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Best Speeches From Shakespeare's Henry V

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As it has been argued that, among the best Shakespeare plays , the Henriad (a four-play cycle containing Richard II, Henry IV Parts One and Two , and Henry V ) is the crowning achievement of the Immortal Bard's incredible career.

The 3 Best Henry V Speeches

There are many reasons why fans laud the Henry plays above the others, including the remarkable character arc; the astute blend of humor, history, and family drama; and the awesome array of battle scenes. For fans of Henry V, another reason to admire this work is that it contains some of the most powerful monologues in the English language.

Listed below are three of the best speeches delivered by King Henry:

Once More Unto the Breach

In this scene, Henry V and his small band of English soldiers have been battling the French . They've gotten roughed up pretty good, and some of them are ready to give up, but when Henry delivers this motivational speech, they take charge once more and win the day. Note that, contrary to a common misconception, the first line of this speech is not "Once more into the breach."+

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage; Then lend the eye a terrible aspect; Let pry through the portage of the head Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it As fearfully as doth a galled rock O'erhang and jutty his confounded base, Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean. Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide, Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit To his full height. On, on, you noblest English. Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof! Fathers that, like so many Alexanders, Have in these parts from morn till even fought And sheathed their swords for lack of argument: Dishonour not your mothers; now attest That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you. Be copy now to men of grosser blood, And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman, Whose limbs were made in England, show us here The mettle of your pasture; let us swear That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not; For there is none of you so mean and base, That hath not noble lustre in your eyes. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game's afoot: Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'

Upon the King

The night before the most monumental battle in the play, Henry looks upon his sleeping soldiers and contrasts a king's life of pomp and ceremony with the emotional life of a commoner.

Upon the king! let us our lives, our souls, Our debts, our careful wives, Our children and our sins lay on the king! We must bear all. O hard condition, Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel But his own wringing! What infinite heart's-ease Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy! And what have kings, that privates have not too, Save ceremony, save general ceremony? And what art thou, thou idle ceremony? What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st more Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers? What are thy rents? what are thy comings in? O ceremony, show me but thy worth! What is thy soul of adoration? Art thou aught else but place, degree and form, Creating awe and fear in other men? Wherein thou art less happy being fear'd Than they in fearing. What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet, But poison'd flattery? O, be sick, great greatness, And bid thy ceremony give thee cure! Think'st thou the fiery fever will go out With titles blown from adulation? Will it give place to flexure and low bending? Canst thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee, Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream, That play'st so subtly with a king's repose; I am a king that find thee, and I know 'Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball, The sword, the mace, the crown imperial, The intertissued robe of gold and pearl, The farced title running 'fore the king, The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp That beats upon the high shore of this world, No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony, Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, Who with a body fill'd and vacant mind Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread; Never sees horrid night, the child of hell, But, like a lackey, from the rise to set Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night Sleeps in Elysium ; next day after dawn, Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse, And follows so the ever-running year, With profitable labour, to his grave: And, but for ceremony, such a wretch, Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep, Had the fore-hand and vantage of a king. The slave, a member of the country's peace, Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wots What watch the king keeps to maintain the peace, Whose hours the peasant best advantages.

St. Crispin's Day Speech

This is the most famous monologue from Henry V, and with good reason. These inspiring lines are delivered to the rabble of brave English soldiers who are about to go into battle (the famous Battle of Agincourt ) against thousands of French knights. Outnumbered, the soldiers wish they had more men to fight, but Henry V interrupts them, declaring that they have just enough men to make history.

What's he that wishes so? My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin; If we are mark'd to die, we are enow To do our country loss; and if to live, The fewer men, the greater share of honor. God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more. By Jove, I am not covetous for gold, Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost; It yearns me not if men my garments wear; Such outward things dwell not in my desires. But if it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive. No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England. God's peace! I would not lose so great an honor As one man more methinks would share from me For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more! Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host, That he which hath no stomach to this fight, Let him depart; his passport shall be made, And crowns for convoy put into his purse; We would not die in that man's company That fears his fellowship to die with us. This day is call'd the feast of Crispian. He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd, And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall live this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors, And say "To-morrow is Saint Crispian." Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say "These wounds I had on Crispian's day." Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he'll remember, with advantages, What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words- Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester- Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red. This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered- We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition; And gentlemen in England now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

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About Shakespeare
Shakespeare's plays
About the play

Famous Quotes

Here is a selection of well-known quotes from Shakespeare's Henry V, including part of the famous St Crispin's Day Speech.

Joshua Richards as Fluellen, Jim Hooper as Erpingham, Alex Hassell as Henry V and Dale Mathurin as Bates in Henry V.

O, for a muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! (Chorus, Prologue)

Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? or may we cram Within this wooden O, the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? (Chorus, Prologue)

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead. (King Henry, Act 3 Scene 1)

The game's afoot: Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’ (King Henry, Act 3 Scene 1)

Men of few words are the best men. (Boy, Act 3 Scene 2)

That’s a valiant flea that dare eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion. (Orleans, Act 3 Scene 7)

I think the king is but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me. (King Henry, Act 4 Scene 1)

Every subject’s duty is the king’s, but every subject’s soul is his own. (King Henry, Act 4 Scene 1)

This story shall the good man teach his son, And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother. (King Henry, Act 4 Scene 3)

There is occasions and causes why and wherefore in all things. (Fluellen, Act 5 Scene 1)

A good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon— or rather the sun and not the moon, for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps his course truly. If thou would have such a one, take me: and take me, take a soldier: take a soldier, take a king. (King Henry, Act 5 Scene 2)

Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country's fashion: we are the makers of manners, Kate. (King Henry, Act 5 Scene 2)

Dates and Sources

A Short Analysis of the ‘St Crispin’s Day’ Speech from Henry V

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The ‘St Crispin’s Day’ speech is one of the most famous speeches from William Shakespeare’s Henry V , a history play written in around 1599 and detailing the English king’s wars with France during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453).

Henry V himself delivers the St Crispin’s Day speech in the play. He delivers the speech on the occasion of the Battle of Agincourt. The real battle did indeed take place on 25 October 1415, and 25 October is indeed the feast day of the Christian saint St Crispin.

However, although Shakespeare’s speech is often referred to as the ‘St Crispin’s Day’ speech, Henry doesn’t actually mention St Crispin until the end; the saint he mentions at the beginning of the speech (‘This day is called the feast of Crispian’) is actually a different saint.

Henry needs to make a rousing speech to his men. They are significantly outnumbered by the enemy forces. The real, historical Battle of Agincourt bears this out: it is thought that Henry’s forces numbered around 5,000 men, while the French army numbered at least around 30,000, although some estimates are as high as 100,000 men.

Henry’s speech captures the sense of comradeship and patriotism which binds the men together on the field of battle. The best way to offer an analysis of this classic speech is to go through it section by section, summarising its meaning and analysing the language Henry uses as we go.

This day is called the feast of Crispian: He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named, And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

As mentioned above, ‘Crispian’ is not a mere variation on the name of St Crispin, for the purposes of metre: he’s a different saint. And even that one isn’t properly called ‘Crispian’.

The legend tells of two brothers, Crispin and Crispinian ( not Crispian), who left Rome and settled in France, where they became shoemakers. They both subsequently became the patron saints of shoemakers. They attained sainthood by converting many people to Christianity, before being beheaded as martyrs.

Henry’s speech refers to ‘the feast of Crispian’: a reference to St Crispin’s brother , St Crispinian. However, because the fortunes of the two brothers were so closely interlinked, they share a feast day, 25 October.

Now we’ve cleared that up … Henry begins his rousing speech to his troops by telling them that all men who fight in the battle that day, and survive, returning safely home afterwards, will ‘stand a-tiptoe’ (i.e. walk tall, or feel proud) whenever the day of St Crispin’s (or Crispinian’s) Day is mentioned, because it will remind them of their heroism on this day.

He that shall live this day, and see old age Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’ Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’

Henry goes on to tell his men that those who survive the battle and live to see old age will, every year on the ‘vigil’ (i.e. the eve) of the anniversary of the battle, celebrate with his neighbours back home and mark the occasion, showing off his battle scars.

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember with advantages What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words, Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester, Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.

Old men tend to be forgetful, and all of the soldiers standing before Henry will become forgetful as they grow old too; but one thing they will never forget is their feats of bravery that they perform in the battle on this day.

The names of those who lead the battle – the King and the noblemen who fight with him – will remain familiar in the mouth of every man who fought alongside them, as familiar as ‘household words’ or common phrases.

The reference to ‘mouth’ here suggests that the veterans of the battle will be telling their war stories to a rapt audience of neighbours in years to come: people who wish to hear of the part the men played in the heroic battle.

Curiously, Shakespeare is inaccurate in listing ‘Warwick’ and ‘Talbot’ as among those fighting at the Battle of Agincourt: Warwick was a later figure, mentioned in 1 Henry VI , and Talbot (John Talbot, First Earl of Shrewsbury) didn’t join the French campaign until 1419, four years after Agincourt.

But then this was probably deliberate anachronism on Shakespeare’s part: he needed to mention the names of figures his audience would recognise from the popular history (and earlier plays, such as his own trilogy of Henry VI plays), otherwise Henry’s claim that these names would be ‘familiar … as household words’ in years to come might sound comically wide of the mark.

This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remember’d;

Every good man will teach his son about the battle, so that not a single year will go by when the battle is not remembered on St Crispin’s Day. This will last forever – until the end of the world.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition:

Here’s the most famous line from Henry’s whole speech: ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’.

‘Band of brothers’ gave its name to Steven Spielberg’s TV series about the Second World War, and the phrase is often associated with comradeship and camaraderie among soldiers serving and fighting together: although not related by blood, they are brothers-in-arms, through battle – or brothers in ‘blood’, not in the sense that they are related by blood, but because they have shed blood together. (Henry, or rather Shakespeare, may well be drawing upon the brotherly relationship between Crispin and Crispinian, too.)

And it really is a case of ‘we few’, given how much Henry and the English army are outnumbered by the French enemy!

When Henry says that ‘be he ne’er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition’, he means that every man, no matter how small (‘vile’ was used to refer to someone of minor social standing, e.g. a member of the ‘great unwashed’, as well as denoting someone mean or evil), will become a ‘gentleman’, or be raised up in the eyes of society, through his heroic conduct in battle.

Henry doesn’t literally mean that the swineherds and peasants fighting with him will become earls or dukes when they get home: he’s speaking figuratively, of course. They will be ennobled in a general way through their noble deeds done in battle, fighting for king and country.

However, as is often the case in Shakespeare, there is a potential secondary meaning: namely, that no matter what ‘vile’ deeds these fighting-men have carried out before, their ‘condition’ in the eyes of God will be improved through their heroism. It’s as if, by fighting with Henry V in this battle, they can attain absolution or forgiveness for past sins or misdemeanours.

And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Indeed, those current ‘gentlemen’ (Henry’s use of the word follows Henry’s use of ‘gentle’ as a verb in the previous line) who are now safe in their beds back home, and not fighting alongside their king, will think it a bad thing that they were absent from the fighting – it will be so terrible for them that it will carry the force of a curse.

They will consider their masculinity, their sense of courage and heroism, a small and worthless thing whenever they hear others talk of the bravery of the men who did fight in the battle. (Once again, there’s another, slightly rude meaning to Henry’s words: ‘hold their manhoods cheap’ suggests these non-combatants will consider their ‘manhoods’, i.e. their male genitalia as a symbol of their male power, worthless because they did not prove their mettle in the heat of battle.)

The ‘St Crispin’s Day’ speech does at least end with Henry mentioning the correct saint. But the speech was worth closer analysis, not only because of the double meanings to some of the language Shakespeare uses, or because of the fact that he is actually talking about two saints rather than one (albeit two with very similar names).

No: the speech is also noteworthy for the way Henry cleverly switches from speaking of ‘we few, we happy few’ – i.e. those noblemen who immediately surround him in the front line of battle – to including the whole army in his rousing and inspiring speech. All men who shed blood with him will become his ‘brothers’.

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5 thoughts on “A Short Analysis of the ‘St Crispin’s Day’ Speech from Henry V”

The “gentlemen now a-bed” feel no remorse, though; they become presidents and send the children of others – not their own children, of course – to fight in undeclared wars.

Love the double meanings and the new (for me) info about “two saints rather than one.” I will have to add this below my own blog entry on “Henry V: Compartments and Counterfeits” :) ( https://shakemyheadhollow.wordpress.com/2015/03/29/henry-v-compartments-and-counterfeits/ )

Just watched Tom Hiddleston’s version from The Hollow Crown which is so different than Kenneth Branagh’s. Another version is from Danny Devito’s Renaissance Man.

