Henry V

by William Shakespeare

  We see more productions of Titus Andronicus than of Henry V these days, as if we are embarrassed by the latter's undeniable patriotism. But directors ... have shown that it is an emotionally complex play as much about the pain of war and the cost of kingship as it is about military triumph.51

  The program to the 1964 Peter Hall production used a sixteenth-century quote about war to emphasize the anti-war stance and provide evidence that nothing is learned from history:

  War is sown from war. The prince is compelled to expose his young men to so many dangers, and often in a single hour to make many an orphan, widow, childless old man, beggar, and unhappy wretch. The wisdom of princes will be too costly for the world if they persist in learning from experience how dreadful war is.52

  In an age in which mankind was supposed to be more reasoned, aware, and humane, there were more deaths by war in the twentieth century than in all the centuries preceding in the Christian calendar put together. An awareness of this depressing fact of twentieth-century warfare has had an indelible effect on performances of Shakespeare's history plays, and more so with Henry V than any other. Terry Hands referred to Peter Hall's 1964 production as "the Vietnam anti-war version";53 Adrian Noble's 1984 version "powerfully and effectively ... responded to the recent Falklands conflict by stressing the awful realities of war."54

  Many of the RSC's productions have brought together an amalgam of recognizable and iconic images from film, television, and newspapers to make a direct connection to a twentieth-century audience. The physical remembrances of war, including memorials, litter the scenic design. The social impact has also played a part, especially with regard to the democratization that happens in war--the bringing together of all classes, the dropping of social pretensions. This was emphasized in Edward Hall's 2000 production which dispensed with the Chorus as a single identifiable figure, giving his lines to the cast of men and women in army fatigues: "The Chorus's text is chopped up so that everyone can have his--or her--own little piece ... expressions of relevance and democratic individualism."55

  Soldiers are no longer nameless, faceless casualties; we see their families' grief on television, read about their suicides in the newspapers. At the start of the twenty-first century each soldier has a voice in a way they never had before. The common soldiers' domination of this production was emphasized by the use of striking songs by the political songwriter Billy Bragg:

  The entire cast wear military fatigues, and the low-life scenes, set in a boozed-up Naafi, are superbly played, with fights breaking out and the entire cast singing an "Ere-we-go, ere we go"-style anthem especially written for the occasion ... with repeated cries of "Eng-er-land."56

  The setting, predominantly Second World War, with references to other modern conflicts, also emphasized an anti-heroic stance by removing the king from center stage:

  For a play that is so closely identified with its charismatic leader, this is not a production in which all hearts and minds are bent on good King Harry. On the contrary, Henry here blends into a busy, populous world and a stage that is as permanently crowded as a musical.57

  Similarly, in the RSC's 1964 production the costumes of the soldiers were indistinguishable with regard to rank. In this army a man's worth was gauged by his valor. The "band of brothers" motif extended to the king and there was "no perceptible difference between officers and men."58 The battles were

  presented as bloody, clobbering and unpleasant [with] no traditional heroics in the speeches of the king to his troops. This is a ragged army led by a leader at times almost desperate with fatigue. The heroism, where it exists, is found almost entirely in the sheer dogged pugnaciousness. It is the heroism of the First World War trenches, of attrition ... and of men following a leader, not because he is a king, but because he is as tired and stubbornly determined as they are. It is, in short, democratic twentieth-century heroism.59

  2. Ian Holm addressing his ragged army before Harfleur in the Brechtian 1964 production directed by Peter Hall and John Barton.

