Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, 1943–4. For a generation it was Olivier’s version of Henry V that dominated the English imagination.
BATTLE GEAR OF HENRY V
KING HENRY: Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
A generation ago, Laurence Olivier created the Henry V that everyone knew. In his film version, made during the Second World War, Olivier’s King Henry was a handsome, valiant Englishman taking his people onward into battle.
KING HENRY: In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage…
For a country at war Shakespeare’s dashing young Henry was an inspiring figure. He is a king who mingles with commoners, walks among his soldiers on the eve of battle showing ‘a little touch of Harry in the night’. The whole nation is united in arms and becomes one great family, a band of brothers: ‘For he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition’.
Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, 1943–4. For a generation it was Olivier’s version of Henry V that dominated the English imagination.
The young hero leads his men to victory against the French, and against the odds, first at Harfleur and then at Agincourt.
KING HENRY: I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot!
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
In the Crypt Museum at Westminster Abbey there remain some of the objects that Henry would have needed, and may actually have used, in 1415 as he led those greyhounds out of the slips and into battle at Agincourt. There is a battered shield and sword, a sturdy helmet and a saddle for a warhorse. They are known as Henry V’s ‘funeral achievements’ – the heraldic term signifying the armour, weapons and banners of a medieval lord, traditionally displayed over his tomb. Henry’s shield is made of lime-wood. It has the shape of a garden spade, but is much larger, twenty-four inches high, curved to fit round and protect the body that held it. The sword is hefty and unadorned, a brute of a weapon about three feet long. The wooden saddle still has some of its original hessian padding and leather; the dark metal helmet is battered but edged with gold.
The tomb of Henry V in Westminster Abbey was positioned, as he intended, next to the tomb of St Edward the Confessor. The current effigy is a modern reconstruction.
For centuries, these instruments of battle were on public display in Westminster Abbey, hung over Henry V’s tomb, and they are, in their way, props in the great theatre of national history that Westminster Abbey has become – emblems of royal display, military might and patriotism. They arrived at the Abbey on 7 November 1422 at Henry V’s funeral, after his early death at the age of thirty-five. That spectacular funeral opens Henry VI, Part 1:
BEDFORD: Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry’s death –
King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long!
England ne’er lost a king of so much worth.
In the 1590s, when Shakespeare and his audiences came to visit Westminster Abbey, Henry V’s military memorials were still colourful and bright. Although the original, splendid statue had been despoiled at least twice – most recently in January 1546, when thieves removed the silver head in a night-time raid – the wooden core of the effigy remained on view. The painted arms of the King, the blue and gold velvet, were still on the sumptuously covered saddle; the blue figured Chinese silks that lined his shield had not yet faded, and a painted leopard crest was still in place on the dented helmet. This display of armour – brightly coloured, elaborate and obviously used – offered an emphatic reminder of the martial prowess of the figure in the tomb beneath.
Tourists have been visiting the tombs and monuments of Westminster Abbey for over 400 years, and this sepulchral tourism was already thriving under Elizabeth and her successor James. In 1599 a German visitor to London paid to see the tombs and dutifully recorded them in his diary. Unable to snap a quick photo of Henry V’s tomb on his phone as today’s visitors can, he carefully transcribed the epitaph: ‘Henry, the scourge of France, lies in this tomb. Virtue subdues all things. A.D. 1422.’
Jonathan Bate explains more about the Westminster sightseers:
It is quite a surprise to discover that Westminster Abbey was a real tourist attraction in London round about 1600. Indeed by 1612, Westminster Abbey had become such a popular tourist attraction that there were actually guides employed there who would give you the guided tour. You would pay a penny (which is exactly what you would pay to get into the theatre), and the guide would take you around the tombs and give you a little history lesson. You would go from tomb to tomb, and on each tomb there would be an effigy of the monarch. There would be a description in Latin of who they were, what their relations were, what their achievements were, and one imagines the guide would have translated these for you. The tombs and effigies of the English kings were the main attractions. So there is an extraordinary parallel between the process of going to the theatre to see the history plays and going to the Abbey to see the ‘living monuments’, as they called them, the lively statues of the kings and queens in question.
So there were two ways of learning about national history in Shakespeare’s time, if you did not want to resort to books: you could go to Westminster Abbey, pay a penny and be instructed about the ‘living monuments’ of dead kings or you could go to the theatre, pay a penny and see the great kings stride out in front of you. And in each case the hero of the story was most likely to be Henry V. It might seem strange that a king whose reign was so short, and whose conquests vanished so swiftly under his successor, should be given superstar status in the 1590s. Historian Susan Doran explains why Henry V was elevated to the position of national icon and how far Shakespeare’s version of him corresponded to the real historical Henry:
The gap between the myth and reality in the presentation of Henry V was not as wide as it might be, compared, for example, with Macbeth or Richard III. Henry V was presented as the exemplary figure of chivalry. He was seen as magnanimous, he had martial courage, he was someone who could rally his troops to join him in a band of brothers. His value in Elizabethan times, particularly in the 1580s and 1590s, was as a figure that rallied the English against their ancient enemy. And in the late Elizabethan period, of course, England was at war, not against France, but against Spain and in Ireland. The most important aspect of Henry V’s character and the myths surrounding him was that he had united Englishmen successfully in war.
Portrait of Henry V, by an unknown artist, late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. What is perhaps now the most familiar portrait of Henry V was in fact painted during Shakespeare’s lifetime.
Bronze Seal matrix of Henry, Prince of Wales (later Henry V), for the lordship of Carmarthen, around 1410. The seal shows the Prince on horseback surrounded by his titles: Prince of Wales, Duke of Aquitaine, Lancaster and Cornwall, Earl of Chester and Lord of Carmarthen.
