Photo Gallery | Behind the Scenes Video (150MB)
|
Program
|
SMART Guide
Heroism, Nationalism, and God’s Providence in Henry V
Shakespeare’s nine history plays show us the power inherent in the office of king and the frailties of six kings who ruled England between 1199 and 1485. Henry V, written in 1599, is the playwright’s last venture in the form, and its title character is the only king in the histories whose reign is preeminently successful.
Classic Players’ spring 2008 production of Henry V takes up the story of Hal where the spring 2007 production, an adaptation of the Henry IV plays, left off. The Prince of Wales has become King Henry V, the hero of a play that takes heroism as its theme.
With all its pageantry and patriotism, Henry V can be regarded as Hal’s success story. The new king proves that his promise to reform, made to his dying father, was genuine; he no longer keeps company with Falstaff, whose degenerate band of merry thieves is now dwindling and dying. Henry V also renews his great grandfather’s claim to France, an act that extends his military prowess and unifies a divided England against a common enemy. After brilliantly leading his forces to victory against all odds, the English conqueror becomes heir to the French throne. As a final boon, Henry accepts the hand of the French princess Katherine in marriage, and the play closes with romance and reconciliation.
Thus Shakespeare provides a comic ending to the strife and civil war that dominate the other three plays in his great tetralogy. The cycle begins with Richard II’s weak reign, brought to a close by Henry IV’s seizure of the crown and subsequent implication in Richard’s murder. The next two plays depict the troubled reign of the usurper Henry IV. But the tetralogy ends with Henry V’s great military victory at Agincourt, a triumph that legitimizes Lancaster rule and restores trust to the monarchy.
Shakespeare’s audience was familiar with both the historical events he draws from and, in most cases, the three interconnected plays penned before Henry V. During the Elizabethan age, Henry was one of the most popular figures in the English chronicles. Shakespeare based his character in part on well-known historical writings by Raphael Holinshed and Edward Hall.
Besides glorifying the battlefield heroics and rousing rhetoric of Queen Elizabeth’s most celebrated forebear, Shakespeare portrays him as an earnest king who accepts responsibility for his country’s welfare as a sacred trust. The play also develops the parallel biblical theme that God in His Providence determines the destiny of nations, at times using war as His instrument of judgment.
Convinced that his cause is righteous and his claim to France legal, Henry V manifests a sincere confidence that God’s favor is upon England. He habitually ascribes the outcome of events to Providence, eloquently arguing that God is powerful in protecting His followers and punishing their enemies.
Before the troops set sail for France, an assassination conspiracy by three of the king’s trusted nobility, in league with the enemy, comes to light. Henry sentences the traitors to death and then uses the incident to extol God’s providential care for England and to lead his compatriots forth against the enemy:
Since God so graciously hath brought to light
This dangerous treason lurking in our way
To hinder our beginnings, we doubt not now
But every rub is smoothed on our way.
Then forth, dear countrymen: let us deliver
Our puissance [power, might] into the hand of God.
Shakespeare could not have chosen a better historical subject for generating national pride, patriotism and faith in God’s Providence than the battle at Agincourt on October 15, 1415. English forces—sick, famished and outnumbered five to one—seemed doomed to be massacred by the French. By all estimates, however, one of the most lopsided fights in world history had a miraculous outcome.
In Shakespeare’s poetic accounting, 10,000 Frenchmen but only 29 Englishmen perished. Why? “God fought for us” is Henry’s simple explanation. The king therefore calls for the singing of Psalm 115, which begins, “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give the glory.”
While Elizabethans generally regarded Shakespeare’s Henry V as an ideal Christian king, a modern distaste for war and warriors has produced negative reaction to Henry V as a piece of warmongering chauvinism. In an effort to defend Shakespeare, actors and directors have searched his lines deeply for an ironic undercutting if not downright condemnation of Henry.
To traditionalists, however, Henry remains “This Star of England” whom Shakespeare took every care to associate with successful kingship. At the same time, the playwright, with his brilliant sense of the complexity of human experience, did not ignore either the excruciating personal cost of war or the darker political side to the events he depicts. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Henry V remains both balanced and compelling.
Janie McCauley, Dramaturg