  The brutal realities of war are not something that can be shirked in production. Adrian Noble's 1984 production underlined the conflict between soldiers' emotional life and the hardships of the battlefield:

  the cruelty, pain, and pathos of the ensuing war as well as its moments of professional exhilaration ... the most touching is the sight of the impoverished English soldiery ... huddled together under tarpaulin sheets as the rain pelts down. This is what war means--getting soaked in some foreign field ... What this humane and thoughtful production offers is the soldier's view of war; and their feelings about conflict are summed up in ... the memorable sound of the clang of swords hurled to the ground as the battle is finally won.60

  By use of war memorials, designers have dominated productions with a sense of death--the greatest leveler of all. In an eerie opening, the 1997 production, directed by Ron Daniels, saw the ghosts of the dead, names from a memorial, coming to life to relive and tell their story in the eternal field of conflict. Henry and the others entered, "a phalanx of officers in gold-and-blue uniforms slow-marching to a drum":61

  [This was a] ... sustained critique of the horrors of war. The set is part American Vietnam memorial, part Menin Gate. Well over 2,000 names cover every wall, an ever-present reminder of the fellowship of death. King Henry is first seen watching with appalled fascination a flickering film of the carnage of 1914-18 trench warfare ... the production portrays remorselessly how soldiers on both sides die brutally in war.62

  Likewise, in Matthew Warchus' 1994 production there was an added sense of mortality and futility as Henry battled across the stage at Agincourt:

  with a fiercely rising spotlight of the sun capturing Orleans's "The sun doth gild our armour" [4.2.1], the stage floor tipped to a steep rake, revealing that the rake carried the dates "1387-1422," the limits of Henry's life, so that the battle was fought across his tomb.63

  Warchus emphasized the brutality of war by choosing to show the killing of the French prisoners--a moment which is often left offstage, cut, or moved to after the discovery of the murdered boys to maintain sympathy for Henry. Again the effect on the ordinary soldier was marked:

  ... having the prisoners killed on stage brilliantly produced a reaction of protest and horror from Clive Wood's Pistol, a coward forced to kill and loathing it, nearly vomiting after the killing, an unwilling participant in the actuality of the war off which he has been freeloading.64

  In the words of the critic and academic Jan Kott, "The greatness of Shakespeare's realism consists in his awareness of the extent to which people are involved in history"65--the common citizen as much as the king.

  Nationalism

  In a time of war Shakespeare brings together the different nations of Britain. The ordinary soldiers represent the forced unity of war behind which lies national antagonism. Ron Daniels, who staged the play in 1997, hoped that his use of twentieth-century references would express

  his fear of the dangers of nationalism, of the "flaring up of genocidal tendencies and religious ethnicities" to be observed around the world in the 20th century ... There is an unashamed xenophobia in the play: "It's quite clear that Henry's army is an army of invasion. It is not defensive and it practically destroys another culture."66

  When tackling the play at the start of a new millennium, Edward Hall commented:

  Now is a more important time in terms of national identity than ever before ... We don't quite know how to think about nationalism because of the echoes it has with football hooligans and far-right politics. It belongs to them, that's what we feel. So it's quite difficult for us to think about ... its positive aspects, particularly when England is a multicultural, multiracial society and has been since the Romans ... This play deals with a moment in time ... where a great national unity is achieved through the coming together of disparate parts of what is now Britain. For a moment they gained the world, but then lost it in the end.67

  The program to Hall's production included iconic English nat
ional images: the Union Jack, a pint of beer, a bulldog, a red rose, a tennis ball, alongside definitions of individual nations and nationalist feelings. Echoing back to earlier in the series of histories, the words of Richard II came to mind with the image of a "To Let" sign stuck in an outline of Britain, filled with an image of a "green and pleasant land." Hall obviously took Henry V's part in the This England series of history plays as ironic and postmodern. This irony flowed through the production with uneasy but comic effect, which seemed at odds, almost conflicting, with the original play by not taking it seriously:

