SOURCE: Marsland, Elizabeth. “Updating Agincourt: The Battle Scenes in Two Film Versions of Henry V.” In Modern War on Stage and Screen, edited by Wolfgang Görtschacher and Holger Klein, pp. 5-19. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, the published version of a lecture delivered at a conference in Salzburg, Austria, in October 1995, Marsland compares Laurence Olivier's and Kenneth Branagh's representations of the Battle of Agincourt in their cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare's Henry V. Although the critic calls attention to the difference between Olivier's romantic view of war and Branagh's more realistic one, she contends that both directors glossed over the negative attributes of Shakespeare's Henry.]

Shakespeare's Cronicle History of Henry the fift, a play written in 1599 about a battle fought in 1415, may seem an unlikely starting-point for a conference on the representation of modern war. But since part of my purpose is to call into question some of our widely-held tenets concerning the difference between modern and so-called ‘traditional’ warfare, as well as between more recent and older war literature, I believe that Agincourt is indeed an appropriate place to begin.

Possibly because recent wars have been so vividly portrayed to nonparticipants through visual and auditory media, it is easy to believe that the horror of war is a twentieth-century discovery. As war-literature critics we seem inclined to assume that, until industrialization drastically changed the nature of warfare in August 1914, battles had always been colourful and exciting affairs involving chivalric man-to-man combat, individual courage and prowess rather than superior weaponry, and relatively little destruction. Military history can offer many examples to challenge such a view, and not least amongst the bloody and terrible battles of the past was that at Agincourt in October 1415, when the English under Henry V, though greatly outnumbered, decimated the French army at relatively little cost to themselves. (Holinshed's Chronicle, Shakespeare's historical source, speaks of 10,000 French and a mere 29 English killed, which is rather hard to believe, but even the more realistic estimates of modern military historians suggest a disparity of 7000 French to 500 English.)¹

This disproportionate outcome appears to have resulted from several factors. The long-bow archers who outnumbered men-at-arms by five to one in Henry's army were highly trained in the techniques of mass fire-power as well as individual skill, and the English king deployed them to maximum effect. He lured the French to attack at a point where the field was narrow, and ordered his archers to set pointed stakes in the ground to slow the momentum of the French cavalry advance. The attacking horsemen were thus trapped between a barricade of stakes and their own advancing infantry, with English archers firing on them from either side.² The English took an unusually large number of prisoners, who normally would have expected to be ransomed. In this instance, however, the English king ordered all except the most valuable prisoners killed, a deed of questionable morality that was long associated with his name.³ The historical Battle of Agincourt, described by one modern military historian as “a story of slaughter-yard behaviour and of outright atrocity”, clearly bears little relation to our imagined ideal of heroic man-to-man combat (Keegan, p.79).

Our present concern, however, is not so much war per se as the representation of war on stage and screen. Yet here, too, Agincourt offers a salutary lesson. Since we take it for granted that industrialized war is essentially different in nature from traditional warfare, we tend to assume that modern warfare not only calls forth a different literary response in general (anti-war rather than pro-war) but also demands and inspires different modes of literary representation. (For lack of a more convenient term I am extending the meaning of ‘literary’ to encompass these two branches of the performing arts.) Yet the concerns that Shakespeare voices in King Henry V about the difficulty of staging Agincourt, and the solutions he offers, are very much those of a dramatist dealing with a modern battle. Meanwhile, the two most popular film adaptations of this play—those directed by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh—serve convincingly to refute the assumption that the type of warfare determines how war is perceived and represented artistically, since they depict the same battle in strikingly different ways. What is more, although the films are dealing with a late-medieval conflict, each embodies a specific (and specifically) twentieth-century manner of imagining and representing war. Accordingly, a comparison of the Agincourt battle-scenes in the two movies, completed respectively in 1944 and 1989, not only demonstrates the characteristics of these two paradigms, but also serves to exemplify some of the techniques that determine whether a representation is likely to be regarded as “pro-war” or “anti-war”. Ultimately, however, it becomes clear that both directors find in war a value that is absent in Shakespeare's ambivalent play: the automatic equating of traditional war literature with a pro-war attitude and of modern representation with an anti-war attitude simply is not justified by the evidence.

