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Reviewed by:
  • King Henry IV, Part 1
  • Christopher Highley (bio)
The Arden Shakespeare King Henry IV, Part 1. Edited by David Scott Kastan (London: Thompson Learning, 2002). Illus. Pp. xviii + 398. $54.99 cloth, $13.99 paper.

With the publication of David Scott Kastan's edition of 1 Henry IV, scholars now have three excellent single-volume modern editions of the play from which to choose, the others being David Bevington's 1987 Oxford edition and Herbert and Judith Weil's 1997 New Cambridge edition. Like Bevington and the Weils, Kastan takes Q1 as his copytext, except for 1.3.200 to the end of 2.2, where he relies on the Q0 fragment (which is reproduced in facsimile in appendix 5). Kastan admits to being a "conservative" editor who resists amending his copytext except in cases of obvious error (119). For example, where other modern editors have amended Vernon's speech "All furnished, all in arms, / All plumed like ostriches," arguing that a line must be missing, Kastan leaves the "disjunctive syntax" of the speech intact on the grounds that it reflects Vernon's excited state of mind: "While emended texts sometimes produce better sense than the original, we cannot be sure it is Shakespeare's sense" (119). Kastan is especially sensitive to the role of the printing house with its compositors and other agents in determining the form of the printed text. For example, the word tasking at 5.2.50 in Q1 becomes talking in all subsequent quarto editions up to F1, but Kastan retains tasking because "this seems an example of a more common word being substituted in the printing house for the less familiar, though appropriate, one" (316). In another case Kastan decides to recast prose as verse because the compositors seem to have converted verse into prose in order to fit more words onto a page, a technique used when printing a book "set by formes" (126). Kastan elaborates on the significance of printing-house practices in his fascinating introductory section "The play on the page: the text of 1 Henry IV." "Increasingly," Kastan insists, "editors and even critics have begun to recognize how the process of a text's materialization affects what is made present to be read" (110).

The notes in this edition elucidate the text by drawing on an array of primary documents. Kastan includes many analogues noted by earlier editors of the play, although he also discovers a few new ones. In Falstaff's reference to his own "frailty," for instance, Kastan hears an echo of a passage in Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1583) where two Marian Protestants discuss their plight (3.3.165-67). Kastan's references to Shakespeare's use of rhetorical topoi are valuable, as is his inclusion of source passages and stage history in the notes. At 1.3.56 we learn that in 1945 Laurence Olivier, misled by a description of Hotspur in 2 Henry IV, stammered his way through "guns, and drums, and w-w-wounds."

Kastan's sweeping introduction considers what it meant for Shakespeare to call a play a "history," what understanding of history the play promotes, and how the play engages the circumstances in which it was written and performed. Kastan denies that Shakespeare's history plays tell the story of a country punished and redeemed by divine Providence. While characters may express providential views, Shakespeare himself [End Page 75] remains skeptical, using the plays as vehicles to explore competing models of history. Kastan shows how Shakespeare transforms history into historical drama by manipulating sources such as Holinshed and interweaving them with fictional comic material. Kastan makes a strong case for seeing the anonymous Famous Victories (1598) as Shakespeare's model for staging the past as a hybrid form that mingled kings and clowns, history and comedy. Unlike earlier critics, Kastan does not see the play's dramatic unity as resting on the subordination of the comic subplot to the historical main plot. Kastan argues that the disruptive energies of the subplot, embodied most extravagantly in Falstaff, undermine the orderly containment that other characters or viewers/readers might expect.

Kastan sketches two ways of responding to the play's politics...

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