The Significance of a Single Letter and Word in Shakespeare

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 This search was conducted on 17 April 2024. This article uses the second edition of The Norton Shakespeare for act, scene and line references.

2 I am grateful to Dr. Darren Freebury Jones, Dr. Leonard Neidorf, and the anonymous readers of The Explicator whose observations drew my attention to Bardo’s discussion and enhanced my thinking and prose style. Gary Taylor in “Shakespearean Magnitudes” Shakespeare Quarterly discusses the Chorus. A “‘kingdom for a stage’ (Prologue.3) magnifies Henry, ‘this wooden O’ (Prologue.13) magnifies Agincourt.” Taylor adds that “Shakespeare needed ‘a Muse of Fire’ (Prologue.1) because the chronicles did not provide the amplitude that English theater audiences wanted then—and still want now—from their national myth”(265). Taylor discusses the choruses six speeches (248–9, 263–65) but doesn’t discuss the reverberations of “O”, the focal point of the present article.

3 Gary Taylor in “Play Manuscripts, Vectors of Transmission, and Shakespeare’s Henry the fifth” discusses the relationship between the quarto 1600 and the 1623 Folio and “demonstrates why we need to revisit old conclusions, examine material witnesses afresh [as he] systematically re-examine[s] variants to find of repetition in speech prefixes, stage directions and speeches in the Shakespeare texts” (Emma Depledge “Editions and textual studies” Shakespeare Survey). Taylor’s article overlooks the opening word of the Folio text.

4 For a discussion of the significance of Shakespearian openings and the literature on the subject see the present author’s “Shakespeare’s Openings: Their Significance” Shakespeare Review, I (2023):3–34 http://shakespearesociety:wixsite.com/chongqing.

5 Of course it is speculative that “O” might represent the shape of the Globe Theatre. As an anonymous reader points out “An examination of Elizabethan paleographic manuscripts reveals that an ‘O’ is not necessarily always round”, some may appear as elongated rectangles. Recent archaeological work has revealed this seems to have been the shape of The Theatre and The Curtain, two other venues for Henry V-see for instance Mave Kennedy “Excavation finds early Shakespeare theatre was rectangular” The Guardian, 17 May 2016.