Shakespeare's Henry V opens with the wish for a “Muse of fire” to bring down inspiration from “the brightest heaven of invention.” It is spoken by the Chorus, a narrator or commentator figure rare amongst Shakespeare's works, who addresses the audience at the beginning of each act, and whose function seems to be to set the scene, to bias our judgment about personalities and coming events, and above all to apologize for the medium. The Chorus regrets at some length that the theatre cannot “hold / The vasty fields of France” nor the Company offer “the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt.” The only solution, he suggests, lies in the imagination of the spectators: “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts”, he pleads; “Think when we talk of horses that you see them”; “Into a thousand parts divide one man” to imagine an army; and try to believe that “four or five most vile and ragged foils / Right ill disposed in brawl ridiculous” can actually represent, however inadequately, the famous battle. A cavalry attack is certainly no easier to stage than a modern artillery battle; and if dramatic representation of war is indeed more difficult for the twentieth century than for the seventeenth, as some critics have suggested, the reason more probably lies in changed theatrical conventions than in the type of warfare. Modern audiences, having been taught to expect realistic representation, are perhaps less content to “eke out” the performance through imagination than were the spectators whom the Chorus originally addressed.

Although in some respects the Chorus proves to be a less-than-reliable commentator, in the sense that the scenes which follow his various prologues are often at odds with what he has led us to expect, his speeches nevertheless play a significant part in the build-up of tension in anticipation of Agincourt, the climax of the play. In particular, his description of the rival encampments the night before the battle sets the scene for what threatens to be a massacre of the “poor condemned English”, who sit sadly and patiently by their campfires “like sacrifices” while the “confident and over-lusty French” long for the morning. At last the day of battle arrives. Henry delivers his rousing “St. Crispin's Day” address to his army (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”); he rejects a final invitation from the French to deliver himself up for ransom; and with a last formulaic prayer that God “dispose the day” as He may see fit, the King and his troops march away.

The battle that follows, however, must be the greatest anti-climax in all of English theatre. As Henry and his soldiers leave the stage they are replaced, to the accompaniment of battle noises offstage (an invaluable resource in war drama then as now), by the comic character Pistol, his companion “the Boy” and a terrified French soldier, the far from iron-like M. Le Fer, who readily surrenders and is taken prisoner. Immediately afterwards, to our surprise, we hear some French nobles discussing their “shame” at being overcome by the pitiful English army. Next, another offstage “Alarm” prompts Henry to order the killing of all French prisoners; and then we are given a very brief account of a French attack on the unarmed boys guarding the English camp. Enter Henry again, followed by the French herald, who confirms that the battle is over and the English have won. Admittedly the Chorus warned that the attempt to perform Agincourt on the stage would produce only a “brawl ridiculous”, but after all the build-up most spectators probably expect to see something more of the famous battle than the single comic encounter that is actually shown. The joke is definitely on us.

There is no doubt, however, that the playwright's decision not to try to reproduce Agincourt proves fortuitous for the two film directors, who both make good Shakespeare's omission with a series of scenes that present the battle at considerable length. In general, film technology must surely be just the kind of “invention” the Chorus wished for. If it cannot exactly offer “the very casques” from Agincourt, it can certainly supply convincing imitations, while “vasty fields” can be made to appear before the cinema audience almost as if in real life. Furthermore, because film so readily persuades us that what we see on the screen is part of a whole—and this, of course, is the secret of how we perceive reality, mentally supplying whatever is behind and beyond the visible façade—it can easily convince us that a few dozen soldiers with their “vile and ragged” swords are the front ranks of a whole regiment, not merely, as a small group on the stage would be, a representative sample. As we well know, film representation is no less governed by convention than live drama, but the conventions are in many respects less obtrusive, so the problem of generating “willing suspension of disbelief” is on the whole easier in film. But filming a Shakespearean play offers a different kind of challenge, since naturalistic representation does not accord well with Shakespeare's verse, a decidedly unnatural way of speaking; and although the cinema audience may be willing to accept verse dialogue after the first few minutes, such obviously theatrical devices as soliloquies and set speeches remain problematic. The King's Saint Crispin's Day address, for instance, produces an awkward moment in both these films, when Henry's conversational response to his “cousin Westmoreland” must suddenly become the opening of an oratorical speech to the troops, a change that requires the assembling of the men to form an audience. For the sequence of non-Shakespearean battle-scenes, however, there is no “unnatural” dialogue that must be incorporated into the naturalistic flow of events, so Olivier and Branagh are able to concentrate unimpeded on the action and visual details of their now “silent” movie, abandoning the pretense of drama in favour of straightforward narrative.⁴

