by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan •All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched
Shakespeare’s Henry V, presented as the
fourth and last (at least so far; there’s always the chance that the BBC, which
produced this, will duplicate their 1960 15-part mini-series An Age of Kings and run the entire Shakespeare history cycle from the fall
of Richard II in 1399 to the fall of Richard III in 1485) in a cycle of
Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry IV
parts 1 and 2, and Henry V in a
four-part mini-series. Though they departed enough from the Age of Kings template to cast two actors as Henry IV — Rory Kinnear
played him in Richard II and the much
better-known Jeremy Irons played him in the two Henry IV plays — and they used three different writer/directors
(Rupert Goold in Richard II, Richard
Eyre in the two Henry IV plays and Thea
Sharrock, who directed Henry V and
co-wrote the adaptation with Ben Power), at least they allowed Tom Hiddleston,
an actor so far best known for playing Loki in the Thor movies, to play Prince Hal, later King Henry V, in all
three plays in which he appears. The story of the complete cycle tells of how
young Henry Hereford, a.k.a. Bolingbroke, a.k.a. Lancaster (the British
penchant for not only giving their upper-class people noble titles but adding
those titles to their names sometimes makes it confusing to tell who is who,
and in particular whether a person coming in with a new name is the same as the
person we met before under one of his earlier ones), overthrew his cousin,
Richard II, and established the House of Lancaster; how his son was a tavern
wastrel, hanging out with a batch of disreputable companions led by Sir John
Falstaff (Simon Russell Beale), until dad died and he suddenly snapped out of
it, becoming a super-responsible king and taking his father’s deathbed advice
to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” In other words, Henry IV, who had
grabbed the throne illegitimately and whose reign was full of attempts by other
nobles to rebel against him, get rid of him and put Richard II’s designated
heir, the Earl of Mortimer, on the throne, was telling his son that the best
way to stop all the domestic squabbling would be to find the country a common
enemy and wage a foreign war. And he had no doubt as to who the foreign enemy
would be: France. Since William the Conqueror, ruler of the Norman (Vikings who
had settled on the coast of France and been given the province of Normandy by
the French king in exchange for them letting the rest of France alone) enclave
in northern France, used that as a stepping stone for a successful invasion and
takeover of England, the English kings had had ambitions to conquer France and
unite the two kingdoms under joint rule. They’d come close to succeeding in the
previous century when Edward III (son of Edward II, the mostly Gay king; also
the grandfather of Richard II and Henry IV and therefore the great-grandfather
of Henry V) sent his son Edward the Black Prince (who never got to be king only
because he died one year before his dad
did) at the head of an army that nearly conquered France.
Now Henry V, armed
with a paper-thin claim to the French crown based on a tortured
re-interpretation of the so-called Salic Law (it was a document designed to
ensure that a woman would never inherit the throne of France — an interesting
dramatic device given that at the time Shakespeare wrote this play his own
country was ruled by a woman, Queen Elizabeth! — which the ministers of the
Roman Catholic Church in England, fearful that if they didn’t Henry would sign
a bill forcing the church to sell much of its property to pay his taxes, argued
didn’t apply to France), decides to mount an army, sail across the Channel and
finish the job his great-grandfather and great-uncle started. Henry V lands his
army, successfully besieges the town of Harfleur and then fights a major battle
at Agincourt, which the British manage to win even though they’re outnumbered
five to one. He then cuts a deal with the French king that includes his
marriage to the king’s daughter Katherine (Mélanie Thierry), though there’s a
charming scene in which he’s attempting to win her genuine love while still
trying to penetrate the language barrier between them. Shakespeare wrote Henry
V at a time when the Earl of Essex was at
the peak of his popularity in 1599 and was about to launch his own “foreign
quarrel” in Ireland, and it’s known that the play was at least in part agitprop
to get English theatergoers to accept the Henry = Essex parallel and see them
both as similarly dashing heroes — but unlike Henry, Essex got his ass kicked
by the Irish leader, the Earl of Tyrone, retreated in disgrace, ultimately
launched a plot against Elizabeth herself and ended up first in the Tower and
then beheaded. Henry V’s inspirational speeches in the play — particularly the
famous St. Crispian’s Day address on the eve of the battle — were mined in the
20th century by football coaches looking for particularly
inspirational language to rally their players to victory. They were also mined
by Winston Churchill, who loved Henry’s line “we few, we happy few, we band of
brothers” and used it for the far more important purpose of mobilizing both the
British military and the civilian population to resist the Nazis and win World
War II. Indeed, after shutting down virtually the entire British film industry
for two years (1942 to 1944), Churchill allowed it to reopen in 1944
specifically so that Laurence Olivier could direct and star in a film of Henry
V as a morale-booster. Given that
background, one might expect Henry V to
be a rah-rah patriotic pageant in which the gooder-than-good hero leads his
triumphant minions and wins over an evil and decadent enemy — but you’d be
wrong. Shakespeare filled his play with ambiguities and didn’t shy away from
the bad things — like ordering his soldiers to slaughter all the French prisoners after Agincourt — the historical
Henry V did. Henry V is a typically jumbled Shakespearean character in which we
see qualities we like (like his disguising himself as a common soldiers and
going about the camp on the eve of the battle to have interactions with his men
and find out how they really feel about him, the battle and the cause) and
qualities we don’t (like his ruthless suppression of anyone who displeases him
— including his old friend Bardolph, who’s been caught stealing from a French
church and who’s executed for it) cheek by jowl.
