crowned at Paris (1431), Talbot was still a prisoner to the French, Exeter was dead, and Gloucester in England serving as the King's lieutenant.
IV. i. 19. Patay. The Folios erroneously print 'Poictiers,' doubtless from confusion in the compositor's mind with the Black Prince's great victory at Poitiers seventy-three years before (1356). For the battle of Patay, cf. note on I. i. 110, 111.
IV. i. 181 S. d. Flourish. Modern editors place this 'Flourish' in the stage direction following line 173, after the exit of the king. It probably belongs there.
IV. ii. A lapse of twenty-two years, from Henry's coronation (1431) to Talbot's last campaign (1453), is covered rather skilfully by the concluding portion of the previous scene.
IV. ii. 10, 11. my three attendants, Lean famine, quartering steel, and climbing fire. These words furnish a significant parallel to those in the Prologue preceding Act I of Henry V, lines 6-8:
'and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire
Crouch for employment.'
The figures are not identical, but each bears the Shakespearean stamp, and both (more particularly that in the present play) are reminiscent of a speech which the chroniclers report Henry V to have made to the besieged citizens of Rouen.
IV. iii. 47. vulture of sedition. A figurative allusion to the vulture which fed in the bosom of the bound Prometheus.
IV. iii. 50. scarce cold conqueror. Henry V had been dead thirty-one years when Talbot fell, but the hyperbole is dramatically effective and tends in a very Shakespearean way to give cohesion and the sense of rapid movement.
