Famous Victories of Henry V: Scene 2

Para1The Queen’s Men apparently found their contemporary volunteer police force, the town watch, to be an excellent source of fun. Comic watchmen are featured in King Leir (27) and appear again here. The recurring joke, featured in many early modern plays, is that the constables entrusted to watch the cities at night, the Watch, are incompetent or negligent. The watchmen in King Leir decide they will go to the pub rather than watch, and the watchmen in this scene are full of fear and prefer to sleep rather than protect the citizens of London. The characters in this scene are indisputably clowns and the scene continues the knockabout humor of the play’s opening. It also introduces us to the character of Derrick, the poor carrier mentioned in the first scene, a role we can be relatively confident was played by the Queen’s Men’s star actor, the great clown Richard Tarlton (Cockett, Ghost). Although this scene is clearly intended to be comic, there are few verbal gags, and led by Alon Nashman (Derrick) our principal clown, the actors developed physical business to bring out the comedy of the situation. Since the Queen’s Men were renowned for their comedy we might infer that the Queen’s Men’s humor was equally reliant on physical comedy. The humor of the scene was not readily apparent on the page and it took a significant amount of work from the company to unearth the latent humor of the clown parts. Nashman paid close attention to the details of the text but was given creative licence to apply his clown training and develop physical comedy even where it was not specifically indicated. The production notes in this scene document our struggles deciphering a clowning text that lacks specific stage directions, pointing out the textual evidence for specific gags, and indicating where the actors’ creativity alone was responsible for the humor.

Prosopography

Alon Nashman

Alon Nashman was an actor and musical director with Shakespeare and the Queenʼs Men Project. He played Keeper and Miles in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006) and Derrick in Famous Victories (2006).

Andrew Griffin

Andrew Griffin is an associate professor in the department of English and an affiliate professor in the department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is general editor (text) of Queen’s Men Editions. He studies early modern drama and early modern historiography while serving as the lead editor at the EMC Imprint. He has co-edited with Helen Ostovich and Holger Schott Syme Locating the Queen’s Men (2009) and has co-edited The Making of a Broadside Ballad (2016) with Patricia Fumerton and Carl Stahmer. His monograph, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, History, Catastrophe, was published with the University of Toronto Press in 2019. He is editor of the anonymous The Chronicle History of King Leir (Queen’s Men Editions, 2011). He can be contacted at griffin@english.ucsb.edu.

Anonymous

Helen Ostovich

Helen Ostovich, professor emerita of English at McMaster University, is the founder and general editor of Queen’s Men Editions. She is a general editor of The Revels Plays (Manchester University Press); Series Editor of Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama (Ashgate, now Routledge), and series co-editor of Late Tudor and Stuart Drama (MIP); play-editor of several works by Ben Jonson, in Four Comedies: Ben Jonson (1997); Every Man Out of his Humour (Revels 2001); and The Magnetic Lady (Cambridge 2012). She has also edited the Norton Shakespeare 3 The Merry Wives of Windsor Q1602 and F1623 (2015); The Late Lancashire Witches and A Jovial Crew for Richard Brome Online, revised for a 4-volume set from OUP 2021; The Ball, for the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley (2021); The Merry Wives of Windsor for Internet Shakespeare Editions, and The Dutch Courtesan (with Erin Julian) for the Complete Works of John Marston, OUP 2022. She has published many articles and book chapters on Jonson, Shakespeare, and others, and several book collections, most recently Magical Transformations of the Early Modern English Stage with Lisa Hopkins (2014), and the equivalent to book website, Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: The Three Ladies of London in Context containing scripts, glossary, almost fifty conference papers edited and updated to essays; video; link to Queenʼs Mens Ediitons and YouTube: http://threeladiesoflondon.mcmaster.ca/contexts/index.htm, 2015. Recently, she was guest editor of Strangers and Aliens in London ca 1605, Special Issue on Marston, Early Theatre 23.1 (June 2020). She can be contacted at ostovich@mcmaster.ca.

Holger Schott Syme

Holger Schott Syme is an associate professor of English and Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He is author of Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare’s England: A Culture of Mediation (CUP, 2011) and co-editor with Helen Ostovich and Andrew Griffin of Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583-1603 (Ashgate, 2009). His recent work includes (Mis)representing Justice on the Early Modern Stage, Studies in Philology (2011); The Meaning of Success: Stories of 1594 and its Aftermath, Shakespeare Quarterly (2010); and Unediting the Margin: Jonson, Marston, and the Theatrical Page, English Literary Renaissance38.1 (2008): 142-71. As textual editor, he has produced Edward III (Shakespeare and others) and The Book of Sir Thomas More, by Munday, Chettle, Dekker, Heywood, Shakespeare and others, for The Norton Shakespeare 3, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (W.W. Norton, 2015). He can be contacted at holger.syme@utoronto.ca.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Joey Takeda

Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020 after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.

