Henry V
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
1599

INTRODUCTION

The play Henry V by the great Elizabethan playwright William Shakespeare was first performed in London, England in 1599. It may have been the first play performed at the Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames River. The play tells the story of one of the most popular English kings, Henry V (1387–1422, reigning 1413–1422), and it was probably a spectacular opening production for the new theater. It featured two battle scenes, a plot against the king's life, several scenes of bawdy comedy, stirring patriotic speeches, and even a witty courtship in the last act. The battles would have been thrilling to the audience, as drum rolls and trumpet blasts evoked an army on the advance, and cannons firing backstage evoked the sound and smell of battle. During the siege of the French city of Harfleur in Act 3, ladders were placed against a gallery at the back of the stage to resemble the walls of the actual besieged city.

Shakespeare's career as a playwright had begun ten years before, with a tetralogy, or series of four plays, about the English kings Henry VI (the son of Henry V) and Richard III. In 1595, he began a new tetralogy that followed the struggle over the English monarchy and Henry IV's eventual overthrow of Richard II, perhaps by murdering him. At the time Shakespeare was writing, England was enjoying a long period of domestic peace under a popular monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, who had ruled since 1558. The plays, however, depicted a troubled time nearly two centuries before, when unscrupulous ambition and violence nearly always accompanied the transfer of monarchical power. These stories held more than historical interest for their audience. Elizabeth was sixty-six years old in 1599; she had no spouse or children, and thus had no heir. Shakespeare's audience could not help but wonder if the same sort of turmoil was in their future.

Henry V was the fourth play in the tetralogy. It continued the story set out in the first three plays, but it was also a departure from them. Richard II was a serious political drama, and the two parts of Henry IV featured the antics of Henry's irresponsible son Prince Hal, who spent much of his time making mischief with a group of petty thieves and drunkards led by one of Shakespeare's most popular characters, Sir John Falstaff. The scenes with Hal and Falstaff and the secondary characters Bardolph, Pistol, and Mistress Quickly were wildly popular, and there is some reason to believe that Shakespeare wrote the second part of Henry IV to cash in on the success of the comic scenes in the first part.

By the end of part two, circumstances have forced maturity on Prince Hal. He had led men into battle in defense of his father's crown, and at the end of the play, upon his father's death, he inherited the crown himself. One of his first acts as King Henry V was to renounce his old playmate Falstaff forever, which broke the old man's heart. As the first audience for Henry V was to discover, the giddy Prince Hal of Henry IV had grown into a forceful, eloquent, and decisive leader. And unlike the first three plays of the tetralogy, which are about court intrigue and bloody civil war, the fourth play shows England united (with a few exceptions) behind a charismatic leader in an ambitious foreign war, even if the justification for that war is a little unclear.

BIOGRAPHY
William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare, the first surviving child of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, was baptized on April 26, 1564, in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire, England. Eighteen years later, he was granted a license on November 27, 1582, to marry Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior. Their first child, Susanna, was born six months later, and two years later twins, a boy and a girl, were born. Shakespeare eventually moved to London (without his family) and became a well-known actor. He appears in the cast list of a play by Ben Jonson and is listed as a founder of an acting company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men.

His first plays were probably the three parts of Henry VI, written between 1589 and 1591. In this history tetralogy and the one that follows, Shakespeare's fascination with war, both civil and foreign, is evident. In the next twenty-two years, he wrote or collaborated on nearly forty plays. Many of them include wars or battle scenes, including Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello. He is also famous for his 154 sonnets, poems that consist of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, a style he invented. He retired to Stratford near the end of his life and died in April 1616, at the age of fifty-two.

Henry is portrayed as a complex and sometimes brutal man, willing to sacrifice many lives, even those of his friends, for a controversial cause. Although Henry V is not considered one of Shakespeare's great plays (Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth would follow in the next six years), it remains one of his most popular, whether produced as a patriotic spectacle or as a subtle examination of moral ambiguity and the savage realities of war.

PLOT SUMMARY

Prologue

In the Prologue to Henry V, the Chorus, which narrates the play, introduces it by asking the audience to believe that a few actors ("the flat unraiseèd spirits") and a simple stage ("this unworthy scaffold") can represent a king's army and the battlefields of France. The Chorus asks the audience to imagine that each actor represents a thousand men and to use its thoughts to "deck," or dress, the king.

Act 1, Scene 1

At the king's court in London, two English Catholic Church officials, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely, discuss a proposed law that would allow the crown to confiscate church property. They are not particularly worried, however. Henry had a wild, irresponsible youth (chronicled in Henry IV, parts one and two), but since his father, King Henry IV's death, he has grown into a serious and thoughtful ruler. He is also, says Ely, a "true lover of the holy Church." To ensure the king's support, Canterbury says he offered Henry a large financial contribution for his military campaign to win the crown of France. He also tells how he began to encourage Henry's claim to the French crown, but he was interrupted by the arrival of the French ambassador.

Act 1, Scene 2

King Henry comes looking for Canterbury, attended by several lords, or noblemen—the dukes of Gloucester, Bedford, Clarence, Warwick, Westmorland, and Exeter. Henry asks the archbishop to explain the Salic Law of France, which forbids inheriting the French crown from a female ancestor. The archbishop launches into a lengthy and complex explanation of why Henry's claim is just, even though his French ancestor is Queen Isabella. The archbishop and several of the lords tell Henry that should he adopt the warlike spirit of his ancestors, the people will support his claim. Henry worries that the Scots will invade England if he invades France, just as they did when his grandfather, Edward III, fought in France. The others tell him that he will have to divide his forces. Several of the lords leave, and Henry calls for the ambassador of France, who tells the king that the Dauphin (the son of the French king) wishes to inform Henry that conquering France will not be easy. The Dauphin has sent Henry a gift, but it turns out to be an insult—a crate of tennis balls—a sly reference to Henry's reputation as a wild youth, implying he is not serious enough to carry out an invasion of France. Henry sends the ambassador back to the Dauphin with the message that he will turn the tennis balls into cannonballs, and Henry tells his lords to prepare for an immediate invasion of France.

Act 2, Prologue

The Chorus sets the scene, describing how the English prepare for war and how the French try to avert it by mobilizing a plot to kill Henry. They have bribed three English lords—the Earl of Cambridge, Lord Scroop, and Sir Thomas Grey—to kill the king before the English forces leave for France from the port of Southampton. The Chorus again asks the audience to use their imaginations to cover the distance from London to Southampton.

