OK, so thanks for coming back to this second lecture in the series Approaches to Shakespeare.
Today, I'm going to be talking about Henry the Fifth, Henry the Fifth. So, again, I'm going to focus on a specific question.
Last week, I asked a question about the significance of Othello's grace to that play this week.
The critical question I'm trying to think about is again directed to the play's main character.
I think I'm asking, is Henry admirable? Is Henry admirable as last week and then to try and use some different critical approaches.
In part, the play's relation to its source material, its iterations in print and on the stage,
its critical history and its own structure and imagery to provide different ways of addressing that question.
And again, I think my ultimate aim is to show that the play asks rather than answers the question.
So that I'm trying to build up a sense, I think, that Shakespeare's plays a interrogative in some sense that they demand that we
address questions or that we think about questions rather than providing answers.
Now, last week when we thought about Othello's genre, we met some strange creatures who looking and quacking like ducks, did not turn out to be ducks.
The duck. Unlikely as it may seem, provides us with another useful, critical paradigm.
This week, writing in the 1960s, the critic Norman Rabkin likened Henry the Fifth to the drawing,
much used by psychologists to discuss mental processes in visual perception.
It's a line drawing that is both a rabbit and a duck.
You may be able to recall this image.
The picture is either a duck with a long beak looking to the left or a rabbit with long, straight ears looking to the right.
Strikingly, if you can't visualise this, you're like the first readers of Rapkin essay,
which makes a great play on this, but never reproduces the image. You can Google it quite easily.
Rabbit to duck the point of the image and its suggestiveness.
For Rankins analysis of Shakespeare is that it is irreducibly Deuel.
We can't say that it's really a rabbit, but just looks a bit like a duck or vice versa.
We can't say it's really a duck that just looks a bit like a rabbit. And it's almost more importantly, I think we can't compromise.
We often have a literary instinct, which I think is often taught to us at school and but highly valued at school,
which is the instinct in matters of interpretation to compromise, to sit on the fence,
to say, I can see that you're right and I agree with you a bit and I agree with you a bit.
And I think the truth is somewhere in between now, now, I think sort of two state solutions and other fora, that's a very, very admirable gift.
Not sure. It's always an admirable gift and literary criticism. One of the things the rabbit gives us is an image which can't be compromised.
It's not a debate and it's not a ruck. We can't combine it into a single image.
It isn't a combination of the two, because in order to see one of its meanings, we have to suppress that.
The other one even exists. And whereas we can probably each make ourselves see the rabbit and the duck.
Each of us probably sees one first and the other second. We can't make ourselves see both at the same time.
There's a huge psychological literature on this. If you'd become more interested in the rabbit duck than Henry the Fifth,
including that if you give people the image on Easter Monday, most of them see the rabbit.
But I'll leave you to explore that for yourselves.
The metaphorical reading, the metaphorical value of this symbol for the reading of the play, I think is quite clear.
Rapkin reading of the play is nothing like as good as this inspired analogy might suggest, and actually particularly, I'm afraid.
Recommend is his article, although I do acknowledge it. But I do recommend the Rabbit Duck as a way of thinking about Henry the faith and the question
of our response to the presentation of Henry in the question of whether he is admirable.
Rabkin allows us to see or maybe forces us to see that Hendry's presentation is both rabbit and duck.
He is both admirable and deplorable. I think they could be attached variously to the rabbit or the duck.
I don't think rabbit is a better thing than a duck in any existential sense.
The analogy means that A, we can't say one of these takes priority.
OK, so we can't say that Henry is really admirable, but maybe as a secondary meaning he's not so great or vice versa.
So that's quite important. And also, we can't see both the meanings at the same time.
You have to toggle between them. It may be possible for us to see.
Yes. A presentation of the play in which Henry is admirable and yes, a presentation in which he's deplorable.
But it's hard for us to see both at the same time. The play asks us then to see Henry in two distinct ways.
One is, as the chorus puts it, a mirror of all Christi and King's, a mirror of all Christi and King's and heroic man who leads his men with charisma,
with rhetorical energy, and with the winning creation of camaraderie.