The Olivier film version is the best rendition I have seen. A great call to arms esp effective as made during World War two

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Henry V Monologues

The Henry V monologues below are extracts from the full modern Henry V ebook , along with a modern English translation. Reading through the original Henry V monologue followed by a modern version and should help you to understand what each Henry V monologue is about:

“Once More Unto The Breach Dear Friends” (Spoken by Henry V, Act 3 Scene 1) “The Feast Of St Crispin” (Spoken by Henry, Act 4 Scene 3) “To Horse You Gallant Princes” (Spoken by Constable of France, Act 4 Scene 4)

More Henry V monologues coming soon!

Read Henry V soliloquies >>

Read other Shakespeare monologues >>

What is a monologue? >>

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Tom Hiddleston delivers one of many powerful Henry V monologues in the BBC’s Shakespeare adaptation The Hollow Crown

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Henry V Shakescleare Translation

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Henry V Translation Table of Contents

After his father’s death, Prince Hal has been crowned King Henry V. In order to demonstrate his military might and unite his country, recently embroiled in civil war, Henry V plans to reclaim lands in France that once belonged to England. He leads his troops across the English Channel, and aims to woo the French Princess, Catherine. Shakespeare’s Henry V contains some of his most famous and stirring orations, including the King’s St. Crispin’s day and “Once more unto the breach, dear friends” speeches. With the Shakescleare modern English translation of the play, you can understand these important lines and others, including the famous prologue, which begins: “O! For a muse of fire that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention!”

Act 1, Prologue

Act 1, scene 1, act 1, scene 2, act 2, prologue, act 2, scene 1, act 2, scene 2, act 2, scene 3, act 3, prologue, act 3, scene 1, act 3, scene 2, act 3, scene 3, act 3, scene 4, act 3, scene 5, act 3, scene 6, act 3, scene 7, act 4, prologue, act 4, scene 1, act 4, scene 2, act 4, scene 3, act 4, scene 4, act 4, scene 5, act 4, scene 6, act 4, scene 7, act 4, scene 8, act 5, prologue, act 5, scene 1, act 5, scene 2.

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Act 5, scene 2.

The Duke of Burgundy has brought about a meeting between French and English to sign a peace treaty. Henry delegates negotiation of the treaty to his nobles while he woos Katherine, Princess of France, who agrees to marry him. The French are brought to accept all English terms, including Henry’s right to succeed to the French throne.

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Must I hold a candle to my shames? — The Merchant of Venice , Act II Scene 6

History of Henry V

(complete text)

A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

What Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’ Tells Us about Leadership, Motivation, Wooing and Hanging

October 13, 2010 • 17 min read.

It has been described as one of the greatest battles of all time -- the fight between Henry V of England and the French army on October 25, 1415, at Agincourt in northern France. Henry, whose goal was to reclaim English territory, had approximately 6,000 men; the French army had five to 10 times that many. Who won and how -- and the events surrounding the battle -- were the subject of a course on leadership at Wharton executive education. Shakespeare, after all, not only offers keen insights into issues that confront today's managers; he is also one of the world's most renowned storytellers.

It has been described as one of the greatest battles of all time — the fight between Henry V of England and the French army on October 25, 1415, at Agincourt in northern France. Henry, whose goal was to reclaim English territory seized by France in earlier centuries, had approximately 6,000 men. The French army, depending on which historical report you read, had anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 soldiers, many of them knights in armor prepared to fight on foot and on horseback. The English army had neither armor nor horses, and they were exhausted by their two-month trek across France trying to reach what was then the English port of Calais.

But they did have what turned out to be a decisive advantage — Henry V’s leadership skills and his ability to innovate in ways that would turn significant disadvantages into game-winning advantages. In addition, before the battle started, he delivered one of the most famous motivational speeches in history — at least as it is written in Shakespeare’s Henry V. The speech has been played on Allied ships crossing the English Channel to Normandy during World War II; in locker rooms by football coaches losing at half time, and on the Internet for U.S. soldiers about to leave for duty in Iraq.

Here is how Henry won: He stopped his army on a field that was flanked on either side by woodlands, thus forcing the French army to move forward through a narrow funnel and neutralizing their superior numbers. He took full advantage of a rainfall that had muddied the battlefield and that would prove disastrous for the armored French soldiers — when they slipped backwards wearing their 60-pound armor, they couldn’t hoist themselves back up; when they fell forward, they drowned in the mud.

In addition, rather than rely on the more traditional, easy-to-use crossbow, Henry chose the long bow, which could fire arrows more quickly and at greater range. The resulting hail of arrows killed French soldiers behind the front line, taking away urgently needed reinforcements. Henry armed his men with pikes a foot longer than those used by the French, allowing English soldiers in hand-to-hand combat to deliver the first, and usually lethal, blow. And, in what has been described as a last minute innovation, Henry planted sharp stakes in the ground just at the point of the battle’s engagement. The French army’s horses, rushing forward, were impaled on the stakes and fell to the ground, crushing soldiers around them and blocking the path forward for others.

When the fighting stopped after several hours, the French had lost about 6,000 men, and the English about 450.

Some version of this battle has been told in history books, in Shakespeare’s play and, two weeks ago, by Carol and Ken Adelman, founders of Movers & Shakespeares, which uses the world’s greatest playwright to teach modern management skills to executives. The Adelmans were at Wharton as part of a Wharton executive education program called “The Leadership Journey.”

Carol Adelman is director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Prosperity where, among other things, she developed the annual Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances. Ken Adelman is a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and director of the U.S. Arms Control & Disarmament Agency during the Reagan administration.

The two started Movers & Shakespeares eight years ago because, as Carol noted during the course, William Shakespeare offers his audience exceptionally astute insights into human nature and has a genius for telling stories, which, she suggested, “is the best way to learn.” The downside to the bard, she added, is that the language can be tedious and hard to understand — something that comes as no surprise to high school students everywhere.

The Adelmans’ approach is to delve into the language and extract leadership lessons from Shakespeare’s plays. In this particular session, the focus was on Henry V , brought to life by a series of scenes from the 1989 movie starring Kenneth Branagh as Henry and Emma Thompson as the French princess Katharine. The class discussion centered on the battle scene, the motivation speech, Henry’s wooing of Katharine, the punishment meted out to a soldier caught stealing, and the conference between Henry V and the Archbishop of Canterbury before Henry sets sail for France.

This ‘Band of Brothers’

From the description of the battle at Agincourt, it’s clear that Henry V displayed remarkable leadership capabilities, said Ken Adelman. He led by example, situating himself in the middle of the fighting whereas the French king, Charles VI, stayed in Paris, leaving the army under the leadership of a group of nobles. “Henry was willing to innovate, recognizing, for example, the superiority of the long bow and making sure his men were well-trained in how to use it,” Adelman noted. Before Agincourt, the English army was 80% foot soldiers and 20% archers. After Agincourt, it was 20% foot soldiers and 80% archers.

Yet perhaps the English army’s biggest asset was the speech Henry made to his men just before going into battle, including the famous sentence, “All things are ready if our minds be so.” (The words are Shakespeare’s; the actual text of the speech does not exist.) Even before speaking, Henry walks among his troops listening to what they are saying and feeling, and then positions himself in their midst to deliver his address. By contrast, the French leaders (in the Branagh movie) are shown at the head of their army, uttering confident phrases unable to be heard by any of their soldiers.

Here are excerpts from Henry’s speech in the play:

“That he which hath no stomach to this fight, Let him depart; his passport shall be made And crowns for convoy put into his purse: We would not die in that man’s company That fears his fellowship to die with us…

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember with advantages What feats he did that day: then shall our names Familiar in his mouth as household words Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester, Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d. This story shall the good man teach his son And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remember’d; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that shed his blood with me Shall be my brother.”

“Henry painted a vision of what success looked like,” said Adelman. “He spoke of God, and never mentioned the word ‘defeat.’ He talked about children being proud of their fathers who fought in this battle. He said ‘we are a band of brothers’ and he is one of them. He connected to the mission and to the people.”

In addition, Adelman noted, Henry said he did not want one more man on his side because it would dilute the glory, and he told the troops that if any man didn’t want to fight, then he should feel free to go. Finally, Henry called out some of his key people “and said they would be household words.” In our workplaces today, Adelman told the class, “we can’t bring religion in but we can remind employees that we have a higher purpose, and we can communicate to them that vision.”

Legitimizing the Mission

Contrast Henry’s moving speech with a scene earlier in Henry V during which the young (age 28) newly crowned king asks the Archbishop of Canterbury a simple question: Does he, Henry, have the right to reclaim France? The response from the Archbishop is long-winded, meandering and almost impenetrable. An excerpt:

“Nor did the French possess the Salique land Until four hundred one and twenty years After defunction of King Pharamond, Idly supposed the founder of this law; Who died within the year of our redemption Four hundred twenty-six; and Charles the Great Subdued the Saxons, and did seat the French Beyond the river Sala, in the year Eight hundred five. Besides, their writers say, King Pepin, which deposed Childeric, Did, as heir general, being descended Of Blithild, which was daughter to King Clothair….”

The speech continues in this vein until Henry finally is forced to repeat the question: “May I with right and conscience make this claim?” (The answer, eventually, is “yes.”) The Archbishop’s performance is not that different, Carol Adelman noted, from executive presentations that ramble; use obscure language, irrelevant facts, and charts and graphs that no one understands; and allude to unspoken subplots that hint at, rather than reveal, the meaning of the presenter’s words.

Indeed, the outcome of the discussion between Henry and the Archbishop had already been decided before the meeting took place. Based on earlier speeches in the play, it is known that the Archbishop will grant Henry the right to attack France because Henry had earlier agreed to stop a bill in Parliament that would have taxed the church and taken away half its land. We also know that Henry entered the discussion with the full support of the English nobles who had visions of plundering the land and riches of a defeated France. As for the king himself, he favored war in order to gain the respect of the English people and the nobles of the English court. But none of this is mentioned during the talk between Henry and the Archbishop, nor is there discussion of substantive questions, such as: Could England actually win? How many troops would be needed to secure that victory?

So why have the meeting at all? “For unity and affirmation from the church,” said Ken Adelman. “God gives Henry the right to invade France. The battle is legitimized.” Equally important, he added, is that “Henry has the last word, which provides further clarity and legitimization for the mission ahead.” As the king says: “Now are we well resolved; and, by God’s help, and yours, the noble sinews of our power, France being ours, we’ll bend it to our awe, or break it all to pieces….”

The question for the leadership course: Is this a good way to reach a major decision? Adelman’s response: “In my experience, this is the only way to go if you want to make a big change in your organization. You have to meet with all the interested parties before hand and get them behind you. You have to meet the specific interests of different groups before you can align the group behind the big goal.”

It’s true in business and also in politics, he noted. Adelman remembered attending a meeting called by the national security advisor (NSA) during the Reagan administration. The object was to debate SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative), an idea which Reagan had long championed. Indeed, the President had already spoken about SDI with all the relevant groups before the meeting even took place, and Adelman as well had been asked by the NSA to show his support. “So when it came time to agree on implementing the initiative, everybody present, including [Secretary of Defense] Caspar Weinberger and [Secretary of State] George Shultz, was on board,” said Adelman. And at the end of the very agreeable discussion, “Reagan looked around the room and said, ‘This has been a great meeting.'”

To Hang or Not to Hang

Henry V is full of other teachable moments, including a scene where Henry’s childhood friend and drinking companion, Bardolph, has been caught stealing a pewter chalice from a French church. Henry had ordered his men to refrain from pillaging French property or harming French civilians; anyone who disobeyed this order, he had stated, would be hung.

When Bardolph is captured by one of the English soldiers shortly before the battle and brought to Henry on horseback, tied up and badly beaten, the other soldiers look to their king to see whether he will order the death of his friend. The question for the executive education class becomes: What should Henry have done?

The “anti-hanging” advocates argue that the prisoner had already suffered a brutal beating, that the crime is relatively minor, that Bardolph had no chance to defend himself, and that the outmanned English army needs every soldier it can get for the upcoming battle. The “pro-hanging” advocates respond that the policy was clear, that the king wanted to convey a message to the French people that he would not tolerate the looting of their countryside, that the king should not compromise on core values (one of them being “don’t steal”), and that the king should not undermine his own aides, who were in favor of enforcing the policy.

