Staging Henry V in a Restless World

By Yan Chen, Dramaturg

Winter 1598: Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, loses their lease on their longtime venue, The Theatre. Their response? Dismantle the playhouse in the dead of night, and use the timber to build the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare and his fellow company members would become joint shareholders, in a first for the London professional theatre world. 

Shakespeare was writing Henry V as the Globe rose from the ground in the spring of 1599, and the play’s opening speech makes evident the inspiration its author took from the architecture and scenography of the new playing space. The Chorus, who might have first been played by Shakespeare himself, draws attention to the “unworthy scaffold” of the stage in the Globe’s “wooden O,” and entreats the audience to create the world of the play with their imagination, in tandem with the actors onstage, who wore contemporary Elizabethan clothes with token costume pieces added on for effect. 

Political anxieties outside the playhouse would have seeped past the Globe’s walls and into the minds of Henry V’s first London audiences in 1599 as they watched this story of a celebrated English monarch taking his country and people to war with France in 1415 during the Hundred Years’ War. In the words of Stephen Greenblatt, “Late Elizabethan England knew in its heart that the whole order of things was utterly fragile.” The question of who would succeed the aging Elizabeth I, then 66 and in the 41^st year of her reign, had become increasingly urgent as she persistently refused to name an heir. Major battle was imminent on two fronts: England was being threatened by the possibility of invasion from Spain, its longtime enemy in over a decade of naval skirmishes. At the same time, in Ireland, then a dependent kingdom of England, the English were also struggling to quell a revolt against the extension of royal authority led by Irish lord Hugh O’Neill. The Earl of Essex, the Queen’s favorite courtier who had led numerous military operations for her and a popular figure among the public, was preparing for a massive campaign in Ireland. The war effort would end disastrously for the English, and the truce that Essex called in disobedience to Elizabeth would lead to his political and financial disgrace. His last-ditch attempt to raise a revolt against the Queen’s counselors failed to gather support among Londoners, and ended with his execution in 1601. 

It would have been dangerous in Shakespeare’s times to discuss any of these political issues publicly, much less put them onstage. Elizabethan theatre was subject to official censorship, and the authorities only cracked down harder on mentions of current politics in a time of political sensitivity and military tension. Shakespeare had witnessed what could happen to a playwright playing with fire when only two years prior, Ben Jonson, his contemporary, was thrown into jail for writing the “seditious” satire The Isle of Dogs. Forbidden from dramatizing the political situation of their time, playwrights and companies turned instead to history, and Shakespeare was no exception. 

The far-off story of Henry V’s war on France, in Shakespeare’s hands, was nevertheless laced with contemporary concerns, as evidenced by the fact that among all of Shakespeare’s plays, Henry V alone contains references to contemporaneous political events by alluding to Essex’s Ireland campaign. As Marjorie Garber points out, “Shakespeare’s ‘history’ plays are concerned as much with current history as with the historical past.” When the Chorus remarks after King Henry’s declaration of war, “now all the youth of England are on fire,” the irony of the propagandistic description would not have been lost on Londoners of Elizabethan England weary of forced military recruitment. Discussing themes that tapped into the heart of an audience anticipating war, Henry V explores questions that remain ringingly relevant today: What justifies the choice to go to war? How do leaders make those decisions, and what is a leader’s responsibility to their people? What is the cost of war for a nation and its people? How do people from different parts of a country, with different backgrounds
and heritage, come together in the heat of battle? What does victory mean, and what does it take to find and broker peace? 

Over the centuries, Henry V and its title character have sparked polarized responses. The play has often been used to rouse patriotic sentiment, with Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film being a prime example. Yet the idea that it wholeheartedly celebrates England’s military might and its heroic warrior king is belied by debates over the legitimacy of Henry’s war and his more questionable actions such as his threat to raze the French town of Harfleur to the ground. Indeed, William Hazlitt views Henry as “a very amiable monster,” and W. B. Yeats calls him “as remorseless and undistinguished as some natural force,” albeit with “a resounding rhetoric that moves men.” 

Still other critics argue for neither one view nor the other. For Norman Rabkin, the ambiguity of Henry’s character is the point, and his contradictory facets reflect “the simultaneity of our deepest hopes and fears about the world of political action.” And for James Shapiro, Henry V is “not a pro-war play or an anti-war play but a going-to-war play.” He describes how, in response to contemporary audiences’ deep ambivalence about war, 

“Shakespeare fills the play with competing, critical voices: The backroom whispers of self-interested churchmen, the grumblings of low-life conscripts, the blunt criticism of worthy soldiers who know that leaders make promises they have no intention of keeping, the confessions of so-called traitors, the growing cynicism of a young boy off to the wars, the infighting among officers, the bitter curses of a returning soldier…Opposing voices collide over the conduct of the war…All the debate about the war is the real story.” 

The variety of these vying voices was matched by the diversity of the play’s Elizabethan audiences, who also came from all walks and levels of life. For those earliest viewers of Henry V, watching the events of long ago unfold against the backdrop of their own restless world, all the play’s debates about war would truly have been the real story. Their real story.