Karen Sawyer Marsalek

Karen Sawyer Marsalek (Famous Victories of Henry V, early modern text) is an associate professor of English at St. Olaf College. She has edited, directed and performed in several early English plays. Her publications include essays on true resurrections in medieval drama and The Winter’s Tale, false resurrections in the Chester Antichrist and 1 Henry IV, and theatrical properties of skulls and severed heads. Her current research is on remains and revenants in the King’s Men’s repertory. She can be contacted at marsalek@stolaf.edu.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVicʼs Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

Mathew Martin

Dr. Mathew R. Martin is Full Professor at Brock University, Canada, and Director of Brock’s PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities. He is the author of Between Theatre and Philosophy (2001) and Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (2015) and co-editor, with his colleague James Allard, of Staging Pain, 1500-1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theatre (2009). For Broadview Press he has edited Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second (2010), Jew of Malta (2012), Doctor Faustus: The B-Text (2013), and Tamburlaine the Great Part One and Part Two (2014). For Revels Editions he has edited George Peele’s David and Bathsheba (2018) and Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (forthcoming). He has published two articles of textual criticism on the printed texts of Marlowe’s plays: Inferior Readings: The Transmigration of Material in Tamburlaine the Great (Early Theatre 17.2 [December 2014]), and (on the political inflections of the shifts in punctuation in the early editions of the play) Accidents Happen: Roger Barnes’s 1612 Edition of Marlowe’s Edward the Second (Early Theatre 16.1 [June 2013]). His latest editing project is a Broadview edition of Robert Greene’s Selimus. He is also writing two books: one on psychoanalysis and literary theory and one on the language of non-violence in Elizabethan drama in the late 1580s and 1590s.

Navarra Houldin

Project manager 2022-present. Textual remediator 2021-present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.

Peter Cockett

Peter Cockett is an associate professor in the Theatre and Film Studies at McMaster University. He is the general editor (performance), and technical co-ordinating editor of Queen’s Men Editions. He was the stage director for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM), directing King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006) and he is the performance editor for our editions of those plays. The process behind those productions is documented in depth on his website Performing the Queen’s Men. Also featured on this site are his PAR productions of Clyomon and Clamydes (2009) and Three Ladies of London (2014). For the PLS, the University of Toronto’s Medieval and Renaissance Players, he has directed the Digby Mary Magdalene (2003) and the double bill of George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale and the Chester Antichrist (2004). He also directed An Experiment in Elizabethan Comedy (2005) for the SQM project and Inside Out: The Persistence of Allegory (2008) in collaboration with Alan Dessen. Peter is a professional actor and director with numerous stage and screen credits. He can be contacted at cockett@mcmaster.ca.

Scott Matthews

Tracey El Hajj

Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life. Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.

Bibliography

Cockett, Peter. The Ghost of Dick Tarlton, Gentleman. The Queen’s Men Seminar. Shakespeare Association of America. April 2009.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

QME Editorial Board (QMEB1)

The QME Editorial Board consists of Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text), with the support of an Advisory Board.

Queenʼs Men Editions (QME1)

The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text).

Shakespeare and the Queenʼs Men Project (SQMP1)

https://thequeensmen.ca/

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Famous Victories of Henry V: Scene 2
Type of text Critical
Short title FV: Scene 2
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Queen’s Men Editions
Source
Page written by Peter Cockett. First published in the QME 1.0 anthology on the ISE platform. Converted to TEI-XML and remediated by the LEMDO Team for republication in the QME 2.0 anthology on the LEMDO platform.
Editorial declaration n/a
Edition Released with Queenʼs Men Editions 2.0
Sponsor(s)

Queenʼs Men Editions

The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text).
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published, peer-reviewed
Licence/availability Intellectual copyright in this edition is held by the editor, Peter Cockett. The critical paratexts, including this Scene 2, are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that they are freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the editor, QME, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and/or data; (2) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (3) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of QME, the editor, and LEMDO. This license allows for pedagogical use of the critical paratexts in the classroom. Production photographs and videos on this site may not be downloaded. They appear freely on this site with the permission of the actors and the ACTRA union. They may be used within the context of university courses, within the classroom, and for reference within research contexts, including conferences, when credit is given to the producing company and to the actors. Commercial use of videos and photographs is forbidden.