SOURCE: Wright, Louis B., and Virginia A. LaMar, eds. “Mirror of Kingship.” In The Life of King Henry the Fifth, by William Shakespeare, pp. vii-xliii. New York: Washington Square Press, 1960.

[In the following excerpt, Wright and LaMar provide an overview of Henry V, including its historical background, sources, stage history, and text.]

When Shakespeare presented King Henry V to London audiences in the spring or summer of 1599 in a pageant-like play, he showed them a hero-king long established in the heroic tradition and one already popular on the stage. A shrewd appraiser of public taste, as always, Shakespeare took advantage of the swelling patriotism of the moment. When Henry V opened in London, England once more faced the prospect of war. The Irish had rebelled under Tyrone and had administered a stinging defeat to English troops. Now the Earl of Essex was ready to lead a punitive expedition against the troublesome Irish and conquer them once and for all. With a great concourse of people following and applauding him and his train, the noble Earl, a dashing character and the favorite of the Queen, marched out of London on March 27, 1599, bound for Ireland, and, as he and the populace believed, for victory and honor. That he would return defeated and disgraced in September was as yet a secret wrapped in the mists of Ireland.

No subject better than the deeds of King Henry V could have been chosen for the opening of the season in 1599, for Englishmen were enormously interested in the strength that he had brought to the Crown and the glory that he had won. By the end of the sixteenth century England was no longer the weak and puny country that it had been at the end of the Wars of the Roses, when Richard III had died at Bosworth Field and Henry Tudor had snatched his crown and made himself Henry VII. The country had grown strong under the Tudors and had taken its place as a world power under the greatest of them all, Elizabeth the Queen, Gloriana of the poets. Just eleven years before Henry V opened, England had defeated Spain, the mightiest power in the world, and had sent reeling home such galleons as survived from the vast invading Armada. Small wonder that Englishmen thrilled at the deeds of national heroes, present or past.

The reign of Elizabeth, especially the last two decades, saw an enormous interest in history and in historical plays. Felix Schelling, in his history of Elizabethan drama, has estimated that something like 220 plays during the Elizabethan period were drawn from the chronicles of British history, and that approximately half of these plays have survived. From 1588 to 1605, “more than a fifth of all contemporary plays” had for their themes some episode of British history. King John appeared in at least six plays, Henry V and Edward III in seven, Richard III in eight, and Henry VI was a character in at least ten. Of Shakespeare's plays, thirteen, or about one-third, used British history, or legend that passed for history, as their theme. The appetite for historical reading matter was enormous and the greatest poets and writers set out to satisfy this interest.

Shakespeare had already achieved success in historical drama before Henry V was written. Indeed, this play was a sequel promised the public who had taken the two parts of Henry IV to its heart. At the end of Henry IV (Part 2), Prince Hal succeeds to the throne and renounces Falstaff and his madcap cronies. The Epilogue, however, promises that the historical drama will continue with another play in which Falstaff will also appear: “If you be not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will continue his story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katherine of France; where, for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already 'a be killed with your hard opinions.” Henry V followed according to promise, but Falstaff was not in it. Shakespeare changed his plan and killed Falstaff off stage near the beginning of the play. Perhaps he felt that the fat knight would steal too many of the scenes in a play which sought to focus interest upon the King himself.

For Henry V is primarily concerned with the hero-king, with the prowess that such a king displays, with the glory that comes to England through the king's exploits, and with the problem of kingship as such. Given the spirit of the times, any drum-and-trumpet play would have attracted attention, but Shakespeare wrote something more and something deeper. His is a drama that breathes the spirit of the new nationalism that suffused England; though it is set in a previous age, it reflects with striking immediacy the attitudes and concepts of his own period. While the spectators applauded Henry V on the “vasty fields of France,” they were also conscious of their own heroic Queen and they may have remembered how, eleven years before, she had ridden her charger before the troops drawn up at Tilbury to repulse the Spanish invaders.

Henry V was a hero who appealed to the Elizabethans. In the face of heavy odds he had won a great victory against a traditional enemy. He was a strong king, who united the country behind him and showed to everyone, at home and abroad, that he would brook neither disorder within his borders nor encroachments from without. Furthermore, Shakespeare made him both God-fearing and just, qualities that the English believed their Queen possessed. She was supreme head of the church and she was the ultimate arbiter of a justice that the English had come to prize as one of their most priceless legacies. Shakespeare makes of Henry the ideal sovereign, or as the Chorus to Act II expresses it, “the mirror of all Christian kings.”

