The culmination of Shakespeare’s mature sequence of English histories, Henry V, the last play of the *Second Tetralogy, is comparatively easy to date thanks to an uncharacteristic topical reference. At the start of Act 5 the Chorus explicitly compares Henry V’s welcome back to London after his campaign in France to the anticipated welcome the Earl of *Essex would receive should he return victoriously from his current expedition against Tyrone’s rebellion in Ireland (5.0.30–5). Essex’s planned campaign was common knowledge as early as November 1598, but this passage, and probably the rest of the play too, is more likely to have been written between the Earl’s departure in March 1599 and his return in disgrace that September.
Text: The play was first printed in *quarto in 1600, said to have been ‘sundry times played by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlain his servants’, and reappeared in the Folio of 1623 in a version derived from Shakespeare’s own *foul papers. The quarto is in many respects corrupt, apparently a memorial reconstruction (See reported text) assembled by actors who had appeared in a version of the play shortened for performance by a small cast (perhaps on a provincial tour), but it seems to derive from a later authorial text of the play than does the Folio. In particular, the quarto chooses to follow Shakespeare’s historical sources in not representing the Dauphin as a combatant at Agincourt, giving the lines he speaks there in the Folio to the Duke of Bourbon.
Sources: Shakespeare again worked from the materials he had used in the Henry IV plays, namely the chronicles of *Holinshed and *Halle and the anonymous play The Famous Victories of Henry V. It is possible that he was also influenced by other contemporary plays on this subject, now lost.
Synopsis: The Chorus speaks a prologue, lamenting the inadequacy of the theatre to so great a subject and imploring the audience to use their imaginations.
1.1 The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely are anxious that the new King, whose transformation from reveller to statesman they applaud, may support a measure heavily taxing the Church: the Archbishop has attempted to dissuade him from this by offering a large grant towards a military expedition urging his title to the French crown.
1.2 Before receiving a French embassy, King Harry calls upon the Archbishop to explain his right to the French throne, which he does at some length, urging Harry to attack France. The Archbishop is seconded by Ely and a number of English nobles including the King’s uncle the Duke of Exeter, who convince Harry that he can mount a campaign in France while satisfactorily garrisoning England against potential Scottish invasion. The French ambassador is admitted with a message from the Dauphin, who has heard of Harry’s plans to claim French territory and, as a comment on his youth and alleged frivolity, has sent a barrel of tennis balls as a present. The King dismisses the ambassadors after promising that he will soon avenge this mockery in full, and sets the preparations for his campaign in motion.
2.0 The Chorus describes the country’s eager preparations for the war, but also outlines a French-funded conspiracy to assassinate the King at Southampton.
2.1 Corporal Nim and Ensign Pistol quarrel about Nim’s former fiancée the Hostess, Mistress Quickly, whom Pistol has married: they are prevented from duelling by Bardolph, and by a summons home to the bedside of their sick master Sir John Falstaff, broken-hearted over his rejection by Harry (dramatized at the end of 2 Henry IV).
2.2 At Southampton the King, about to embark with his forces for France, is advised by the traitors Scrope, Cambridge, and Grey against showing mercy to a drunk who has shouted abusively at him, but has the man released. He then presents the three traitors with what he says are their commissions but are in fact their indictments for capital treason, decrying their treachery and refusing them mercy by their own earlier advice. They confess and apologize before being led away to execution, and the King embarks.
2.3 Pistol, Nim, Bardolph, and the Boy are also leaving for France, sorrowful over the death of Sir John, which is poignantly narrated by the Hostess, from whom they part.
2.4 King Charles of France is making arrangements to defend his realm against King Harry, whom the Dauphin scorns to take seriously despite the misgivings of King Charles and the Constable: Exeter arrives as Harry’s ambassador, delivering his claim to France, demanding an immediate response, and passing on Harry’s personal defiance to the Dauphin. King Charles insists on a night in which to consider his reply.
