Henry V is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to be written in approximately 1599. Its full titles are The Cronicle History of Henry the Fifth (in the First Quarto text) and The Life of Henry the Fifth (in the First Folio text). It tells the story of King Henry V of England, focusing on events immediately before and after the Battle of Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years' War.
The play is the final part of a tetralogy, preceded by Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2. The original audiences would thus have already been familiar with the title character, who was depicted in the Henry IV plays as a wild, undisciplined lad known as "Prince Hal." In Henry V, the young prince has become a mature man and embarks on a successful conquest of France.
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Elizabethan stages did not use scenery. Acknowledging the difficulty of conveying great battles and shifts of location on a bare stage, the Chorus (a single actor) calls for a "Muse of fire" so that the actor playing King Henry can "Assume the port [i.e. "the bearing"] of Mars." He asks, "Can this cockpit [i.e. the theatre] hold / The vasty fields of France?" and encourages the audience to use their imaginations to overcome the stage's limitations: "Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts."
The early scenes deal with the embarkation of Henry's fleet for France, and include a real-life incident in which the Earl of Cambridge and two others plotted to assassinate Henry at Southampton. Henry's clever uncovering of the plot and ruthless treatment of the plotters is one indication that he has changed from the earlier plays in which he appeared.
When the Chorus reappears, he describes the country's dedication to the war effort – "They sell the pasture now to buy the horse." The chorus tells the audience "We'll not offend one stomach with our play," a humorous reference to the fact that the scene of the play crosses the English Channel.
The Chorus appears again, seeking support for the English navy: "Grapple your minds to sternage of this navy" he says, and notes that "the ambassador from the French comes back / Tells Harry that the king doth offer him / Katherine his daughter."
At the siege of Harfleur, Henry utters one of Shakespeare's best-known speeches, beginning "Once more unto the breach, dear friends..."
Before the Battle of Agincourt, victory looks uncertain, and the young king's heroic character is shown by his decision to wander around the English camp at night, in disguise, so as to comfort his soldiers and determine what they really think of him. He agonizes about the moral burden of being king, noting that a king is only a man. Before the battle, Henry rallies his troops with the famous St. Crispin's Day Speech.
Following the victory at Agincourt, Henry attempts to woo the French princess, Catherine of Valois. This is difficult because he does not speak French well and she does not speak English well, but the humor value of each others' mistakes actually helps him to achieve this. The action ends with the French king adopting Henry as his heir to the French throne and the prayer of the French queen "that English may as French, French Englishmen, receive each other, God speak this Amen."
But before the curtain descends, the Chorus re-appears one more time and ruefully notes that Henry's own heir's "state, so many had the managing, that they lost France, and made his England bleed" – a reminder of the tumultuous reign of Henry VI of England, which Shakespeare had previously brought to the stage in a trilogy of plays: Henry VI, Part 1, Henry VI, Part 2 and Henry VI, Part 3.
As with all of Shakespeare's serious plays, there are also a number of minor comic characters whose activities contrast with and sometimes comment on the main plot. In this case, they are mostly common soldiers in Henry's army, and they include Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph from the Henry IV plays. The army also includes a Scot, an Irishman, an Englishman and Fluellen, a comically stereotyped Welsh soldier, whose name is an attempt at a phonetic rendition of "Llywelyn". In Kenneth Branagh's acclaimed 1989 film version of the play, most of these scenes were played as serious drama, because Branagh felt the humour was outdated and incomprehensible to modern audiences, while Laurence Olivier, in his equally praised 1944 film version of the play, staged the comic scenes as comedy, whether modern audiences understood them or not.
The play also deals briefly with the death of Falstaff, Henry's estranged friend from the Henry IV plays whom Henry remembers fondly.
Shakespeare's primary source for Henry V, as for most of his chronicle histories, was Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles; the publication of the second edition in 1587 provides a terminus ad quem for the play. Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York appears also to have been consulted, and scholars have supposed that Shakespeare was familiar with Samuel Daniel's poem on the civil wars.
On the basis of an apparent allusion to Essex's failed mission to quell Tyrone's Rebellion, the play is thought to date from early 1599.[1]The Chronicle History of Henry the fifth was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on 14 August 1600 by the bookseller Thomas Pavier; the first quarto was published before the end of the year—though by Thomas Millington and John Busby rather than Pavier. (Thomas Creede did the printing.)
Q1 of Henry V is a "bad quarto", a shortened version of the play that might be a pirated copy or reported text. A second quarto, a reprint of Q1, was published in 1602 by Pavier; another reprint was issued as Q3 in 1619, with a false date of 1608—part of William Jaggard's False Folio. The superior text first saw print in the First Folio in 1623.