  In working to re-create the experience of patriotism, this production shows it to be a mixed and composite thing: beautiful, confused, self-contradictory, stupid, fleeting and circumstantial at the same time. Moreover, this experience is shown to be primarily a cultural one, and as such it is constituted by bits and pieces--a random assortment of, more often than not, visual icons and motifs. The arrival of the English soldiers in France at the beginning of Act Three, for example, is instantly recognized as our visual shorthand for the Normandy landings. Fluellen's first appearance on the stage as the solitary soldier, last in line, with his flag (here a Welsh one, of course) sticking jauntily from his pack is the nation's collective signifier for the Falklands war. If patriotism or national identity exist at all, they seem to be made up of such images--images drawn from war photography, documentary and film, and processed in turn by comedy, musical and soap ... [it suggests] our sense of national character ... if it exists at all, seems to lie in the shallows of the national consciousness from where it can so easily, so effortlessly be whipped up into a storm.68

  Many productions have been criticized for making the French seem weak or corrupt in order to accentuate English superiority. Of the RSC's 1994 production one critic noted: "Warchus falls into the trap ... of presenting the French court as ineffectual fops. It makes for some gorgeous costumes but detracts from Henry's achievement."69 However, in an interesting move Warchus emphasized the horror of Henry's speech before Harfleur by casting a female as Governor of Harfleur, and so "feminised the city and provided a direct response to the horrendous threat of rape and murder that Henry had offered, his language and her body directly connected."

  In 1997 the French were

  at something of a disadvantage, having not caught up, by some margin with the modern techniques of destruction espoused by the English. They totter medievally--not to say suicidally--around on high, two-legged silver horses that look more like the weirdo frocks of some post-Vivienne Westwood designer than animals you'd take anywhere near a battlefield.70

  Likewise, in 1984 the costuming indicated the difference between the democratic, down-to-earth nature of the English army, the "band of brothers," as opposed to the French, who held on to an outmoded chivalry and hierarchy: "the Chorus prowls over the squalid downstage area shining a torch over Henry's followers while in the farthest depths of the stage the French are seen lolling in golden luxury languidly passing the night in games of chess before their supposedly certain victory."71

  In 1975 Terry Hands commented:

  Theatrically, period costume is an outmoded convention. Used here it helps to accentuate the fact that the French are frozen in an era that has already passed. The French, all in golden armour, were fifteenth century; the English, in grays and brown, appeared in a timeless ambience suggestive of world war combat ... Throughout, the English scenes emphasized the realities and human costs of war, while the French still inhabited a beautifully illuminated Book of Hours.72

  The Chorus

  The fictional nature of theater (and therefore also the story Shakespeare presents to us) is emphasized by the role of the Chorus.

  Matthew Warchus' 1994 Henry V was an interactive museum piece with Chorus as guide to history. Rather like a modern history program with reconstructions based around iconic objects--a robe, broken bits of armor, poppies; and the actors often placed to create stage pictures or tableaux--frozen moments in history like old photographs or war paintings:

  Warchus investigated the play as a series of overlays of history. Its opening and closing image, with Henry's red regal gown with a gold collar placed on a dummy, roped off like an exhibit in the Imperial War Museum, established a sense of royal myth. But the robe was surrounded by tall red poppies, the strongest modern symbol of the cost of war. Tony Britton's Chorus was an old soldier, in military camel-coloured overcoat and campaign ribbons; the poppy in his buttonhole and his rich theatrical voice summoned up past wars. With the house lights still up he strode to an electrical box on stage, turned the handle and put out the house lights, taking the audience from his contemporary perspective on the history of war into the play's sense of its own history.

  ... But Britton's Chorus was also a reminder of what will happen to the myth of Agincourt, so that in the middle of the battle, at Henry's lowest ebb, he could come forward and help the King to his feet, reassuring him of the outcome that the Chorus, the military historian of the future, already knew.