3.0 The Chorus asks the audience to imagine Harry’s army crossing the Channel and laying siege to Harfleur.
3.1 Harry urges his troops to make one more assault on the breach in Harfleur’s walls.
3.2 Bardolph is eager enough to join the attack but Nim, Pistol, and the Boy would rather stay alive: they have to be driven towards the breach with blows by the Welsh captain Fluellen. The Boy remains behind and comments on the cowardice and petty thieving of his associates, whom he plans to leave.
3.3 Fluellen laments to his English comrade Captain Gower that the operation to lay mines under Harfleur’s walls is not being carried out according to proper military precedent, for which he blames the Irishman, Captain MacMorris, who arrives in the company of the Scots captain Jamy. MacMorris, furious himself at the mismanagement of the mines, is in no mood to enter into a discussion about military discipline with Fluellen, and is especially touchy about Fluellen’s reference to his nationality, but they postpone their quarrel to another occasion when they hear a parley sounded. King Harry urges the Governor of Harfleur to surrender, threatening that his soldiers will otherwise commit rape, infanticide, and other atrocities when they finally gain entrance, and the Governor capitulates, having received word that the Dauphin will not be able to send reinforcements. Harry plans to retire to Calais with his increasingly sickly army.
3.4 At the French court the Princess Catherine is learning English from her gentlewoman Alice, naming parts of the body and finding the English words ‘foot’ and ‘gown’ shockingly immodest.
3.5 King Charles’s nobles are astonished that the English have hitherto been so successful, lamenting that their women are taunting them for being less virile. Detaining the Dauphin with him, King Charles sends an immense force against Harry led by the Constable of France, first sending the herald Montjoy to ask what ransom Harry will pay to be spared.
3.6 Fluellen has been impressed by Pistol’s valiant language, but is disillusioned when Pistol asks him to intercede with Exeter to have Bardolph spared from hanging after being caught looting: Gower confirms that Pistol is a fraud. The King arrives and receives a progress report from Fluellen, including the news of Bardolph’s execution, which the King endorses. Montjoy arrives with King Charles’s request that Harry name his ransom: Harry, however, though admitting that his army is enfeebled by sickness and few in number, says he will not decline a battle, ordering his soldiers to encamp for the night and be ready to fight the next morning.
3.7 The French nobles, eager for battle, scoff at the supposedly doomed English: Bourbon [in the Folio, the Dauphin] brags absurdly about his horse.
4.0 The Chorus describes the two armies the night before the battle—the over-confident French dicing for English prisoners, the demoralized English being cheered by the King in person—and apologizes that the stage is so inadequate to the task of representing the battle of Agincourt.
4.1 During the night King Harry borrows a cloak from Sir Thomas Erpingham and wanders incognito among his soldiers: he is defied by Pistol for calling himself a friend of Fluellen, and approvingly overhears Fluellen reproaching Gower for speaking too loudly so close to the enemy army. He then joins a discussion among three common soldiers, Bates, Court, and Williams, about the justice of the King’s war and his responsibility for its casualties: Williams insists that the King’s declaration that he will not be ransomed is so much cynical propaganda, and he and Harry exchange gloves, by which they will recognize one another again, so that they may take up this quarrel after the battle. Alone, Harry laments the responsibilities laid on him by his subjects, ill compensated by the idle ceremonies of royalty, and prays that God will make his soldiers brave, imploring pardon for his father’s crime in usurping the crown from the murdered Richard II.
4.2 In the morning the French nobles eagerly prepare for battle.
4.3 The English nobles, their army outnumbered by five to one, bid farewell to one another, Warwick wishing their numbers were swelled by 10,000 of those at home who will do no work on this day: arriving from reviewing his troops the King overhears and rebukes him, saying the fewer they are the more honour they will share. In a stirring oration Harry claims that on this day, the feast of St Crispin, the heroic deeds of this small band of brothers will forever be remembered. Montjoy comes with one final appeal that Harry should negotiate a ransom instead of fighting, but Harry defies him, allowing the Duke of York to lead the English vanguard into battle.