The problem of kingship and the nature of the office interested the Renaissance generally and the Elizabethans particularly. England had suffered from weak rulers during the Wars of the Roses until, in the end, the rise of the Tudors had brought stability and prosperity. Works of history, plays, and poems, as well as popular legend and story, kept alive the memory of the chaotic conditions that existed before the accession of Henry Tudor, and no Englishman wanted a return of civil strife. Strength and justice were the qualities most admired in a sovereign, and the majority of Englishmen agreed that the Tudors supplied both. Queen Elizabeth had shrewdly capitalized upon her subjects' yearning for stability, and she managed to identify herself so completely with the public weal that Englishmen could hardly think of a form of government or a sovereign more benign.

But lurking in the back of every Englishman's head was the thought of what might happen when the Queen was no more, for the succession was in doubt, and the fear of civil commotion was a ghost that could not be laid. Far more depended upon the succession than depends upon the outcome of the most critical election today. All of these facts gave special point to the histories of previous English sovereigns and are a further explanation of the popular interest in history plays. In Shakespeare's Richard II the public could see the evils that come upon the commonwealth when a king is weak and vacillating; in the three plays concerning Henry IV and Henry V they could see and appreciate the benefits of a strong dynasty. There is no question that audiences would equate for themselves the qualities of the great Plantagenets with those of the great Tudors. Consequently, for the spectators in 1599 Henry V was timely, topical, and of consuming interest.

Victorian and modern critics at times have found much fault with Henry V. To some, the reversal of the madcap qualities of Prince Hal and his conversion into a sedate, pious, and business-like ruler once he has succeeded to the throne are unrealistic and unconvincing. To others, the new King's hard and callous rejection of his old pot-companion Falstaff is too brutal to accept. To still others, the King's undertaking of a bloody campaign of aggression in France is proof of nothing except territorial greed. And lastly, to many the play has appeared lacking in structure, a sequence of poorly related scenes.

All of these criticisms are beside the point when one considers Shakespeare's purpose, the interpretation that he intended, and the attitude of the Elizabethans. We must remember that sixteenth-century concepts of character, of the responsibilities and obligations of a king, of war and peace—even of dramatic structure—differed radically from those possessed by the Victorians or by us.

For Henry to have retained the companionship of Falstaff after he had become king would have violated every canon of propriety understood by the Elizabethans. The King might have retained the services of a clown but not the fellowship of a clownish soldier and roistering reprobate. Having assumed the obligations of the crown, Henry had to put aside the frivolities of his irresponsible youth. There was a divinity that hedged a crown, and comic rascality had no place near it. Falstaff had to go. Sentimentalists who shed tears over Falstaff's discomfiture forget that to an Elizabethan the King's action in dismissing Falstaff at the end of Henry IV, Part II, was both proper and just. Though he forbade Falstaff to come within ten miles of the royal presence, he commanded that he be given a “competence of life”—in short, a pension. When the new play of Henry V opens, the King is no longer encumbered with cronies unbecoming a ruler. He is the very picture of an upright king.

The justification for Shakespeare's attribution of religious piety to Henry is found in his sources as well as in the dramatist's own purpose. He wanted to portray the perfect ruler, the character that he proposed to give to the chief protagonist in his play, and the perfect ruler was the spiritual as well as the temporal leader of his people. That was what Elizabethans understood. Their Queen was at pains to let nobody forget that she was supreme head of the church. That was the role that her father, Henry VIII, had assumed, and she had no choice, even if she had wished otherwise, than to maintain that position, for the stability of her throne depended upon her supremacy in spiritual as well as political affairs. Henry V is not the pious hypocrite that some unhistorical critics have made him; instead he is a sovereign mindful of his spiritual duties.

To an Elizabethan, Henry's undertaking the conquest of France was not naked aggression but the assertion of a legal right which it was his duty to enforce even at the expense of war. That is the point of the long passages at the beginning of the play in which the Archbishop of Canterbury expounds the fine points of the law of succession. Henry V—as well as Shakespeare—wants to make clear the legality of his claims and the justice of his cause. Whether we approve or not, Shakespeare's audience was convinced and they approved his actions. War was a part of life in the sixteenth century and few if any dreamed of banishing war as an instrument for enforcing national policies.

Although Shakespeare at times could be careless and forgetful of minor details, he was too skillful a dramatist merely to fling together a series of episodic scenes in a military pageant as some critics have implied. It is true that some of the comic scenes have little relation to the main plot, and occasionally there is evidence of hasty reworking of the material, as in Act IV, Scene vii, where no provision is made for Gower's exit, though the King talks about him as if he had left the stage. But Henry V is not a play without a plan. It must be interpreted as part of a trilogy that began with Henry IV, Part I, as the final element in a dramatic epic of the reigns of these strong Plantagenet kings.

Since Shakespeare was writing an epic of history, he was circumscribed by the known facts in what he could do. Although he could telescope the action and let a chorus account for the passage of years, he could not take too much poetic license with the actual deeds of the English in France or with the results of the war.