A man who takes the men into apparently impossible battle situation from which
they emerge victorious under a man who dedicates this victory not to himself,
but to God. A man who deals fairly with his men shows no favouritism to his friends,
and a man who ends the play by turning himself into a tongue tied and embarrassed
romantic suitor trying to win a haughty bride turning more into love.
So that's one version of Henry that I think the play gives us. But it also gives us the opposite.
A monstrously efficient war machine. Even a war criminal, as John Sutherland has provocatively put it, in more contentious modern terms.
A man who orders the killing, the pre-emptive killing of French prisoners against military law,
who rejects with complete callousness his old companions,
who is capable of pathological sexualised violence,
who talks about brotherhood but distinguishes between the dead of name and those not worthy of memorial.
So it's these two versions of Henry, which I think are simultaneously present in the play that I want to discuss in the rest of this lecture.
And I want to start by thinking about the chorus.
Henry, the Fifth is unusual amongst Shakespeare's plays for having a chorus figure which punctuate the action by marking the beginning of each act.
It gives the play a marked epic structure, unlike, for example, the part chorus we get in Romeo and Juliet.
The narrator figures we get in Troilus and Cressida or imperatively is the chorus's speech in the play can be divided into two types,
those which attend to the play as a play.
OK, so those which are reminding us that what we're watching is theatre and those which describe and manage our view of Henry.
The opening prologue.
This is a famous and quite a long quotation I'm going to give you, but I'm going to use it to set up the flavour of both these functions.
So this is the prologue to the play over a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest cabinet with invention, a kingdom for a stage,
a princess to act and monarchs to behold the swelling seen then should the war like Harry, like himself,
assume the Port of Mars and at his heels leashed in like hounds should famine, sword and fire crouch for employment.
But pardon gentles all the flat and raise it spirits that have dead on this unworthy scaffold to bring forth so great an object.
Can this cockpit hold the varsity fields of France or may we cram within this wooden.
Oh the very casks that did affright the air at ajin core.
Oh pardon. Since a crooked figure may attest in little place a million letters cyphers to this great account on your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls are now confined to my two monarchies whose high up rear road and abutting front the perilous,
narrow ocean parts asunder. Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts into a thousand parts.
Divide one man and make imaginary pleasence. Think when we talk of horses that you see them printing their proud hooves of the receiving earth for.
Tis your thoughts that now must deck.
Our kings carry them here and they're jumping our times, turning the accomplishment of many years into an hourglass for the which supply.
Admit me chorused to this history who prologue like your humble patients.
Pray gently to hear kindly, to judge our play in that phrase, the war, like Harry the chorus introduces, is its admiring, intimate view of King Henry.
Even the use of the diminutive form of his name works to bring us closer to him and to suggest a particular access to him.
But in its repeated injunctions to the audience to work the illusion of theatre, piece out our imperfections with your thoughts,
his your thoughts, which now must deck our kings in that those repeated injunctions.
The chorus strangely undermines that effort of verisimilitude by pointing out the material aspects of the stage itself.
The wooden o, the girdle of these walls, the absent present horses.
If we look at some of the ways in which the chorus has been represented on the stage, we can bring out some of these tensions.
What is the role of the chorus in relation to the events that he or sometimes she reports?
Should we see the chorus as a kind of embedded Fox reporter spinning the news from the battlefield as he brings it to the public?
Is the chorus a figure of history and historical process itself?
Should the chorus exist in the same temporal world as the other characters?
Derek Jacobite, for instance, made a striking modern figure in an overcoat striding around the film set in Kenneth Brunner's film.
In contrast to the mediaeval costuming of the rest of the of the movie,
Olivier in his film had the chorus as an Elizabethan figure on the global stage,
even as his film moves interestingly away from its early theatricality.
It's the chorus apart which is doubled. It's certainly not enough stage time, really, to earn a day's pay.
This is an actor who has to do something else in the play as well.