Act 2, Scene 1

Despite the Chorus's introduction, however, the first scene of Act 2 is set in London with several of Henry's friends from his youth, characters that appeared in Henry IV, when Henry was known as Prince Hal. Bardolph and Nym, comic rogues, meet in the street; Bardolph wonders if Nym is still friends with Pistol, who has recently married Mistress Quickly, a character who also appeared in the earlier play. Mistress Quickly was engaged to Nym but married Pistol instead. When Pistol and Mistress Quickly meet Nym and Bardolph in the street, Nym and Pistol draw their swords and threaten to kill each other. As Mistress Quickly and Bardolph try to stop the duel, the Boy enters. The Boy is the servant of Sir John Falstaff, a character who does not appear in this play but who was young Prince Hal's most important and most disreputable friend in Henry IV. After Hal became King Henry V, he told the old man he never wanted to see him again. The Boy announces that because of Henry's rejection, Falstaff lies dying of a broken heart. Pistol and Nym agree to be friends again, especially if Pistol pays Nym some money he owes him, and they all go to see the dying Falstaff.

Act 2, Scene 2

In the port of Southampton, the dukes of Exeter, Bedford, and Westmorland enter, discussing the conspiracy against Henry. They know that the king knows of the plot, but so far, he has pretended not to, keeping the three conspirators—Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey—close to him. Now, as Henry and the three conspirators enter, Henry asks them what they would do with an unnamed man who insulted him yesterday. The king is inclined to pardon the man, because he was drunk, but the three conspirators urge Henry to be unmerciful. At this point, Henry reveals that he knows about the conspiracy, and Grey and Scroop beg for his pardon. Henry uses their argument against mercy for traitors against them and berates them for ingratitude and disloyalty. Only Cambridge defends himself, saying that he was not tempted by the French gold (the play does not give his reason, but historically, Cambridge believed that his brother-in-law, the Earl of March, should have been king rather than Henry). Henry sentences them to death and sends them away, then he tells his loyal lords to board ship for France.

Act 2, Scene 3

Back in London, Falstaff has died, and his friends Bardolph, Nym, Pistol, and Mistress Quickly mourn him. They recall his last words, though they cannot agree exactly on what he said. Then Bardolph reminds them that they must leave for Southampton, to join the king's campaign against France, where Bardolph hopes to do well by looting. Pistol and Bardolph kiss Mistress Quickly goodbye, but Nym does not.

Act 2, Scene 4

At the royal court in France, the French king Charles VI, his son the Dauphin, and several French lords debate how dangerous Henry is. The king orders his lords and the Dauphin to prepare the country for war. The Dauphin agrees, though he says Henry is a frivolous king and no real threat. One of the lords, the Constable, protests that Henry's frivolity is only a trick to fool his enemies, and the French king points out that Henry is descended from the same line as Edward III and Edward, the Black Prince of Wales, who defeated the French at Creécy in 1346. The Duke of Exeter, Henry's emissary, enters and demands that the French king recognize Henry's claim to the French throne. If he does not, the French people's suffering will be Charles's responsibility. The Dauphin demands to know if there is any message from Henry for him. Exeter says there is a message, "scorn and defiance, slight regard, contempt," and he promises that the Dauphin will come to regret his insulting gift of tennis balls. He further promises that France will soon understand the difference between the younger Henry and Henry the king. The French king promises an answer tomorrow, and Exeter tells him he had better hurry, because Henry and his army are already in France.

Act 3, Prologue

Once again the Chorus sets the scene, asking the audience to imagine Henry's ships departing for France. The audience also learns that, as a counter offer to forestall the invasion, the French king has offered Henry his daughter Katherine in marriage and some insignificant dukedom as her dowry. It is not nearly enough, and Henry lays siege to the French town of Harfleur.

Act 3, Scene 1

At the height of the battle for Harfleur, Henry urges his men on. In peacetime, he says, "nothing so becomes a man / As modest stillness and humility," but in wartime, he must be like a tiger, full of rage. He urges his men to fight to honor their fathers, who won earlier battles in France, and not to dishonor their mothers. He exhorts the men to show their breeding and fight in the name of Henry, England, and Saint George, the patron saint of England.

Act 3, Scene 2

As the battle of Harfleur continues, Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol are reluctant to advance against the French. They say they would much rather be back in England drinking, but they are driven forward by Captain Fluellen. Before he follows them, the Boy notes that all three together are not as much of a man as he is, for Bardolph is a coward, Pistol is a blowhard, and Nym has never hurt anybody but himself. Furthermore, they are using the war as an excuse to loot, and the Boy is disgusted by it. Meanwhile, several officers of the English army—Fluellen, who is Welsh; Jamy, who is Scottish; and Macmorris, who is Irish—bicker with each other in their unique national accents over who is the best, most knowledgeable, and most disciplined soldier. They are about to come to blows when the besieged town announces that it wants to parley with the English army.

Act 3, Scene 3

Before the walls of Harfleur, Henry gives the Governor of the town one last chance to surrender. If he does not, Henry threatens to reduce his city to ashes and turn England's soldiers loose, letting them rape the city's young women and slaughter its old men and children. Henry tells the Governor to surrender now, while Henry can still control his men, or else the Governor will be responsible for the consequences. The Governor surrenders and asks for mercy. Henry sends his men through the gates and tells Exeter to fortify the city and to be merciful to its inhabitants. Meanwhile, Henry will withdraw the rest of his exhausted army to the port of Calais.

Act 3, Scene 4

This scene, set at the French court in Rouen, is performed almost entirely in French. In it, the princess Katherine, who was offered to Henry in marriage, asks her elderly lady-in-waiting, Alice, to teach her some English words. Alice teaches her the English words for "hand," "fingers," "fingernails," "elbow," "chin," and others, most of which Katherine mispronounces, sometimes with vulgar connotations.

Act 3, Scene 5

Also at the court in Rouen, the king and his noblemen are upset at Henry's success. The Dauphin asks if the French are worthy of their ancestors. The Duke of Brittany says that if the English cannot be driven back, he will sell his dukedom and buy a dirty farm in England. The Constable wonders how the English, who live in a foggy climate and boil their food, can be so brave against warm-blooded, wine-drinking Frenchmen. The Dauphin complains that Frenchmen's wives offer themselves to "the lust of English youth," mocking their husbands. The French king exhorts his lords to rise up and defeat Henry. The Constable says he is only sorry that Henry's army is so small and exhausted because they will probably give up without a fight. The king sends them off to fight Henry, but he asks the Dauphin to stay behind.

