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Henry V
The member's edition. The leader's edition adds notes for whoever opens the discussion: the history behind the scene and where Shakespeare bends it, where the Quarto and Folio differ, the two readings of the King and where each has to look away, and a question to start a fight.
Read it
Henry V is in the public domain. The whole play is on this page, scene by scene with its Choruses, every harder word glossed where it stands; the same text sits in the Society's library, the Armarium, inside the Complete Works.
Start reading → Contents Read along in the Armarium: the words light up →Listen free
The LibriVox full-cast reading (2011): Arielle Lipshaw as Henry V, Elizabeth Klett as the Chorus, the Hostess and narrator, Martin Geeson as Fluellen, Algy Pug as Pistol, ezwa as Katharine. Five tracks, one an act with its Chorus, about three hours. It plays here, keeps your place in every act, and works from the lock screen on an iPhone or Android phone.
Recorded for LibriVox and hosted by the Internet Archive; in the public domain. The cast reads the Project Gutenberg text, the same one on this page. Not the Arkangel recording, which is a commercial release and stays under copyright. Each act is a 64 kbps MP3 of 12 to 25 MB: on a phone plan, start it on Wi-Fi.
Kindle + Audible
Whispersync links a Kindle book to its Audible narration: own both, and your phone keeps one place between them, so you can read at home and pick up by ear in the car where you stopped.
The Arkangel Shakespeare on AudibleFor the ear the Society's standing choice is the Arkangel Shakespeare's full-cast recording (Jamie Glover as Henry, Brian Cox as the Chorus, Elizabeth Spriggs as the Hostess; about three hours), on Audible. For the page, the Folger edition, matched across the whole Henriad. The two do not sync; nobody has paired a Kindle Henriad to Arkangel, and the Society has not found one to recommend. Read the Folger, listen to Arkangel, and let the page here keep your place.
Henry V closes the Henriad. It was written in 1599, the year the Globe opened, and the Chorus's apology for the wooden O is probably the new theatre's; the play's one topical line, about the general of our gracious Empress returning from Ireland with rebellion broached on his sword, dates it to the spring and summer of that year, before Essex came home in disgrace. The King who banished Falstaff invades France, takes Harfleur, wins Agincourt against five times his number on 25 October 1415, and marries the French King's daughter; the Chorus ends by reminding the audience that his son lost it all.
It is the most argued-over of the four plays. Read one way it is a pageant of the perfect king: just, pious, brave, plain-spoken, loved. Read another it is a study of what such a king costs: Falstaff dead of a broken heart, Bardolph hanged, Harfleur threatened with Herod's slaughtermen, the prisoners killed, and a wooing in which the bride is an article of the treaty. Shakespeare wrote both readings into the text and declined to choose, and the Society need not either; but it should notice where each reading has to look away.
A note on the text
The text is Project Gutenberg's Complete Works (ebook #100, the PG Shakespeare Team's text), as canon-corpus cuts it into speeches for the Armarium, where the play sits inside shakespeare as henry-v; nothing is cut. The Quarto of 1600 is a short, garbled text without the Choruses; the Folio of 1623 is the play as we have it, and the Choruses, the Salic law speech and the Jamy-Macmorris exchange are Folio only. The Prologue and the four act-Choruses are given here as their own sections; the Epilogue is the Chorus's last speech in V.ii. The French of III.iv, IV.iv and V.ii is left as the text has it, Gutenberg's accents included. Line numbers are counted as canon-corpus counts them.
Persons
Everyone in the book, alphabetically by surname, with the parts they are in.
The Great Ideas
Each of Adler's Great Ideas the book touches, with the parts where it does. Ideas marked in gold are from the Society's own Syntopicon Addendum and link to it.
Scripture
Every quotation and clear allusion, in canonical order, with the King James text.
Glossary
Every harder word, A to Z, glossed in the sense it has here. Each links to the place it is used. Rarity is measured by how seldom the word turns up in English at large; the commonest words are never glossed.
Lines Worth Keeping
Every line the Society marked, in order.
Potent Quotables
The book's most-quoted lines, as first-letter study cards: read the first letters and say the line, then check it against the full text.
The Armarium Shelf
Books in the Society's library that the companion sends you to, and which parts send you there.
Memory Work
The Potent Quotables, and every line worth keeping ( of them), as decks for the Mnemonicon.
Download the Potent Quotables or the whole deck, then in the Mnemonicon choose Import and pick the file. Importing both adds nothing twice.
To study the glossary's words with spaced repetition, open the Vocabularium.