Nor are there stage instructions to be followed, with the result that the two directors are free to present the combat in any way they choose. Both opt for something approaching historical accuracy in costume and weaponry, and both, perhaps not surprisingly, introduce two aspects of the battle that were historically very important, but which Shakespeare failed to mention: the presence of the archers and their use of stakes to entrap the enemy. Olivier begins his visual battle-narrative in the accepted manner of heroic epics, moving from one camp to the other to offer a picture of the preparations—and a study in contrasts that echoes the Chorus's descriptions. The rich, elaborate armour and brilliant coats of arms of the confident and relaxed French knights and the simple drab jerkins of the hardworking English archers are symbols not only of disproportionate wealth and social status, but also of the relative strength of the two armies. Although during the battle Henry and some of the English nobles appear in fine armour, and French foot-soldiers are shown in the distance, these potentially complicating factors, a threat to the absolute contrast, are omitted in the preparation phase. At the same time, a much more extensive focus on the French preparations than on the English augments the feeling that the latter are the underdogs and the victims of aggression. Furthermore, Olivier is clearly intent on making the French knights strange and unfamiliar, even at times laughable; and when eventually their faces are hidden behind their visors they become inhuman or monstrous. The line between ‘us’ and the enemy is thickly drawn, an attitude likely to appeal to Olivier's intended audience in 1944.

In filming the preparation for battle Branagh follows the path of his predecessor, but with slight though significant variations. Olivier shows a man delivering bundles of arrows to the archers; Branagh repeats the scene with the time-management efficiency of the post-industrial 1980s, making Olivier's men look like enthusiastic amateurs. But Branagh has a valid point: this battle was won (historically) by thorough training and disciplined co-operation as well as by innovative military technique, and the longbow archers who formed such a large part of Henry's army in 1415 were indeed a well-trained and efficient workforce. Like Olivier, Branagh moves from one camp to the other and back again, but the contrast between the rival encampments is by no means so strongly drawn as in the earlier film. Branagh's English men-at-arms are perhaps less grand than the French (who are themselves far less elaborately equipped than Olivier's), and the clothing of the English soldiers is definitely muddier and more worn-looking than that of their enemy, but neither side is privileged by the camera, as if Branagh were trying to balance Olivier's (and Shakespeare's) implication that the French were the aggressors and the English the defenders, rather than vice versa. Nor is there any hint that the French are to be seen as a subject of humour. Their armour appears useful rather than ostentatious or peculiar, and unlike their counterparts in Olivier's version they lower their visors only at the last possible moment, thereby remaining familiar and “human” as long as possible. Branagh has, in fact, humanized the French throughout the film; his French king, for instance, is not the incompetent senile of Olivier's version but a serious and concerned old man. Such sympathy with the enemy and minimizing of national difference is usually associated in modern war literature with an attitude of protest.

Visual effects such as costume and properties obviously have an important symbolic function in these films. Olivier's entire battle scene is one of splendid pageantry and attention to detail, but the source of this spectacle is not the Middle Ages so much as the nineteenth-century medievalist revival. The film as a whole, as John Collick suggests, is “a complex reassertion of the British spectacular tradition” of Shakespeare production⁵, a tradition that prevailed from the middle of the nineteenth century until about 1920. These productions, so named because spectacle took precedence over Shakespeare's dialogue, were lavish and pageant-like, with elaborate costumes and almost overwhelming visual detail, often including accurately-represented tableaux vivants based on famous paintings. Throughout Olivier's film many viewers will catch glimpses of familiar scenes from the field of art; near the end, for instance, we see a Breughel winter village brought to life. Although there is an often-repeated claim that the costumes in the film were inspired by the late-medieval Calendar of the Book of Hours of the Duc de Berri,⁶ Henry in armour bears considerable resemblance to several Pre-Raphaelite representations of Sir Galahad, especially a well-known painting by Edward Burne-Jones, while the lavish outfits of the knights and their horses are decidedly reminiscent of those designed for a “medieval” tournament held at Eglington Castle in Ayrshire in 1839. (Some costume illustrations, as well as several Sir Galahad paintings, are reproduced in Mark Girouard's The Return to Camelot.) Olivier's overall interpretation of Henry V is similarly in a Victorian and Edwardian tradition, in which the play was regarded as a celebration of English nationhood and national superiority, and Henry himself as “a model of knightly honour and kingly dignity”.⁷ (This quotation, appropriately, is from the 1905 introduction to a Macmillan Pocket Classics school edition, which also asserts that Henry V is “a wholesome, vigorous play, with a strong appeal to the manly instincts, and King Henry is a hero whom every rightly-constituted boy and girl can respect and admire.”) In keeping with his patriotic purpose, Olivier omits or plays down anything that might throw doubt on either the King or the English; the opening scene, for instance, which reveals that the instigation for Henry's French campaign was not a genuine ‘just cause’ but the greed and cunning of the English Church, and which hints at complicity on Henry's part, is made farcical in the film, while Henry's very nasty threats to the Governor of Harfleur—that his soldiers will commit rape and murder if the town does not surrender immediately—are omitted.

