According to Peter Holland, who reviewed the production in Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995), “having a female Governor of Harfleur feminized the city and provided a direct response to the horrendous threat of rape and murder that Henry had offered, his language and her body in direct connection and opposition” (p. 210). Ten years from now the device may not play so effectively, but today it speaks to us. Shakespeare, born in the Elizabethan Age, has been dead nearly four hundred years, yet he is, as Ben Jonson said, “not of an age but for all time.” We must understand, however, that he is “for all time” precisely because each age finds in his abundance something for itself and something of itself.

And here we come back to two issues discussed earlier in this introduction—the instability of the text and, curiously, the Bacon/Oxford heresy concerning the authorship of the plays. Of course Shakespeare wrote the plays, and we should daily fall on our knees to thank him for them—and yet there is something to the idea that he is not their only author. Every editor, every director and actor, and every reader to some degree shapes them, too, for when we edit, direct, act, or read, we inevitably become Shakespeare’s collaborator and re-create the plays. The plays, one might say, are so cunningly contrived that they guide our responses, tell us how we ought to feel, and make a mark on us, but (for better or for worse) we also make a mark on them.

 

—SYLVAN BARNET Tufts University

Introduction

In the theater Henry the Fifth is renowned for its pageantry, battles and crowd scenes, its varied collection of minor characters, and the unquestioned dominance of its hero. After Shakespeare’s day it first became popular as the theaters began to use ambitious stage settings and more elaborate stage management. Shakespeare’s play was embellished in 1761 by a Coronation scene, and in 1839 with a moving “diorama”—an extensive panoramic view which moved across the back of the stage—that depicted the journey from Southampton to Harfleur. In recent years it has been performed in battle-dress against film sequences showing twentieth-century warfare or, as at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1964, with painstaking realism of gunsmoke and bloody shattered bodies. (Sir Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh made it the subject of films.) For actors the play has always been hard work, with many changes of costume as pageantry is displaced by mobilization and then by warfare and hardship: and then there is another switch back to pageantry. But rewards are there, too, in the great number of parts that Shakespeare has individually realized for two or three episodes, or even a single scene: Mistress Quickly, Bardolph, Nym, the boy; Williams and Bates—or even a strangely effective gentleness in the one-line part of Court; Jamy, Gower, Macmorris; the Dauphin, Princess Katherine, the King of France, Montjoy, Burgundy. Press criticisms show that Henry the Fifth is the minor actors’ opportunity; a boy or Mistress Quickly, a Princess or Burgundy can steal a large part of the notice.

Yet it also has an undoubted hero. For other history plays, the leading actor in a company might play the Bastard rather than King John, Falstaff or Hotspur rather than Prince Hal or Henry the Fourth—even Bolingbroke in preference to Richard the Second. But here Fluellen and Pistol are the most considerable rivals to the hero, and neither is effectively present in more than six or seven scenes, or has more than incidental contact with the King.

Written in 1599, a year or so before Hamlet, Henry the Fifth was Shakespeare’s last history play for ten years or more, and he appears to have taken no risks. Despite its crowd scenes and wide range of characters, it has a simple plot of wars, a battle and a peace, centered on its undoubted hero. A Chorus, before each act, encourages the audience’s warmest responses, and invites its imagination to see two mighty monarchies, and follow Harry as a type of virtue, “the mirror of all Christian kings” (2.Prologue.6). For most of the play, the King appears publicly, in ceremonial consultation or address, or as leader of his army; his words are well ordered, and clearly and fully understood. When he surprises the French ambassador with defiance of the three traitors with a knowledge of their crimes, the audience has been prepared in advance so that its understanding suffers no shock. The minor characters are all dependent on Harry and yet make only occasional appearances in unconsecutive scenes, usually without the hero, so that the independent plot-interest they awaken is both small and quickly answered. Except for the French royal house, none already established has a place in the last long scene; but two entirely new characters are then introduced to eminence, Isabel and the Duke of Burgundy. The play’s structure is firmly centered; its setting splendid, varied, broad. In its sweeping, general impression, and usually in performance, Henry the Fifth is a popular pageant play of the “star of England,” and incidentally of his people and his victories.

But this view of Shakespeare’s achievement will not satisfy many critics and scholars who have studied the play and resisted the confident tone of the Chorus. They can see it as a routine and unwieldy continuation of other histories, without the imaginative argumentation or consistency of earlier plays. Or, especially if they concentrate attention on the words of the hero, they can read it as a careful investigation of the human failings of a politician. (Professor Tillyard’s book on the Histories, of which the relevant section is reprinted in the Commentaries, and Miss Honor Matthews’ treatment of the play in her Character and Symbol in Shakespeare’s Plays are eloquent advocates of these opposing views.) In the theater, too, the play can seem merely routine, especially in association with Shakespeare’s other histories. When acted at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1951, as the fourth of a continuous series of plays, from Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV, it seemed something of an appendix. The stage designer was led to elaborate the single setting that had served for the other three plays with flags, drapes and properties. The official book on the season speaks of the play in these terms:

By the time we reach Henry V the particular interest of the “presentation in cycle” is all but over.

When Henry the Fifth was performed at the same theater in 1964 in a longer series after the two parts of Henry the Fourth and before the three parts of Henry the Sixth and Richard the Third, its Harry (“the mirror of all Christian kings”) was hailed as a plain man’s king, a pacifist warrior or, fashionably, a self-questioning anti-hero. Shakespeare’s ground plan for the hero-centered pageant-narrative can sustain very different edifices.

Indeed, in many small details of the play’s structure Shakespeare seems to be guarding against too broad or relaxed a reception of the play.