Henry V

Henry V

During the sixteenth century, Henry V was a popular figure, one celebrated in history, poetry, and drama. It is therefore hard to determine what influence Shakespeare had, if any, on appraisals and views of Henry V during the subsequent century. Judging from the critical commentary on his play, he likely had very little. Raphael Holinshed—the historian whose Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577; 1587, second edition) was, along with Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548), Shakespeare's primary source for the play—described the king, after discussing the wildness of Henry's princely days, in these terms: "This Henrie was a king, of life without spot; a prince whome all men loved, and of none disdained; a capteine against whome fortune never frowned, nor mischance once spurned; whose people him so severe a iusticer both loved and obeied, (and so humane withall,) that he left no offense unpunished, nor freendship unrewarded; a terrour to rebels, and suppressour of sedition; his vertues notable, his qualities most praise-worthie (Shakespeare, 1955).

" Holinshed here captures, as well as helps to fashion, the idea of Henry as a great warrior and leader, the type of monarch that Michael Drayton celebrated when he asked at the conclusion of his poem "The Battle of Agincourt," "when shall … / England breed again / Such a King Harry."

As a dramatic subject, Henry V had been put onstage numerous times from the 1580s to the end of the century, probably starting with the anonymous The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth: Containing the Honourable Battell of Agin-court, which was almost certainly performed earlier than 1588, was entered into the Stationers' Registry in 1594, and appeared in a quarto edition in 1598. Other now lost Henry V plays may also have existed. Thomas Nashe, for example, describes a scene from one that does not appear in The Famous Victories, at least as it has come down to us, observing that for "some shallow braind censurers … [, a]ll Artes … are vanitie: and, if you tell them what a glorious thing it is to have Henrie the fifth represented on the Stage, leading the French King prisoner, and forcing both him and the Dolphin to sweare fealty, I, but (will they say) what do we get by it?"

The full title of the anonymous play and the scene that Nashe writes about attest to the popularity of the image of Henry as a warrior king, but his value as a stage character also rested on his youthful reputation for wildness, as the period of his life before he assumed the throne gave a playwright comic material to please audiences who, after all, were coming to the theater for entertainment. The first half of The Famous Victories had dealt with Henry's youth, as had the two Shakespeare plays, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2,in the tetralogy that began with Richard II and concluded with Henry V.Shakespeare had approached his three plays in which ...