Act 3, Scene 6

At the English camp in northern France, Captain Gower receives a report from Captain Fluellen. The Duke of Exeter has successfully defended a bridge against a French assault. As they speak, Pistol enters. His friend Bardolph was caught stealing a crucifix from a French church, and Exeter has sentenced him to death for looting. Pistol hopes Fluellen will save Bardolph's life, but Fluellen says that discipline is so important to an army that he would allow his own brother to be executed for looting. Pistol curses him and exits. Gower calls Pistol a rascal, and Fluellen says Pistol spoke very bravely during the battle on the bridge. Gower replies that rogues like Pistol go to war only so they can brag about their exploits and that Fluellen should not be fooled by such talk. The king arrives and asks Fluellen about the battle at the bridge. Fluellen tells him it went well and then mentions Bardolph's predicament. Even though the king and Bardolph were once friends, he commands that the execution go forward, saying that the French population will be easier to manage if the English do not steal from them or abuse them. Montjoy, a French emissary, approaches the king and tells him that the French let him win at Harfleur, and that Henry is now too weak to defeat the French army. Henry tells him that he will darken the soil with French blood. As Montjoy leaves, the Duke of Gloucester says he hopes the French do not attack them now, but Henry orders the army forward.

Act 3, Scene 7

Late at night in the French army camp near the town of Agincourt, the Dauphin and several French nobles await the arrival of the English army. The Dauphin brags that in the coming battle, "my way shall be paved with English faces," and Lord Rambures wants to place a bet on how many English prisoners he will capture. When the Dauphin leaves to put on his armor, the noblemen talk about him behind his back. They say the only courage the Dauphin has ever shown was when he beat his servant. A messenger arrives to say that English lie within fifteen hundred paces of the French camp, and the French nobles say they feel sorry for Henry and his feeble army. By ten in the morning, says Lord Orleans, "we shall each have a hundred Englishmen."

Act 4, Prologue

Now the Chorus asks the audience to imagine the two enemy camps at night near Agincourt, close enough that each can hear sentinels exchanging passwords, the neighing of horses, and the hammer of metalsmiths preparing knight's armor for the coming battle. The overconfident French eagerly await the dawn, while the English wait patiently by their fires and think about the coming danger. Meanwhile the English king walks among his men so that they may take comfort from his confidence, providing all who encounter him with "a little touch of Harry in the night."

Act 4, Scene 1

In the English camp at Agincourt, Henry sends two of his lords to summon his officers to his tent, then borrows a cloak from an old knight, Sir Thomas Erpingham, so that he can walk among his men without being recognized. He is challenged by Pistol, and tells Pistol that he is a Welshman named Harry le Roy, which is a pun: le roi means "the king" in French. Next he overhears Captain Fluellen telling Captain Gower not to talk so loudly just because the French are making noise. As they pass out of sight, three common soldiers enter—John Bates, Alexander Court, and Michael Williams. Henry tells them he is an officer in Erpingham's company and then discusses with them what the king might be thinking tonight. Henry says he is content to be here, because the king's cause is honorable. Williams replies that if the cause is not good, then the king will be judged harshly for the many the men he led to death. Henry disagrees, claiming the king is not responsible for the deaths of particular soldiers, and besides, not all the soldiers going into battle are innocent. Some may be guilty of crimes, so their deaths will be just punishment for their sins. "Every / subject's duty is the King's," says Henry, "but every subject's soul is his own." Finally, Henry and Williams (who still does not know he is speaking to the king) agree to settle the argument with a fight after the battle, if they both live. They give each other a glove, so they will recognize one another after the battle. The soldiers leave.

Henry, alone now, considers the extra burdens that a king carries. Set apart from all other people by the ceremony of the crown and the flattery of his nobles, a king cannot have even a simple, restful night's sleep as the common peasant can; he must always be considering the safety and welfare of his subjects. Erpingham approaches and Henry asks him to assemble his nobles at his tent. Alone, he prays to the God of battles for strength in his soldier's hearts and asks God not to hold his father's crimes against him in the coming battle. (As told in Shakespeare's earlier plays, Richard II and Henry IV, parts one and two, Henry's father Henry IV took the crown from Richard II and then spent much of his reign fighting off other contenders for the crown.)

Act 4, Scene 2

At dawn in the French camp, the Dauphin and his lords are feeling cocky about the battle. A messenger tells them that the English army is arrayed for battle, and the Constable says they look ragged and starved, with scarcely enough blood to go around for French blades. Another lord makes fun of how hungry and weak the British look and asks what the Dauphin is waiting for. The Dauphin jokes about sending dinner to the English first and fighting them afterwards.

Act 4, Scene 3

In the English camp, the lords realize that the French outnumber them five to one, and they wish each other well. Westmorland wishes they had more men; in the play's most famous and most stirring speech, Henry says he would not wish for one more man, because fewer men will have more glory to share among them. Henry says that the men who fight on this day (the feast day of St. Crispin, October 25), will remember it for the rest of their lives and will share a closer bond with each other than with anyone who did not fight in the battle. Henry says that whoever sheds his blood with him today will be his brother. Montjoy, the French herald, arrives to tell Henry that the French will let his army go in peace if he will withdraw from the field. Henry refuses and orders his army forward.

Act 4, Scene 4

On the battlefield, Pistol threatens a terrified French soldier with his sword. The Boy translates for Pistol and the French soldier, and the soldier agrees to pay Pistol a large sum of money if Pistol will spare him. Pistol and the soldier leave, and the Boy goes off to join other boys in guarding the English army's luggage.

Act 4, Scene 5

On the battlefield, the Dauphin and the French lords are in despair because they are losing the battle. The Constable suggests they surrender, and Lord Orleans says they still outnumber the English, if only the French could organize their forces.

Act 4, Scene 6

Henry knows he has done well so far on the battlefield, but the French are still fighting. The Duke of Exeter tells Henry tearfully of the death of the Duke of Suffolk. Then Henry sees that the French are reinforcing their scattered forces, and he orders his men to kill the French prisoners.

Act 4, Scene 7

On the battlefield, Fluellen and Gower reveal that the enemy has killed all the boys who were sent to guard the army's luggage. The French have also burned Henry's tent and carried away his things; Gower assumes that this is why Henry ordered the French prisoners killed. Fluellen compares Henry with the ancient Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great, comparing the way Alexander killed his friend Cleitus with the way Henry renounced Falstaff. The king enters, angry about the slaughter of the boys. He demands that the remaining French clear the battlefield and orders the execution of the remaining French prisoners. Montjoy arrives again, this time to concede that the French have lost the battle, and to ask Henry for permission to gather the French dead and wounded. Henry asks the name of the castle nearby, and Montjoy tells him that it is Agincourt. Fluellen reminds Henry of his great-uncle, Edward the Black Prince of Wales, and his victory in France.

