Henry V See attachment 1300 words See attachment
Henry V Notes
This play concludes the second tetralogy of history plays after Richard II, Henry IV (parts 1 and 2). Written in 1599, it was Shakespeare’s last English history play. It appeared in a Quarto in 1600, reprinted twice before the Folio version of 1623. It captures a unique moment: the ending stages of the 100 years war begun in 1337 by Edward III (the play references the two main English battle victories of the war, Crecy in 1346; Poitiers in 1356). After 1360 English power in France fades until Henry V. After him, the English hold Normandy until 1444 and in 1453 are finally driven out of Bordeaux and out of France forever. It also signals the beginnings of the Wars of the Roses.
Shakespeare used Hall and Holinshed’s chronicles and probably a document called “The Famous Victories of Henry V” published in 1598. Almost 200 years after his death, Henry was still a wildly popular figure of high chivalry, the professional athlete of his day.
Richard II (the last Plantagenet) ascended the throne in 1377 when Edward III his grandfather died. He was only 10. He was the son of Edward, the Black Prince of Wales, who had died in 1376. There was no formal regent but his uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (himself Edward’s third son) was his staunch supporter and guide. Richard ruled for 22 years (1377-1399) enduring the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 and constant plotting by his court and parliament. One of his many exiled enemies was Henry Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt and thus Richard’s first cousin. When Gaunt died in 1399, Richard seized the lands belonging to the dukedom of Lancaster which should have passed to Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke raised an army and returned from France. He forced the now very unpopular Richard to abdicate the throne and imprisoned him in the Tower of London. After becoming the new king, Henry IV, he had Richard moved to the castle of Pontefract and starved him to death (he died in 1400).
So Edward III’s other grandson, Henry IV, usurped the throne in 1399. He rules for 14 years (to 1413) as the first Lancastrian King. He was always somewhat insecure on the seized throne. Shakespeare explores this thoroughly in both Parts of Henry IV. 1.) Richard still had some powerful supporters. 2.) Edmund Mortimer, age 8, had been officially chosen as Richard’s heir. He became a focal point of a rebellion led by Percy, the Earl of Northumberland and his son, known as Hotspur) and including many Northern nobles. There was also a serious rebellion by the Welsh lords. Henry crushed these but he began to experience constantly failing health. His young son, the future Henry V, became Chancellor in 1409. Henry IV died at the age of 45 and effected a peaceful succession to his eldest son.
Henry V was born in 1387 at Monmouth Castle. By the age of 15 he was embroiled in his father’s affairs and fought alongside his father during the Welsh rebellion. In later years he disagreed with his father (they supported opposite sides during a French Civil war). He took the throne in 1413 at the age of 26. (and he astutely gave Richard a state burial at Westminster). His reign was almost entirely focused on regaining English control of France. First he tried to negotiate a slice of the pie and when that failed, he invaded in 1415. After besieging and capturing the city of Harfleur, he met the vastly superior French army on 25 October 1415 at the Battle of Agincourt. The military significance of the longbow was established, ending the age of chivalry and medieval battle tactics. Shakespeare compresses a series of French campaigns into one. He invaded again in 1417.
In 1419 he captured Normandy. Then the Duke of Burgundy supported Henry to take the throne from the Dauphin (the son of the French king). The Treaty of Troyes in May of 1420 made Henry heir to the French throne and it was sealed by his marriage to Catherine de Valois, the daughter of King Charles VI. The Dauphin continued to resist and killed Henry’s brother Thomas, the Duke of Clarence, at the Battle of Bauge. In 1422 Henry invaded France yet again. But he contracted dysentery during the siege of Meaux and died on 31 August 1422, age 34. Six weeks later Charles VI died and thus Henry never achieved the French throne. His infant son, Henry VI, was crowned king and then surrounded by ambitious regents. Catherine, his widow, later secretly married a Welsh prince, Owain Tudor, had 4 or 5 children (she died in childbirth in 1437, age 36). Her son Edmund Tudor was the father of the future king Henry VII (Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather).
