King Henry V (The New Cambridge Shakespeare)

Cambridge University Press
Edition: 2, 7/21/2005
EAN 9780521612647, ISBN10: 0521612640

Paperback, 264 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. For this second edition of King Henry V, Shakespeare's most celebrated war play, Andrew Gurr has added a new section to his introduction in which he considers recent criticism and important contemporary productions of the play. Concentrating in particular on 'secret' versus 'official' readings of the work, he analyses Shakespeare's double vision of Henry as both military hero and self-seeking individual, and shows how the patriotic declarations of the Chorus are contradicted by the play's dramatic action. Controversial sequences are placed in the context of Elizabethan thought while the exceptional variety of language and dialect in the text is also studied. An updated reading list completes the edition.

List of illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations and conventions
Introduction
The play and its date
The coercive Chorus
Context and sources
Structure and language
Staging and stage history
Recent critical and stage interpretations
Note on the text
List of characters
The Play
Textual analysis
Appendices
Theatre sources
The Famous Victories
Historical Sources
Holinshed's Chronicles
Background sources
Richard Crompton, The Mansion of Magnanimitie
Reading list.