Over the years there’s been a
tendency to “revise” the Henry V character, first in Orson Welles’ Chimes at
Midnight (which was mostly based on the
two Henry IV plays but reworked them so
that Henry’s rejection of Falstaff once he’s crowned was not an acceptance of
adult responsibility, which is what Shakespeare intended, but a betrayal of his
better nature and his becoming a grim fanatic; Welles ends his film by showing
Henry V leading his expedition and proclaiming, “Not king of England, if not
king of France!,” in a direct and deliberate visual quote from Leni
Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will — not
Henry = Essex but Henry = Hitler!) and then in Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 movie,
which played up the ambiguities and less attractive aspects of Henry’s
character that Olivier had played down. This script continues the “revisionist”
tradition, though less so in the Thea Sharrock/Ben Power adaptation than in Tom
Hiddleston’s casting. Hiddleston is clearly more comfortable as the responsible
King Henry V than he was as the wastrel (or at least posing as a wastrel) Prince Hal, but his previous role as Loki
gives his performance here an unsympathetic air that the filmmakers may or may
not have intended. After all, in the Thor
movie Hiddleston is also playing a commander who besieges a walled and
well-fortified city on his way to conquering an entire community — though in
the context of that film we’re clearly meant to hate him and to root for the
defenders — and it’s hard for me to believe the filmmakers were not mindful of
the similarity between the two plots and didn’t fully intend it. Another
decision they made was to cut down on the caricaturing in the scenes taking
place in the French court; they cut most of the scenes in which Shakespeare makes
fun of the French and instead went for the similarities — an anxious young
commander (in France’s case the Dauphin, who expects to inherit the French
throne and who will instead be cut out in favor of Henry V under the peace
treaty — though since the real Henry V died of dysentery three years after
Agincourt and was replaced by his two-year-old son Henry VI, the French were
able to mount a resistance and put the Dauphin back in his rightful place as
heir to the French throne —while Henry VI’s weakness, even after he grew up and
assumed full powers, provoked the civil war known as the Wars of the Roses,
with the humiliating result that a country that had nearly conquered France now
was subject to a civil war in which both
sides were hoping to get French help!) mobilizing his troops and fighting for
his country
When Charles and I watched An Age of Kings after its DVD release in 2010 I was struck by the parallel
between Henry V and George W. Bush; both members of hereditary ruling families,
both with wastrel pasts, both mistrusted by their fathers (Henry IV would
rather have been succeeded by his more responsible younger son, John of
Lancaster, and George H. W. Bush was convinced that Jeb, not W., would be the
second President Bush), and both of whom led their countries into foreign wars,
had initial success (one could readily imagine Henry V at Agincourt posing for
his court painters under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished”) but then got
dragged into a quagmire after the people of the country they were trying to
conquer and rule put together a successful resistance. The battle of Agincourt
is considered a landmark in military history because it showed off a new style
of warfare in which the armored cavalry of the knightly era (the word
“chivalry” even comes from cheval, the
French word for “horse”) would prove cumbersome and unable to deal with a
highly mobile infantry equipped with a long-range weapon — in Henry V’s case
the longbow, which served for his generation of warriors as the machine gun
would six centuries later, raining deadly fire on his enemies with high speed
and accuracy. There was one other key reason for the English victory that isn’t
reproduced in this movie; the film shows the battle of Agincourt taking place
on a clean, dry field. In fact it had just rained and the battlefield was muddy
— which helped neutralize the French’s numerical advantage: their horses,
weighted down by the amount of armor both riders and horses were wearing, got
bogged down in the mud and couldn’t move, making them sitting ducks for the
English attacks. (Olivier made this a gag in his movie; he showed one of the
French knights being lifted onto his horse with a pulley, since his armor made
him weigh too much to mount his horse normally.)
Overall, Henry V is the best of the four episodes of The Hollow Crown, partly because it’s the best play (it’s Shakespeare on the
cusp of his acknowledged masterpieces like Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet) and
partly because Thea Sharrock gets more energy into it than the previous directors
in the series. Though she inserts a brief shot of Simon Russell Beale as
Falstaff — at the end of Henry IV, part 2
Shakespeare had inserted a brief chorus which promised a sequel “with Sir John
in it,” but he broke that promise; the precedent for showing the dying Falstaff
in a Henry V production was set by
Olivier, who cast veteran British musical star George Robey in the role — she’s
clearly more interested in the serious business than the comic relief, and she
moves the action along well even though there are an awful lot of dialogue-less
sequences of ships sailing and riders riding that don’t add much either to the
action or the atmosphere. Henry V is
also the most extravagantly scored episode in the series — Sharrock clearly
doesn’t share the general reticence of British directors towards background
music — and her deployment of Adrian Johnston’s score is well done even though
it occasionally gets a bit too Mickey-Mouse-ish for me (in order to give as
much of a sense of realism as possible to his animation, Walt Disney insisted
on a very exact matching of music, sound effects and images — and to this day
an especially tight combination of those elements in a film is referred to in
the trade as “Mickey-Mousing”). Overall this Henry V is a good adaptation, with Hiddleston maybe not quite as
charismatic as Olivier or Robert Hardy (the remarkable actor who played him in An
Age of Kings — whatever happened to him? He may have killed Hotspur in the series, but it
was the actor playing Hotspur, Sean Connery, who had the international
superstar career Hardy deserved!) but certainly effective and genuinely moving
in the role — and I can only hope the epilogue delivered by John Hurt (who did
all the “chorus” speeches), written in mock-Shakespearean style by Sharrock and
Power, which gives us a précis of how
Henry V’s early death plunged England into chaos, civil war and the loss of France,
presages a Hollow Crown, Part II which
will dramatize the remaining four plays in the cycle.
