History background for the play Text of the play Shakespeare on the Web
The play was first performed in 1599 at the Globe Theatre ("this
wooden O", Prologue).
He had already written Henry VI (in
three
parts,
1590-91), Richard
II (1593), Richard
III (1594), and Henry IV (in two
parts,
1597-98). Henry V completes the saga of the Lancastrian Rebellion,
the Hundred Years' War, and the Wars of the Roses, a series of plays that
cover events in English political history from 1398
to 1485.
These events comprise the principal historical background for the
political realities of Shakespeare's time. The Wars of the Roses had
been resolved by the accession of the House of Tudor, the family of
Queen Elizabeth, who had reigned almost 50 years when the play was
written.
By 1599 Shakespeare had a secure position in the Lord Chamberlain's
Company, and a financial share in the Globe Theatre. He was an
established playwright, with a name of sufficient renown for a
dishonest publisher to appropriate it for the title page of a book he
was issuing.
Shakespeare shows in the play his highly politic (in 1599) admiration
for Henry V, whose character is almost unrelievedly noble and romantic.
Henry leaps from victory to victory, with virtually no missteps, no
falls from grace, no failures to overcome. His generalship is
unexcelled, his statesmanship the very model of kingliness, his
courtship straightforward and appealing. It would all be a completely
wonderful story, if it weren't for the fact (which the audience knew
too well in 1599, and which Shakespeare found necessary to mention in
the Epilogue), that Henry V died young, only
two years after marrying his Kate, leaving Henry VI an infant monarch at
the tender mercies of his noble guardians. It was this poor hapless
child in whose name Joan of Arc was burned, and who thus bears public
blame for the loss of English possessions in France. Henry V, on the
other hand, was an image to reckon with in the Elizabethan Age, the era
in which England sought to break the power of Spain in the New World.
Shakespeare was never above taking liberties with history in the
service of a good story. In this story he takes serious liberties with
a number of historical facts. For instance, the Battle of Agincourt,
like the Battle of Crécy, 80 years before, was won by the English for
two reasons:
The longbow is a
weapon that, in skilled hands, can put a steel-tipped arrow completely
through an armored man (or horse) at 500 yards, with a rate of fire
comparable to a modern bolt-action rifle. The Black Prince at
Crécy used massed archers against armored cavalry. The French
chivalry charged in a body and were mowed down at a distance, again and
again, until between 5,000 and 10,000
men-at-arms were killed, with only a few hundred English casualties.
The French refused to learn their lesson, however, and repeated their mistakes
at Agincourt, resulting in a virtual repetition of Crécy for
Henry V. These were great victories for the English yeomanry, who manned
the longbows. Shakespeare, however, barely mentions the bowmen, and
concentrates on hand-to-hand combat of knights and nobles, of which there
was very little at Agincourt. This suits his dramatic purposes, which
concentrate on the nobles.
Another liberty Shakespeare takes is in the way he collapses the
aftermath of Agincourt in 1415 with the Treaty of Troyes, 5 years later
in 1420, where Henry wins the hand of Catherine of France. The
courtship scene in Act
V, Scene II in which Catherine can
speak but broken
English (set up by Act
III, Scene IV, which takes place between Catherine and
her maid, entirely in French) and Henry purports not to speak French, is
surely stretching the point. It is quite probable that Catherine had
learned the language of the enemy, and it is utterly certain that Henry
learned French at his mother's knee. It was the language of his family
and their court, a fact which was neither well known nor politic to
deal with in the England of 1599.
Henry's political task was to make a nation of a congeries of tribes;
the English, of several varieties, the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish all
were his subjects. And Shakespeare's linguistic genius was to show the
languages of all of them, tossed into the melting pot of English. Watch
for Gower the Englishman, Fluellen the Welshman, Jamy the Scot, and
Macmorris the Irishman, talking (and quarrelling) in their respective
dialects - and all working together - for Henry at Harfleur in Act III,
Scene 2. And watch for Pistol's humbling at Fluellen's hands in Act V,
Scene 1 for making sport of the Welsh plant badge, the humble leek.
Two films have been made of Shakespeare's play; of these, the WWII-vintage
Olivier version
makes it very clear who's who and who's speaking how. By contrast, Branagh's post-Vietnam-era
version leaves out the bonding scenes, and omits both of these.
A different linguistic contrast is provided by the difference between
the language of the nobles and that of Falstaff's entourage: Pistol,
Bardolph, Nym, The Boy, and Mistress Quickly, who are characters left
over from the comedic parts of Henry IV. They are lower-class ruffians
who come to no good end, and their talk is very different from that of
their betters, just the way Henry Higgins shows it to be much later in
Shaw's Pygmalion.