Henry V by William Shakespeare is itself a work of literary adaptation.  It draws upon Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587), a history of the British Isles which Shakespeare used as a source for his other English history plays.  The play itself is generally thought to have been written in 1599.  The events on which the play is based occurred nearly two centuries earlier.  To understand the conflicts which drive the characters in the play it may be useful to know something about the history with which Shakespeare expected his audience to be familiar.

In 1066 William, Duke of Normandy, later called "William the Conqueror," defeated Harold, the Saxon claimant to the throne of England, at the battle of Hastings.  England's rulers became French-speaking Normans rather than Anglo-Saxon or Old English-speaking Saxons.  (The conflict between Normans and Saxons surfaces in versions of the Robin Hood legend, particularly Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe).  The descendents of William the Conqueror ruled not only England and Normandy, but also (through various marriages, inheritances, and conquests) other holdings on the continent which in the modern era are part of France.  Over the course of generations the kings of England, who had frequently neglected or exploited England in favor of their other holdings, lost control of their continental fiefdoms as the power of the king of France had expanded.  In 1327 Edward III came to the English throne and soon declared war on France, claiming the French throne for himself.  This was the start of what has come to known as the Hundred-Years War between England and France, and reference is made in Henry V to the earliest days of that war, when Edward III's son, young Edward the Black Prince, defeated French forces at the Battle of Crécy and captured the King of France himself at the Battle of Poitiers.  The English king gained control of large sections of French territory but by the end of the century most of that power had been lost.

The demand that Henry V makes for French land in the play is based on his descent from Edward III and Edward's earlier claim to be heir to the French throne through his mother.  Henry V did lead English troops into France and defeat the French forces decisively at the battle of Agincourt in 1415; in 1420 England and France signed the Treaty of Troyes and Henry married Princess Catherine of Valois.  Their only son, Henry VI, was born in 1422, the same year Henry V died, and it was during his reign that the French, partly inspired by Joan of Arc, defeated the English and took control of their territory again.  The Hundred Years War ended in 1453.  So in the play Henry V we are concentrating, in part, on a glorious victory that marked the highpoint of English power in France.

But Henry V is also concerned with the nature of kingship and the question of legitimate succession to the throne.  The tangled passage of the crown from one king to another is also an important part of the background or context of the play.  In 1377 Edward III died; his immediate heir, Edward, Prince of Wales (the Black Prince), had died the year before but had left his son to succeed  to the throne as Richard II.  In the strict line of succession Richard II was the legitimate heir, even though the Black Prince had had several brothers, including the Duke of Lancaster and the Duke of York.  But Richard was a child of ten, and the regent was the Duke of Lancaster, and by the time Richard took control of his own throne the country was in turmoil.  Richard was deposed and murdered and his cousin, the Duke of Lancaster's son, Henry Bolingbroke, came to the throne as Henry IV.  These are events that Shakespeare recounts in three plays, Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, and Henry IV Part 2.  As Prince Hal, the title character of Henry V has an important role in the Henry IV plays, disguising his cunning and resourcefulness by behaving as a rowdy wastrel hanging out with low-life characters like Falstaff, Pistol, Bardolph, and Nym.  He is able to help his father subdue those who rebel against him and keep himself from being assassinated until he comes to the throne.  So in Henry V, the beginning of the play is also the beginning of Henry the Fifth's reign, and there is much talk about the past: the way his father came to the throne, the kind of wild youth the new king had as Prince Hal, and the military glories of Henry V's great-grandfather Edward III and his grand-uncle the Black Prince.

If we think of Henry V as an adaptation of Holinshed, and Holinshed as an interpretation of history, we need also to recognize that Shakespeare did not write the play without an appreciation of the time in which he lived as well.  Henry V is the last of eight plays Shakespeare wrote about the period of English history from 1377 to 1485, covering the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III, the period generally referred to as the Wars of the Roses, when the houses of Lancaster and York competed for the throne, which ended with the accession of the first Tudor king, Henry VI.  He wrote them in two sets of four, Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3, and Richard III probably between 1591-1594, and Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V between 1595-1599.

