The Chronicle History of Henry The Fift Author:Graham Holderness This book is part of a controversial new series which has raised fundamental questions about the authenticity of Shakespeare's texts as we know them today. In a radical departure from existing texts, this book presents the earliest known edition of this Shakespearean play. The original text of "Henry V" is startlingly different from the play we ... more »know today. The first edition-or First Quarto-published in 1600, does not contain the Chorus, a dramatic device which modern criticism has used to suggest a strikingly modern view of history and politics. If Elizabethan audiences saw in performance something closer to the First Quarto than the 1623 Folio text, then their dramatic engagement with history was of a kind very different from that of the play's twentieth-century interpreters. This new edition makes available the original text of "Henry V" as a vigorous and powerful instance of Elizabethan comic-historical drama.« less