Williams enters wearing the glove Henry gave him in Act 4, Scene 1 and, not realizing that the king is the man he argued with earlier, tells Henry he plans to fight the man with whom he exchanged gloves. Henry sends Williams away to find Captain Gower and then gives Williams's glove to Fluellen and tells him to wear it. He tells Fluellen he took the glove from the body of a French knight he killed named Alençon, and that if anybody challenges Fluellen because of the glove, Fluellen should capture him, because he is a friend of the enemy. Then he sends Fluellen to fetch Captain Gower, too. After Fluellen leaves, Henry asks Warwick and Gloucester to follow Williams and Fluellen and make sure they do not hurt each other.

Act 4, Scene 8

Near the English camp, Williams escorts Captain Gower to the king, telling Gower that he thinks the king intends to knight the captain. They come upon Fluellen, and recognizing his glove, Williams thinks this is the man he intended to fight, and he strikes Fluellen. Fluellen, remembering what Henry told him about the glove he wears, calls Williams a traitor. Gower comes to Williams's defense. Just then, Warwick and Gloucester arrive, followed immediately by the king and Exeter. Williams and Fluellen each make their case against the other, and Henry reveals that he was the man Williams threatened to strike. Williams says if he had known it was the king, he never would have offended him. Henry fills Williams's glove with coins and hands it back to him, pardoning him. He also orders Fluellen to make up with Williams. An English herald arrives with a tally of the losses on both sides. Fifteen hundred French soldiers have been captured and ten thousand Frenchman killed, while only twenty-nine Englishmen have died. Henry gives credit to God for the victory and announces his victorious return to England by way of the French port at Calais.

Act V, Prologue

The Chorus asks the audience to imagine Henry's victorious return to England and the celebratory atmosphere in London. The play then skips forward five years, to Henry's second military campaign in France in 1417.

Act V, Scene 1

At the English army's camp in France, Captain Gower asks Fluellen why he is wearing a leek (a kind of onion) in his cap, even though it is not St. David's Day. (On St. David's Day—March 1—Welshmen wear leeks in their caps in memory of the Welsh defeat of the Saxons.) Fluellen says he does it to taunt Pistol, who demanded that Fluellen eat the leek. Pistol enters, and Fluellen beats him and forces him to eat the leek. Gower tells Pistol it serves him right, and Pistol thinks sadly of the death of his love, Mistress Quickly, in England. He decides to return home, where he can pass off the scars from Fluellen's beating as war wounds from France.

Act V, Scene 2

At the French court, Henry and his lords enter by one door, as the French king and queen, the princess Katherine, and their nobles, enter by another. Henry and the French king and queen great each other warmly; the French Duke of Burgundy compares France to a garden overrun by weeds and asks why they should not have peace. Henry says they will, as soon as they satisfy his demands. The French king says he has only glanced at Henry's demands and suggests a council. Henry empowers the English noblemen to speak for him and they, with the French king, queen, and nobles, leave to discuss the demands. Henry stays behind with Princess Katherine and Alice, the princess's lady-in-waiting. The princess speaks little English, and the king claims that his French is poor. Nonetheless he slyly but aggressively woos her, saying he is only a rough soldier, but that he loves her. He tries to get her to say that she loves him, but she repeatedly claims that she cannot understand what he is saying. When Katherine protests that she could not love the enemy of France, Henry says that he is not France's enemy, that he loves France so much he will not part with even a village of it. He tries to kiss her hand, and then her lips, but Alice explains that it is not the fashion in France for an unmarried girl to kiss someone. Henry kisses her anyway.

The French king and queen return along with the French and English noblemen, the French having agreed to all of Henry's demands. Henry asks the French king for permission to marry Katherine, and the king agrees. The French queen hopes this marriage will be the end of war between England and France. Henry commands that the wedding be arranged, saying he will keep all his oaths.

Epilogue

The Chorus returns one last time to sum up the action. Although Henry only ruled for nine years (he died at the age of thirty-five), he conquered France and left it to his son, Henry VI. Many years later, Henry VI lost France again. This became the subject of three popular early plays by Shakespeare (Henry VI, parts one, two, and three), and the Chorus closes by expressing hopes that this play, too, will meet with the public's approval.

THEMES

Heroes and Leaders

Of the seven English kings who appear in ten of William Shakespeare's plays, Henry V is depicted as the most heroic. He starts out as the wild and mischievous playmate of Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV parts one and two, but by the time of Henry V, the irresponsible Prince Hal of the earlier plays has renounced Falstaff and turned into a confident and decisive leader. In the play's opening scenes, he solicits davice from the Archbishop of Canterbury and his assembled lords as to whether he should invade France to claim the crown of that country: "May I with right and conscience make this claim?". However, his subsequent swift call for action implies that he had already made up his mind and was simply testing the court's support.

This confidence sets him apart from nearly all the other leaders—soldiers, kings, and princes—in Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare's most famous character, Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is almost the complete opposite of Henry V; Hamlet spends most of the play paralyzed by doubt, doubting himself and everyone around him. Shakespeare's more decisive leaders, such as Marc Antony in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra or Henry IV in Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV are often troubled with doubts or mixed motives. Indeed, decisiveness often has mixed consequences in Shakespeare's plays, as it does for the fictional kings Lear and Macbeth, each of whom makes a decision that later leads to disaster. Perhaps the only other king in Shakespeare's plays who shows Henry V's level of confidence is Richard III. However, Richard III is depicted as evil and manipulative, and his decisions ultimately lead to his defeat and death.

Henry, on the other hand, possesses an almost supernatural confidence that is a key factor in obtaining the results he desires. Henry is not simply more decisive than Shakespeare's other leaders; in this play, at least, he never makes a mistake. His invasion of France is successful, he defeats a superior force at Agincourt, and he wins Princess Katherine's hand, if not necessarily her heart. It is for this reason, no doubt, that Henry V has remained a popular play in England, where it is often performed as a patriotic spectacle, as it was in the 1944 film version directed by Laurence Olivier.

Violence and Brutality

Henry V is still an ambiguous character in certain ways. Henry may be confident and decisive, but some of his actions are uncommonly brutal by modern standards. Some allowance must be made for the harsher rules of medieval warfare and even for the more difficult lives of those living in Elizabethan England. Nonetheless, it remains true that, for a heroic character, Henry can be unusually cruel. With few exceptions, his response is merciless whenever someone crosses him. His execution of the traitors Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey in Act 2 is perhaps excusable, given that they intended to kill him. However, he toys with them before he sentences them, deceiving them into making an argument against mercy for traitors, which he then uses against them. Later, at the siege of Harfleur, he threatens to turn his men loose on the city, to rape its young women and slaughter its old men and children—"Your naked infants spitted upon pikes"—unless the town's governor surrenders immediately.

