1438100 1623 Shakespeare. Henry IV Pt. 2. Complete.
9386.
Henry IV. Part Two.
From the First Folio. 1623. Complete.
The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, Containing His Death: and the Coronation of King Henry the Fift. Complete. [Extracted from: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. London: Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623]. Folio, period-style full calf gilt; pp. f6-2g8 (73-102). The 1623 printing, extracted from the landmark First Folio, of Shakespeare’s tragicomic chronicle of King Henry’s decline and Prince Hal’s ascendancy.
Believed to have been composed in late 1597 or early 1598, Shakespeare’s pensive dramatization of Henry IV’s twilight endures thanks in large part to its being one of the three plays to feature Sir John Falstaff, so original and so overwhelming [a character] that with him Shakespeare changes the entire meaning of what it is to have created a man made out of words (Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, 47). (Falstaff also appears in the first part of Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor).
The text was first published in the 'good quarto' of 1600, but would not see print again until this appearance in the First Folio of 1623. See Jaggard, 332. The Folio text includes eight additional pasages not contained in the quarto. It has also been scrubbed of all profanities which were forbidden in the 1606 Parliamentary "Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players." Interestingly, Epilogue, in the final speech of the play promised to "continue the story with Sir John in it" in his next play, but reneges as Henry V does not contain any appearances by Falstaff.
The First Folio was prepared by Shakespeare’s associates John Heminges and Henry Condell, and published by William and Isaac Jaggard along with the bookseller Edward Blount in 1623. Of Shakespeare’s thirty-nine undisputed plays, eighteen survive solely because they appear in the 1623 Folio, making the book 'intrinsically the most valuable volume in the whole range of English Literature' (Grolier 100 19). Fewer than 250 copies of the First Folio survive, and most of those copies are incomplete. Individual plays extracted from the First Folio are exceptionally scarce and desirable. The final page of 1 Henry IV on f6r; the list of characters in 2 Henry IV on 2g8v, including 'Rumour the Presentor' and Falstaff, an 'irregular humorist.' Expertly washed, restoration to margins. An excellent copy.
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