The myth of Henry V was that of the Prodigal son. Supposedly his youth was spent in riotous living with unsavory companions and everyone including his father despaired of him ever “making something of himself.” This is the primary subject of the two Henry IV plays, where the young prince lays about with Sir John Falstaff and his crew of drunkards, prostitutes and thieves. But Henry is merely learning street smarts and in the end he takes up the crown, rejects Falstaff, and transforms himself into a powerful and warlike king.
Although the two Henry IV plays are titled after that monarch, the focus of both plays is actually on his youthful son, Henry (called Hal in the plays), the Prince of Wales. Hal was born in 1387 and he was only 12 when his father usurped the throne from his (Henry IV’s) cousin Richard II in 1399. Hal is sometimes called Henry of Monmouth (or Monmouth) because he was born in Monmouth castle in Wales (which is also why he makes reference in the play to being Welsh).
As we learned when we studied Henry IV, Part One, because Henry IV essentially stole the throne by force from a cousin who had a much stronger claim, he was perpetually insecure in his office. Shakespeare’s two plays feature him (along with his son and his loyal followers) fighting a more or less continual battle against various rebels (Scots, Welsh, and Northern English noblemen) all intent on overthrowing him.
The true genius of the two Henry IV plays is the way Shakespeare interweaves this high serious plot of Henry’s wars with a paralleling low comic plot involving his greatest comic creation, Sir John Falstaff, and his rag-tag crew of cutpurses, thieves, liars, drunkards, and all-around low-lifes. The connecting link is Prince Hal, who appears in the two Henry IV plays as a drunken reveler who is estranged from his father’s court and who has taken up with Falstaff and his roguish companions. Indeed, Falstaff becomes a kind of surrogate father to Hal and their contentious and comical relationship is the heart and soul of the two plays. But even as he whiles the days away with Falstaff and his riotous crew, Hal (in asides and soliloquies to the audience) plots a startling transformation. That is, when his father dies and he himself is crowned king, he plans to utterly forsake his former life of wildness and sin and prove himself a mighty ruler.
The second part of Henry IV ends thus with Henry’s death and Hal’s accession to the crown as King Henry V. It also contains one of the most heartbreaking scenes in all of literature, where Hal (now King Henry) coldly rejects Falstaff and has him hauled off to debtor’s prison.
Henry IV, Part Two also ends with a spoken epilogue where Shakespeare promises the audience another play, with further adventures for Falstaff and his hilarious companions. But, as Shakespeare wrote this play, he somehow couldn’t bring himself to send Falstaff to France when King Henry invades. Instead, in a move that has both infuriated and pleased generations of readers, he has Falstaff die quietly, offstage, in Act II of the play. One of his companions remarks, almost off-handedly, that “the King hath killed his heart.” Much of the debate about King Henry’s actions in invading France (in the play, not necessarily in history) must be seen in the light of his casting off of Falstaff’s influence and the subsequent breaking of the fat knight’s heart. Falstaff was an enormously popular character, with everyone from the crowds in the public theatres to Queen Elizabeth herself delighting in his lies and misdeeds. As King Henry becomes the fighting machine who conquers France, there seems to be no place for Falstaff’s antics.
The interweaving of comic scenes is more troubling then in Henry V than in the earlier plays. All of Falstaff’s crew: Pistol, Nym, Bardolph, and the nameless “Boy,” all of whom feature in the two Henry IV plays and in Merry Wives of Windsor, the other Falstaff play, reappear in Henry V and they all travel with the army to France. Mistress Quickly, another major character from the earlier plays also appears in Act II here and it is she who movingly narrates Falstaff’s death to the other characters. But the comic world they all inhabited in the earlier works is gone here. By the end, Nym and the Boy have died in the battle, Bardolph has been hung, on Henry’s orders, for robbing a church, and we learn that Mistress Quickly has died back in England as well. Only Pistol, embittered and disgraced, remains alive at the end and all of his quick humor is gone as he declaims “To England then I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal”.
This back story from the previous plays floats like a ghost in the subtext of the play. In Branagh’s film version, he even includes a number of flashback scenes culled from the two Henry IV plays in order to strengthen the ties between them.