To provide information that the stage could not portray and to bring his historical episodes into focus, he employed the technique of a Prologue, an explanatory chorus before each act, and a concluding chorus that serves as an Epilogue. These elements deserve careful study for the information that they provide, not only about the action itself, but about Shakespeare's intentions. That the play has been an enduring success since its first performance is an indication that it is something more than a mere military pageant. It is Shakespeare's epic interpretation on the stage of the career of a national hero, and the poetry that Shakespeare wrote into this play has appealed to Englishmen in every national crisis from that day to this.

SOURCES AND STAGE HISTORY

As was his usual custom in writing a play on British history, Shakespeare turned to Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577-87) for the information, and sometimes the phraseology, that he wanted. But he did not stop with Holinshed. He consulted Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Families, of Lancaster and York (1548), which Holinshed himself had used as a source, and he apparently knew an older play on the same subject, The Famous Victories of Henry V (ca. 1586-87). In addition, some editors find traces of other works bearing on Shakespeare's theme. For example, Dover Wilson thinks Shakespeare knew a Latin life of Henry V, written by his chaplain, entitled Henrici Quinti, Angliae Regis Gesta, and others have found an echo of a second Latin biography, Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti, but it is doubtful whether Shakespeare went to work like a college professor to find bits and pieces when he had all that he needed in Hall and Holinshed; these English histories supplied ample raw material. At times he merely cast into blank verse the prose of Holinshed or Hall, as in the opening scenes of the play where the Archbishop of Canterbury discusses the Salic law.

The first printed version of Henry V, the corrupt quarto of 1600, announced on the title page that it had “been sundry times played by the right honorable the Lord Chamberlain his servants,” that is to say, by Shakespeare's company of players. The date of the first performance is fixed within fairly definite limits by a flattering allusion of the Chorus of Act V to the Earl of Essex's expedition to Ireland, which set out from London on March 27, 1599. Since the venture failed and Essex returned in disgrace in September of the same year, the play must have been acted before that date. The reference in the Prologue to “this wooden O” has been taken to mean the Globe playhouse, but it is not certain precisely when in 1599 the Globe was completed. The place of first performance may have been another of the public theatres.

Although Henry V was apparently a popular play, surviving records of its early stage history are scanty. We know that it was performed at Court before King James on January 7, 1605, as part of the Christmas holiday festivities. During the Restoration it was revived and Samuel Pepys saw Thomas Betterton play the King at Lincoln's Inn Fields on July 6, 1668, but there is little evidence of other performances of the play until well into the eighteenth century. Aaron Hill borrowed from Shakespeare for a play of his own on the same theme, but by 1735 Shakespeare's text was restored to the theatre and thenceforth Henry V was seen at regular intervals on the English stage. It was popular at both Drury Lane and Covent Garden and many of the most noted actors of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries have played in it. David Garrick chose to serve as Prologue and Chorus on several occasions, an indication of the importance that he attached to that role. Perhaps the strangest recorded performance of Henry V was that at Stratford-upon-Avon on Shakespeare's birthday, 1921, with an all-woman cast in which Marie Slade played the King.

The mid-nineteenth-century theatre often attempted naturalistic realism in staging the play, a mistake that saw some fantastic stage sets as producers tried to remedy the inadequacies that Shakespeare's Prologue had described. Some of the spectacles provided dioramas of Henry's ships moving from Southampton to Harfleur and of great battle scenes. It remained, however, for Sir Laurence Olivier to weld poetry and scenic effects into a convincing unity in the motion-picture version of Henry V, first seen in England in November 1944. This version of the play has had an enormous popularity on both sides of the Atlantic and fifteen years after its première it is still being seen in British and American theatres.

THE TEXT

The text of Henry V printed in the First Folio of 1623 is the basis of all modern editions of the play. Although this text is reasonably free from mislineations, misspellings, and other mistakes, some passages require emendation to make proper sense, and editors have made some use of the quarto versions in an effort to arrive at Shakespeare's meaning. The First Quarto, printed in 1600 by Thomas Creede for Thomas Millington and John Busby, is an abbreviated and corrupt text, shorter by about two thousand lines than the Folio text. Suggestions as to the origin of this quarto version include a text put together from memory by one or more of the actors, and a text taken down by shorthand. A suggestion has also been made that it was a stage version cut for a provincial performance. In any case it is a perversion of the text that was used for the Folio printing, presumably an acceptable playhouse manuscript.

Two other quarto versions appeared before the publication of the First Folio, the Second Quarto of 1602 and the Third Quarto of 1619, but these are not independent versions and merely reprint with some corrections the text of the First Quarto. …