4.4 In the fighting Pistol takes a French prisoner, with whom, using the Boy as interpreter, he negotiates a ransom. The Boy is anxious that the English camp is currently guarded only by boys.
4.5 Some of the French nobles are appalled that their army is losing, all order confounded: Bourbon leads them back into the battle, preferring death to the shame of defeat.
4.6 Exeter tells the King how York and Suffolk have died together in chivalric brotherhood: seeing the French regrouping, Harry orders the English to kill their prisoners.
4.7 Fluellen and Gower are horrified that the French have killed the English boys who were guarding the camp. Fluellen praises Harry, proud that the King was born in Monmouth, and makes a far-fetched comparison between Harry and Alexander the Great, likening Alexander’s killing of his friend Cleitus to Harry’s rejection of Falstaff. The King, angry to have heard of the slaughter of the boys, receives Montjoy, who concedes defeat. Fluellen congratulates the King for living up to the example of his ancestors and for being proud to be Welsh: heralds go to count the dead. Harry speaks with Williams, who does not recognize him; he then gives Fluellen the glove he had from Williams the previous night, telling him whoever challenges it is a traitor and should be arrested, but he sends Warwick and Gloucester to follow and prevent any mischief.
4.8 Williams challenges Fluellen’s glove and Fluellen tries to have him arrested: the King arrives with Warwick, Gloucester, and Exeter, however, explains his trick, reveals the identity of the man Williams challenged the previous night, and rewards Williams by returning his glove filled with gold coins. A herald brings the lists of the dead from both sides: the French have lost 10,000, including the Constable and many nobles, while the English have lost only 25 men all told. The King attributes the victory to God and decrees a mass.
5.0 The Chorus describes the King’s triumphant return to London, but says the play will not show this, cutting ahead to his return to France for the peace negotiations.
5.1 Fluellen has been affronted by Pistol on St David’s Day and mocked for wearing a Welsh leek in his cap: he now seeks out Pistol, cudgels him and makes him eat the leek, with Gower’s approval. Pistol, alone, laments that the Hostess has died of venereal disease, but looks forward to returning to England, resuming his career as a bawd and pickpocket, and passing off the marks of his beating as heroic war wounds.
5.2 At a grand summit between Harry and his delegation and the French court, Burgundy laments the damage the war has done to French agriculture, urging the swift conclusion of a peace: while his nobles discuss their proposed settlement with King Charles and his Queen, Harry remains with Alice and the Princess Catherine, whose marriage to Harry is one of the English demands under discussion. In a mixture of English and French Harry woos Catherine, assuring her that he loves France so well that he means to keep it, and on her concession that she will marry him if her father agrees he kisses her, much to her shock. Burgundy, finding them kissing on his return with the negotiators, jests elaborately. King Charles has agreed to all the English terms, including his daughter’s marriage to Harry, except the requirement that he should officially call Harry the heir to France. At Harry’s insistence, however, he cedes this point, and peace is concluded, the nobles looking forward to Harry and Catherine’s wedding. The Chorus speaks an epilogue, in the form of a sonnet, reminding the audience that despite Harry’s triumphs his son Henry VI lost France and allowed England to fall into renewed civil wars.
Artistic features: The Chorus’s speeches contain some of Shakespeare’s most exciting and ambitious poetry, reaching towards the territory of epic, and the King’s two great orations, ‘Once more unto the breach’ (3.1) and ‘This day is called the Feast of Crispian’ (4.3.18–67), are classics of English patriotic rhetoric. The play is more double-edged, however, than these frequently quoted passages may suggest: its depiction of warfare never precisely matches the glamorous and heroic pictures conjured by the Chorus, while its protagonist, aptly parodied by his comic counterpart Pistol, is both more insecure and more Machiavellian than the ‘warlike Harry’ promised in the Prologue.