Henry orders his friend to be hung. While CEOs these days are fortunately not able to hang employees who break a company’s code of conduct, Henry’s decision with regard to Bardolph raises questions about executive authority and the appropriate “punishment” for offenders. “The king may be more concerned with his own reputation” than with whether his decision was morally right or wrong, suggested Adelman, but he is a young king “who needs to show his toughness.”

Artful Wooing

The famous wooing scene in Henry V takes place in a royal palace in Paris during a meeting that is attended by Henry, the French king and queen, and princess Katharine, among others. Henry is negotiating what he insists on calling the “peace treaty” (to avoid humiliating the French with words like “surrender”) and has decided to woo Katharine to be his queen rather than merely order up the marriage, as he is allowed to do under the terms of the proposed treaty. Wooing was probably a good idea, said Adelman: “After all, Henry had just put her father out of business and killed 6,000 French soldiers.” Good communication and persuasion skills could help get this royal couple off on the right foot.

Excerpts from Henry’s wooing of Katharine (whom he is soon calling “Kate”) show just how astute a wooer he is:

“Fair Katharine, and most fair, Will you vouchsafe to teach a soldier terms Such as will enter at a lady’s ear And plead his love-suit to her gentle heart?…

And while thou livest, dear Kate, take a fellow of plain and uncoined constancy; for he perforce must do thee right, because he hath not the gift to woo in other places: for these fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into ladies’ favours, they do always reason themselves out again. What! a speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad. A good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a black beard will turn white; a curled pate will grow bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps his course truly. If thou would have such a one, take me; and take me, take a soldier; take a soldier, take a king. And what sayest thou then to my love? speak, my fair, and fairly, I pray thee….”

At one point, Katharine asks if it is possible that she could love an enemy of France. Henry replies:

“No; it is not possible you should love the enemy of France, Kate: but, in loving me, you should love the friend of France; for I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it; I will have it all mine: and, Kate, when France is mine and I am yours, then yours is France and you are mine.”

At another point, Henry attempts to speak to Katharine — in French, despite his lack of fluency:

“I will tell thee in French; which I am sure will hang upon my tongue like a new-married wife about her husband’s neck, hardly to be shook….

When I come to woo ladies, I fright them. But, in faith, Kate, the elder I wax, the better I shall appear: my comfort is, that old age, that ill layer up of beauty, can do no more, spoil upon my face: thou hast me, if thou hast me, at the worst; and thou shalt wear me, if thou wear me, better and better: and therefore tell me, most fair Katharine, will you have me?…

You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate: there is more eloquence in a sugar touch of them than in the tongues of the French council; and they should sooner persuade Harry of England than a general petition of monarchs. Here comes your father.”

The wooing scene, as Adelman and “The Leadership Journey” participants pointed out, was notable — and successful — for several reasons. Henry asked everyone to leave the room except for Katharine and her lady-in-waiting; he was a good listener and changed his speech based on what he heard from Katharine; he made himself vulnerable by stating that he was a great king and soldier but not very successful with women, and he said he would wear well in old age (alas, he died at age 34).

In addition, he converted himself from an enemy of France into a friend of France by saying he loved the country so much that he took it; he had a sense of humor; he was respectful and at several points, he even tried to speak Katharine’s native language despite an almost comical inability to do so. As Adelman pointed out: “He incentivized her. She was the princess of a deposed king, and she left the room as a queen of England and France. It was a career-enhancing move for her.”

Channeling Shakespeare on Your Own Stage

“By watching how historical figures behave in settings far before our time — in this case, looking at the characters Shakespeare brought to life in Henry V — we often get very good insights into what is vital in our own leadership or managerial moments,” says Michael Useem , co-director of “The Leadership Journey” and director of the Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management . “We include Shakespeare in our range of learning experiences because it is one of the more indelible ways we have found of bringing points to life — in part because of the power of his insights and also because of the intrinsic elements of the stories he tells.”

If you are about to walk onto a stage at an offsite event, Useem adds, “looking at the language in Henry V will remind you to offer up the big purpose of why you are there and also to make it personal and motivational. For doing that, Henry V is about as good as it gets.”

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StageMilk / Monologues For Actors / Henry V Monologue (Act 4, Scene 1)

Henry V Monologue (Act 4, Scene 1)

Let’s have a look at a soliloquy from Henry the Fifth . This is a truly fantastic character to explore. Henry is put through so many trials and high-stakes situations, and his personality is constantly torn between his pride and honour. We see him bolstering his disheartened troops in the siege of Harfleur, we see him rallying his officers before the battle of Agincourt. We also see him be petty and competitive, and in the case of this speech, desperate. This text, taken from Act IV, Scene I, beginning with the line “Upon the King” is the soliloquy we’ll be unpacking today.

So as always, let’s talk about what’s going on for Henry at this point in the play. It’s dawn, on the day of the Battle of Agincourt, where the English forces led by Henry are outnumbered 5 to one. Morale is low amongst his troops, and Henry wishes to speak to some of them to understand their feelings, and perhaps boost their morale and even empathise with his situation. Let’s think about that for a second; Henry’s main concern does not seem to be with the well-being of his men but rather with his reputation. It says a lot about Henry as a character. These flaws are wonderful for us to explore as actors, though we must be careful not to judge him outright. We need to endeavour to empathise with his situation.

In disguise, he speaks to two soldiers in the English camp, Bates and Williams. He attempts to convince them of the King’s (his own) good intentions and loyalty to his soldiers, and the difficulty of his position as King, but the soldiers remain unmoved by his arguments. The men speak of the guilt the King will carry for all the dismembered bodies that will lay on the battlefield come sunset on that very day.

This discussion with the troops is so unsuccessful for Henry, and his pride is so affronted that an argument breaks out between Henry and Williams. The only reason the argument doesn’t come to psychical violence is the fact that they will both most likely be killed by the French in mere hours. They resolve to continue their quarrel if they are somehow victorious.

All these circumstances, the oncoming battle, the cold dawn, the disguise Henry wears, the disillusioned soldiers and the argument which erupts between Henry and his men all contribute to Henry’s emotional state at the top of this soliloquy. Let’s take a closer look at the speech itself:

Original Text

Upon the king! let us our lives, our souls, Our debts, our careful wives, Our children and our sins lay on the king! We must bear all. O hard condition, Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel But his own wringing! What infinite heart’s-ease Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy! And what have kings, that privates have not too, Save ceremony, save general ceremony? And what art thou, thou idle ceremony? What kind of god art thou, that suffer’st more Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers? What are thy rents? what are thy comings in? O ceremony, show me but thy worth! What is thy soul of adoration? Art thou aught else but place, degree and form, Creating awe and fear in other men? Wherein thou art less happy being fear’d Than they in fearing. What drink’st thou oft, instead of homage sweet, But poison’d flattery? O, be sick, great greatness, And bid thy ceremony give thee cure! Think’st thou the fiery fever will go out With titles blown from adulation? Will it give place to flexure and low bending? Canst thou, when thou command’st the beggar’s knee, Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream, That play’st so subtly with a king’s repose; I am a king that find thee, and I know ‘Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball, The sword, the mace, the crown imperial, The intertissued robe of gold and pearl, The farced title running ‘fore the king, The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp That beats upon the high shore of this world, No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony, Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread; Never sees horrid night, the child of hell, But, like a lackey, from the rise to set Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn, Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse, And follows so the ever-running year, With profitable labour, to his grave: And, but for ceremony, such a wretch, Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep, Had the fore-hand and vantage of a king. The slave, a member of the country’s peace, Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wots What watch the king keeps to maintain the peace, Whose hours the peasant best advantages.

Unfamiliar Words/Phrases

‘subject to the breath of every fool’ to be subjected to the criticism of even the most foolish of people.

Private men Common people with their ‘normal’ (non royal) lives.

Ceremony The ritual observances and procedures required or performed at grand and formal occasions. Think: The crown jewels.

Homage Special honour or respect shown publicly.

Adulation Excessive admiration or praise

Flexure and low bending The bowing and penitence of a King’s subjects. Repose: In a state of rest, sleep or tranquility

Phoebus The Greek God Apollo, tasked with driving the sun chariot across the sky each day.

Elysium Paradise of the afterlife from Greek myth.

Hyperion The Titan who came before Apollo, the “God of heavenly light”

Modern Translation

Upon the king! let us our lives, our souls, Our debts, our careful wives, Our children and our sins lay on the king! We must bear all.

On the shoulders of the King rest the common people’s lives, souls, debts, family and sins. The king must bear all this weight.

O hard condition, Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel But his own wringing! What infinite heart’s-ease Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy! And what have kings, that privates have not too, Save ceremony, save general ceremony?

What a difficult position, though it comes with greatness, to be subjected to the voices and demands of all the most base of society. What peaceful lives must Kings refuse that common people get to enjoy! What do Kings have that common people don’t have, except formality and rituals?

And what art thou, thou idle ceremony? What kind of god art thou, that suffer’st more Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers? What are thy rents? what are thy comings in? O ceremony, show me but thy worth! What is thy soul of adoration? Art thou aught else but place, degree and form, Creating awe and fear in other men? Wherein thou art less happy being fear’d Than they in fearing.

And what are these rituals which Kings have that common people have not? What kind of ‘God’ suffers more than its subjects? What does ceremony give me in return? What income? Ceremony show me your worth! Or are you just useless systems made only to make others fearful and subservient – even if in doing so I am less happy that those beneath me?

What drink’st thou oft, instead of homage sweet, But poison’d flattery? O, be sick, great greatness, And bid thy ceremony give thee cure! Think’st thou the fiery fever will go out With titles blown from adulation? Will it give place to flexure and low bending? Canst thou, when thou command’st the beggar’s knee, Command the health of it?

What drink does ‘ceremony’ get to enjoy except for forced respect? Nothing but fake flattery. Make a King sick with a disease- then cure him with this ‘ceremony’. See what happens. Do you think you will cure a fever with a fancy title? Will a fever run away because of penitence and the bowing of the King’s subjects? Can ceremony command a servant to kneel before him and also cure the servant of any ailment – like a God?

No, thou proud dream, That play’st so subtly with a king’s repose; I am a king that find thee, and I know ‘Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball, The sword, the mace, the crown imperial, The intertissued robe of gold and pearl, The farced title running ‘fore the king, The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp That beats upon the high shore of this world, No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony, Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread; Never sees horrid night, the child of hell, But, like a lackey, from the rise to set Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn, Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse, And follows so the ever-running year, With profitable labour, to his grave:

No. This power is nothing but a dream that makes me restless. I am a King and I understand you, ceremony, and I know that none of the Royal apparel: the ball, sceptre, sword, mace or crown, none of the decorations of Regality can help a King sleep as soundly as the most base slave. He has a full stomach and an empty mind, and he never fears the night. The slave is like the servant to a God who gets to sleep in heaven to then repeat his simple servitude day after day until his death.

And, but for ceremony, such a wretch, Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep, Had the fore-hand and vantage of a king.

Were it not for ceremony, this slave I speak of, being able to end his days of work with peaceful sleep, is luckier than a King will ever be.

Notes on Performance

The key to effectively performing any soliloquy is understanding the argument that is being made. For Henry, his argument is clear and unfaltering: The supposed ‘benefits’ of being a King are not better than being a common person without responsibility. Henry gives many points to support his argument. To deliver this soliloquy we need to empathise with and understand the situation he is in. Once we understand and can feel the difficulty of the position he is in, (He is about to send thousands of men to their deaths in a few hours, remember?) we can start to truly perform the soliloquy.

Henry has a deep yearning to be relived of the burden and responsibility of leadership. He feels a tremendous weight upon his shoulders, all the lives, fears and resentment of his subjects are within his as he is speaking these words. It is important then for us as actors to be propelled forward by this inner conflict. Henry wants to be free from responsibility, yet he knows he will never be.

Declan Donnellan, director and author of ‘The Actor and the Target’ tells us that we need a clear target to direct our objectives and actions towards. Henry in this speech has a number of ‘target’s’, the most prominent being this idea of ‘Ceremony’. It’s important for us to understand exactly what this ‘ceremony’ is to him. This image needs to be clear to us as actors. We need to understand our relationship to it and what it ignites within us.

‘Ceremony’, to Henry, could be comparable to manure for the everyday person. Ceremony clearly does not hold the same mysticism, awe and wonder for Henry as it would for most observing the ornaments and jewellery of royalty. Henry is personifying ‘Ceremony’ in this speech, giving it life and putting it on trial, testing it for its true worth. In performing this the actor must clearly know what the image of ceremony is to them and where it is in space to direct their thoughts towards it.