Later, at the Battle of Agincourt, Henry orders that the French prisoners be executed—an action that would be considered a war crime in modern times. Some interpretations, such as Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film version of the play, suggest that Henry orders this execution in a rage, as revenge for the French having killed the boys guarding the English luggage. Captain Gower, too, assumes that to be true, in the scene immediately following Henry's order. But Henry's brief, one-line command that "every soldier kill his prisoners" comes after Henry has learned that the French have brought reinforcements and before the audience learns of the boy's deaths, implying that Henry orders the executions simply because he needs manpower and cannot spare the men to watch the prisoners.

These actions are the relatively dispassionate decisions of a leader in wartime. However, Henry can be ruthless on a personal level as well. When Bardolph, his old friend from Falstaff's crew of rogues, is arrested for looting, Henry not only consents to his execution, he does not even refer to the fact that he used to know the man. He does not say Bardolph's name, just "We would have all such offenders so cut off." Falstaff's death, which occurs offstage, can also be laid at Henry's feet; it was Henry's renunciation of their friendship that led to the man's death from a broken heart. Shakespeare seems to imply that the reverse side of decisiveness is ruthlessness.

Duty

Further ambiguity arises in what is probably the most morally complex scene in the play, Act 4, Scene 1. Henry walks through the camp in disguise on the night before the battle, testing the resolve of his men. He encounters three common soldiers who do not recognize him. All three of the soldiers wish they were somewhere else and wonder if the king's cause is worth dying for. One of them, Michael Williams, puts it bluntly: "if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make." Speaking as an unknown stranger, the king makes a forceful and legalistic response; his reply boils down to the simple fact that a soldier's duty is to obey his king. He also shifts the debate in a subtle way by suggesting that many of the soldiers are sinners or criminals, and that their deaths are no concern of the king's. "Every subject's duty is the King's," says Henry, "but every subject's soul is his own." Michael Williams can only agree with this claim: "'Tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill upon his own head, the King is not to answer for it." To a contemporary reader, Henry sounds very modern in this scene; he speaks like a politician, answering the question he wants to answer instead of the one he was asked. Immediately following this encounter, Henry gives his only soliloquy—a monologue used to express the speaker's innermost thoughts—; even then, Williams's question has not raised doubt in Henry's mind about his cause, though it might have for Hamlet, King Lear, or Macbeth. Rather than questioning his actions, Henry spends fifty-five lines excusing himself and bemoaning the fact that a simple peasant, who has the luxury of sleeping untroubled through the night, carries a much lighter burden than the king.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The Wars for the Monarchy

Shakespeare wrote two tetralogies—two series consisting of four plays each—about the succession of the English monarchy from the late fourteenth century until the late fifteenth century. His first tetralogy is made up of Henry VI, parts one, two, and three, and Richard III.—These were the first plays Shakespeare ever produced. They dramatized the dynastic civil wars after the reign of Henry V, known as the Wars of the Roses (1455–1485), which occurred when two rival royal houses contested the legitimate claim to the English crown: the House of Lancaster and the House of York. Shakespeare's second tetralogy—Richard II, Henry IV, parts one and two, and Henry V—was written between 1595 and 1599 and reveals how that struggle originated in the late fourteenth century. Henry V is the turning point of the two tetralogies, the climax of one and the background of the other. The other seven plays in the two tetralogies are mainly concerned with who gets to be king and how that person wins (or steals) the crown and defends it against his rivals. Henry V is the only play of the series in which the king has no challengers and can devote his energies to a different goal, namely winning the crown of France.

The houses of Lancaster and York spent eighty-five years fighting for the throne, even though both were descended from Henry V's grandfather, Edward III. When Edward died in 1377, his grandson, Richard II, became king. Richard was only ten at the time, so his uncle John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, played the king's powerful role in politics. By the time Richard was old enough to reign on his own, a number of powerful noblemen opposed his rule. In 1399, Gaunt's son, Henry Bolingbroke, led these nobles in a rebellion against Richard and usurped his throne, becoming King Henry IV. Henry was descended from King Henry III (ruled 1216–1272) and used this ancestry to justify his claim to the crown; even so he spent much of his reign defending himself from powerful nobles who challenged his rule, some of whom had supported his struggle against Richard II. Henry IV was often ill during the final years of his reign, and two factions in his court contended for power: one led by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other led by the king's son. This struggle created tension between the king and his son, tension that persisted when Henry IV died in 1413 and his son became Henry V.

Henry V was born in 1387, and after his father died in 1413, he ruled until his own death in 1422. He was an intelligent and high-spirited young man, though the facts do not necessarily support the tales of his reckless youth that Shakespeare immortalized in the two parts of Henry IV. In 1403, at the age of sixteen, he was already leading the English forces against a rebellion in Wales, which he did very capably until 1408, after which he sought a role in his father's administration. Early in his reign, he quickly and mercilessly put down two challenges to his rule and subsequently devoted much of his energy to his ambition to rule France as well as England. In 1415, his first campaign in France climaxed with his famous victory over a larger French army at Agincourt on October 25 of that year. Another campaign in France ended victoriously in 1419, followed by the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, making him heir to the French throne. His marriage to Katherine, the daughter of the French king Charles, came only two weeks after the treaty. He continued fighting to gain the rest of France and died of camp fever at Vincennes in 1422. After Henry V died, as the epilogue to Henry V intimates, his son Henry VI was unable to keep France as his own reign dissolved into the Wars of the Roses.

The Elizabethan Age

The struggle between Lancaster and York finally ended with the rise of the line of monarchs known as the Tudors, which included Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603, reigning 1558–1603), the monarch during Shakespeare's time. By the time of Henry V's first production in 1599, she had been ruling England for over forty years, a period in English history that has come to be known as the Elizabethan Age. Thanks to England's defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and its growing colonies in the Americas, England was becoming a world power during this period. At the same time, it experienced an extraordinary cultural flowering, manifested in the music of composers Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, and John Dowland; the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser; and the plays of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, and the greatest playwright of all, William Shakespeare.