The subject of what makes a good monarch and how the throne is passed from one monarch to another was an important issue in Shakespeare's day.  His first tetralogy ends with the beginning of the Tudor dynasty in 1485; that dynasty was nearing its end.  Henry VII had been succeeded by his son, Henry VIII, who had been succeeded by his son, Edward VI, who was still a child when he died.  Henry VIII's Catholic eldest daughter, Mary I, had come to the throne and persecuted Protestants; when she died her half-sister, Elizabeth I, came to the throne and persecuted Catholics.  The question of who should be on the throne had caused plots against Elizabeth.  One of the claimants had been Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland and grand-daughter of Henry VIII's sister, who was executed in 1587; at the time Shakespeare was writing Henry V Queen Elizabeth was in her late sixties, unmarried and childless, and had been on the throne for forty years.  She would die in 1603 and concern over who would succeed her had been widespread for years.  In fact she would be succeeded by the son of Mary Stuart, James VI of Scotland who also became James I of England, the first of the Stuart dynasty of monarchs.

The question of what kind of monarch the king of England should be was of vital national importance to Shakespeare's "sceptered isle".  Our reading of the play should bear in mind that, perhaps more than as a "re-creation of history" on the stage, it is a timely drama that has resonances for the audience at the time it was written.  We should also ask what resonances it has for us in our own time.  This gets complicated: the cinematic versions of the play will not simply reproduce for us Shakespeare's context but rather connect to the context in which the films themselves are made.  To make matters further complicated, we will need to consider how those film contexts connect to the context in which we are viewing the films (and reading the play) at the end of the twentieth century.
 

With the reading of Henry the Fifth  by William Shakespeare we examine a full-length Elizabethan history play.  As you read Henry V  consider the following aspects of the first two acts:

• What happens in each scene? in each act?  what relationship do the scenes in any act have with one another?  (For example, the nobility speak blank verse and the commoners speak prose, but there is often an alternation between "high" and "low" scenes.)  In the first act what happens in each scene?  In the second act what happens in each scene?
• Very often in plays the first act or first two acts offer an exposition  of events leading up to the beginning of the play.  What do the first two acts here suggest happened before the play began?
• What is the concern that the bishops have about the king?  what significance do you attach to the long speech of the Archbishop about the right of succession in Act I Scene ii?  what significance to the interchange between the French ambassador and the English king?
• What is the relationship of the low characters (Pistol, Bardolph, Nym) to the king?  How do you compare their behavior to the behavior of the king and his followers in the court scenes?  How is the French court different from the English court? How well do you understand the language of the characters?  Try reading the scenes aloud.

Continue analyzing the history play:

• Consider the characterizations given to the opposing forces--what are the French like? what are the English like? what are the Irish, Welsh, and Scottish characters doing in the play? Has anything happened to change these characters' relationships with one another?
• Examine too the progress of Henry V himself--what did you make of him at the beginning of the play? what do you make of him at the end?  Has anything happened to change his character?  Look at his principal speeches in Acts III and IV, especially his soliloquies.
• This is one of Shakespeare's history plays (rather than a comedy or tragedy or romance); what is he trying to do with this historical material?
• Finally, this is also a play.  What's theatrical about it?  How do you imagine actors playing any of these scenes on stage?  How does it differ from a novel or historical non-fiction?  How does it differ from Bertold Brecht's "The Jewish Wife" as a theatrical piece?

Laurence Olivier's 1945 film adaptation of Henry V  by William Shakespeare is our first look at the attempt to translate theater into cinema.  Are there any ways in which the theatrical remains a part of the film?  How successful is Olivier in getting the film to move from the stage, with all its  conventions, to the screen, with all its  conventions?  What contributes or detracts from that success?  Have the cinematic elements helped you to better understand the play? the characters? the language?  Are there any ways that Olivier as director has led you to a different understanding of character and motivation than you had had after your reading of the play?  Finally, how would you compare this production with other Shakespearean films or stage performances you have seen?  Complete your speculations about the film before the next class meeting.
 

Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film adaptation of Henry V  by William Shakespeare is our second look at the attempt to translate theater into cinema.  Forty-odd years separate it from Olivier's version.  Compare the two.  Is Branagh's Henry a different person than Olivier's?  Is Branagh's interpretation of the point of the play different?  Is Branagh's cinematography (his use of the camera) different?  Which version is the most cinematic?  the most theatrical? the most Shakespearean?  Why?  Compare the two versions of Henry V  with the original text and bring the journal entry to our next class meeting.
 

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