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The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text; until 2026); and Janelle Jenstad, General Editor (Text; 2026–)

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Queen’s Men Editions

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 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author MARC Code List for Relators definition: A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Markup Editor MARC Code List for Relators definition: A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. LEMDO uses this term for someone who encodes a file, remediates a converted text, or reviews the XML markup of a file. s ſ {s} U+017F th þ {th} U+00FE r ꝛ {r} U+A75A st ſt ſt {{s}t} U+FB05 Fixed misspelling of MacLean. Published file. Updated metadata Added head to intro div. Finished encoding. Questions left for COCK1. Continued editing for QME. Created file and commenced editing Peer review arranged by QME Editorial Board Peter Cockett Peter Cockett

Peter Cockett is an associate professor in the iArts (Integrated Arts) program at McMaster University. He is the co-editor, with Melinda Gough, of Engendering the Stage in the Age of Shakespeare and Beyond (University of Toronto Press, 2025) which publishes the findings of their 2018 Performance as Research (PaR) workshop at the Stratford Festival Lab. He is the general editor (performance), and technical co-ordinating editor of Queen’s Men Editions. His PaR directing credits include King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006), Clyomon and Clamydes (2010), and Three Ladies of London (2015) for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM). The process behind the 2006 productions is documented in depth on the project website Performing the Queen’s Men. 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.

 Tracey El Hajj 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.

 Mahayla Galliford Mahayla Galliford

Project Manager, 2025-present; Assistant Project Manager, 2024-2025; Research Assistant, 2021-present. Mahayla Galliford (she/her) graduated from the University of Victoria with a BA (honours with distinction) in 2024, and an MA English in 2026. Mahayla’s undergraduate research explored early modern stage directions and civic water pageantry. Her SSHRC-funded MA thesis project focuses on transcribing, editing, and encoding early modern girls’ manuscripts, specifically Lady Rachel Fane’s May Masque in collaboration with LEMDO.

 Andrew Griffin 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.

 Martin Holmes Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s 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.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Janelle Jenstad 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 Beatrice 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.

 Karen Sawyer Marsalek Karen 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.

 Mathew Martin Mathew Martin

Dr. Mathew R. Martin is Full Professor at Brock University, Canada. He is the author of Between Theatre and Philosophy (2001), Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (2015) and Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory (2023), 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), and Robert Greene’s Selimus (2022). For Revels Editions he has edited George Peele’s David and Bathsheba (2018) and Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (2021). For Queen’s Men Editions he has edited The Famous Victories of Henry V (2016). He has published two articles of textual criticism on the printed texts of Marlowe’s plays: Inferior Readings: The Transmigration of Material in <title level="m">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 <title level="m">Edward the Second (Early Theatre 16.1 [June 2013]). His latest editing projects are a double-play Revels edition of Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and John of Bordeaux and a Digital Renaissance Editions edition of Dido, Queen of Carthage.

 Helen Ostovich 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 Queen’s 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.

 Joey Takeda 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.

 Anonymous Thomas Creede Thomas Creede Adams, Joseph Quincy. Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas: A Selection of Plays Illustrating the History of the English Drama from its Origin Down to Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924. Blayney, Peter W.M. The Texts of King Lear and their Origins: Volume 1 Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Dutton, Richard. <title level="m">The Famous Victories and the 1600 Quarto of Henry V. Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing. Ed. Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin. Ashgate: Farnham, 2009. 135–144. WSB bby196. Egan, Gabriel. <quote>As it was, is, or will be played</quote>: Title-pages and the Theater Industry to 1610. From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England. Ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 92–110. WSB aat505. Greg, W.W., ed. A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration. 5 vols. Bibliographical Society, 1939–1959; rpt. 1962. Greg, W.W., ed. Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: <title level="m">The Battle of Alcazar and Orlando Furioso. Clarendon Press, 1923. Gurr, Andrew, ed. The First Quarto of <title level="m">Henry V. New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, 2000. WSB aab370. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Playing Companies. Clarendon Press, 1996. WSB ao469. Hanabusa, Chiaki, ed. The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, 1598. Malone Society Reprints. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Lesser, Zachary. Typographic Nostalgia: Playreading, Popularity, and the Meanings of Black Letter. The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers and Readers in Early Modern England. Ed. Martha Straznicky. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachussets Press, 2006. 99–126. Maguire, Laurie E. Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The <soCalled>Bad</soCalled> Quartos and their Contexts. Cambridge University Press, 1996. WSB ao178. McKerrow, R.B. Printers’ and Publishers’ Devices in England and Scotland, 1485–1640. 1949. McMillin, Scott, and Sally-Beth MacLean. The Queen’s Men and Their Plays. Cambridge University Press, 1998. WSB aw359. Melchiori, Gregorio. Dying of a Sweat: Falstaff and Oldcastle. Notes and Queries 34.2 (1987): 210–211. WSB bh196. Praetorius, Charles and P.A. Daniel, eds. The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. The Earliest Known Quarto, 1598. London, 1887. Wells, William S. <title level="m">The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth: A Critical Edition. Stanford University. PhD dissertation, 1935. Yamada, Akihiro. Thomas Creede: Printer to Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Meisei University Press, 1994. WSB a763. LEMDO Team 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. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/ QME Editorial Board

The QME Editorial Board consists of Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text); and Janelle Jenstad General Editor (Text).

 Queen’s Men Editions QME

The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text; until 2026); and Janelle Jenstad, General Editor (Text; 2026–)
Introduction

The 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).

Creede 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.

The 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.

The 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.

In 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).

At 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).

Creede’s Copytext: Quality, Provenance, and Authority

The 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.

Rather 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.() 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.

The 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.

Creede’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).

Alsop’s Q2

In 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.

Alsop’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.

Q2 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.

In 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).

Most 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.

Surviving 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.