ABSTRACT
Shakespeare's Henry V, first performed in 1599, belongs to the end of the Tudor period. The 'Tudorness' in literature must certainly have lingered on into the Stuart period, just as the emergent 'Stuartness' of the new era may be identified in the literature produced in Elizabeth's final years. This chapter compares the 1600 Quarto version of the play with the First Folio of 1623, in order to highlight a particular facet of 'Tudorness' which is more clearly identified in the earlier, Elizabethan text, and all but obscured in the later, Jacobean, and, simultaneously, to recover the little-known quarto play-text for Tudor literature. The First Folio is a Jacobean text, published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death and twenty years after the death of Elizabeth. In the Folio text the Chorus's historicising rhetoric, together with Henry's own long, patriotic speeches, foreground the English king's heroic stance – the military adventurer to be admired and emulated by his inferior followers.
