Transeditions: Shakespeare’s two french english lessons

Editions translate. Translations edit. Although these principles apply to all editions and translations, they are particularly conspicuous in some transeditions, like Jerome’s Latin Bible, or Shakespeare’s Henry V. Shakespeare’s play survives in two very different versions: a quarto text published in 1600 (The Chronicle History of Henry the fift) and the posthumous 1623 folio Comedies, Histories, but both texts also contain other mistakes that cannot be plausibly attributed to the characters, seeming instead to have been introduced by compositors in the printing house or by copyists preparing the manuscripts those compositors were given. Can we distinguish the deliberate mistranslations from the accidental ones? Abridgement from expansion? Shakespeare’s own mistakes in French from the mistakes made by those who transmitted his texts? If so, how?