Members of the venerable Shakespeare Club of Roanoke have read, studied, discussed, and seen in performance the plays of Shakespeare for generations. Despite its long-held policy of offering membership to women only, the club doesn’t mind having a man show up for an occasional guest appearance, and this November, the members have invited me. I’ll be talking about Henry V for about twenty minutes before the group begins to read the play in its entirety. I’m frankly daunted to be speaking to such a gathering of intellectual powerhouses, women who have joined an organization that is almost as old as the city itself in order to continue their educations at the loftiest of levels. But I am reassured in knowing that they have already read Henry IV, Part 1. Thus I’ll be able to refer to the earlier play as I offer some observations about Henry V, which is a seriously inferior play to its predecessor. Yes, Henry V does offer some famous lines (the muse of fire, the breach into which the soldiers must go once more, the band of brothers), and it serves as a perennially popular infomercial for those eager to recall the glorious days of England’s military victory at Agincourt. But as a play, as a piece of stagecraft made by an artist, it’s dismayingly flawed. From Henry IV to Henry V: what a falling-off was there.
Henry IV, Part 1 is about as close to perfect as a play can be. It teems with subplots, memorable characters, changes of location, tonal shifts, and grand speeches, but it’s also beautifully constructed. Here Shakespeare demonstrates just how skillful he is as a play wright, as a maker of plays. Scene 1 begins in the palace, where the title king bemoans his problems with Welsh incursions in the west and Scottish raids in the north. But he also takes the time to complain of the dissolute behavior of his son, Prince Hal, who spends too much time in the taverns, and to compare Hal with young Harry Percy, nicknamed Hotspur, who is valiant and brave and eager to fight those Scottish troublemakers. In the next scene we see Hal in the tavern with Sir John Falstaff, Shakespeare’s greatest comic creation, where the prince confirms his father’s accusations of low behavior but also, in his only soliloquy in the play, promises to step into his role as crown prince when the time is right. In Scene 3 we return to the palace, where we observe the king in conversation with Hotspur. And so it goes for much of the play: moments of serious palace politics juxtaposed with those of boisterous tavern carousing until both worlds, palace and tavern, converge on the battlefield. Hal and Hotspur never appear onstage until their one final showdown in the final act, but they are aware of each other and comment about each other throughout the play. Each scene advances the plot clearly and effectively, and each scene features either King Henry, Prince Hal, Hotspur, or Falstaff. It’s a tight, compelling rendering of English history from two centuries before Shakespeare lived and wrote the play. National mythology is always good for the box office, as those who have seen Hamilton can testify.
That draw of national mythology explains why Henry V remains such a popular play today even though it needs some significant editing. Once again Shakespeare gives us grand palace intrigue that leads to the battlefield, and once again he alternates the high-stakes political and military events with scenes of low comedy and clownish characters. But too frequently those scenes with the clowns don’t have any clear reason for being. Critics can find ways to justify their presence (they counter or parallel the serious events with comic pastiches; they demonstrate just how benevolent the grown-up Prince Hal is when, as king, he declares these men to be his brothers in combat), but too often they slow the momentum and register as filler. King Henry V does occasionally mix with these lowly characters, sometimes to suggest that he has not abandoned his love of the practical joke from his tavern days, but too often we get random characters showing up to have a little comic interplay before they disappear. The play we call Henry V sprawls and tests the limits of our patience as we wait for the next plot-advancing scene to arrive. And the character of the king, with his frequent and pious-sounding references to God and his cold-blooded order to murder all French prisoners, is a one-dimensional bore and hypocrite who is nearly unrecognizable from his days as the madcap Prince Hal, a complex, dynamic character who grows from a good-time boy in the tavern into a thoughtful, generous, courageous prince deserving of the crown he will inherit. I plan to present this approach in November, and I hope I don’t put the members of the Shakespeare Club off their reading. But I suspect that the play itself will do that for me.