Thank you so much for your fascinating post, Adam! I love this kind of hyper-focused analysis. I agree with you and the other commentators that 'table' should be left as is. Scholars and editors should annotate, elucidate, and enrich readers' understanding of Shakespeare's text, not amend it.
As a puppeteer, and one who has performed Shakespeare with puppets - Orsino as a huge alien but that's more there than here - I have long held an interest in tabletop theatre and written about it in fiction where you can stage what you like without having to construct it till all hours. Not only should we leave interpretation to the footnotes and leave "typos" in, the typo here is the colon. Ink spots (or just a mid-line breath, if not a typo at all). If his "Flowers" was not euphemistic spunk - highly unlikely unless heroic rallying, as they call it - the succession of commas signals to the actor breathless relation of the event. And that he has made flowers with his pleasing fingertips, and a field. He's made art, as you say, and travelled into it.
"Flowers" seems a stretch, bt tabletop theatre is fascinating. I just wrote a "History of Fantasy" and I'm struck that you can evoke the scale and range of epic Fantasy by spending a billion dollars and three years roaming over New Zealand, or you can do that literally on a tabletop, playing Dungeons and Dragons.
King Arthur has just been mentioned here, and in an erroneous way: we know this character is someone who gets things wrong. To me, the obvious table to be referring to in this context is the Round Table, so…
…is it maybe just a joke? This character, who has got Falstaff’s character wrong, describes him as being “as sharp as the round table” while being blind to the irony. I like “a table of green fields” in that kind of context because as you say it’s evocative of England and Patriotism* and so on; I think it would feel Arthurian to me even if he’d not been mentioned a few lines beforehand
And I suppose although Arthur’s Table is not sharp – having equal space for his knights and no head seat for a king – a sharp table might be a good thing to be praising in these Histories to be seen by the Crown
Apparently the line has been linked by other people to the round table in Winchester Hall— recently repainted by Henry VIII, in green and white.
Wikipedia says that the Winchester table itself might be related to the concept of the Wheel of Life, the knights representing life stages moving towards a dignified end? But I don’t think I really trust the source, and that feels even more speculative a link than the rest of this
I am not in any way a Shakespeare expert, but I've seen a fair amount and it is very rare for the grammar not to make sense. This is missing a verb unless you are saying that "his nose (actually) was...a table of green fields". It seems to me to be the sort of error that a person might make when transcribing the play by ear. "What was that word, sounded like "table"? I'll work it out later."
I'm not a Shakespeare specialist, but I know enough to report that scholars distinguish "good quarto" editions of plays from "bad quarto" editions along those lines: the idea being that a Good Quarto is mostly printed from a manuscript playscript, and a Bad Quarto is some dude attending the play and writing down what he can remember.
The text I quote in the post is from the First Folio of 1623. I know there are both Good and Bad Quartos of the play, but I'm not sure what the textual history of this passage is in all of them. ("Q1 of Henry V is a "bad quarto", a shortened version of the play that might be an infringing copy or reported text. A second quarto, a reprint of Q1, was published in 1602 by Pavier; another reprint was issued as Q3 in 1619, with a false date of 1608—part of William Jaggard's False Folio. The superior text was first printed in the First Folio in 1623.")
2. I'd prefer a text that left the puzzler as it is, but I understand why some editors feel they need to emend for ease of performance. But Folger's eliminating the comic dialect of "'a" seems merely tone deaf.
I'd hoped for some sort of text-based condensation, maybe procedural, or filtered through a sense of humor (à la "A Humament" or Ronald Johnson's "RADI OS"), or even greatest-tunes-only (like the one-night version of Wagner's Ring a local opera company put on). But for all of Forced Entertainment's many challenging virtues, they retain an old-fashioned avant-garde disdain for Shakespeare's poetry, and so their renditions are basically plot summaries. Given a charismatic performer and a ridiculous enough plot, the results can still be forcibly entertaining, and it was certainly a fine use of COVID-19 lockdown time.
It's a lovely image, but it cannot be brought even close to making sense in that context. I agree that changing a hypothetical "babled" to Table would be a weird emendation, but I find that easier to swallow than assuming Shakespeare put a floating noun phrase in the middle of a pathetic-comical vernacular prose speech. Maybe in Pericles - late-period WS sometimes seems to be doing tricks so as not to get bored - but not in H5.
My own theory (everyone's got one!) is that the hypothetical MS emendation was from "bable", not "babled". ("A Babel of green fields?" thinks the hard-pressed compositor, unconsciously priming himself to reach for an initial cap.)
Thank you so much for your fascinating post, Adam! I love this kind of hyper-focused analysis. I agree with you and the other commentators that 'table' should be left as is. Scholars and editors should annotate, elucidate, and enrich readers' understanding of Shakespeare's text, not amend it.