  The Chorus's perspective ... was set against the frequent appearances of a crowd of English non-combatants, principally women and children, dressed in 1940s costumes, both visitors to the "museum" and a reminder of the civil cost of war.73

  3. Ian McDiarmid as Chorus in Adrian Noble's 1984 production.

  It seemed to indicate that "Shakespeare's play is not just a celebration of our unlikely success at Agincourt but the case-study of a campaign. Listen and watch, and we may learn something about how men feel when they go to war and why they continue to do so."74

  Ian McDiarmid's Chorus in 1984 was a skeptical commentator, the cynical manipulator of events, conjuring and revealing the story through the will of his imagination:

  He ridicules the brawls he is to present then draws back the white traverse curtain to reveal a breathtaking ballet of flags, lights and smoke. He watches and he goads. He even appears to be enjoying the performance before quickly resuming a bitchily jocose manner with a swirl of his mephistophelian black cloak. At Harfleur the traverse is suddenly one of shining steel and three long ladders reach to the sky ... Mr McDiarmid not so much imagines as dreams this scene, pounding on the walls and willing them to rise on English soldiers, ablaze in spotlights, slithering through the gaping scenic wound. This most original and creative playing of the Chorus is at one with a production of which it is a corporate element.75

  In a timeless black costume, he remained

  on stage throughout, reflecting every queasy shift of emotion with which modern audiences view this discordant work ... [The] main importance is structural. It invites the spectator not only to share the task of imagination but also to acknowledge complicity in the play's nationalistic prejudices.76

  Eric Porter in 1964 deliberately appeared as if he was in a different production. His costuming was elaborate and Elizabethan, and his rhetoric appeared at odds with the depiction of the play. This emphasized the difference between the theatricality of the play and the realities of war:

  The Chorus ... has a romantic, heroic, theatrical view of events. But the events are often handled by Shakespeare in an unromantic, unheroic way. We see what it was actually like to be in the field with Harry, cold and wet, in fever and fear, boredom and pain. These are the real elements of a campaign ... the play ... is a criticism of the Chorus's view of the story, as the Chorus is meant to tell us how to respond to the action.77

  The simplicity of the staging for the 1975 production put the emphasis on the Chorus's plea for the audience to imagine the setting. The actors arrived onstage in their rehearsal clothes, and, as if to mirror the audience's engagement and immersion in the world of the play, the characters gradually assumed their costumes in the opening scenes. Farrah, the designer, felt that:

  What we wanted to create was not a box of illusions, but something that freed the audience's imaginations and made them conjure their own illusions ... So we stripped the stage; we cleared it of everything extraneous, to make it as austere and as bare as po
ssible ... we built a new stage-platform with one-in-twelve rake. It was a stage designed to launch the actors into the audience.78

  The audience discovered [the actors] in workshop gear, jogging, improvising, lying down, studying. One of the actors detached himself from the others, and came forward: "Oh for a Muse of fire ..." and Chorus (Emrys James) indicated, as he spoke, the "flat unraised spirits" lying around the stage. The drab, modern garb--inviting a detached and sceptical response--was retained into the clerics' scene, and the Council. Thereafter the action reverted to period costume.79

  Henry

  If you have to be a king and do your job, you become a pattern of contradictions. Henry is therefore both a devious politician and a man of sincerity; a hypocrite and an idealist ... Henry is no shining Sir Galahad: he executes men when it is needful ... The Church's role in Henry V is totally political. Henry's prayers are, like most things about him ambiguous. They are both sincere and expedient. God is on the English side ... Henry dies young, leaving the country bankrupt because of his glorious wars, and leaving government to his baby son ... It is a celebration of war and a criticism of war. An ambiguous document: Shakespeare usually is.80

  In 2000, Edward Hall's revival was the third in a row "in which the RSC have put English warmongering and the medieval war hero under the severest scrutiny."81 Shakespeare faces us with the fact that what makes a great king and leader is often at odds with what makes a great human being. Henry's outburst of rage, the hanging of Bardolph, the speech before Harfleur, the killing of the French prisoners, the domination of a land and culture that don't belong to you, are all expedient tactics and necessary steps in Henry's development as a king, but their morality is in doubt.