The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. For this second edition of King Henry V, Shakespeare's most celebrated war play, Andrew Gurr has added a new section to his introduction in which he considers recent criticism and important contemporary productions of the play. Concentrating in particular on 'secret' versus 'official' readings of the work, he analyses Shakespeare's double vision of Henry as both military hero and self-seeking individual, and shows how the patriotic declarations of the Chorus are contradicted by the play's dramatic action. Controversial sequences are placed in the context of Elizabethan thought while the exceptional variety of language and dialect in the text is also studied. An updated reading list completes the edition.

List of illustrations; Preface; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations and conventions; Introduction: The play and its date; The coercive Chorus; Context and sources; Structure and language; Staging and stage history; Recent critical and stage interpretations; Note on the text; List of characters; The Play; Textual analysis; Appendices: Theatre sources: The Famous Victories; Historical Sources: Holinshed's Chronicles; Background sources: Richard Crompton, The Mansion of Magnanimitie; Reading list.