Specificity is key. Beware the list in this speech! Detailed work is required from the actor in generating specific images and feelings about each object Henry mentions. The sceptre and the ball are two very different and individual objects. The sword and the mace cannot be grouped together in how we reference them because they are both categorised as ‘weapons’. The actor must have a specific robe in their mind when they reference it in this speech. Henry knows each of these objects individually and specifically. Generalisation about this list is dangerous – it’s a sure fire way to turn off the audience’s imagination.

In performing this soliloquy we need to firstly understand the circumstances around it and what has immediately preceded it – Henry’s emotional state is drastically impacted by these factors. Next, we must understand what is being said and the argument which is being made. This speech has a ‘venting’ quality to it – Henry has no confidant but the audience for these controversial thoughts, and this gives them an explosive and desperate nature. In dissecting this speech we must ask, “Does Henry truly feel this way about Ceremony?” Would Henry actually substitute his life and privilege for that of someone from the lower class? That is for the individual actor to decide. Regardless, Henry has an intimate knowledge about ‘Ceremony’ and therefore has very strong opinions about it. The actor must be as clear as Henry is about what this pomp and circumstance is, what it looks like, how it feels and how it makes us feel. Only then can we achieve specificity in performance and evoke detailed images in the minds of the audience.

About the Author

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Page contents.

The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth: Basic Facts
Who Was Henry V
Famous Victories and its Sources
History and Comedy: Clowning in Famous Victories
Famous Victories and the Elizabethan Context: Empire, Invasion, Succession
Famous Victories and Shakespeare's History Plays
Famous Victories and Modern Performance

About this text

Title : The Famous Victories of Henry V: Introduction
Author : Mathew Martin
Textual editors : Andrew Griffin, Helen Ostovich
Coordinating editor : Michael Best
Production editor : Peter Cockett
The Famous Victories of Henry V: Introduction
List of Characters
The Famous Victories of Henry V: Bibliography
Introduction to the SQM Performance of Famous Victories
Shakespeare and the Queen's Men (SQM) Repertory Productions
SQM Performance Bibliography
Famous Victories of Henry V, Modern
The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, Quarto, 1598 (Old-spelling transcription)
Famous Victories of Henry V: Supplementary Materials
Complete text

1 The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth: Basic Facts

According to modern scholars, the anonymous The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth , written and first performed in the mid-1580s, is "our earliest extant English history play" (Adams 667), a dramatic genre that Shakespeare and other playwrights would take up and make arguably the most popular kind of play on the stage in the following decade. The play, then, stands at the beginning of an impressive dramatic tradition that includes the plays for which it is often treated as merely the source, Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV , 2 Henry IV , and Henry V . Famous Victories , though, is in no sense merely primitive or naîve raw material. It was written for an elite acting company, the Queen's Men, who were "the best known and most widely travelled professional company in the kingdom" (McMillin and MacLean 67) and had been given a complex ideological mandate that their plays had to negotiate, which included "increas[ing] the prestige of their patron" Elizabeth and "harness[ing] the theatre in the service a moderate Protestant ideology" (McMillin and MacLean 24). Along with romances, moralities, and magician plays, history plays like Famous Victories were part of the company's propaganda effort.

2 As various parts of this introduction will demonstrate, however, Famous Victories 's treatment of history is not ideologically passive. Certainly, overall the play presents a positive picture of the Lancastrian hero, Henry V, from whom Elizabeth traced in part her royal descent, while minimizing attention to the dubious means by which his father, Henry IV, acquired the English crown. Nonetheless, the play does not eliminate all critique from its dramatization of Elizabeth's illustrious ancestor and his martial accomplishments, critique that in various direct and indirect ways might have been perceived as not entirely flattering reflections on the contemporary historical and political situation too. Likewise, in keeping with its mandate to promulgate a moderate Protestant ideology, the play avoids the divisive religious issues of Henry's reign, namely the rebellion and martyrdom of the Wycliffite proto-reformer Sir John Oldcastle (the character Jockey in the play), in order to present a religiously unified English nation in conflict with its national other, the French. Nonetheless, the play foregrounds another deep fissure within the English nation, that of class, in its adroit and critically pointed mixing of historical and comic characters and events. In the interactions between the play's historical, upper-class characters and its lower-class, comic characters ("clowns" like Derrick and John), the play both acknowledges the existence of a class hierarchy and exposes its gross unfairness, in times of peace as well as in times of war. The play also does not shy away from representing the gender inequities at work in war, or at least in the distribution of war's spoils: the romance of the play's concluding marriage may work to ameliorate the harsh realities of conquest for a woman in Princess Katherine's position, but in the process the play allows Katherine to articulate (to Henry and to the audience) the meaning of those harsh realities for her and gives her a measure of agency in her efforts to negotiate those realities in pursuit of both her own desire and her country's good.

3 Famous Victories , then, may be partisan; it is, however, in no way jingoistic. This general contention will developed throughout the introduction, which is divided into the following six sections: Who Was Henry V?; Famous Victories and Its Sources; History and Comedy: Clowning in Famous Victories ; Famous Victories and the Elizabethan Context: Empire, Invasion, Succession; Famous Victories and Shakespeare's History Plays; Famous Victories and Modern Performance.

4 Who Was Henry V

Born on 16 September 1387 at Monmouth in Wales, the child who would become Prince of Wales in 1399 and Henry V in 1413 was the eldest son of Henry Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, and the grandson of John of Gaunt, who as the duke of Lancaster and eldest surviving son of Edward III (r. 1327-1377) exercised considerable influence during the reign of his nephew, Richard II. Richard's father was Edward the Black Prince, the eldest son of Edward III. The Black Prince, however, died in 1376, a year before his father, so in 1377 Richard became England's king at the age of ten (Keen 260). His reign came to an ignominious end in 1399 when he was deposed by Henry of Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV. Having been banished from England in 1398, Henry had returned in 1399 with an army to claim his ancestral rights as duke of Lancaster, of which Richard had deprived him upon the death of John of Gaunt that year, but, seizing the opportunity afforded by Richard's absence in Ireland, decided to press further and claim the crown as well (Keen 293-4, 297-8). As Maurice Keen aptly puts it, Bolingbroke "got the crown because he was the man of the moment" (303). Famous Victories ' Prince Henry might respond to the twinges of his father's conscience regarding his usurpation of Richard's crown by telling him that "Howsoever you came by it [the crown], I know not" (TLN 749), but historically the future Henry V surely did know. Having been a hostage in Richard II's camp during his father's rebellion (Seward 8-9), Prince Henry would have been well aware of the dubious means by which his father came by the English crown.

6 After his accession to the throne, Henry V quickly began plans to obtain the crown of France. In 1414 and again in 1415, Henry sent embassies into France demanding the French crown, marriage to Charles VI's daughter Katherine with a large dowry, and major territorial concessions (Dockray 136-7). The French rejected these demands, as Henry surely knew they would. On 6 July 1415 he declared war on France, and on 11 August he launched from Southampton the full-scale invasion for which he had preparing throughout the preceding negotiations (Dockray 137-40).

7 Famous Victories compresses this complex historical process into one fluid scene, at the beginning of which Henry's erstwhile companion Jockey exclaims "Did you not see with what grace he sent his embassage into France to tell the French king that Harry of England hath sent for the crown and Harry of England will have it?" (TLN 800-803) and at the conclusion of which Henry tells his noble counselors, "let us be gone and get our men in a readiness" (TLN 985) for the invasion. Framed by these expressions of Henry's unswerving determination, the scene shifts quickly from dramatizing Henry's rejection of the old companions of his dissolute recent past to staging the steps leading to the war with France as further confirmation of his reformation: Henry receives advice from his wise new counselors, responds haughtily to the French ambassador who conveys Charles VI's disdainful rejection of Henry's demands and presents the Dauphin Louis' insulting gift of a tun of tennis balls and a carpet, appoints as lord protector the Lord Chief Justice to whom he had given a box on the ear earlier in the play, and then marches off to war. His first stop was Harfleur, which he successfully besieged 19 August-23 September (Dockray 140). The siege seriously weakened Henry's army, however, and he decided to march back to the English city of Calais rather than venture deeper into French territory. A French army intercepted the English along the way, leading to the famous battle of Agincourt on 25 October, in which the English longbow played the central role in producing an overwhelming victory for the drastically outnumbered English (Dockray 143-55).

8 The dramatization of Agincourt takes up the bulk of the second half of Famous Victories , from scene eleven to scene eighteen, highlighting the overconfidence of the French in contrast to the grim resolve and piety of the English. Although in scene eleven the French king and ambassador recognize the magnitude of the threat posed by Henry's invasion, both the dauphin and the constable treat it lightly. "Tut, my lord, although the king of England be young and wild-headed, yet never think he will be so unwise to make battle against the mighty king of France" (TLN 1072-1075), the dauphin advises his father. The constable is even more condescending: "Tush, we will make him as tame as a lamb" (TLN 1101), he retorts when the French ambassador reports that Henry "is such a haughty and high-minded prince, he is as fierce as a lion" (TLN 1099-1100). Two scenes later, on the eve of the battle, a French captain catches his men playing at dice for high-ranking figures in the English forces, including the king, as hostages. Rather than rebuking them, the captain informs them that the king "is left behind for me, and I have set three or four chair-makers a-work to make a new disguised chair to set that womanly king of England in, that all the people may laugh and scoff at him" (TLN 1226-1230). "I am glad, yet with a kind of pity, to see the poor king. Why, whoever saw a more flourishing army in France in one day than here is?" (TLN 1232-1235), he declares. In contrast, the English forces are fully cognizant of their plight: "They threescore thousand, and we but two thousand. They forty thousand footmen, and we twelve thousand" (TLN 1262-1265), Henry calculates at the beginning of scene fourteen, "They are a hundred thousand, and we fourteen thousand: ten to one" (TLN 1266-1267). Nonetheless, Henry is not dismayed: "My lords and loving countrymen, though we be few and they many, fear not. Your quarrel is good, and God will defend you. Pluck up your hearts, for this day we shall either have a valiant victory or an honorable death" (TLN 1268-1272). Henry's piety remains even after the battle is over: "the honorable victory which the Lord hath given us doth make me much rejoice" (TLN 1351-1352).

9 Having given eight scenes to Agincourt, the play then moves from the comic interlude in scene eighteen featuring Derrick and the French soldier to Henry's negotiations for France and Katherine in scenes nineteen and twenty-one. The dramatic illusion created by this sequence, and by Derrick's allusion to "the duke of York's funeral" (TLN 1607-1608) in scene twenty, is that the negotiations follow immediately after the battle, but historically almost five years separate Agincourt and the Treaty of Troyes, signed 21 May 1420, whose terms were that Henry be regent of France during Charles VI's lifetime, that Katherine be given to Henry in marriage, and that their heirs be recognized as the legitimate French monarchs (Dockray 188-89). Henry V returned to England soon after Agincourt, on 15 November 1415, but invaded France again 1 August 1417, besieging Rouen 30 July 1418 and negotiating the Treaty of Troyes after Rouen surrendered 19 January 1419 (Dockray 159; 170-8). Henry did not live long enough to enjoy the fruits of the Treaty of Troyes, however: he died on 31 August 1422, predeceasing Charles VI by less than two months and leaving the English and French crowns to his infant son Henry VI.

10 This brief summary of Henry's reign might leave the impression that Henry was preoccupied primarily with foreign affairs. According to modern historians, however, Henry did not neglect domestic matters (Seward 171-2), and one such domestic matter is especially noteworthy because of its conspicuous absence from Famous Victories : the matter of Sir John Oldcastle. Prince Henry's companion before Henry became king, Sir John Oldcastle (1378-1417), was executed after having been found guilty of heresy in 1413 and having been implicated in various revolts against Henry between 1413 and 1417 (Dockray 53, 103-10). Oldcastle's heretical beliefs derived from those of the proto-Protestant fourteenth-century Oxford scholar John Wycliffe, and sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers like John Foxe considered Oldcastle to be a martyr (Corbin and Sedge 2). Nonetheless, the play chooses not to mention either Oldcastle's religious beliefs or his rebellions, limiting Oldcastle's presence to that of a minor character, Jockey, who, along with his companions Ned and Tom, disappears from the play after Henry dismisses them in scene nine. One might chalk this up to the dramatic streamlining to which the examples of dramatic compression discussed above attest, but significantly, writing in the 1580s, the playwright saw fit to minimize internal political divisions and confessional conflicts to present Henry as a Christian hero leading a nation whose fissures are primarily those of class. The play's only hint at confessional conflict, in fact, is mapped onto and muted by national antagonism. Urging John in scene ten to say goodbye to his wife and depart as soldier for France, Derrick says, "Why, John, come away! Dost think that we are so base-minded to die among Frenchmen? Zounds, we know not whether they will lay us in their church or no" (TLN 1054-1057). An Elizabethan audience member might anachronistically assume that the reason underlying Derrick's fear that dead English soldiers wouldn't be given a proper burial is that Catholics considered Protestants heretics and therefore unfit for burial in the sacred ground of the churchyard, but even if this is the case the play deflects the religious tension outward onto the larger, more emphatically stated conflict between the English and the French, and turns the possibility of improper burial into a joke.

