Henry V (play)

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry V, Shakespeare's history play believed to have been written circa 1599, opens with an apology. A lone figure steps forward on the stage and asks the audience to forgive what they are about to see. The theatre is too small, the actors too few, and the stage too cramped to contain the sweep of a king's conquest of France. "Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts," the Chorus pleads, asking listeners to compress many years "into an hour-glass."

  This opening confession is more than theatrical modesty. It signals that Henry V is a play acutely aware of its own limitations and contradictions. The king at its centre fights a war both glorious and brutal. He delivers speeches that still echo through culture, and he orders acts that scholars continue to debate in courtrooms. He wins against odds that appear impossible, and yet the play closes with the Chorus reminding the audience that everything Henry built would soon be lost.

  The questions the play plants are not ones of plot. They are questions of character and conscience: can a man be both a great leader and a war criminal? Can a conquest be both righteous and violent? And can a playwright, working from a bare wooden stage, make an audience feel the mud of Agincourt?

• 2. The Prince Reborn

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  Audiences who saw Henry V in 1599 had already watched this king grow up across two earlier plays. In the Henry IV plays, Prince Hal was a wild, undisciplined young man running with tavern companions including the rotund knight Sir John Falstaff. By the time Henry V opens, that prince has become a king, and the transformation is the engine of the entire drama.

  The proof of his change arrives early. In Act II, the Earl of Cambridge and two comrades plot to assassinate Henry at Southampton before he can sail to France. Henry uncovers the conspiracy with a cool cleverness that would have been foreign to the reckless Hal of earlier plays. His treatment of the plotters is described as ruthless, a deliberate signal that he has shed the indulgences of youth.

  Yet the past is never fully absent. Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph, those same tavern companions from the Henry IV plays, march in Henry's army. Bardolph is executed for looting during the French campaign, a grim punctuation mark. The play also pauses briefly on the death of Falstaff himself, whom Henry had publicly rejected at the end of Henry IV, Part 2. The king who now commands armies is the same man who once caroused in the Boar's Head tavern, and Shakespeare does not let either Henry or the audience forget it.

• 3. The Weight of Command

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  The night before the Battle of Agincourt, Henry does something no general in a triumphalist war epic would be expected to do. He wanders his camp in disguise, listening to what his soldiers actually think of him. He agonises about the moral burden of being king and prays to God to "steel my soldiers' hearts."

  This scene anchors the play's most serious inquiry. Henry's army is vastly outnumbered. Three ordinary soldiers, John Bates, Alexander Court, and Michael Williams, argue with the disguised king about whether a monarch bears responsibility for the souls of the men who die in his wars. Henry deflects with a legalistic argument, but the exchange leaves an unresolved charge hanging in the air.

  The American critic Norman Rabkin described the play as a picture with two meanings, arguing that it never settles on a single viewpoint on war. Henry's own language shifts dramatically depending on context. At Harfleur, he threatens the governor with graphic descriptions of rape and pillage if the city does not surrender. Hours later, at Agincourt, he speaks of patriotic glory and brotherhood. Scholar Christopher N. Warren has argued, drawing on Alberico Gentili's De armis Romanis alongside the play itself, that the question of whether Henry V can be considered a war criminal is not only legitimate but "historically appropriate." A mock trial held in Washington, D.C. in March 2010, with Justices Samuel Alito and Ruth Bader Ginsburg presiding, reached a split verdict on the justification for war but found Henry unanimously guilty on the killing of prisoners.

• 4. Agincourt and Its Numbers

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  Shakespeare does not stage the Battle of Agincourt directly. The audience hears the French lament "Tout est perdu" ("all is lost"), but the outcome remains uncertain to Henry until the herald Montjoy returns and quietly announces that "the day is yours."

  What follows is one of the most startling casualty reports in English literature. The French suffered ten thousand dead. The English lost a Duke, an Earl, a knight, a squire, and, in Henry's own account, "of all other, but five and twenty." That figure so strained credulity that Laurence Olivier, in his 1944 film adaptation, changed the line to "five and twenty score," since historians at the time believed the English toll was approximately six hundred. The original text's number was apparently too miraculous even for a wartime propaganda film.