Olivier's production was a conscious contribution by one of Britain's leading actors to the Allied war effort in the Second World War, and in this respect it follows yet another practice from the early years of the century, the tendency to comment on modern war in knightly or chivalric terms. It would, of course, be a mistake to assume that a ‘chivalric’ attitude towards war had persisted from the Middle Ages, especially since it is questionable whether, even then, chivalry was a military concept. Rather, this romanticizing of war was a nineteenth-century development, owing much to the medievalist revival in the arts, and coinciding very conveniently with the perceived need for ever larger armies, and the associated concept of “total war”, that were by-products of the newly-evolved sense of nationhood in Europe. And Henry V, one of the two of Shakespeare's plays most widely taught in school in Edwardian England,⁸ was seen as the ideal vehicle for this merging of chivalric war and nationalistic patriotism. (Inconvenient elements in the play, such as the slaughter of the prisoners, the dubious reasons for going to war, and the divergence between the Chorus's enthusiastic comments and the less-than-heroic action that often follows, seem to have been either overlooked or dismissed as momentary carelessness on Shakespeare's part.)

The romanticizing of war as a knightly quest was not confined to England; other European countries produced variants in keeping with their own literary traditions, and it is a partial explanation at least for the enthusiasm with which war was welcomed in August 1914, and the readiness with which the continuing need for “the supreme sacrifice” was accepted for over four years, despite the enormous casualty lists. Although the Great War ultimately produced a sense of disillusionment, the chivalric ideal was by no means completely abandoned, and it retained considerable popular appeal throughout the Second World War and beyond (as, indeed, the popularity of Olivier's movie indicates).

An especially appealing aspect of the ‘knightly’ ideal of war is the sense of adventure and excitement. A well-known First World War poem, Julian Grenfell's “Into Battle”, begins,

The naked earth is warm with spring
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's gaze, glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze.
And life is colour and warmth and light
And a striving evermore for these;
And dead he is who will not fight,
And who dies fighting, has increase.

It is precisely such a sense of colour and life that Olivier captures in the second stage of his battle narrative, the French cavalry advance. Once again Olivier borrows from the heroic epic, and specifically the narrator's external and objective ‘eye’. Although one might have expected a commitment to the English point of view, the camera focuses almost exclusively on the French, with only brief glimpses of the English waiting calmly for the king's order. The scene is filmed from the middle distance, and the camera moves along on the level (a feat that required the construction of a temporary railway track at the estate near Dublin where the filming took place). With the Dauphin in full armour in the foreground, and the other French knights vying for position alongside and behind him, the camera keeps pace with the attackers until, giving an impression of increased momentum, they outpace it. The weather is beautiful, the grass green (Orson Welles observed acerbically that the battle seemed to have been fought on a golf course),⁹ there is a momentary pastoral glimpse of horses and riders reflected in clear water. Olivier fills the “silence” with exciting music, composed for the purpose by William Walton; and music, colour and movement all serve to produce a sequence that epitomizes the thrill and excitement that we associate, probably wrongly, with ‘traditional’ warfare.