The monument of Henry V, with the evocative helmet, shield and saddle hanging high above it, was immensely popular. Many of those in Shakespeare’s audience at the playhouse, watching his play Henry V, would have seen the funeral achievements at the Abbey. They would have understood that here were memorials of unsurpassed military triumph, but also of admirable, and unusual, royal humility – because for many people these would have been the very sword and helmet mentioned in Shakespeare’s account of King Henry’s refusal to parade vaingloriously through the streets of London when he came back from his triumphs in France:
CHORUS: You may imagine him upon Blackheath,
Where that his lords desire him to have borne
His bruisèd helmet and bended sword
Before him through the city. He forbids it,
Being free from vainness and self-glorious pride,
Giving full trophy, signal and ostent
Quite from himself to God.
Henry V is Shakespeare’s only history play of the 1590s about a successful king, one in which the story does not focus on conspiracy and revolt. Instead, Henry V’s reign is described as one of virtually unadulterated triumph, in which English forces, though ostensibly weaker than their foes, still end victorious. It is true that the king – although charismatic and admirable – is not altogether whitewashed; events such as the massacre of prisoners during Agincourt are included, and some have sought to see a subversive, anti-war message in the play. But the fact remains that it is nearly impossible, during a live performance, not to be caught up in admiration and patriotism.
The two popular ways of learning national history were closely connected. The playhouses and Westminster’s tourist attractions both drew large and diverse audiences. Thanks to Shakespeare and to Christopher Marlowe, the history play as a genre took off in the 1590s and indeed it came to define Elizabethan theatre. Jonathan Bate again:
The public theatre was a new thing in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and one of the big innovations that it brought to the cultural life of the nation was plays about English history. You can roughly trace this from the time of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. This was really the first opportunity that ordinary people had to discover about the history of their own nation. For ordinary people to get a sense of the history of the nation, the theatre was the place to go.
The history on offer was exhilaratingly jingoistic. Henry V contrives to be not just anti-French, but blisteringly anti-Scots.
ELY : But there’s a saying very old and true:
‘If that you will France win,
Then with Scotland first begin.’
For once the eagle England being in prey,
The Kings and Queens of England, by Hendrik Goltzius, 1584, depicting some of the leading figures of Shakespeare’s history plays of the 1590s: Richard II and the Lancastrians Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI.
To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot
Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs.
The tabloid nationalism of the history plays was certainly a hit: they made Shakespeare’s reputation and eventually his fortune. Printers knew there was a strong market for them: the histories appear in print as much as all the other Shakespeare plays put together. Their popularity was further buoyed because they were seen as useful, they were based on fact and – it was argued – made the people watching them better citizens. This gave those running the theatres ammunition to defend the stage against its puritanical critics, a line of reasoning the playwright Thomas Heywood ingeniously set out in 1612 in his Apology for Actors:
Plays have made the ignorant more apprehensive; taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous victories, instructed such as cannot read in the discovery of all our English chronicles: and what man have you now of that weak capacity that cannot discourse of any notable thing recorded even from William the Conqueror, nay from the landing of Brute, until this day, being possessed of their true use? For because plays are writ with this aim and carried with this method, to teach the subjects’ obedience to their king; to show the people the untimely ends of such as have moved tumults, commotions and insurrections; and to present them with the flourishing estate of all such as live in obedience, exhorting them to allegiance, dehorting them from all traitorous and felonious stratagems.
Wooden funeral effigy of Queen Katherine de Valois, Westminster Abbey. This is the original effigy of Queen Katherine from her funeral procession. Her body itself suffered several moves and a long exposure to public view before being placed in Henry V’s chapel in 1878.
Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, 1943–4: in the epilogue to Henry IV, part 2, Shakespeare had promised ‘our humble author will continue the story…and make you merry with fair Katherine of France’.
In other words, the people standing in the theatre watching history plays are learning to be good, law-abiding Englishmen – learning, above all, to be loyal subjects of the Queen.
There was a slight problem here. Happy though Elizabeth might have been to claim that she descended from Henry V, in fact it was not the case. Her ancestor was Henry’s French wife, Katherine of Valois, who after Henry’s death married Owen Tudor and thus became the founder of the Tudor dynasty. Shrewdly, and unsurprisingly, Shakespeare does not neglect Elizabeth’s fetching foremother when he dramatizes the story for his audience. Katherine of Valois is one of Shakespeare’s most captivating young women, whom we see struggling to lisp out a little English before being wooed, kissed and married by the strapping Henry. On stage, they are the celebrity couple of everybody’s dreams. And, like royal couples today, their public kiss in Act V is greeted with cheers from the adoring public.
KING HENRY: You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate: there is more eloquence in a sugar touch of them than in the tongues of the French Council, and they should sooner persuade Harry of England than a general petition of monarchs.
This was not to be Katherine’s last kiss. If Harry and Kate were winners on stage, they continued to be a joint attraction in death. Not far from Henry’s is the tomb of his wife, which was also a much-visited tourist sight in the 1590s – and for good reason: Katherine’s embalmed corpse lay fully exposed to view. It was perfectly possible to touch her – as indeed the diarist Samuel Pepys did seventy years later. Copying Shakespeare’s Henry, Pepys leaned over in Westminster Abbey and kissed Katherine on the lips. We do not know whether he found witchcraft in them, but he was certainly very moved:
here we did see, by particular favour, the body of Queen Katherine of Valois, and had her upper part of her body in my hands. And I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen, and that this was my birthday, 36 years old, that I did first kiss a Queen.
It must have made quite a difference watching Henry kiss Katherine on stage if you had seen – and perhaps even kissed – her dead lips yourself.