The eighty-five-year struggle over the English crown depicted in Shakespeare's two tetralogies ended a century before he wrote his plays. Nonetheless, that unsettled period was well known to Shakespeare's audiences, chiefly through two famous histories, Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles and Edward Hall's Union of Lancastre and York. In contrast with that era, England was relatively peaceful during Elizabeth's reign; most of the warfare of that period happened elsewhere, in Scotland, Ireland, France, and the Netherlands. Yet the events depicted in the tetralogies, which were mainly wars over the succession of the crown, remained a sober lesson for Elizabethan audiences. As Elizabeth neared the end of her life—she died four years after Henry V premiered—the English could only wonder if the death of the queen, who was childless and had not yet named an heir, would lead to another dynastic war and more turmoil in England itself. When Henry V was first performed, this anxiety over succession, combined with recent crop failures and an expensive war in Ireland, added to the appeal of this play about a strong, decisive, confident king who maintained peace at home and was successful in his military campaigns abroad.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

The fate of the English monarchy was being fought over in the English Civil War, and after the first production of Henry V in 1599, the play was performed infrequently over the next century. The theaters were closed under the Puritan rule of Oliver Cromwell, and the story of a powerful king may not have held much interest during an era when kings themselves could be executed. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the play was still rarely performed, but the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, London, revived it in 1738 and staged it thirty-two times in the next sixty years. During those years the scenes in which Henry executes the traitors (Act 2, Scene 2) and the common soldiers question the worth of the war (Act 4, Scene 1) were usually cut, making the character of Henry both more heroic and less complex. The Chorus scenes were often omitted as well, a decision supported by the critic Samuel Johnson, who in 1765 in Works of Shakespeare wrote of the Chorus, "a little may be praised, and much must be forgiven."

During the nineteenth century the British Empire became enormously powerful and Henry V was often performed as a patriotic spectacle, featuring large casts, elaborate staging, and impressive special effects. A production in 1859 by Charles Kean featured a cannon that spewed smoke and rocks against the city walls during the siege of Harfleur. The historian Thomas Carlyle, in his book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), wrote glowingly of the play: "There is a noble Patriotism in it…. A true English heart breathes, calm and strong, through the whole business; not boisterous, protrusive; all the better for that." On the other hand, in Characters of Shakespear's Plays, the critic William Hazlitt was careful to distinguish between the real Henry V and his fictional counterpart—"We feel little love or admiration for him. He was a hero, that is, he was ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives"—and the Henry of the play—"How then do we like him? We like him in the play. There is he a very amiable monster, a very splendid pageant." Another nineteenth-century writer, Charles Knight, noted the ambiguity of Shakespeare's portrait of Henry in Studies in Shakespere. Knight examined the scene in which Henry threatens the city of Harfleur with death and destruction, "the poet tells us, though not in sententious precepts, that nationality, when it takes the road of violence, may be driven to put off all the gentle attributes of social life, and … have the tiger's undiscriminating bloodthirstiness."

Critics at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries took a more skeptical view of the play. In 1894, American critic Barrett Wendell wrote in William Shakspeare, a Study in Elizabethan Literature, that Henry is more an ideal than a man, and that audiences "gravely admire Henry V because we feel sure we ought to, [but] most of us would be forced to confess that, at least as a play, Henry V is tiresome." The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was even more critical, in Dramatic Opinions and Essays, saying that he can hardly forgive Shakespeare for thrusting such a hero down audience's throats: "The combination of conventional propriety and brute masterfulness in his public capacity with a low-lived blackguardism in his private tastes is not a pleasant one." Stage interpretations throughout the first half of the century, however, continued to stress the play's patriotism and Henry's heroism; the actor Frank Benson's many performances as Henry featured him vaulting over the walls of Harfleur in full armor. Laurence Olivier's Academy Award-winning film of 1944 featured what may be the most influential performance of Henry. Made in the last year of World War II, the film is both explicitly theatrical, beginning and ending on stage at the Globe Theatre, and unapologetically patriotic, showing Henry as the ideal English king and hero and cutting any scenes that might cause a modern audience to think badly of him.

By the 1960s and 70s, the debate over the Vietnam War found its way into stage interpretations of Henry V, and many directors and actors showed a darker side of the play. A 1964 Royal Shakespeare Company production in Stratford-upon-Avon presented a graphically bloody depiction of the Battle of Agincourt, and a production in 1966 in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, depicted Henry as showing no reaction at all when the body of his old friend Bardolph, hanged for looting, is flung before him. These and other productions through the 1970s featured Henry either as a dupe of the imperialistic Archbishop of Canterbury or as a ruler full of doubts about himself and the war he started.

These two strains of interpretation, the heroic and the grimly realistic, were brought together in 1989 in Kenneth Branagh's popular film. This film is grittier and more psychologically complex than Olivier's. Olivier filmed the Battle of Agincourt in a beautiful Irish landscape with soldiers in colorful uniforms; Branagh depicts it as a slow-motion horror of mud and gore, filled with men stabbing each other at close range and horses writhing in agony. But the film is stirring as well, especially during Branagh's performance of the St. Crispin's Day speech, and it ends hopefully, with Henry successfully wooing Princess Katherine, played by Emma Thompson.

This complexity of interpretation is reflected in contemporary criticism of the play. The American critic Stephen Greenblatt has claimed that the play presents critical, or subversive, interpretations of its own actions, but then refutes them, as in the scene between Henry and the skeptical common soldiers in Act 4, Scene 1. Greenblatt, quoted in Joan Lord Hall's Henry V: A Guide to the Play, writes that Henry V

registers every nuance of royal hypocrisy, ruthlessness, and bad faith, but it does so in the context of a celebration, a collective panegyric to "[t]his star of England," the charismatic leader who purges the commonwealth of incorrigibles and forges a martial nation state.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Laurence Olivier's stars as Henry in his famous film adaptation of Henry V (1944). Made during World War II, the film provides a patriotic interpretation of Henry, cutting certain scenes from the play (such as the execution of the traitors in Southampton and the killing of the French prisoners) that might reflect badly on the hero. The film is available on DVD from the Criterion Collection.

Kenneth Branagh's equally famous adaptation of Henry V (1989) was produced by the BBC and Renaissance Films. Branagh's version is grittier and more realistic than Olivier's, though still stirring, and features a memorable score by Patrick Doyle. The film is available on DVD and VHS from MGM/UA Home Video.

An unabridged audio performance of Henry V, directed by Clive Bell, is available on three CDs from Arkangel, featuring Jamie Glover as Henry, Bill Nighy as the King of France, and Brian Cox as the Chorus.

"King Henry V's Conquest of France," a medieval English folksong about Henry V and the French king's insulting gift of tennis balls, is sung by the English folksinger Richard Thompson on his CD 1000 Years of Popular Music. It is available from Beeswing Records and at Thompson's website, www.richardthompson-music.com.

In "For God and Country," critic Alan A. Stone compares the two film versions in the context of the Iraq War, arguing that "the parallels between the king and [George W. Bush] are intriguing and even disturbing. Both leaders are hard-drinking playboys who found God, mended their ways, and followed their fathers into office," later leading their nations into foreign wars. The critic Harold Bloom, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, locates the play's brilliance in the ambiguity at the heart of Henry himself. Bloom writes that "Shakespeare does not let us locate Hal/Henry V's true self; a king is necessarily something of a counterfeit, and Henry is a great king…. No one could fall in love with Henry V, but no one altogether could resist him either."

