Saturday, November 22, 2008

What act and lines is the number of English and French soldiers killed at the battle of Agincourt located in Shakespeare's "Henry V"?

This seems like a simple question, but it isn’t: there is no agreement among different Shakespeare editions about how acts, scenes, and lines are numbered. Each edition has its own system. Line numbers especially can greatly differ from edition to edition, because for instance any scene with prose in it means that the lines of prose are numbered according to how they break on the pages of the physical book, and therefore they and any lines of verse thereafter can be numbered very differently from edition to edition. So where is it? Well, in the edition I just grabbed from the shelf, the Herald’s line “Here is the number of the slaughtered French” (incidentally, the legendary Sir John Gielgud’s one and only line in his London debut) appears as Act 4, scene 8, line 75, and Henry’s reading of the tally begins at line 81 – but your edition may differ.

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