Critical history: The success with which the play has monopolized the representation of the historical Henry V has often led commentators to conflate Shakespeare’s Henry with the real one, and this in turn has exacerbated a tendency to identify the play solely with its titular hero. *Romantic critics, from *Hazlitt to W. B. *Yeats and beyond, tended to disparage Henry as somehow mechanical, convinced that as a true poet Shakespeare must have preferred his more contemplative protagonists, such as Hamlet and Richard II, to anyone so decisive and successful. Much 20th-century commentary, particularly before 1950, was interested in relating this play to the design of the *Second Tetralogy as a whole, often presenting Henry as Shakespeare’s culminating ideal of English kingship (a view particularly associated with E. M. W. *Tillyard): since then critics have more often been divided between those who accuse the play of jingoism, or at best of complicity with Tudor policy in *Ireland and elsewhere, and those more interested in highlighting Shakespeare’s awareness of the contradictions and moral problems implicit in Harry’s attack on France.
Stage history: The play was revived at court in 1605, but the extant evidence suggests that it did not achieve the same popularity in its own time as the Henry IV plays or Richard III, something for which it would wait until the 18th century. When it was first revived, however, it appeared only in pieces, the Fluellen–Pistol scene appearing in Charles Molloy’s farce The Half-Pay Officers in 1720 and some of the rest of the play the following year in Aaron Hill’s adaptation *King Henry the Fifth; or, The Conquest of France by the English. The original was first revived in 1735, during the wave of patriotism that preceded the War of Jenkins’s Ear, and from then on a succession of wars with France kept it in the repertory for most of the rest of the century: it was revived at Covent Garden, for example, in every single season during the Seven Years War (1756–63). *Garrick cast himself as the Chorus in 1747, but the role was more usually cut, and the increasingly spectacular style in which the play was mounted mandated further cuts over the ensuing years. Major actors taking the role of Henry included *Kemble, *Macready, *Phelps, and, in New York, George Rignold, whose 1875 production lost even more of Shakespeare’s text to make way for a grand recreation of Harry and Catherine’s betrothal ceremony. In England the role became a favourite of Frank *Benson from 1899 onwards: his athletic ascent of the proscenium arch in full armour during ‘Once more unto the breach’ and his subsequent vaulting over the walls of Harfleur remain legendary, although he had strong competition during the Boer War years from Lewis Waller. The play was much revived during the First World War (Sybil *Thorndike played the Chorus at the Old Vic) and remained a favourite during the inter-war years, with Laurence *Olivier playing his first Henry in 1937. Since the Second World War interpretations of the title role have been largely shaped by their response to his portrayal, filmed in 1944, with some actors closely following his approach (such as Alan *Howard in Terry *Hands’s important Stratford production of 1975), some reacting strongly against it (such as Michael *Pennington, playing Henry as a cold cynic in Michael *Bogdanov’s production of 1985–6), and some attempting to do both, notably Kenneth *Branagh, who first played the role in Adrian *Noble’s ambivalently post-Falklands War production for the RSC in 1984.
Michael Dobson
On the screen: The two outstanding Henry V films were made by Laurence Olivier (1944) and Kenneth Branagh (1989) who, like Olivier before, was director and played the title role. Olivier’s film, despite its vigorous wartime patriotism, remains a classic, exploiting with imaginative brilliance cinema’s ability to embrace a range of visual styles and to effect transitions in time and place, and between theatre and cinema. With *Walton’s rousing orchestral score punctuating the soundtrack with sparkle and wistfulness, it is the first sound film to establish both artistic stature and public appeal for filmed Shakespeare. Branagh’s Henry V, made for an audience far more suspicious of the glamorization of war, has been seen as a reaction to Olivier’s film. Yet Branagh incorporates and modifies some of Olivier’s devices. His is a profoundly searching Henry, with none of the easy RAF-style nonchalance so evident in Olivier’s portrayal: he finds the body of the slain Boy at Agincourt, for example, and carries it, grieving, across the battlefield. On the small screen, the play was filmed as part of the *BBC Shakespeare series in 1979, with David Gwillim as Henry, and formed the final chapter of the BBC’s grand retelling of the *Second Tetralogy, The *Hollow Crown (2012).
Anthony Davies, rev. Will Sharpe