A tradition, impossible to verify, holds that Henry V was the first play performed at the new Globe Theatre in the spring of 1599—the Globe would have been the "wooden O" mentioned in the Prologue—but Shapiro argues that the Chamberlain's Men were still at The Curtain when the work was first performed, and that Shakespeare himself probably acted the Chorus.[2][3] In 1600 the first printed text states that the play had been played "sundry times." The earliest performance known for certain, however, occurred on 7 January 1605, at Court.
Samuel Pepys saw a Henry V in 1664—but it was written by Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery, not by Shakespeare. Shakespeare's play returned to the stage in 1723, in an adaptation by Aaron Hill.[4]
The longest running production of the play in Broadway history was the staging starring Richard Mansfield in 1900 which ran for 54 performances. Other notable stage performances of Henry V include Charles Kean (1859), Charles Alexander Calvert (1872), Walter Hampden (1928), and Ty Jones (2011) in an all black cast.[5]
Major revivals in London during the twentieth century include:
On British television the play has been performed as follows:
Readers and audiences have interpreted the play’s attitude to warfare in several different ways. On the one hand, it seems to celebrate Henry's invasion of France and valorises military might. Alternatively, it can be read as an anti-war allegory.
Some critics connect the glorification of nationalistic pride and conquest with contemporary English military ventures in Spain and Ireland. The Chorus directly refers to the military triumphs of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, in the fifth act. Henry V himself is sometimes seen as an ambivalent representation of the stage machiavel, combining apparent sincerity with a willingness to use deceit and force to attain his ends.[6]
Other commentators see the play as looking critically at the motivation for Henry's violent cause.[7] The noble words of the Chorus and Henry are consistently undermined by the actions of Pistol, Bardolph and Nym. Pistol talks in a bombastic blank verse that seems to parody Henry's own style of speech. Pistol and his friends thus show up the actions of their rulers.[8] Indeed the presence of the Eastcheap characters from Henry IV has been said to underscore the element of adventurer in Henry's character as monarch.[9]
The American critic Norman Rabkin described the play as a picture with two simultaneous meanings.[10] Rabkin argues that the play never settles on one viewpoint towards warfare, Henry himself switching his style of speech constantly, talking of "rape and pillage" during Harfleur but of patriotic glory in his St. Crispin's Day speech.
The play's ambiguity has led to diverse interpretations in performance. Laurence Olivier's 1944 film, made during the Second World War, emphasises the patriotic side, while Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film stresses the horrors of war. A 2003 Royal National Theatre production featured Henry as a modern war general, ridiculing the Iraq invasion.
A mock trial of Henry V for the crimes associated with the legality of the invasion and the slaughter of prisoners was held in Washington, D.C. in March 2010, drawing from both historical record and Shakespeare's play. Titled "The Supreme Court of the Amalgamated Kingdom of England and France", participating judges were Justices Samuel Alito and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The outcome was originally to be determined by an audience vote, however due to a draw it came down to a judges decision. The court was divided on Henry’s justification for war, but unanimously found him guilty on the killing of the prisoners after applying “the evolving standards of the maturing society”. Previously the fictional "Global War Crimes Tribunal" ruled that Henry’s war was legal, no non-combatant was killed unlawfully and that Henry bore no criminal responsibility for the death of the POWs. The fictional "French Civil Liberties Union", who had instigated the tribunal, then attempted to sue in civil court. However the judge concluded that he was bound by the GWCT’s conclusions of law and also ruled in favour the English. The Court of Appeals affirmed without opinion, thus leaving the matter for the Supreme Court’s determination.[11][12][13]
The St. Crispin's Day Speech is a famous motivational speech from the play, delivered by Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt (Act IV Scene iii). It is so called because 25 October is the feast day of Saints Crispin and Crispinian.
There have been two major film adaptations. The first, directed by and starring Laurence Olivier in 1944, is a colourful and highly stylised version which begins in the Globe Theatre and then gradually shifts to a realistic evocation of the Battle of Agincourt.[14] Olivier's film was made during the Second World War and was intended as a patriotic rallying cry at the time of the invasion of Normandy.
The second major film, directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh in 1989, attempts to give a more realistic evocation of the period and lays more emphasis on the horrors of war. It features a mud-spattered and gruesome Battle of Agincourt.
In 2004, post-modern choreographer David Gordon created a dance-theatre version of the play called Dancing Henry Five, which mixed William Walton's music written for the Olivier film, recorded speeches from the film itself and by Christopher Plummer, and commentary written by Gordon. The piece premiered at Danspace Project in New York, where it was compared favorably to a production of Henry IV at Lincoln Center.[15] It has been revived three times – in 2005, 2007 and 2011 – playing cities across the United States, and received a National Endowment for the Arts American Masterpieces in Dance Award.[16]