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As I understand it, the printers often ran out of certain words
or letters they had often packed into a "cliche". . .this is the
original meaning of the term cliche. . .and thus, being unwilling
to unpack the cliches, and thus you will see some substitutions
that 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, presuming
Shakespeare did not actually write the play in this manner. . . .
The answer is that they MAY have packed "liue" into a cliche at a
time when they were out of "v"'s. . .possibly having used "vv" in
place 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 spend
more on a wider selection of characters than they had to.
You will find a lot of these kinds of "errors" in this text, as I
have mentioned in other times and places, many "scholars" have an
extreme attachment to these errors, and many have accorded them a
very high place in the "canon" of Shakespeare. My father read an
assortment of these made available to him by Cambridge University
in England for several months in a glass room constructed for the
purpose. 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 a
variety of errors we credit him for, even though he was in/famous
for signing his name with several different spellings.
So, please take this into account when reading the comments below
made by our volunteer who prepared this file: you may see errors
that are "not" errors. . . .
So. . .with this caveat. . .we have NOT changed the canon errors,
here is the Project Gutenberg Etext of Shakespeare's The first
Part 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 from
a copy of Shakespeare's first folio and it is as close as I can
come in ASCII to the printed text.
The elongated S's have been changed to small s's and the
conjoined ae have been changed to ae. I have left the spelling,
punctuation, capitalization as close as possible to the
printed text. I have corrected some spelling mistakes (I have put
together a spelling dictionary devised from the spellings of the
Geneva Bible and Shakespeare's First Folio and have unified
spellings according to this template), typo's and expanded
abbreviations as I have come across them. Everything within
brackets [] is what I have added. So if you don't like that
you can delete everything within the brackets if you want a
purer Shakespeare.
Another thing that you should be aware of is that there are textual
differences between various copies of the first folio. So there may
be differences (other than what I have mentioned above) between
this and other first folio editions. This is due to the printer's
habit of setting the type and running off a number of copies and
then proofing the printed copy and correcting the type and then
continuing the printing run. The proof run wasn't thrown away but
incorporated into the printed copies. This is just the way it is.
The text I have used was a composite of more than 30 different
First Folio editions' best pages.