11 Famous Victories and its Sources

The author of Famous Victories took the received facts of Henry V's reign mainly from a mid-sixteenth-century history, Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1550), much of which was later incorporated in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles , the 1577 edition of which the author may also have consulted, along with Stow's Chronicles (1580). Tudor chronicles such as Hall's, Holinshed's, and Stow's are characterized by the way in which they weave the histories of individual monarchs and their reigns into moralizing and providentialist grand narratives: each particular monarch becomes an example of vice or virtue whose fate testifies to the unfolding of God's plan in the secular time of human affairs. In her essay on the providentialism underpinning Holinshed's history, Alexandra Walsham writes that "For early modern Englishmen and women the idea that history was a record of the marvellous workings of the Almighty in the world was both a pious commonplace and a deeply ingrained precept" (427) and that "far from bearing witness to the gradual collapse of providence as an explanatory paradigm, the two editions of Holinshed's Chronicles underline the vitality and resilience of this way of thinking" (429).

12 Several examples from Hall will serve to illustrate the workings of providentialist thought in the play's historical sources. In Hall's narrative, Edward II and Richard II are held up as examples of kings who "fell from the high glory of fortunes whele two [sic] extreme misery and miserable calamitee" ( Henry V fol.1v) because of evil counselors, in contrast to whom the newly crowned Henry V's replacement of his old companions with wise advisors is praiseworthy. Indeed, Henry's adoption of new counselors is, according to Hall, evidence that Henry "determined with himself to put on the shape of a new man" ( Henry V fol. 1r). Following up the echo of the terminology of Christian conversion here, at the end of his account of Henry's reign Hall lauds Henry as "the blazing comete and apparent lantern in his dayes, he was the mirror of Christendome and the glory of his country, he was the floure of kynges passed, and a glasse to them that would succeed" ( Henry V fol. 49v). Later, through the mouth of the duke of York, Hall provides a providentialist interpretation of Henry VI's downfall as deferred punishment for his grandfather's usurpation of the crown from Richard II: "although almighty God slackely and slowly do procede, to the punishment of synners: yet the differryng of his scorge, is recompensed, with the greater payn, when his rod striketh, and oftentimes he leaueth the very malefactors, apparauntly vnpunished, and scorgeth their bloud, and punisheth them in their heyres, by worldely aduersitie" ( Henry VI fol. 96v).

13 Nonetheless, as Phyllis Rackin observes, sixteenth-century English historians were beginning to be influenced by rationalist models of historiography that tended to seek explanations for historical events in purely human terms, models developed previously in Italy in the works of such political theorists as Machiavelli (5-8). Historians like Hall and Holinshed, Rackin contends, "mingled providential and Machiavellian explanations, with no apparent sense of contradiction" (7). Famous Victories does likewise. As we have seen, the play follows Hall in representing Henry as a Christian monarch who, for example, attributes his success at Agincourt to God. The play also broadly reproduces the conversion narrative that structures Hall's representation of Henry's transition from prince to king: confronting his father in scene six in his cloak of needles, Prince Henry is suddenly struck by his "conscience" (TLN 613), submits himself to his father, and, after receiving his father's blessing, declares "I am born new again" (TLN 644). Yet in the play this pious perspective on Henry jostles with other, less flattering or moralized ones.

14 Three examples, all frequently discussed in modern criticism of the play, illustrate the extent to which the playwright was willing to modify his sources to present these alternative perspectives. The play opens with Prince Henry and his companions gleefully counting the money they have just robbed from Henry's father's receivers (tax collectors and rent gatherers). The incident is related in Stow as follows: Henry

15 wold waite in disguised araye for his owne receyuers, and distresse them of theyre money: and sometimes at suche enterprices both he and his company wer surely beaten: and when his receiuers made to him their complaints, how they were robbed in their coming vnto him, he wold giue them discharge of so much mony as they had lost, and besides that, they should not depart from him without great rewards for their trouble and vexation, especially they should be rewarded that best hadde resisted hym and his company, and of whom he had receyued the greatest and most strokes. ( Chronicles 583)

16 The Prince Henry of Famous Victories , however, robs his father's receivers, does not restore their money but rather plans to spend it at "the old tavern in Eastcheap" (TLN 93) where "[t]here is good wine" (TLN 94) and "a pretty wench" (TLN 94), and after having intimidated the receivers with threats of hanging exclaims, "Was this not bravely done?" (TLN 84). In contrast to Stow's sporting but ultimately generous and fair prince, the play's prince, according to Larry Champion, here displays "his concern only for personal pleasure and for the material benefits that accrue from a privileged position above the law" (5). "The result," Champion suggests, "is a demystification of the royal house and an exposure of the corruption at its center" (5).

17 Scene four, the scene in which Prince Henry assaults the Lord Chief Justice for refusing to release Cutbert Cutter, affords the opportunity to observe the playwright negotiating between several sources to produce a similar demystification. Hall's account of the incident is brief: "for the imprisonmente of one of his wanton mates and vnthriftie plaisaiers he [Prince Henry] strake the chiefe Justice with his fiste on the face. For which offence he was not onely committed to streyght prison, but also of his father put out of the preuy counsaill and banished the courte" ( Henry V fol. 1r). In the more elaborate versions of the incident found in Thomas Elyot's The Book named the Governor and Stow's Annals , however, the prince's anger is subdued when the Lord Chief Justice "charge you [the prince] desist of your wilfulnes and unlaufull enterprise, and from hensforth gyve good example to those whiche hereafter shall be your proper subjects. And nowe for your contempt and disobedience, go you to the prison of the kynges bench, where unto I committe you" (Bullough 4.289). Henry goes, and when his father hears of it he exclaims, "O mercifull god, howe moche am I, above all other men, bounde to your infinite goodness; specially, for that ye have given me a juge, who feareth nat to minister justice, and also a sonne who can suffer sembably and obey justice" (Bullough 4.289). Famous Victories clearly echoes the more extended version of Elyot and Stow, but, significantly, follows Hall in representing Prince Henry assaulting the Lord Chief Justice and being, as Janet Clare notes, unrepentant about it afterwards: "Gog's wounds, Ned, didst thou not see what a box on the ear I took my Lord Chief Justice?" (TLN 484-486). Contrary to Elyot and Stow's moralizing interpretation of this incident, according to Clare, the play's "message is unequivocal: there is one law for the powerful, another for the powerless" (106). Observing the comedy of the scene, created through the repetition in the dialogue, the physical assault, and Ned's menacing but humorous question (repeated throughout the play), "Gog's wounds, my lord, shall I cut off his [the Lord Chief Justice's] head?" (TLN 391), Louise Nichols contends that "[t]he scene (Ned's defiance included) completely destroys the moral emphasis given this part of Henry's life in the chronicles and in the process, makes a travesty of justice and the court setting. It is clearly a parody of the historical accounts which the audience would have known well, and this dramatic, comical version would undoubtedly have caused much laughter" (170).

18 The third example involves the cloak of needles in which Prince Henry confronts his father in scene six. In Stow, when Prince Henry learns that his father "suspected that he would presume to vsurpe the crown, he being aliue," he "disguised himself in a gown of blew satten, made full of small Oylet holes, and at euery Oylet the needle wherwith it was made hanging still by a threede of silke. And about his arme he ware a dogges coller set ful of SS [curved links] of golde, and the Tirets [rings of a dog collar by which the leash is attached] of the same also of fine gold. Thus apparelled, with a great companye of Lordes and other noble men of his Court, he came to the king his father" ( Chronicles 576). As Sally Romotsky insightfully observes, the author of Famous Victories has inverted the gown's meaning. If sixteenth-century historical accounts of Prince Henry's gown consider it to be a sign of his sincere contrition for his unruliness and his desire for reconciliation with his father (157), in Famous Victories the cloak "symbolizes callous ambition" (158) and aggression: "'tis a sign that I stand upon thorns 'til the crown be on my head" (TLN 533-534), according to Prince Henry, to which Jockey adds "Or that every needle might be a prick to their hearts that repine at your doings" (TLN 535-536). Later in the scene Prince Henry's sudden repentance before his father is dramatically represented when he gives his father his dagger, throws off "this ruffianly cloak" (TLN 628), and asks for his father's pardon. As Karen Oberer has recently argued, the play's audience would have been familiar with the symbolism of such sudden conversions from morality play drama: "The audience expects Prince Henry to transform just as Everyman or Mankind (or the prodigal) does" (173). Nonetheless, Champion suggests, the inverted symbolism of the cloak combined with the naked aggression of the dagger might strain the credulity of even those audience members accustomed to the sudden conversions of the morality play. If, as the cloak and the dagger might indicate, Prince Henry confronts his sickly father fully intending to murder him, then, according to Champion, his sudden conversion could be considered merely a face-saving strategy that "covers his original scheme to take the king's life; the resulting reconciliation with his father also solidifies his expectations for the crown" (7). Champion sees the ambivalence of the play's dramatization of Prince Henry's conversion as representative of the multivocality of the play as a whole. " The Famous Victories ," he states, "in the final analysis, offers little guidance or shaping of events in such a manner as to delimit the meaning or significance of history, and the spectator is individually forced to come to terms with the welter of contradictions and conflicting ironies" (15).

19 History and Comedy: Clowning in Famous Victories

Famous Victories ' mingling of historical perspectives finds concrete expression in its mingling of the serious and the comic. Scenes featuring such comic characters as John and Derrick, whose role was played by the famous clown Richard Tarlton, alternate regularly with the scenes dominated by the English and French nobility. Corbin and Sedge remark that "One of the undoubted achievements of Famous Victories lies in its mingling of clowns and conquest at a time when 'heroicall histories' contained few examples of low-life humour" (25). This achievement, which later Elizabethan dramatists such as Marlowe and Shakespeare would incorporate into their own dramaturgy, is significant, Corbin and Sedge contend, because it "offers not 'relief' but a balance of perception to the audience" (27). Scene ten, in which the prospect of the war with France is shown from the perspective of commoners being pressed into the king's army, provides one example of this balance of perception; scene twenty, which interposes a scene featuring the spoils of war for the commoners, shoes and clothes stripped from corpses left on the battlefield, between two scenes featuring the spoils of war for Henry, a crown and a royal wife, provides another. The scenes featuring the comic characters' involvement in the war are deeply funny but not frivolous.

20 Other critics have argued that the comedy and clowning are ideologically edgier that the word "balance" might allow. Nichols, for example, argues that "the comic scenes effectively diminish the significance of the chronicle version of Henry's life" (162). Indeed, for Nichols the critical deflation can be the effect of the comic not just alternating with but, more forcefully, seeping into ostensibly serious moments in the play, such as Prince Henry's sudden reformation in scene six: "Henry's sudden, motiveless transformation, the overly emotional and weepy exchange that occurs between father and son, the melodramatic passing of the dagger and the prince's tearing off of his cloak are all part of what could be a very funny scene and a parody of the chronicle story as it was known to the play's original audience" (173).

21 Brian Walsh suggests that the comedy has a function akin to the Brechtian "alienation effect." "Clowning with history is a signature move of the Queen's Men, a move that highlights the temporality and artifice of historical knowledge" (48), he writes. Walsh's argument here emerges out of his analysis of scene five of the play, in which John and Derrick repeat the previous scene's dramatization of Prince Henry hitting the Lord Chief Justice for his refusal to release Cutbert Cutter. As Robert Weimann puts it, in this scene "the delicate subject of princely prerogative is played out once more, but this time from a complementary and thoroughly plebeian point of view" that reveals its farcical and inequitable nature (188). If, as Derrick exclaims before he and John commence their re-enactment, the blow that Prince Henry gave to the Lord Chief Justice illustrates "what princes be in choler" (TLN 420), then John's response is to indicate that such intemperate violence is not the prerogative of commoners: "we should have been hanged" (TLN 424). The two commoners, however, hilariously usurp that prerogative along with their aristocratic betters' identities in their muddled restaging, which leads to John confusing his real and assumed roles and to Derrick as Prince Henry mocking John the Lord Chief Justice's claim "to teach you what prerogatives mean" (TLN 453) as he hits him, exits and re-enters the stage, and concludes, "O John, come, come out of thy chair! Why, what a clown wert thou to let me hit you a box on the ear, and now thou seest they will not take me to the Fleet!" (TLN 457-459). The two clowns' re-enactment, according to Walsh, allows them critically to appropriate the past for their present purposes and pleasures: "Reenacting the incident allows them to reflect on it, while also affording them the thrill of assuming aristocratic identities and participating in the transgression of the Prince's indecorous strike" but, through his clowning, "Derrick disrupts the mimetic moment in which he and John are engaging and, by so doing, mirrors how the larger mimetic framework of the play as a representation of the past cannot be sustained" (64). For Walsh, Derrick and John's clowning in this scene exemplifies the function of the clowning throughout the play: through its clowning, " The Famous Victories of Henry V demonstrates that the enactment of history, showing the past, must unfold in the present-tense of theatrical time and so asserts that the historical time of the history play is an institutionalized construct produced in and on theatrical terms" (68).

