Play Manuscripts, Vectors of Transmission, and Shakespeare's Henry the fifth.

For more than a century, I The Chronicle History of Henry the fift i has been almost universally regarded as a "bad quarto."[2] In fact, it was a charter member of that category, included in the 1909 initial articulation of the distinction between "good" and "bad" quartos by A. W. Pollard.[3] The five original "bad quartos" were I Romeo and Juliet i (1597), I Henry the fift i (1600), I Sir Iohn Falstaff and the Merry Wiues of Windsor i (1602), I Hamlet i (1603), and I Pericles i (1609). However, as we have already noted, the speech prefixes for the princess herself most closely link the quarto (" I Kate i ") to Shakespeare's source for the wooing scene, I The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth i (" I Kate i "), which never uses as a speech prefix the folio's " I Kath i ." or " I Kathe i ." Such marginal additions could be found in an authorial draft or a playhouse manuscript, but the fact that the material is not present in the quarto suggests that the vector of transmission was from something like the quarto to something like the folio: something apparently I added i in the margin of the pre-folio manuscript corresponds to something that the quarto does not contain, and which thus might have been I added i after the pre-quarto manuscript was composed. I The Chronicle History i is not a "bad quarto" (however defined), and I The Life i was not printed from Shakespeare's "foul papers" (or from his literary first draft). [Extracted from the article]