Event Comment: The
Duke's Company. Pepys does not indicate that this performance is the premiere, and
Summers,
The Playhouse of Pepys, p. 137, states, without offering his evidence, that the play first appeared on 11 Aug. 1664. The play also appears in
Herbert,
Dramatic Records, p. 138. If Pepys saw the premiere, the play was possibly given on 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24 Aug.
Pepys, Diary:
Mr Creed dining with me I got him to give my wife and me a play this afternoon, lending him money to do it, which is a fal
lacy that I have found now once, to avoyde my vowe with, but never to be more practised I swear, and to the new play, at the Duke's house, of
Henry the Fifth; a most noule play, writ by my
Lord Orrery; wherein
Betterton,
Harris, and
Ianthe's parts are most incomparably wrote and done, and the whole play the most full of height and raptures of wit and sense, that ever I heard; having but one incongruity, or what did not please me in it, that is, that
King Harry promises to plead for Tudor to their Mistresse,
Princesse Katherine of France, more than when it comes to it he seems to do; and
Tudor refused by her with some kind of indignity, not with a difficulty and honour that it ought to have been done in to him.
Downes,
Roscius Anglicanus, pp. 27-28: This Play was Splendidly Cloath'd:
The King, in the
Duke of York's Coronation Suit;
Owen Tudor, in
King Charle's:
Duke of Burgundy, in the
Lord of Oxford's, and the rest all New. It was Excellently Perform'd, and Acted 10 Days Successively