King Henry V (Oxford Shakespeare)

by WilliamShakespeare (Author), Gary Taylor (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1984

  $3.25

  The climax of Shakespeare's sequence of English history plays, this book is a celebration of a young warrior-king. It is also a study of the costly exhilarations of war and of the penalties, as well as the glories of human greatness. The editor, Gary Taylor, shows how Shakespeare shaped his historical material, examines controversial critical interpretations, discusses the play's fluctuating fortunes in performance, and analyzes the range and variety of Shakepeares characterization. The first folio text is radically rethought, making original use of the First Quarto (1600). Gary Taylor is the author of Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present , co-author of Modernizing Shakespeare; Spelling (with Stanley Wells) and co-editor of The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear (with Michael Warren).

• Used

  Paperback
  1992

  $3.25

  This new edition of Shakespeare's most celebrated war play points to the many inconsistencies in the presentation of Henry V. Andrew Gurr's substantial introduction explains the play as a reaction to the decade of war which preceded its writing, and analyses the play's double vision of Henry as both military hero and self-seeking individual. Professor Gurr shows how the patriotic declarations of the Chorus are contradicted by the play's action. He places the play's more controversial sequences in the context of Elizabethan thought, in particular the studies of the laws and morality of war written in the years before Henry V. He also studies the variety of language and dialect in the play. The appendices summarise Shakespeare's debt to his dramatic and historical sources, while the stage history shows how subsequent centuries have received and adapted the play on the stage and in film.