Earliest known manuscript extracts from Henry IV Part 1

Sometime in the final years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, someone copied sixty-three lines from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 into the final leaves of a notebook devoted primarily to his Latin notes on metaphysics and theology. The compiler selected twenty excerpts of varying length—from one line to a dozen—almost exclusively from the main plot of the play. The selections show a particular interest in the subjects of peace, war, dishonor, cowardice, and youthful ambition. King Henry is quoted the most with thirty-two lines from four speeches. 

The extracts from Henry IV Part 1 in BL Add. MS 64078 were copied, with the manuscript upside-down, on the final flyleaf and end pastedown of the notebook (following the order fols. 47v , 48r, and 47r), showing that the compiler was not worried about the presentation of his jottings, but was simply trying to exploit any space left in his notebook, a phenomenon common at the time. Nevertheless, the compiler already shows some care in the way the extracts are chosen and organized, anticipating, as Laura Estill has observed, “the appearance and use of later manuscript extracts” (Estill, 11), as for instance those found in Edward Pudsey’s notebook (fragments of which are now held at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Bodleian Library). The extracts are selected and extracted in a continuous sequence, following their chronological order in the play. Some are accompanied by a marginal comment highlighting the topic or function of the lines excerpted: for example, the marginalia “in praise of one” indicates that the extract next to it, “Amongst a grove y^e very straitest plant” (fol. 47v), is a metaphor that can be used to describe someone worthy of praise. 

The compiler slightly altered some of the extracts by removing speakers and local references, and by changing some of the syntax and grammar of the lines in order to make them independent from their original context and more universally applicable. This is a common aspect of dramatic extracting practice. Because of the presence of some of these alterations, it has generally been believed that these lines were jotted down during a performance of the play, and then copied into this manuscript; however, it is not possible to exclude the possibility that the variations were solely the result of appropriation actively carried out by the copyist. Furthermore, as the date of the extracts is not precise, we cannot know for certain whether these were copied before they were published for the first time, in 1598, or not. 

The manuscript, BL Add. MS 64078, acquired by the British Library at a Sotheby’s sale in 1986, was compiled around 1594-1603. It is one of the few surviving manuscripts from before ca. 1600 containing extracts from professional plays, and it is the first to display excerpts from Henry IV Part 1. Even if it is not possible to precisely date when these quotations were added to the manuscript, we can speculate that it was between 1594, the year in which the theological notes were written, as stated in the title prefacing them (“Notae ex discussionibus Sorbonicis. Parisi 1594,” fol. 3), and 1603, the year in which Elizabeth I died, as suggested by the fact that the word “king” in one of the extracts was substituted with the word “queen.”

The identity of the author of these notes is also uncertain: the original copyist simply entitled the notes “De Deo” (fol. 3) but left them anonymous. Only subsequently did another contemporary hand expand the title to “Notae ex discursu Thomae Harrioti (Ut Credo) [De Deo]” (fol. 3), identifying the compiler as Thomas Harriot, a mathematician and natural philosopher. Harriot (ca. 1560-1621), a contemporary of Shakespeare, was admired throughout Europe for his intellectual achievements, and his connections with the court would certainly make him a notable collector of Shakespearean extracts. However, over the years Harriot also acquired a reputation for impiety, and, as Hilton Kelliher has suggested in his analysis of the manuscript, this “reputation for unorthodox theological views” could have influenced the choice of ascribing these notes to him, basing “this attribution on no evidence other than association of ideas” (Kelliher, 148).

Kelliher argues that the co-existence of dramatic excerpts alongside Latin notes on a metaphysical subject testifies “to the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays among his more articulate contemporaries” (Kelliher, 145). Henry IV Part 1 in particular was greatly appreciated, both in print and on stage, throughout the seventeenth century, and was also well-received by various compilers of manuscript and print collections: first mentioned by Meres in his 1598 Palladis Tamia, it was extracted in print, for the first time, in Belvedere and England’s Parnassus (both 1600), and reappeared again in later manuscripts (for example BL Egerton MS 2446, ca. 1620) and printed collections (see Cotgrave’s The English Treasury of Wit and Language, 1655).

Hilton Kelliher presents a full analysis of the manuscript with transcriptions and images in “Contemporary Manuscript Extracts from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I.” Because the original manuscript was heavily damaged by water, MS Facsimile *1033 is available for consultation at the British Library. A complete transcription of the extracts from Henry IV Part 1 from BL Add. MS 64078 is also available online in the original and normalized spelling on DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts.