'Then Every Soldier Kill His Prisoners': Shakespeare at the Battle of Agincourt

'Then Every Soldier Kill His Prisoners': Shakespeare at the Battle ofAgincourt Charles Edelman W h e n T.W Craik's Arden (Third Series) edition of Henry V was published in 1995, joining those of Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1982), and Andrew Gurr (New Cambridge, 1992), the play became the first to be represented in all of the T>ig three' in Shakespeare publishing.1 Amongst the m a n y insights all three editors provide in their introductions and commentary, some of the most valuable are in Gurr's lucid explication of the numerous textual problems that make Henry V such a difficult yet fascinating play to encounter. H e notes that the Folio text has a number of slips and irregularities that must have been corrected before the play was first performed . . . [with] a disconcerting number of inconsistencies that seem to indicate a change of mind in the course of writing. Others are a matter of the structure, where w e are told what is to happen and it does not.2 1 T.W. Craik, ed., King Henry V, Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Routledge 1995); Gary Taylor, ed., Henry V (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982; Andrew Gurr, ed., King Henry V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Unless otherwise indicated, all Shakespearean quotations are from G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 2 Gurr, pp. 56-57. P A R E R G O N ns 16.1 (July 1998) 32 Charles Edelman Gurr provides a long list of these inconsistencies, from Canterbury s st ment that his conference with the King over the validity of the Salic Law has been interrupted because The French embassador upon that instant Crav'd audience, and the hour, I think, is come To give him hearing (1.1.91-93) only to have the conference go ahead while the ambassador and his tennis balls are kept waiting, through to act five, when Pistol 'makes no mention of his new wife, Mistress Quickly and her tavern, but only laments the death of "my" Doll and the renewal of his old life of bragging pretence.' But 'above all,' Gurr notes, 'there is the question of the Dauphin's presence at Agincourt.'3 The Folio text does indeed show an obvious lack of continuity in the French King's insisting in 3.5 that the Dauphin is not to lead the armies against Henry, but will remain at Rouen, only to have him turn up in 3.7, as he and the other French lords, impatiently awaiting the dawn and the great victory they are certain will be theirs, bicker over w h o has the best armour, has the best horse, and will take the most prisoners. The very same French lords are urged on to immediate battle by the Lord Grandpre in 4.2, and appear again, with the addition of Bourbon, in 4.5, as they speak of their 'reproach and everlasting shame' (4.5.4) in having been defeated by the badly outnumbered English. This lack of continuity is so glaring in the Olivier film, with Harcourt Williams as Charles VI slapping and then kissing M a x Adrian's Dauphin as i f he were a little boy, one wonders why nobody has added it to the delightful lists of 'goofs' maintained by cinema enthusiasts on the internet—cigars getting longer as they are smoked, torn dresses magically mended in an instant, only to be torn again, and so on. Observing that the quarto text of Henry V has Bourbon, not the Dauphin, in the Agincourt scenes, and accepting the premise that Q is in some respect a memorial reconstruction of an early performance of the play, both Gurr and Gary Taylor substitute Bourbon for the Dauphin in 3.7 and 4.2, and re-allocate the lines of 4.5, where the Folio shows both the Dauphin and Bourbon in the scene, to eliminate the former. The problem, as Gurr says, is in deciding which inconsistencies to regularize in order to provide 'a coherent edition' of the play, for in correcting the narrative inconsistencies, disconcerting character inconsistencies are created in their place: now it...