Verse and Prose in Henry V Continued
Thomas Merriam · Notes and Queries · 2020
Critics have noted that the verse and prose parts of Henry V may be segregated insofar as they glorify or satirize martial action.1 In a previous note, I have compared the verse and prose parts of Henry V with Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, on the one hand, and Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and The Winter’s Tale, on the other.2 Using principal component analysis, I showed that the verse parts of Henry V were located near the Marlowe plays, while the prose parts were distanced from the Tamburlaines, in company with the five entirely Shakespearean tragedies and comedy. This result was congruent with other studies of mine, which have suggested that tonal and thematic oppositions in the plays are due to dual authorship.3 My note of 2017 concluded: I am not aware if any textual scholar has responded to this in using the attribution software R Stylo.5 I have further developed ‘Verse and Prose in Henry V’ by separating the verse and prose parts of thirty Shakespeare plays for comparison with the Tamburlaines, and the verse and prose parts of Henry V.6Figure 1 below may be seen as a supplement to Figure 1 of N&Q cclxii, 268. It uses the relative frequencies of the 119 most frequent single words common (‘culled @ 100%’) to all the texts. The first fifty of these in order of their discriminating power are: of, and, I, a, the, sir, you, me, it, my, is, with, that, our, but, he, in, his, not, shall, am, her, man, their, time, to, one, she, thy, as, an, why, master, what, for, all, thou, lord, no, king, at, we, good, now, have, see, by, death, here, tell. These are listed to indicate that the words may be considered, excepting master, lord, king and death, as non-contextual.