Poems like Grenfell's “Into Battle”, thought to glorify war, were amongst the main targets of First World War protest poetry, where one often finds an explicit confrontation between the precepts of the patriotic-chivalric ideal and the reality of modern warfare. A similar approach, and perhaps a similar propagandist intention, is evident in Branagh's counterpart of Olivier's “cavalry advance” scene. Branagh could certainly have shown the start of the battle quite differently (historically, according to Keegan, an English arrow-strike preceded the French advance), so his decision to reproduce Olivier's charge from the opposite angle may be seen as a deliberate confrontation with his predecessor. An obvious reversal technique would have been to let the audience observe the horses and riders as if through the eyes of the English, but Branagh chooses instead to retain Olivier's external viewpoint. He allows us one glimpse of the French moving off, and then, instead of watching a thrilling and romantic cavalry attack, we observe its approach through the reactions of the men compelled to stand in its path. The camera offers close-ups of one familiar face after another amongst Henry's troops, and the noise we hear, as we share in their dread, is not exciting music but the threat of approaching hooves.

Once the two sides meet, the contrast in the use of narrative focus or point of view continues. Like Homer's in the Iliad, Olivier's epic eye is able to draw back and show a large section of the battlefield, or to move closer to view an individual struggle; but unlike Homer, Olivier never permits any sustained close-up, nor follows a struggle through to the inevitably bloody end. There is no counterpart, for instance, of “Nothing held but a piece of skin, from which the head was hanging down,” to quote from E.V. Rieu's Iliad translation.¹⁰ Olivier's camera records much of the battle from the middle distance looking down, with the result that the action is almost always framed by the green field, giving an impression of limitedness and control. He deals very perfunctorily with the collective skill of the English archers. The romantic image of war that he furthers demands a focus on man-to-man combat and individual prowess, and after little more than a single volley the archers abandon their formation (and then their bows) to join the fight. Not only does the battle range freely, but many of Olivier's details refer us to other films with enterprising, free-ranging heroes: English soldiers attack passing horsemen by jumping from trees like Robin Hood and his Merry Men; swordfights owe something to The Three Musketeers, some of the broad views allude to the American cavalry fighting the Indians on the Great Plains (while the villainous French riding through the English camp setting fires as they go by are decidedly reminiscent of Hollywood Indian attacks on wagon trains); and Henry in white armour riding off to confront the Dauphin in black in single combat to conclude the battle is, of course, in the tradition of the Western. Whatever military history may tell about the undoubted effectiveness of concerted action, Olivier makes it clear that the true Englishman is committed to individual initiative—a 1944 reply, perhaps, to the image of the suppression of individuality in Nazi Germany.

Branagh's response to Olivier takes up the arrow-strike motif with a vengeance, emphasizing the collective power of the archers and making the longbow into a terrifying modern weapon. Once the armies meet, the conflict is confused, incomprehensible. There is definitely no framing, no remote view. Far from belonging to an uninvolved, distanced bystander, the eye is that of someone in the midst of the action. The camera is often not even at eye-level so much as at ground level; we rarely see people whole, just a part of them, and the action fills the entire screen for most of the time. The battle, it seems, is everywhere and inescapable. Slow motion shots help emphasize the enormous physical effort of fighting, for Branagh's hand-to-hand combat is not an exciting contest but a fearful and deadly struggle. The grass turns almost immediately to mud, and the clear water has become pools of blood.

Branagh's First World War paradigm had been set up earlier in the film, with such details as a close-up of an old map showing familiar place-names like Dieppe and the Somme, a decidedly trench-like setting for the “four captains” scene at Harfleur, and a long segment featuring soldiers trudging through rain and mud. (The latter detail, incidentally, was historically appropriate, since Henry's French campaign was plagued by appallingly wet weather.) The narratives that helped establish our now standard view of the First World War (Remarque's Im Western nichts Neues and Graves' Goodbye to All That, for instance) are told, not with the distant observation of a general or historian or epic-writer, but from the point of view of an ordinary soldier, whose perspective is necessarily limited. And this, precisely, is Branagh's way of presenting the encounter at Agincourt. While the writers of these First World War narratives did not necessarily claim to be opposed to war, but wished rather to offer a true picture of the combatant experience as an antidote to the patriotic-chivalric ethic, their accounts have nevertheless tended to be read as statements of protest. Consequently, just as Olivier hoped to evoke patriotic commitment in his wartime audience by reminding them of the ancient but successful lineage of their own struggle, so Branagh seems to have expected to draw upon the anti-war connotations of his First World War imagery. His film responds to and undermines not only Olivier's representation, but also all romantic assumptions about war in the past: seen from the viewpoint of the man in the midst of the action, Branagh suggests, war always has been hell.