CRITICISM

Alexander Harrington

In the following excerpt, Harrington, a theater director, examines whether Henry V is in favor of war or against war. He explores the morality of Henry's actions as a king and a warrior.

That Henry V can support both patriotic prowar and critical antiwar interpretations has been discussed to a fare-thee-well among Shakespeare critics, scholars, and directors.

Shakespeare's two-sided position can be seen even in a very quick examination of the play. In its first scene, the archbishops of Canterbury and Ely are fretting over a bill about to be passed by Parliament that would strip the church of much of its property. In order to get King Henry to kill the bill, Canterbury plans to offer a big contribution to the king's war chest for an invasion of France. Henry is descended from a French princess and claims that the crown should have passed to his great-grandfather when the last of the French descendents of the royal house died (the crown was given instead to a cousin of the royal family). The French have barred Henry's claim by holding up an ancient Frankish law (the Salic Law) that does not allow inheritance through women. In the next scene, Henry asks Canterbury whether the French argument is legitimate; if it is not, he believes, an invasion of France would be justified. In substance, Canterbury's argument is straightforward: the Salic Law was devised for territory that is now in Germany, not France, and the kings of France themselves have inherited through women. However, this argument is presented in such an absurdly intricate manner that, to an audience hearing it for the first time, it sounds like double-talk. It sounds like double-talk to Henry as well: after Canterbury's long speech, he repeats his question: "May I with right and conscience make this claim?" Canterbury replies, "The sin upon my head, dread sovereign." After exhortations from his nobles, Henry decides to invade.

Shakespeare is ambiguous as to whether Henry's claim is just. On the one hand, the audience knows that Canterbury has an ulterior motive for justifying the claim, and his speech comes across as obfuscation. On the other hand, his arguments are, given the values of dynastic politics, sound.

Later in the play, at a point when a lengthy siege has failed to get the French town of Harfleur to surrender, Henry tells the governor of the town that if the English are forced to continue the siege, he will no longer be able to control his soldiers. When the town falls, "look to see/The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand/Defile the locks of your shrill, shrieking daughters;/Your fathers taken by the silver beards, and their most reverend heads dashed to the walls;/Your naked infants spitted upon pikes." When the governor surrenders, Henry instructs one of his lords to "use mercy" to the inhabitants. Perhaps Henry's threats were a bluff. Nevertheless, it is morally questionable to threaten rape and murder, the killing of the old, and infanticide—even as a tactic.

As Henry and his troops march from Harfleur to the English-controlled port of Calais, Bardolph, one of Henry's drinking buddies from his wayward youth is arrested and executed for robbing a church. Henry supports the execution and proclaims,

We would have all such offenders cut off: and we give express charge in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language; for when lenity and cruelty play far a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.

The lines recall Henry's repudiation of Falstaff. Here he consents to the death of a friend, but at the same time he insists, like a good king, on the humane and respectful treatment of French civilians.

With Henry's numbers depleted by disease and his soldiers exhausted and weakened, the French strike back, and, near the castle of Agincourt, attack Henry's remaining twelve thousand troops with a force of sixty thousand (a historically accurate figure). Immediately before the battle, Henry rallies his outnumbered troops with the famous "St. Crispin's Day" speech. One would expect that a scene of combat would follow. Instead, Shakespeare gives his audience a comic scene in which Pistol, another crony from Henry's wilder days, extorts ransom from a captured French soldier (Shakespeare has made it clear in Henry IV, Part I, that ransom is one of the perks of war). In the next scene, the French nobility decry their shame: they are losing to a smaller and weaker force. They swear to die wreaking havoc. When the French return to the field, Henry panics and orders his men to kill their prisoners—a violation of the rules of war in both medieval and Elizabethan times. The shamefulness of this act is ironically pointed up by the fact that it follows the description of two English knights chivalrously dying in each other's arms. Later, we discover that the French have killed the boys who were guarding the English supplies. A captain says that it is in response to this French atrocity that the king has ordered every man to kill his prisoners. But the audience knows that Henry was unaware of what the French had done when he gave the order. Perhaps this is simply an inconsistency that Shakespeare failed to correct. Or is the captain rationalizing Henry's war crime? Or is Shakespeare deliberately obscuring the issue of right and wrong?

Whatever the answers to these questions, it is important to stress that there are no combat scenes during the battle of Agincourt—a fact often obscured by the insertion of such scenes into movies and some stage productions. Shakespeare's depiction of one of the most significant battles in English history consists of a comic scene about ransom and scenes of one side's going off to commit atrocities (the French) and the other ordering atrocities (the English). Surely there is irony here.

Nonetheless, at the end of the battle, Shakespeare places God squarely on the English side. The English have won against extraordinary odds. The French have lost ten thousand men, the English twenty-nine (historically, the French lost approximately seven thousand, the English no more than five hundred). Shakespeare offers only one explanation for this incredible outcome: it is a miracle.

Source: Alexander Harrington, "War and William Shakespeare," in Dissent, Fall 2003, pp. 89-91.

Deborah Cartmell

In the following excerpt, Cartmell compares two famous film version of Henry V by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh. She explores how the films differ from the play and from each other, and how each film provides a different interpretation of the character of Henry V and the nature of English nationalism.

Few dispute the impression that Laurence Olivier's Henry V is clearcut propaganda; filmed from June 1943 to July 1944 and premièred in London on 22 November 1944, the film appropriates Shakespeare in order to glorify war in a morale-boosting exercise.

Sponsored by the Ministry of Information, Laurence Olivier eliminates half of the play's lines (most notably, episodes which cast doubt on Henry's motives and heroism) and produces the unity which critics had found missing. To achieve this, he excludes the treatment of the traitors, the speech before Harfleur in which Henry pictures the consequences of war, Henry's exchange of gloves with Williams, Henry's acknowledgement of his father's guilt in the prayer before battle, the hanging of Bardolph, the order to slay the prisoners, Henry's bawdy exchanges with Burgundy and Katherine, and the final remarks of the Chorus who reminds the audience of the ephemeral nature of Henry's victory. With the film's dedication 'To the Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain, the spirit of our Ancestors', it is hard not to view the transformation of the Chorus's speeches to voice-over as evocative of a wartime correspondent describing through newsreel coverage the events leading up to the victory of D-Day.