22 Famous Victories and the Elizabethan Context: Empire, Invasion, Succession

The anonymous playwright who in the mid-1580s penned Famous Victories for the Queen's Men chose as his subject a historical figure and historical events with which he could depend upon his audiences being instantly familiar. Even as they were occurring, Henry's military successes began to be recorded in English, French, and Latin by eyewitnesses and historians with access to eyewitness accounts issuing from both sides of the English invasion of France. Indeed, historian Keith Dockray remarks, "From the very moment of his accession, if not before, Henry embarked on a deliberate stratagem of image-creation, consciously presenting himself as a dramatic contrast to his cautious and uncharismatic father Henry IV, a man not only resolved to restore harmony at home but also vigorously reassert traditional English claims to hegemony in France" (13). The initial histories and other near-contemporaneous fifteenth-century accounts of the events of Henry's reign were later embroidered with anecdotes about Henry's unruly youth and incorporated into the major sixteenth-century English chronicle histories of Hall, Holinshed, and Stow (Dockray 47-50). By the time our anonymous playwright wrote The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth , in fact, Henry had become an English national hero. The play's major historical source, Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1550), ends its chapter on "the victorious actes of kynge Henry the fyft" ( Henry V fol. 51v) with a detailed account of Henry's magnificent funeral and sums up the tragically short-lived monarch's reign with an almost Shakespearean defiance of time's potential to tarnish the lustre of his fame: "Thus ended this noble and puissant prince his most noble and fortunate reygne ouer the realme of England: whose life although cruell Atropos before hys time abbreuiated, yet neyther fyre, ruste, nor frettyng tyme shall emongest Englyshemen ether appall his honoure or oblyterate hys glorye, whyche in so fewe yeres and bryefe dayes achyued so hyghe aduentures and made so greate a conquest" ( Henry V fol. 51v).

23 Aiding the intrepid historian in his battle against fire, rust, and fretting time in the last decades of the sixteenth century were such plays as Famous Victories , Shakespeare's later Henry V (first performed 1599), and possibly another Henry V play if, as David Bevington has suggested (18), the "harey the v" (33) whose thirteen performances at the Rose theatre between 28 November 1595 and 15 July 1596 are recorded in Henslowe's diary is a distinct play from the other two (Foakes 33-7, 47-8). "[W]hat a glorious thing it is," writes Thomas Nashe in 1592, "to have Henry the Fifth represented on the stage, leading the French king prisoner, and forcing both him and the Dolphin to swear fealty" (113). Thus, Nashe declares, "our forefathers' valiant acts, that have lain long buried in rusty brass and worm-eaten books, are revived, and they themselves raised from the grave of oblivion" (113).

24 Nashe may or may not be alluding specifically to Famous Victories , in which the French King Charles VI is neither led onstage as a prisoner nor forced to swear allegiance to Henry (at least not in the two surviving early modern editions published in 1598 and 1617), yet his remarks, made in the context of a defense of plays against detractors who claimed that they inculcated sloth and immorality, clearly demonstrate that at least some of their audience members perceived history plays in general and history plays about Henry V in particular to be performing significant (and positive) ideological work in early modern English culture. Twentieth-century critics of Famous Victories have until recently tended to label the play's ideological work as patriotism, often in order to explain or excuse the play's supposed faults as a work of dramatic art. Thus, Madeleine Doran asserts that Famous Victories ' "chief shaping attitude is patriotism" (Doran 114); although he describes the play as a "decrepit pot-boiler," Bullough concedes that it was "[f]rom Famous Victories Shakespeare learned how to fuse comedy and heroism in one of the greatest national figures" (4.168). This critical verdict has persisted. Contending that "playgoers enjoyed its untroubled patriotism" (99), James Shapiro asserts that " The Famous Victories had no ambition to leave audiences wrestling with any great moral issues and it certainly didn't make any intellectual demands on them. If you were paying to see a play about Henry V you could expect to have a few laughs and cheer on your nation and its heroic past" (99). McMillin and MacLean offer a more complex assessment of the ideological function of Famous Victories and other Queen's Men plays, but they nonetheless also argue that one of the main purposes of this elite touring company was nationalist propaganda. As we have seen, though, Champion and others have found Famous Victories to be less ideologically acquiescent than these arguments would indicate, and in the three subsections that follow I will outline ways in which elements of the play's Elizabethan historical context would almost inevitably give its re-enactment of the history of Henry V a critical edge.

25 If, as Clare has argued, "the history play . . . served collective memory in representing the nation's heroic past" (102), then in the mid-1580s the Elizabethan collective memory may have found the service provided by Famous Victories to be as painful and unsettling as patriotic and nostalgic. Henry's brightness would unavoidably have illuminated the damage fretting time had wrought to England's greatness over the 150 years from Henry's death to the reign of Elizabeth. Henry's conquest of France represented one of the high points for the English in the One Hundred Years War between the two countries that began in 1337 when Philip VI of France seized the duchy of Aquitaine from Edward III, who claimed the French crown through his mother Isabella, daughter of the earlier French king, Philip IV (Allmand 7, 13). Henry's conquests gave the English monarch and his successors the rule over a large European empire with vast resources (France was the most populous European nation in the medieval period). That empire, however, began to disappear rapidly after Henry's death in 1422. By 1429 the dauphin Charles, son of the French King Charles VI whose defeat Famous Victories dramatizes, had with the help of the army of Joan of Arc sufficiently repulsed the occupying English forces to be crowned Charles VII at Reims (Allmand 33-34). Although in 1431 the English countered with the coronation of Henry VI, Henry's son by Katherine, as king of France in Paris (Allmand 34), by 1453 the French had largely succeeded in driving the English from their territories (Allmand 36). Finally, through the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, a year after Elizabeth's accession to the English throne, and the Treaty of Troyes in 1564, the English ceded back to the French their last possession on French soil, the economically and strategically important port city of Calais (Guy 264-67). Not since 1066, the year the duke of Normandy conquered England and inaugurated a new Anglo-Norman dynasty, had England been so insular.

26 Vulnerability accompanied the insularity. If during Henry's reign England was the imperial aggressor, during Elizabeth's reign England was primarily the target of the imperial aggression of sixteenth-century Europe's Catholic powerhouse, Spain. In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation divided Europe into hostile confessional camps. By 1534 Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547) had placed England in the Protestant camp, a position extended by his son Edward VI (r. 1547-1553), reversed by his eldest daughter Mary (r. 1553-1558), who married Philip II of Spain and returned England to Catholicism, but finally consolidated by Elizabeth. Protestant Elizabethan England thus emerged as the David-like champion of European Protestantism pitted against the gigantic military might of a Spanish empire whose efforts to assert its hegemony in the European arena were sustained by immense flows of New World gold and silver. The struggle was fought mainly abroad, with Elizabeth sending money and small numbers of troops to support Protestants in the Low Countries and France or sponsoring naval raids along the coasts of Spain and Spanish American territories. By 1585, however, England was unofficially at war with Spain, a situation that rendered a Spanish attempt to invade England an imminent likelihood (Hammer 1-3). The anticipated attempt materialized in 19 July 1588, when a Spanish armada of 131 ships sailed into the English Channel, but bad weather and superior English naval mobility and gunnery prevented Spanish ships or troops from landing on English shores (Guy 339-42). Spain would launch similar Armadas in 1596, 1597, and 1599 (Guy 350-351).

27 The decades of the 1580s and 1590s, then, the decades of Famous Victories ' composition and initial performances, were a time of deep military anxiety for the English nation, an anxiety that the memory of Henry V's vanished martial accomplishments may have exacerbated as much as ameliorated. The anxiety generated by the heightened militarism of Elizabethan England may be obliquely refracted in Famous Victories ' recruiting scene, in which a captain presses John Cobbler, Derrick, and the thief Cutbert Cutter for service in France. The system of impressment dramatized in this scene is Elizabethan rather than medieval. Elizabeth's government attempted to establish a national system of recruitment for the militia and the army to replace a system that relied on aristocrats recruiting their own soldiers (Hammer 67). The recruiting scene is an ambivalent representation of the results. Although Derrick seems eager to fight, John is not. The common tradesman John perceives war not as the opportunity to acquire glory but as a potentially ruinous economic disruption: "Oh, sir, I have a great many shoes at home to cobble" (TLN 998-999), he pleads to the captain. "Tush, I care not. Thou shalt go" (TLN 1001), is the captain's reply. Whether they wanted to or not, commoners bore the brunt of the wars begun by aristocrats. The new recruiting practices also found easy targets in "masterless men," dispossessed and wandering criminals and paupers whose lack of a master placed them on the peripheries or in the interstices of Elizabethan society. Cutbert Cutter represents this demographic. "Dost thou want a master?" (TLN 1032), the captain asks Cutbert. "Ay, truly sir" (TLN 1033), Cutbert replies, upon which the captain immediately declares, "I press thee for a soldier to serve the king in France" (TLN 1034-1035). Having been exploited then abandoned as Prince Henry's "villain that was wont to spy out our booties" (TLN 26-27), the masterless Cutbert is returned to his old master, now King Henry V, to do him further service in the larger thievery of war.

28 In its opening scenes the play hints at another major Elizabethan political issue: succession. In scene two, as the three members of Billingsgate Ward's local watch--John Cobbler, Robin Pewterer, and Lawrence Costermonger--prepare themselves for their evening duties, they discuss the antics of the youth they presume is their future sovereign. Noting Prince Henry's reputation for highway robbery, John comments to Lawrence that "I dare not call him thief, but sure he is one of these taking fellows" (TLN 121). Clare comments that John's "subordination makes him circumspect; he names thievery by not naming it" (110), acknowledging through his rhetorical evasion that "there is one law for the powerful and another for the commonality" (110). John's circumspection is more explicit when, immediately after (not) calling the prince a thief, he touches upon the matter of succession: "I hear say, if he use it long, his father will cut him off from the crown. But, neighbor, say nothing of that" (TLN 124-126). In an Elizabethan context, the anxiety of these commoners is understandable. When Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558, the expectation was that she would marry and, unlike her elder half-sister Mary, produce an heir to continue the line of Tudor monarchs and provide English government with long-term political stability. Close to thirty years later, Elizabeth remained unmarried and childless. Commoners and aristocrats alike were concerned that some resolution to this problem be found, but Elizabeth reacted violently to their attempts to offer her their advice. In 1579, for example, John Stubbes, author of a tract opposing Elizabeth's last serious marriage negotiation, with the French and Catholic duke of Alençon, had as thanks for his efforts his right hand publicly chopped off (Neale 245-46). Elizabethan audiences would have had no difficulty sensing the fear of political oppression and recognition of political exclusion underlying the nervousness of the watchmen's conversation, while also being reminded that their monarch, unlike Henry IV, had no heir whatsoever, and certainly not a male heir who, however unruly as a youth, would later become a triumphant military hero.

