF HENRY | The fifth. | CONTAINING | the Honourable Battell of | AGIN=COVRT. | As it was Acted by the Kinges Maiesties | Servants. | Ornament | LONDON | Imprinted by Barnard Alsop, and are to be sold by | Tymothie Barlow, at his shop in Paules Church- | yard, at the Signe of the Bull-head. | 1 6 1 7.

While Alsop set this quarto directly from Q1, matching its collation, he also introduced different attribution, typography, and other variants. Notably, Alsop places the play in the King’s Men’s repertoire; though no documentary evidence supports a performance by that company, Shakespeare’s use of The Famous Victories as a source for his Henriad has convinced Gurr that the play had in fact migrated into the stock of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men. (Shakespearian Playing Companies 280). Alternatively, Alsop may have fabricated the attribution to give the play a more updated appeal since the Queen’s Men had not performed for over a decade. In his introduction to an early facsimile, P.A. Daniel offered the extremely charitable suggestion that Alsop was simply amending the attribution to reflect that a king was now on the throne (Praetorius and Daniel v); it is also possible that Alsop was implying that the play was Shakespeare’s Henry V, a title which had twice before been printed by Creede (Q1 1600, Q2 1602), but which was now held by Thomas Pavier.

Para12Alsop’s edition also advertises its authority and currency in the typography of the title page. For the first word of the title, Alsop used a single woodblock, a distinctive xylographic THE. Printers had begun to use this block in 1604, and it became a popular element in play title-pages, particularly frequent for plays associated with the King’s Men (Egan 102). The woodblock gives the article THE distinct prominence, suggesting that this play-text is the definitive article; the most longed-for particular; the one and only (Edmondson, qtd. Egan 103). In addition, Alsop followed typographic trends in eschewing the blackletter font of Q1, as he did for his own edition of A Looking Glass for London and England (Q5 1617), using only roman and italic fonts.

Para13Q2 introduces over a thousand variants into the play. Some are substantive, and reveal attempts to correct Q1. One of the most intense textual interventions is the alteration of repetition on B3, the passage quoted above. In Q2, the first line is spoken by the Judge, so that Dericke’s later repetition is parroting authority rather than riffing on his own previous line, and the Lord Mayor and Prince’s lines are altered as well:

Iud. Heare you sir, is it your mans quality to rob folks
in iest. In faith he shall be hangd in earnest.
Hen. 5. Well my Lord, what doe you meane to do with
my man.
Iudg. And please your Grace, the Law must passe on him,
according to iustice, then he must be executed.
Der. Heare you sir, I pray you, is it your mans quality
to rob folkes in iest, In faith he shall be hangd in iest.
Hen. 5. Well my Lord, once againe, what meane you to
doe with him. Iudg. And
please your Grace according to Law and iu-
stice, he must be hangd. (Q2)

While the Prince’s once again shows an intentional reiteration of his question about his man, the phrasing of both the question itself and the Lord Mayor’s answer avoid the word-for-word repetition found in Q1.

Para14In another kind of correction, the words here he shakes her in TLN 1018 are italicized and separated from the dialogue to properly present them as a stage direction. Sporadic attempts were also made to present the text as prose. Some lines set as verse in Q1 are changed to a prose lineation (TLN 11–12, 90–91, 99–100, 1150–1151, 1208–1209, 1228–1230, 1467, 1524, 1526, 1543–1534, 1555, 1649) but consistent emendation of this kind would have required a new process of casting-off. In other instances, the verse lineation is retained, but capitalization is not used in a line that begins mid-sentence (TLN 148, 171, 176, 780–781, 886, 894, 999, 1397).

Para15Most variants are not substantial, and simply reflect different preferences for spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and capitalization. To give a few instances, Q1 uses spellings such as ailst, mire, and Bird, while Q2 replaces the i with y for aylest, myre, and Byrd. Q2 typically duplicates e in mee and also l in medial and final positions, respelling vilaine as villaine, wel as well, and rascal as rascall. Question marks in Q1 are usually replaced with other marks of punctuation in Q2.

Para16Surviving copies of both Q2a and Q2b are housed at the British Library. Other copies of Q2a are held by the Folger Shakespeare Library, Harvard University, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Worcester College, Oxford, while the Bodleian and the Huntington Libraries have copies of Q2b. Facsimiles of Q1 have been edited by Hanabusa, Praetorius and Daniel, and Farmer; both Quartos (including both issues of Q2) are also available in facsimile through the Early English Books Online database.