Henry V
Henry VThe culmination of Shakespeare's mature sequence of English histories, Henry V, the last play of the Second Tetralogy, is comparatively easy to date thanks to an uncharacteristic topical reference. At the start of Act 5 the Chorus explicitly compares Henry V's welcome back to London after his campaign in France to the anticipated welcome the Earl of Essex would receive should he return victoriously from his current expedition against Tyrone's rebellion in Ireland (5.0.30–5). Essex's planned campaign was common knowledge as early as November 1598, but this passage, and probably the rest of the play too, is more likely to have been written between the Earl's departure in March 1599 and his return in disgrace that September.
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The play was first printed in quarto in 1600, said to have been ‘sundry times played by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlain his servants’, and reappeared in the Folio of 1623 in a version derived from...[The entire page is 3169 words long]
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