Project Gutenberg's Etext of Shakespeare's The first Part of
Henry the Sixt
Executive Director's Notes:
In addition to the notes below, and so you will *NOT* think allthe spelling errors introduced by the printers of the time havebeen corrected, here are the first few lines of Hamlet, as theyare presented herein:
Barnardo. Who's there?
Fran. Nay answer me: Stand & vnfold
your selfe
Bar. Long liue the King
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As I understand it, the printers often ran out of certain wordsor letters they had often packed into a "cliche". . .this is theoriginal meaning of the term cliche. . .and thus, being unwillingto unpack the cliches, and thus you will see some substitutionsthat look very odd. . .such as the exchanges of u for v, v for u,above. . .and you may wonder why they did it this way, presumingShakespeare did not actually write the play in this manner. . . .
The answer is that they MAY have packed "liue" into a cliche at atime when they were out of "v"'s. . .possibly having used "vv" inplace of some "w"'s, etc. This was a common practice of the day,as print was still quite expensive, and they didn't want to spendmore on a wider selection of characters than they had to.
You will find a lot of these kinds of "errors" in this text, as Ihave mentioned in other times and places, many "scholars" have anextreme attachment to these errors, and many have accorded them avery high place in the "canon" of Shakespeare. My father read anassortment of these made available to him by Cambridge Universityin England for several months in a glass room constructed for thepurpose. To the best of my knowledge he read ALL those available. . .in great detail. . .and determined from the various changes,that Shakespeare most likely did not write in nearly as many of avariety of errors we credit him for, even though he was in/famousfor signing his name with several different spellings.
So, please take this into account when reading the comments belowmade by our volunteer who prepared this file: you may see errorsthat are "not" errors. . . .
So. . .with this caveat. . .we have NOT changed the canon errors,here is the Project Gutenberg Etext of Shakespeare's The firstPart of Henry the Sixt.
Michael S. Hart
Project Gutenberg
Executive Director
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Scanner's Notes: What this is and isn't. This was taken froma copy of Shakespeare's first folio and it is as close as I cancome in ASCII to the printed text.
The elongated S's have been changed to small s's and theconjoined ae have been changed to ae. I have left the spelling,punctuation, capitalization as close as possible to theprinted text. I have corrected some spelling mistakes (I have puttogether a spelling dictionary devised from the spellings of theGeneva Bible and Shakespeare's First Folio and have unifiedspellings according to this template), typo's and expandedabbreviations as I have come across them. Everything withinbrackets [] is what I have added. So if you don't like thatyou can delete everything within the brackets if you want apurer Shakespeare.
Another thing that you should be aware of is that there are textualdifferences between various copies of the first folio. So there maybe differences (other than what I have mentioned above) betweenthis and other first folio editions. This is due to the printer'shabit of setting the type and running off a number of copies andthen proofing the pri