Until Olivier's Henry V, Shakespeare scholarship tended to dismiss Shakespeare on film as it popularised through reduction and trivialisation of the play texts. Olivier changed (or rewrote) the play for both propaganda effects and as an answer to literary critics of the film. He defended his decisions by claiming later: 'I had a mission … My country was at war; I felt Shakespeare within me, I felt the cinema within him.' With Shakespeare's implicit permission, he 'improves' the play.

Undoubtedly, one of the most significant deletions is the ending, in which the Chorus relates the short-lived nature of Henry's triumph, and we are led to believe that Katherine and Henry, in the tradition of romantic comedy, will persevere happily into the future. This is a marriage of past and present, film and theatre, albeit a distortion of Shakespeare's jaundiced portrait of Henry in which the sexual conquest (or rape) of Katherine is compared to his conquest of France.

Olivier's version is in accordance with the dominant Shakespeare critics of the period; he rewrites (or interprets) the play as right-wing propaganda. In rewriting Henry V, Olivier has validated the play and created what has become nationalist, 'authentic' Shakespeare.

In 1989 the play was filmed by Kenneth Branagh, seemingly in an attempt to rescue Henry V from its status as propaganda. Dubbed in The Times on the day before Henry V's release as 'the young pretender', Branagh claimed that the play needed 'to be reclaimed from jingoism and World War Two associations.' Without doubt, Branagh's film both pays homage to its predecessor while seemingly recovering the history for an 1980s audience.

In his production of Henry V, Kenneth Branagh reverses many of the editorial decisions of Olivier; most notably, not to appear anti-European, he turns the French into worthy opponents and even makes the Dauphin a likeable figure. As with all film versions of Shakespeare, speeches have to be reduced in order to make the plays filmic—the long speeches freeze the action and can be boring to watch. As in the Olivier version, Branagh's Chorus is fragmented so that a few lines punctuate the action rather than suspend it. On the rare occasions when speech does suspend action, it has a shock effect on the audience. Such is the case of Judi Dench's rendering of Mistress Quickly's account of Falstaff's death and the rebuke to the King by Michael Williams (either deliberately or coincidentally played by the actor, Michael Williams), suggesting that Henry's cause is unjust and his word untrustworthy. Here we have close-ups, concentrating on the suffering of the individual and posing a question mark over the ethical position of the King. Henry himself achieves this intense visual scrutiny in his desperate prayer to the God of Battles on the eve of Agincourt. Initially it would seem that the close-ups are used by Branagh to question rather than approve the King's actions. Certainly, unlike Olivier's production, Branagh's film is—at least, initially—striking for its inclusions rather than its exclusions.

Perhaps the most notable of these inclusions are the sentencing of the conspirators and the hanging of Bardolph (which Branagh shows rather than simply reporting). Branagh also includes flashbacks to the Henry IV plays, depicting Falstaff and crew in the tavern, ostensibly to suggest Henry's betrayal of his comrades. The flashbacks are used again with the hanging of Bardolph and in the final moments of the film. We begin with Henry as an impenetrable mask of monarchy, presented as ruthless, distrustful and potentially evil. He tricks the conspirators and the atmosphere is one of tension—there are spies everywhere and the King can only maintain his position through subterfuge. The archbishops, unlike the ineffectual jokey figures of Olivier, are conspiring together, hardly holy figures, but shrewd and corrupt politicians. The King enters the film literally cloaked in darkness, forecasting the disguised king on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. For an 1980s audience, the inhuman, black-masked figure inevitably recalls Darth Vader in Star Wars (1977), and thus the audience is invited to regard the King—as does Michael Williams in the later scene—with the utmost suspicion.

Through a series of intertextual references—flashbacks to other plays and films—the film initially seems to build a picture of Henry who is hostile and repellent. The close-up and flashback, however, rather than questioning his motives, ultimately soften and humanise the figure. When Bardolph is being hung, Branagh has Henry recall through flashback the ribald days of the tavern, while the close-up reveals his eyes to be moist—the tears blending with the rain. After the prayer to the god of battles in which Henry acknowledges his father's guilt in taking Richard's crown, there are definite tears in the King's eyes, and in his union with Fluellen after victory, he is definitely weeping. The vulnerability of the king in this scene is contrasted with and compared to the slaughtered boys. As David Robinson notes on the eve of the film's UK release: 'Branagh's Henry is strictly according to the Geneva Convention.' The image of the King carrying the dead boy—a former companion of his 'wild Hal' days and a victim of his dubious war—provides the emblem of the film, used in much of the publicity pictures: it visualises the ambivalence of this production which simultaneously glorifies and condemns Henry's war. Youth has been sacrificed; the King emerges at the end of the film as a 'real man.'

Branagh's Henry V does not inspire feelings of nationalism, as in the Olivier film, but rather, as Graham Holderness remarks, conveys the emotions of patriotism. But these emotions grip you unawares. The first third of the film is markedly anti-war and anti-patriotic; but by the end, the audience is cheering the King alongside his rebel ranks (like the opportunistic and corrupt Pistol and Nym, who can't help but feel inspired by the St Crispin's Day speech).

Source: Deborah Cartmell, "Shakespeare, Film and Nationalism: Henry V," in Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen, Macmillan Press, 2000, pp. 94-108.

SOURCES

Bloom, Harold, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Riverhead Books, 1998, pp. xiii-xv, ix, 323-24.

Carlyle, Thomas, excerpt from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), in Shakespeare: Henry V, a Casebook, edited by Michael Quinn, Macmillan, 1969, p. 38.

Hall, Joan Lord, Henry V: A Guide to the Play, Greenwood Press, 1997, pp. 13-14, 104, 133-34, 139, 142-43.

Hazlitt, William, excerpt from Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817), in Shakespeare: Henry V, a Casebook, edited by Michael Quinn, Macmillan, 1969, p. 37.

Johnson, Samuel, excerpt from Works of Shakespeare (1765), in Shakespeare: Henry V, a Casebook, edited by Michael Quinn, Macmillan, 1969, p. 34.

Knight, Charles, excerpt from Studies in Shakespere (1849), in Shakespeare: Henry V, a Casebook, edited by Michael Quinn, Macmillan, 1969, p. 40.

Shaw, George Bernard, excerpt from Dramatic Opinions and Essays (1907), in Shakespeare: Henry V, a Casebook, edited by Michael Quinn, Macmillan, 1969, pp. 55-56.

Stone, Alan A., "For God and Country," in Boston Review, Vol. 30, No. 1, February/March 2005, p. 58.

Wendell, Barrett, excerpt from William Shakspere, a Study in Elizabethan Literature (1894), in Shakespeare: Henry V, a Casebook, edited by Michael Quinn, Macmillan, 1969, p. 54.