As a puppeteer, and one who has performed Shakespeare with puppets - Orsino as a huge alien but that's more there than here - I have long held an interest in tabletop theatre and written about it in fiction where you can stage what you like without having to construct it till all hours. Not only should we leave interpretation to the footnotes and leave "typos" in, the typo here is the colon. Ink spots (or just a mid-line breath, if not a typo at all). If his "Flowers" was not euphemistic spunk - highly unlikely unless heroic rallying, as they call it - the succession of commas signals to the actor breathless relation of the event. And that he has made flowers with his pleasing fingertips, and a field. He's made art, as you say, and travelled into it.
"Flowers" seems a stretch, bt tabletop theatre is fascinating. I just wrote a "History of Fantasy" and I'm struck that you can evoke the scale and range of epic Fantasy by spending a billion dollars and three years roaming over New Zealand, or you can do that literally on a tabletop, playing Dungeons and Dragons.
Here is an absurd speculation:
King Arthur has just been mentioned here, and in an erroneous way: we know this character is someone who gets things wrong. To me, the obvious table to be referring to in this context is the Round Table, so…
…is it maybe just a joke? This character, who has got Falstaff’s character wrong, describes him as being “as sharp as the round table” while being blind to the irony. I like “a table of green fields” in that kind of context because as you say it’s evocative of England and Patriotism* and so on; I think it would feel Arthurian to me even if he’d not been mentioned a few lines beforehand
*or so I am told, being Scottish
And I suppose although Arthur’s Table is not sharp – having equal space for his knights and no head seat for a king – a sharp table might be a good thing to be praising in these Histories to be seen by the Crown
THERE’S MORE
Apparently the line has been linked by other people to the round table in Winchester Hall— recently repainted by Henry VIII, in green and white.
Wikipedia says that the Winchester table itself might be related to the concept of the Wheel of Life, the knights representing life stages moving towards a dignified end? But I don’t think I really trust the source, and that feels even more speculative a link than the rest of this
I had not heard of the possible Winchester connection! That's interesting.
I am not in any way a Shakespeare expert, but I've seen a fair amount and it is very rare for the grammar not to make sense. This is missing a verb unless you are saying that "his nose (actually) was...a table of green fields". It seems to me to be the sort of error that a person might make when transcribing the play by ear. "What was that word, sounded like "table"? I'll work it out later."
I'm not a Shakespeare specialist, but I know enough to report that scholars distinguish "good quarto" editions of plays from "bad quarto" editions along those lines: the idea being that a Good Quarto is mostly printed from a manuscript playscript, and a Bad Quarto is some dude attending the play and writing down what he can remember.
That makes sense,thanks. So is this phrase based on a "good quarto"?
The text I quote in the post is from the First Folio of 1623. I know there are both Good and Bad Quartos of the play, but I'm not sure what the textual history of this passage is in all of them. ("Q1 of Henry V is a "bad quarto", a shortened version of the play that might be an infringing copy or reported text. A second quarto, a reprint of Q1, was published in 1602 by Pavier; another reprint was issued as Q3 in 1619, with a false date of 1608—part of William Jaggard's False Folio. The superior text was first printed in the First Folio in 1623.")
1. In case you somehow missed it: https://www.forcedentertainment.com/projects/complete-works-table-top-shakespeare/
2. I'd prefer a text that left the puzzler as it is, but I understand why some editors feel they need to emend for ease of performance. But Folger's eliminating the comic dialect of "'a" seems merely tone deaf.
I had indeed missed Tabletop Theatre. Is it really a Complete Works? That would take ages (or is that just the name of the project).
"Complete Titles" would be more accurate.
I'd hoped for some sort of text-based condensation, maybe procedural, or filtered through a sense of humor (à la "A Humament" or Ronald Johnson's "RADI OS"), or even greatest-tunes-only (like the one-night version of Wagner's Ring a local opera company put on). But for all of Forced Entertainment's many challenging virtues, they retain an old-fashioned avant-garde disdain for Shakespeare's poetry, and so their renditions are basically plot summaries. Given a charismatic performer and a ridiculous enough plot, the results can still be forcibly entertaining, and it was certainly a fine use of COVID-19 lockdown time.
It's a lovely image, but it cannot be brought even close to making sense in that context. I agree that changing a hypothetical "babled" to Table would be a weird emendation, but I find that easier to swallow than assuming Shakespeare put a floating noun phrase in the middle of a pathetic-comical vernacular prose speech. Maybe in Pericles - late-period WS sometimes seems to be doing tricks so as not to get bored - but not in H5.
My own theory (everyone's got one!) is that the hypothetical MS emendation was from "bable", not "babled". ("A Babel of green fields?" thinks the hard-pressed compositor, unconsciously priming himself to reach for an initial cap.)
An original emendation, I think. I wonder: shift the line towards being about language and confusion? Maybe.