When Blood is Their Argument: Class, Character, and Historymaking in Shakespeare's and Branagh's Henry V | Robert Lane, North Carolina State University
Robert Lane, North Carolina State University
That [these events] had a real truth in history, sharpens the sense of pain, while it hangs a leaden weight on the heart and the imagination … [W]e think that the actual truth of the particular events, in proportion as we are conscious of it, is a drawback on the pleasures as well as the dignity of tragedy.
—William Hazlitt1
Premised on the antagonism between history's "real ground" and the imaginative pleasures of tragedy, Hazlitt's meditation reveals a tension that underlies much discussion of Shakespeare's history plays. Hazlitt's polarizing of history and pleasure is echoed in Shakespeare's Henry V when the Archbishop extols Henry's rhetorical gifts:
List his discourse of war, and you shall hear
A fearful battle rend'red you in music.
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