29 The audience's awareness of the events surrounding Mary Queen of Scots might have added to this tension. Chased from Scotland in 1567 and held by Elizabeth under closely guarded forms of house arrest until her execution in 1587, Mary had been queen of France during the brief reign of her husband Francis II (r. 1559-60) and queen regnant of Scotland from 1542 to 1567. Lineally descended from Henry VII by Henry's oldest daughter Margaret, the Catholic Mary was considered by many to possess a stronger claim to the English crown than Elizabeth, the dubiously legitimate daughter of Henry VIII's arguably adulterous union with his second wife Anne Boleyn, to be the strongest candidate to be Elizabeth's successor, and, in the minds of many English Catholics, to be the logical choice to replace Elizabeth should a Spanish invasion of England succeed. Mary's presence in England unsurprisingly raised the temperature of the debates surrounding legitimacy, marriage, and succession. Indeed, Mary became the center of Catholic conspiracies to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary on the throne (Guy 277-8, 284-5, 331-7). The unravelling of one such conspiracy, known as the Babington Plot, led to Mary's execution in 1587 (Guy 334-6). The history dramatized by Famous Victories would no doubt have resonated strongly with the concerns of this heated political situation. The play features a monarch whose father, Henry IV, usurped the English crown from its previous wearer, Richard II, in 1399 and then had him murdered, and whose own legitimacy was called into question on the eve of his invasion of France in 1415 by a conspiracy, known as the Southampton Plot, whose participants intended to assassinate Henry and replace him with Edmund Mortimer, son of the man whom the parliament had declared in 1397 to be the heir presumptive of the childless Richard II (Seward 9, 47-9; Dockray 110-15; Keen 303).

30 Interestingly, the play mutes this thread of Henry's history, omitting the Southampton Plot entirely and converting Henry IV's rather vague mention of the questionable means by which he acquired the throne into an opportunity for his son to display a bravado that wins him the approval of the dying king and his aristocratic advisors. Having given Prince Henry his crown, Henry IV confesses that "God knows, my son, how hardly I came by it and how hardly I have maintained it" (TLN 747-748), provoking from Prince Henry the rousing declaration that "Howsoever you came by it, I know not, but now I have it from you, and from you I will keep it. And he that seeks to take the crown from my head, let him look that his armor be thicker than mine, or I will pierce him to the heart, were it harder than brass or bullion" (TLN 749-754). Prince Henry's words minimize the matter of legitimacy, valorizing instead the martial strength necessary to maintain power: in domestic as well as foreign affairs, Prince Henry will prove his legitimacy with his sword. The dying king, Exeter, and Oxford approve this position. "Nobly spoken, and like a king" (TLN 755), responds Henry IV, "Now trust me, my lords, I fear not but my son will be as warlike and victorious a prince as ever reigned in England" (TLN 756-758). Perhaps unwittingly raising to the surface the disregard of legality implicit in Prince Henry's power politics, Exeter and Oxford in unison reply that "His former life shows no less" (TLN 759). Famous Victories may avoid directly or extensively addressing the issues of legitimacy, succession, and marriage in their Elizabethan configurations, then, but even in the limited form in which it touches upon them it raises probing political questions to which its Elizabethan audience would have been sensitive.

31 Famous Victories and Shakespeare's History Plays

Famous Victories ' enactment of the history of Henry V's life led to its further appropriation in subsequent English history plays, most notably Shakespeare's trilogy, 1 Henry IV , 2 Henry IV , and Henry V . Shakespeare's indebtedness to Famous Victories has long been acknowledged. As early as 1928 Bernard Ward concluded that Shakespeare took from the earlier history play "the entire design--lock, stock, and barrel" of his own three plays (273). More recently, arguing that the 1600 quarto edition of Henry V is a "workmanlike revamping of the old Queen's Men play" while the 1623 folio version is a "much fuller" and "multilayered" revision, Richard Dutton observes that " FV consists of 20 scenes [21 in this edition]. 1 to 7 correspond with parts of Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV ; 8 and part of 9 correspond with 2 Henry IV ; and the remainder of 9 to 20 (more than half the play) correspond closely with [ H5 ] Q" (137, 139, 140). While "[t]here are relatively few verbal links between FV and [ H5 ] Q," Dutton argues, " FV has provided Shakespeare with the essential shape of Q" (138). The play's status as Shakespeare's source has not always been beneficial, however. Bullough's verdict that "nothing shows the splendour of [Shakespeare's] imaginative alchemy better than the handling of this decrepit pot-boiler" (4.168) is only an extreme example of the disparaging comparisons that have been constructed.

32 If the impulse to assert Shakespeare's superior art is set aside, though, comparisons between the plays can be instructive. The plays represent Prince Henry (Prince Harry or Hal in Shakespeare) in subtly but significantly different ways, for example. The differences are perceptible from the outset. Both Famous Victories and 1 Henry IV commence with the prince involved in highway robbery. Famous Victories ' Prince Henry directly participates, as the blows about the shoulders given him by one of the receivers testify. In 1 Henry IV , in contrast, Prince Harry does not directly participate in the robbery dramatized in 2.2 but, rather, turns it into an opportunity to demonstrate Falstaff's cowardice. Moreover, while Prince Henry determines to spend the thousand pounds he and his companions have taken, Prince Harry resolves that "The money shall be paid back again, with advantage" ( TLN 1515-1516 [[ edition links should not have query or fragment parts ]] ). "The difference," Clare remarks, "is that Hal in 1 Henry IV is willing to take pleasure in the subordination of order and yet cunning enough to avoid directly inculpating himself" (106). The difference in characterization discernible here, Clare argues, extends throughout Famous Victories and Shakespeare's plays. If Prince Henry begins as a vicious rogue only to be miraculously transformed into the virtuous king, then, according to Clare, "Hal's character is entirely consistent. Throughout the trilogy he is self-aware and self-questioning. It is evident that Hal is consciously acting out the role he chooses for himself while, later, he performs the role chosen for him" (108). It is not that Famous Victories ' Henry is better or worse than Shakespeare's but, rather, that the latter consistently manifests an interior depth not often, if at all, visible in the former.

33 In the history of early modern English drama the development of interior depth of character is, arguably, accompanied by a related curtailing of the freedom of the actor, especially the clown, and a comparison of Famous Victories ' clown Derrick and Shakespeare's Falstaff is as revealing as the comparison between Prince Henry and Prince Harry (Gurr, Playgoing 132-3). Falstaff, named Sir John Oldcastle in the initial version of 1 Henry IV (Corbin and Sedge 9-12), is superficially an oversized development of Famous Victories ' Jockey, whose full name is Sir John Oldcastle (TLN 490), one of the three companions (the others are Ned and Tom) whom Prince Henry chastises and repudiates upon coronation. Yet while Shakespeare may have borrowed Jockey's companion position and narrative trajectory for Falstaff, Jockey is a sketchily developed character, and to fill out his character Shakespeare necessarily turned elsewhere. D. B. Landt writes that "Some of the personal qualities and functions of old Ned Poins (as well as Oldcastle and Dericke) have been incorporated into Falstaff, concentrating the action and centralizing the import and dramatic effect of the rejection" (73), adding that Falstaff also takes over "some of the Prince's more disreputable qualities" (74). In his study Shakespeare's Clown , however, David Wiles suggests that Falstaff's major model is Derrick: "The role of Falstaff can be seen as an elaborate reworking of the role of Derrick" (119), Wiles contends.

34 As clown types, Derrick and Falstaff have much in common, from their cowardice in combat to their metatheatricality (which Derrick demonstrates in his play-acting with John, and Falstaff in his play-acting with Prince Harry in 1 Henry IV 2.4). Weimann comments that "What the comedians behind the roles of Dericke and Falstaff perform is an enactment of their clowning selves through the mimesis of mimesis " (190), a performance of their actorly selves in laughter-producing tension with their character roles. Contemporary evidence of this kind of metatheatricality survives in an anecdote about the popular Queen's Men's clown Richard Tarlton's improvisations as Derrick during a performance of Famous Victories : "At the Bull at Bishophs-gate, was a play of Henry the fift, wherein the judge was to take a box on the eare; & because he was absent that should take the blowe, Tarlton himselfe, ever forward to please, tooke upon him to play the same judge, beside his owne part of the clowne: and Knel then playing Henry the fift, hit Tarlton a sounde boxe indeed, which made the people laugh the more, because it was he" (Bullough 4.289-90). No doubt the laughter continued when in the next scene Tarlton playing Derrick playing Prince Henry calls the actor playing John playing the Lord Chief Justice a "clown" for letting him strike him. "[T]he clown-as hero insistently defeats the efforts of those in authority to preserve the outer dressings of social stability" (201), remarks Peter Thomson, referring specifically to the composite image of Tarlton created by the collection of anecdotes, Tarlton's Jests (1611), from which this anecdote is taken. 1 Henry IV 5.4, in which Falstaff plays dead to escape being killed by the rebel Douglas at the Battle of Shrewsbury, might have afforded similarly metatheatrical performative possibilities for the clown who played Falstaff, Will Kemp.

35 In spite of the metatheatricality that they share as clown figures, however, Derrick and Falstaff differ significantly, in ways that at least partly reflect important developments in the Elizabethan theatre. Derrick is plebeian, a poor carrier and the victim of Prince Henry's abuse of his princely powers, while Falstaff is of gentle social status, a knight who hopes to profit from Prince Harry's abuse of that princely power. Derrick is recruited into the army; in 2 Henry IV , Falstaff is doing the recruiting. The laughter Derrick provokes is often socially critical. In contrast, the laughter Falstaff provokes is frequently ironic and self-reflexive, as when he defends his own character in the third person while play-acting with Prince Harry in 1 Henry IV 2.4 or debunks the notion of honor at the end of 5.1 of the same play. One might suggest, then, that when reworking Derrick into Falstaff Shakespeare exchanged some of the unruly, oppositional force of Derrick's clowning for greater depth of character. This would be consonant with Thomson's general claim that in the 1580s and 1590s "the threat of the act of acting was dampened by a shift in audience expectation, away from an admiration for the overwhelming performer towards an admiration for the subtle impersonator. Shakespeare's was the supreme contribution to this shift, since it was in his work that the dramatic 'character' most vividly emerged" (205), adding that "The ideology of character is implicitly conservative of the status quo " (205).

36 Even so, although its dramatic technique is not as sophisticated as that of later dramatists such as Shakespeare, Famous Victories knows how effectively to employ the ideology of character, most conspicuously in its treatment of Henry's wooing of the French princess Katherine (Catherine in Henry V ) in scenes nineteen and twenty-one. Shakespeare clearly modelled his dramatization of the wooing in Henry V on these scenes. The differences illustrate that the ideology of character need not always be conservative or, more precisely, that it can serve multiple, not necessarily reconcilable, conservatisms.

37 Both plays represent the French princess as an object: a bargaining chip, and later part of the spoils of war. In scene nine of Famous Victories Charles VI attempts to buy out Henry's claims to the French crown with a package that includes "fifty thousand crowns a year with his daughter, the said Lady Katherine, in marriage" (TLN 901-902); in scene twenty-one she is the last "trifle" (TLN 1684) that the victorious Henry demands of the conquered French, although she is hardly a trifle given that only through her reproductive function is Henry able to secure the French crown for his heirs. In Henry V Henry is quite explicit about Catherine's political importance as an object: "She is our capital demand, comprised / Within the forerank of our articles" TLN 3084-3085 (5.2.TLN 3084-3085), Henry tells the French Queen Isabeau.

38 In both plays Henry adopts the pose of a rough, blunt, but sincere wooer. Telling Katherine to speak to him in "plain terms" (TLN 1513), Famous Victories ' Henry states that "I cannot do as these countries do that spend half their time in wooing" (TLN 1515-1516). Likewise, Shakespeare's Henry tells Catherine "I speak to thee plain soldier" TLN 3140 (5.2.TLN 3140) and asks her to "take a fellow of plain and uncoined constancy" TLN 3143-3144 (5.2.TLN 3143-3144). In both plays the princess resists Henry's proposal by calling Henry her father's enemy and, ultimately, deferring to the authority of her father (here we find in Shakespeare strong verbal echoes of the earlier play), thus acknowledging her own status as sexual and political object of exchange between men. Famous Victories ' Katherine asks Henry "How should I love him that hath dealt so hardly with my father?" (TLN 1525-1526), later stating that she "must first know his [her father's] will" (TLN 1533) before she answers Henry's suit. Shakespeare's Catherine asks Henry "Is it possible dat I sould love de enemi of France?" TLN 3159 (5.2.TLN 3159), later stating that she will marry Henry "as it shall please de roi mon père " TLN 3236 (5.2.TLN 3236).