  The lopsided victory is the pivot on which the play's moral ambiguity turns. Henry praises God for what he calls a shocking outcome. But the victory follows scenes in which prisoners were killed on Henry's order, a decision the disguised king had defended to his soldiers the night before in abstract terms. The battle's aftermath forces the audience to hold both things simultaneously: a result that appears divinely ordained, and methods that remain morally contested.

• 5. England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland

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  The words England, English, and Englishmen appear more frequently in Henry V than in any other Shakespeare play. Scholar Michael Neill has argued that this reflects the play's deep involvement in the emergence of England as what he calls Europe's first true nation-state. But the play is careful to show that this nation is not a unified thing.

  Henry's army contains a Welshman named Fluellen, an Irishman named Macmorris, a Scot named Jamy, and an Englishman named Gower. Their relations are not always friendly. Henry himself was born in Wales, and he hails Fluellen as a fellow countryman, a detail that signals how Wales had been absorbed relatively smoothly into the English kingdom. Ireland is another matter. When the word "nation" is mentioned to Macmorris, his angry response reflects, in Neill's reading, the anxieties of an ongoing and violent conquest.

  The French complicate this picture further. Henry's solution to the contradiction between conquest and integration is marriage. At the play's end, he woos Princess Katharine in a scene where neither speaks the other's language well. Their mutual incomprehension generates comedy, but Shakespeare also makes the involuntary nature of this union visible. The French queen prays that English and French may receive each other as one people. The Chorus closes the play by noting that Henry's son would lose France entirely.

• 6. On Stage and Screen

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  A tradition holds that Henry V was the first play performed at the new Globe Theatre in the spring of 1599, with its Chorus referring to the "wooden O" of the theatre itself. James Shapiro has argued against this, suggesting the Chamberlain's Men were still at The Curtain when the play debuted, and that Shakespeare himself probably played the Chorus. The earliest performance with a confirmed date took place on the 7th of January 1605 at Whitehall Palace.

  The play's stage history is unusually long and ideologically varied. Richard Mansfield's Broadway production in 1900 ran for 54 performances, the longest Broadway run of the play on record. In London, the play attracted some of the century's most prominent actors: Ralph Richardson at the Old Vic in 1931, Richard Burton at the Old Vic in 1955, and Kenneth Branagh at the Barbican in 1985 for the Royal Shakespeare Company. A 1956 Stratford Shakespeare Festival production cast Christopher Plummer as Henry and William Shatner as his understudy, with Shatner substituting for Plummer in one performance.

  The two major films bracket the play's ideological range cleanly. Laurence Olivier's 1944 version was commissioned as patriotic wartime propaganda, timed to the invasion of Normandy. Kenneth Branagh's 1989 version reversed that emphasis, stressing the mud-spattered horror of battle. A 2003 Royal National Theatre production, with Adrian Lester as Henry, staged him as a modern war general, in a production that audiences read as a critique of the Iraq invasion. The 2019 film The King, starring Timothée Chalamet, drew on Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, and Henry V together.

• 7. Music and Afterlife

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  William Walton composed the score for Olivier's 1944 film, and that music has since taken on a life of its own. In 1963, conductor Muir Mathieson arranged five movements from Walton's score into an orchestral suite. A longer concert work, Henry V: A Shakespeare Scenario, edited by David Lloyd-Jones and arranged by Christopher Palmer, runs to fifty minutes for narrator, SATB chorus, optional boys' choir, and full orchestra. Its premiere took place at the Royal Festival Hall in London in May 1990, with Christopher Plummer narrating, the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields performing, and Sir Neville Marriner conducting. Chandos released a recording that same year.

  A separate symphonic overture, O For a Muse of Fire, composed by Darryl Kubian, premiered with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in March 2015. The work is twelve minutes long and incorporates lines from the play's text sung by a vocal soloist, with the vocal range designed to be adaptable to different voice types. The soloist for the premiere was Mary Fahl, formerly the lead singer of October Project.

  In 2004, choreographer David Gordon created a dance-theatre piece called Dancing Henry Five, mixing Walton's film music with recorded speeches from the Olivier film and from Christopher Plummer, alongside commentary written by Gordon himself. It premiered at Danspace Project in New York and was revived three times, in 2005, 2007, and 2011, touring cities across the United States. The work received a National Endowment for the Arts American Masterpieces in Dance Award.