As the inaugural volume of the Wordsworth Classics’ Shakespeare Series, Henry V opens a newly-edited sequence of Shakespeare’s works whose textual editing strives to take account of recent scholarship while offering a careful reappraisal. The play is the most famous and influential of Shakespeare’s histories, its powerful patriotic rhetoric echoing down the centuries and finding eloquent expression in Laurence Olivier’s renowned film. Astute and charismatic, Henry leads his ‘band of brothers’ to victory at Agincourt and might well seem to embody ‘this star of England’. Yet in recent decades the play has drawn growing critical scrutiny and become highly controversial, a shift reflected in Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation: does a sceptical sub-text undercut its patriotism? Is Henry’s triumph shadowed by irony? Or has modern scepticism distorted what remains a predominantly and proudly nationalistic drama? Henry V shows off Shakespeare’s celebrated gift for adding fresh complexity to his source material, so that each new era finds in his work both the familiar and the strange, the congenial and the harsh, the sustaining and the challenging. This edition is edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex.
ISBN 13: 9781840224214
Author: William Shakespeare