Yet, is Branagh's film ultimately anti-war? His representation seems realistic (especially in comparison with Olivier's), but would those terrifying arrows have discriminated between English and French soldiers in the crowd? And would the English king, glimpsed in action several times, really have fought without a helmet or some minimal head-protection? By abandoning realism for the popular appeal of a heroic fight, Branagh vindicates the warrior ethic in a way that Shakespeare's caricature of a battle, where the symbolic Frenchman simply surrenders and then is ordered killed, does not. Nor, one might add, does either Branagh or Olivier so much as mention the slaughter of the prisoners, though Shakespeare introduces the topic three times. Branagh's commitment to the heroic ethic, however, is revealed even more clearly in the scenes that follow the battle. The many gestures of compassion and affection amongst the English soldiers, as well as those between Henry and the French herald, underline the central importance of the “brothers in battle” motif in this film, and the effect is augmented by the elegiac “Non nobis” sequence. Here the English army slowly crosses the battlefield to the accompaniment of singing (“Non nobis domine”) in an effective and moving scene that is almost as long as the battle itself. Inspired by a mere two lines in the play, it takes up and extends a much briefer version in Olivier's film, and it can be viewed as a reversal of Olivier's French cavalry charge. Instead of the thrilling anticipation of battle we are shown its distressing aftermath, as the men trudge wearily along carrying the dead or helping the wounded. The ground is trampled and bloody, strewn with corpses, the music is solemn; and to the extent that its theme is mourning rather than a celebration of victory, the scene may be viewed as a protest against Olivier's idealization of war.

Yet at the same time it brings to fruition the director's own interpretation of the play, and in particular his representation of the character of Henry. The camera's persistent tracking of Henry's movements centres attention on the King, so that his personality becomes more important than the scenes of destruction in the background. When Henry picks up the corpse of the unnamed “Boy” to carry it from the battlefield, he symbolically takes upon himself the burden of all the deaths, a responsibility that he had earlier refused (and which in the play remains an unresolved issue). The last fault of Henry's character is thus removed, and we recognize that through his ordeal by war he has established his position both as wise and mature ruler and as a true and equal member of a “band of brothers”. The male bonding complete, the Henry who moves on to woo and win the French princess in Branagh's film is not one jot less heroic than Olivier's, and democratic and friendly to boot, almost American in comparison to Olivier's aloof and reserved Englishman with an impeccable public-school accent and a costume which, even after the battle, looks immaculate. And both film Henrys are considerably more admirable than Shakespeare's decidedly ambivalent monarch.

Olivier has updated Agincourt to match the image required by nationalistic heroism, and one looks in vain in the history of war-literature, and certainly not to Shakespeare's ambiguous play, for a romanticizing and glorification of war to equal this twentieth-century example. Branagh's updating, too, is in a pattern demanded by his age, for it seems that, however much we recognize and depict the awful reality, we find the entertainment value of war too great to abandon. The “ordeal by fire” model allows for the necessary compromise, since it can simultaneously condemn and validate war. In the end, it is Shakespeare's own version of Henry V—his far-from-ideal hero, his strong hints that the cause is not just, and the caricature battle which alone can account for the gruesome historical facts—that comes nearest to “the truth of war”. Has his Agincourt really benefitted from its updating?

Notes

1. Christopher Rothero, The Armies at Agincourt, Osprey Men-at-Arms Series 113 (London: Osprey, 1981), p. 13.

2. John Keegan reconstructs the battle in “Agincourt, October 25th, 1415”, Chapter 2 of The Face of Battle (London: Cape, 1976).

3. See Andrew Gurr, Introduction to King Henry V, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 26, 28.

4. Olivier's film begins and ends as a representation of the first performance of the play in 1599, so his shift from the artificiality of drama, deliberately exaggerated here, to the relative realism of cinematic narrative is particularly striking.

5. John Collick, Shakespeare, Cinema and Society (Manchester University Press), 1989, p. 49.

6. This claim seems to have originated in a suggestion by Roger Manvell in Shakespeare and the Film (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 39, but later critics have simply reiterated Manvell's suggestion as fact.

7. Olivier as director distances himself from this already rather old-fashioned reading by showing his Henry initially and finally as an actor in obvious make-up and costume.

8. A. C. Sprague, cited by Gurr, p. 46.

9. Cited by Collick, p. 50; no source given.

10. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957, p. 301.