Navigating Digital Text, Performance, & Historical Resources
Conclusion and Further Reading
These major sources dominate source studies of Shakespeare’s texts. What does history, then, really mean – the facts or the bent of the narrative? In Henry V, Shakespeare mixes facts and narrative into the play that modern audiences know today. Clearly, it remains impossible to fully divorce the layers and levels of adaptation from “the history” of The History, or historiography (the study of how history is told) from history itself. Through the compilation of multiple sources, Shakespeare created (and revised, as detailed in Daniel Yabut’s article, his version of the historical narrative, using popular narrative, drama, and musical and poetic arts to build not a definitive, but perhaps a definitively derivative definition of history.
