The application of thought to Shakespearian textual criticism can still yield exciting results, as the new Oxford Henry V demonstrates. The coupling in a single volume (1979) of Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling, by Stanley Wells, General Editor of the Oxford Shakespeare, and Three Studies in the Text of ‘Henry V’, by Gary Taylor, Associate Editor, seemed arbitrary to some reviewers, but the two kinds of inquiry were complementary and they unite in the achievement of Taylor’s edition.

Wells had deliberated upon the difficulties faced by editors of modern-spelling texts. Recommending more thoroughgoing modernization than has been customary, he set down helpful guidelines toward rational and consistent practice. Taylor’s concern was with the relationship between the Quarto and Folio texts of Henry V and the nature of textual authority in the Quarto. Most scholars have agreed that behind the Folio Henry V lay Shakespeare’s foul papers, and behind the 1600 Quarto a memorial reconstruction or report. Taylor demonstrated the inadequacy of A. S. Cairncross’s case for supposing that F’s use of foul papers was indirect, by way of marked-up copy of a Quarto reprint. He found only the usual authorial loose ends in F, not evidence of the wholesale revision imagined by Dover Wilson and the new Arden editor J. H. Walter.