39 Both plays, however, complicate, in different ways, this simple exchange scenario in the ways they create the dramatic illusion of depth in Henry's and Katherine's ( Famous Victories ) or Catherine's ( Henry V ) characters. Consistent with its use earlier in the play in scene eight when Prince Henry chides himself for not having visited his sickly father, in scene nineteen Famous Victories uses the soliloquy to harmonize Henry's political exterior and sexual interior, thus stressing his sincerity as Katherine's suitor. For a brief moment, after the nobles engaged in the political negotiations have exited the stage and before Katherine enters, Henry is alone on stage. The playwright takes this opportunity to give Henry a revelatory moment of self-address: "Ah Harry, thrice-unhappy Harry! Hast thou now conquered the French king and begin'st a fresh supply with his daughter? But with what face canst thou seek to gain her love, which hath sought to win her father's crown? 'Her father's crown,' said I? No, it is mine own. Ay, but I love her and must crave her. Nay, I love her and will have her" (TLN 1491-1499). The exterior and the interior, the political and the sexual, are aligned in Henry's character: if marriage with Katherine is Henry's political objective, Katherine herself is object of Henry's erotic desire; just as Henry is a bold warrior, so too he is a brash wooer. In Henry V , however, no such aside or soliloquy signals the sincerity of Henry's desire for Catherine, and the wooing scene provides a number of indications--such as Henry's obviously feigned inability to understand French (see 5.2.TLN 3101-3110 and 3168-3182, in which is it is clear that Henry does not need Alice to interpret)--that in his role as plain-speaking suitor Henry is merely continuing the performative self-fashioning in which, as we have seen, he has been engaged from the beginning of 1 Henry IV .

40 Similarly, Famous Victories foregrounds Katherine's political agency, only to set it in tension with her secret erotic desire. Katherine enters scene nineteen as her father's political emissary: "my father sent me to know if you will debate any of these unreasonable demands which you require" (TLN 1504-1505), she tells Henry. She frankly wields her sexuality as a political weapon: "I would to God that I had your majesty as fast in love as you have my father in wars. I would not vouchsafe so much as one look until you had debated all these unreasonable demands" (TLN 1519-1522), she exclaims. Yet concealed by and in conflict with her intense politicization of the sexual is, Famous Victories reveals, Katherine's romantic attraction to Henry: "I may think myself the happiest in the world, that is beloved of the mighty king of England" (TLN 1539-1540), she declares in an aside after speaking to Henry the expertly balanced equivocation that "Whereas I can put your grace in no assurance, I would be loath to put you in any despair" (TLN 1535-1536). This conflict in Katherine's character between the political and sexual is, of course, reconciled in the concluding marriage agreement, in which Katherine can simultaneously acquiesce to the political demands of the situation and get what she wants sexually. Being commanded by her father to "Agree to it [the marriage]" (TLN 1964), Katherine comments in an aside that "I had best while he is willing, lest when I would, he will not" (TLN 1695-1696); then, addressing the assembly of nobles, she states simply that "I rest at your majesty's command" (TLN 1697). Oberer contends that the interaction between Henry and Katherine in scene nineteen "is about mutual capitulation; the audience is invited to believe that their marriage will be a partnership of equals, since Katherine and Henry both show an expertise in manipulation" (175). Here at the conclusion of the play's final scene the audience is invited to believe in a romanticized mutuality that both reinforces and obfuscates the harsh framing realities of political and gender domination.

41 In contrast, like Isabella's feelings for Duke Vincentio at the end of Measure for Measure , Catherine's "true" feelings for Henry at the end of Henry V remain opaque. Catherine might seem more passive than her counterpart in Famous Victories insofar as she does not actively participate in the political negotiations by attempting to use her sexuality to extract political compromises from her conqueror. She resists Henry's advances by pretending not to understand him, by drawing attention to the potentially deceitful and insincere nature of Henry's rhetoric, and by insisting on her status as political object without agency. "I cannot tell" TLN 3182 (5.2.TLN 3182), is frequently her short deflationary reply to Henry's extended efforts of verbal love-making; early on in the dialogue she tells Henry that " les langues des hommes sont pleines de trumperies " TLN 3106 (5.2.TLN 3106); at the end of their dialogue she tells Henry that she will be his bride "as it shall please de roi mon père " TLN 3236 [[ edition links should not have query or fragment parts ]] (5.2.TLN 3236). Perhaps understanding the legitimating ideological function of romanticized sexuality, Shakespeare's Henry would like his Catherine to possess the interior of Famous Victories ' Katherine: "Come, I know thou lovest me" TLN 3185-3186 (5.2.TLN 3185-3186), he fantasizes, "and at night when you come into your closet you'll question this gentlewoman about me; and I know, Kate, you will to her dispraise those parts in me that you love with your heart" TLN 3186-3189 (5.2.TLN 3186-3189). But Catherine refuses to embody an imaginary resolution to the real contradiction between the political and the sexual with which this play culminates, and Henry's fantasy recalls to the audience the scene earlier in the play in which it does see Catherine in her closet: knowing that " Il faut que j'apprenne à parler " ( TLN 1325 ). English, in 3.4 Catherine is taught by Alice the English names for various body parts; she halts the lesson when the sexual double-entendres of her mispronunciations far too precisely name what her own translation into an English queen will mean: " Le foot et le count? O Seigneur Dieu, ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d'honneur d'user [Fuck and cunt? Oh my God! They are foul words, corrupting, rude, and impudent, and not to be used by ladies of honour]" ( TLN 3169-3170 ).

42 Famous Victories and Modern Performance

Until 2006, when Famous Victories along with two other Queen's Men plays, King Leir and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay , were performed as part of the "Shakespeare and the Queen's Men" research project at various venues in Toronto and Hamilton, including a student bar and a club (Cockett 229, 239), the inn yards, great halls, town halls, church houses, and public theatres that were Famous Victories ' early modern performance venues (McMillin and MacLean 67-83) remained its only ones. Although, according to director Peter Cockett, "it was extremely important to our research team that we separate ourselves from the essentialism" (229) of "what is often categorized as 'original practice' production" (229), the SQM team attempted to approximate the original Queen's Men troupe size and organization of fourteen male actors (three boys) (McMillin and MacLean 108) led by master actors (Cockett 230-31), employed a repertory method of rehearsal (235-38), and, at the Toronto club venue at least, tried "to approximate an Elizabethan inn-yard" (239). The performance notes to this edition, written by Cockett with reference to the 2006 performances, simultaneously allow readers to imagine Famous Victories as it might have been performed in the early modern period and encourage them to think of the play as living theatre. Indeed, Cockett's account of the performances at the Hamilton bar and the Toronto club extends Champion's contention, quoted earlier in this introduction, that the audience may not take away from Famous Victories any single, coherent perspective on the characters and events it dramatizes. If the performance in the Hamilton bar "was a rambunctious, dynamic, and highly patriotic/nationalistic version of the life of King Henry V" (239), then the Toronto club performance produced "a laughter that acknowledged the extremity of the nationalism in the play and enjoyed it in a manner that verged on parody . . . [T]he audience laughed at the nationalist sentiment and the play's propagandistic stereotyping" (240). As living theatre, then, the play further multiplies (and destabilizes) the perspectives it offers, each performance exploiting the play's performance possibilities differently to create a different take on the famous victories of Henry the Fifth.

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25th October in 1415, Henry V won The Battle of Agincourt. This day, St
Henry V
KS3 Famous Speeches: Shakespeare (Henry V)

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The Best Speeches From Shakespeare's Henry V
The 3 Best Henry V Speeches . There are many reasons why fans laud the Henry plays above the others, including the remarkable character arc; the astute blend of humor, history, and family drama; and the awesome array of battle scenes. For fans of Henry V, another reason to admire this work is that it contains some of the most powerful monologues in the English language.
Henry V Monologues
FULL BREAKDOWN: Henry V Monologue Act 4 Scene 1. Act 4 Scene 3 (Henry V) Henry's most famous speech, and one of the most well known in all of Shakespeare's works. This speech is a classic, pre-battle motivational speech. The battle ahead will be a gruelling fight with the french, and they are massively out numbered.
St Crispin's Day Speech
The St Crispin's Day speech is a part of William Shakespeare's history play Henry V, Act IV Scene iii(3) 18-67. On the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, which fell on Saint Crispin's Day, Henry V urges his men, who were vastly outnumbered by the French, to imagine the glory and immortality that will be theirs if they are victorious.The speech has been famously portrayed by Laurence Olivier to ...
Famous Quotes
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead. (King Henry, Act 3 Scene 1) The game's afoot: Follow your spirit, and upon this charge. Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'. (King Henry, Act 3 Scene 1) Men of few words are the best men. (Boy, Act 3 Scene 2)
Speech: " Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more
By William Shakespeare. (from Henry V, spoken by King Henry) Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man. As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up ...
The St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V
And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall live this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'. Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars. And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'. Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
A Short Analysis of the 'St Crispin's Day' Speech from Henry V
The 'St Crispin's Day' speech is one of the most famous speeches from William Shakespeare's Henry V, a history play written in around 1599 and detailing the English king's wars with France during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). Henry V himself delivers the St Crispin's Day speech in the play.
St Crispin's Day Speech: Henry V Speech W Analysis
The Feast of St Crispin's Day speech is spoken by England's King Henry V in Shakespeare's Henry V history play (act 4 scene 3).The scene is set on the eve of the battle of Agincourt at the English camp in northern France, which took place on 25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin's Day). Through the course of the speech, Henry V motivates his men - his 'band of brothers', outnumbered ...
Henry V Monologues: All The Best Henry V Monologues
The Henry V monologues below are extracts from the full modern Henry V ebook, along with a modern English translation. Reading through the original Henry V monologue followed by a modern version and should help you to understand what each Henry V monologue is about: "Once More Unto The Breach Dear Friends" (Spoken by Henry V, Act 3 Scene 1)
Henry V Translation
Shakespeare's Henry V contains some of his most famous and stirring orations, including the King's St. Crispin's day and "Once more unto the breach, dear friends" speeches. With the Shakescleare modern English translation of the play, you can understand these important lines and others, including the famous prologue, which begins: "O!
Speeches (Lines) for Henry V
V,2,2982. Peace to this meeting, wherefore we are met! Unto our brother France, and to our sister,... 111. V,2,3002. To cry amen to that, thus we appear. 112. V,2,3049. If, Duke of Burgundy, you would the peace, Whose want gives growth to the imperfections... 113. V,2,3057. Well then the peace, Which you before so urged, lies in his answer. 114 ...
Henry V
Henry V is Shakespeare's most famous "war play"; it includes the storied English victory over the French at Agincourt. Some of it glorifies war, especially the choruses and Henry's speeches urging his troops into battle. But we also hear bishops conniving…
Henry V
Kenneth Branagh's masterpiece film of the Shakespeare classic play. Done in High Definition. Blows away the Braveheart battle speech.
Henry V
Henry V is Shakespeare's most famous "war play"; it includes the storied English victory over the French at Agincourt. Some of it glorifies war, especially the choruses and Henry's speeches urging his troops into battle. But we also hear bishops conniving…
Henry V (complete text) :|: Open Source Shakespeare
Henry V. Peace to this meeting, wherefore we are met! And, princes French, and peers, health to you all! King of France. Right joyous are we to behold your face, 2990. So are you, princes English, every one. Queen Isabel. So happy be the issue, brother England, Shall change all griefs and quarrels into love. Henry V.
What Shakespeare's 'Henry V' Tells Us about Leadership, Motivation
In addition, before the battle started, he delivered one of the most famous motivational speeches in history — at least as it is written in Shakespeare's Henry V. The speech has been played on ...
Henry V Monologue (Act 4, Scene 1)
Henry wants to be free from responsibility, yet he knows he will never be. Declan Donnellan, director and author of 'The Actor and the Target' tells us that we need a clear target to direct our objectives and actions towards. Henry in this speech has a number of 'target's', the most prominent being this idea of 'Ceremony'.
King Henry V of England: St. Crispin's Day Speech at the Battle of
The St. Crispin's Day speech is a part of William Shakespeare's history play Henry V, Act IV Scene iii 18-67. On the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, which fe...
The Famous Victories of Henry V: Introduction :: Internet Shakespeare
1The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth: Basic Facts. According to modern scholars, the anonymous The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, written and first performed in the mid-1580s, is "our earliest extant English history play" (Adams 667), a dramatic genre that Shakespeare and other playwrights would take up and make arguably the most popular kind of play on the stage in the following decade.
Henry V, the Most Capable Medieval English King?
Henry V, a King and a Warrior Both. Henry V, famously known as Henry of Monmouth, ascended to the English throne in 1413 AD, marking the culmination of the Plantagenet dynasty's struggles for power. Henry's reign, though relatively short, is regarded as one of the most impactful in English history. His military prowess, diplomatic acumen, and charismatic leadership left an indelible mark on ...
Shakespeare: Henry V (Shakespeare's Globe)
Capped by one of the most famous speeches ever written, King Henry V recalls the momentous English victory at Agincourt. With comic sub-plots to be found amo...