One view of doubling is that this actor does all the small parts, the kind of messengers and stuff,
and doesn't really that doesn't that that doesn't really register with us.
But there've been some interesting, more significant doublings, perhaps,
where the chorus is, the Archbishop of Canterbury or the French king or even Henry himself.
They each talk in those exalted Terry kind of terms. Henry is always telling people what to do.
So is the chorus saying work harder to achieve this great achieve this great things are kind of parallel between them.
They're these different performance echoes can articulate quite different interpretations of the chorus.
Just as the decision in Michael Bogdanoff sequence of history plays where Henry the Fifth was the final part.
Following Richard the second and the two parts of Henry the fourth, his decision was to cast the Falstaff actor in the role of the chorus,
the figure who is otherwise much missed from this final part of the story.
So the choruses function is to direct our eye by shaping the events we are about to see.
But is it reliable? It is a reliable narrator. We all understand the concept of unreliable narrators in fiction.
Here we have a narrator figure in inner play who might be susceptible to the same kind of analysis.
I just want to look in particular the chorus to act for and the scenes which follow it.
So the chorus to Act four is charged with describing the English and French encampments the night before the battle of Arjan Core.
It's a long speech. The chorus to Act four, which is all about the difference between the two sides.
The French are, broadly speaking, arrogant and certain of victory, and the English are worried, prayerful, pale, anxious about the day to come.
So the poor condemned it. English like sacrifices by their watch for fires, sit patiently and only ruminate.
The morning's danger. So amid this demoralised army, the English army, who feel sure that they won't be successful.
The chorus tells us that King Henry moves full of comfort to his men.
So the chorus tells us Henry bids them good morrow with a modest smile and calls them brothers, friends and countrymen.
Everyone, the chorus says, plucks comfort from his looks.
And it turns out that a phrase which is hard to hear without sniggering but I think is meant is meant not to be funny.
A little touch of Harry in the night is the English secret weapon.
It's an ethics of companionship and solidarity. It's morally as well as militarily opposed to the presentation of the foppish friend.
Should you read reviews of the of the plane performance, read reviewers, reviewers and in fact,
directors love anti French representations in in versions of Henry the Fifth.
So the chorus is here in the role of the propagandist for Henry.
He's telling us about an event that we don't see. So he's telling rather than showing, but he's telling it in a particular way.
And the agenda is to show Henry's selfless devotion to his men and the comfort they draw from his presence.
So this may seem a Henry who is utterly admirable, who, unlike the French,
who are sitting around making sonnets to horses and that kind of pointless aristocratic chat.
Henry is moving around talking to ordinary men.
So Henry seems really admirable, but I think then Shakespeare compromises, or at least he allows us to compromise that initial presentation.
By the way, he structures the scenes which follow the chorus.
So having told us about Henry moving between his troops, this is the next scene shows us this first Henry encounter pistol.
He's in disguise disguised by Thomas Arms Cloak. And he tells Pistol that his name is Harry Le Roy.
Then Henry meets a group of free soldiers. John Bates, Michael Williams and Alexander Court.
Something about the detail of those names here,
I think suggests that these these characters who are only on stage for five minutes or something don't appear again.
Apart from Williams, but Bates and court never appear again.
But they're given quite a bit of a sense of of of real illness and of respect and of dignity by having those full names.
They're not like the plebeians one, two and three in Julius Caesar, for example,
or gentleman one and gentleman two, there's a mouthpiece kind of characters.
These characters, I think, do serve as a mouthpiece of a sort. But they're also given an individual dignity.
So the scene is set up for the king to show off these comfort that he brings to his man and to give them good cheer.
But in fact, as you if you've read the play, as you'll remember, this isn't what happens.
In fact, far from bringing good cheer and comfort to his man, Henry gets in an unseemly row with these stoic English soldiers.
And their sense that they're going to all going to die really outweighs the propaganda of the chorus.
They ask the newcomer, the king in disguise, what does the king think of their chances in the battle?
And the disguised king pleads for the essential humanity of the king in a wonderfully circular argument.
I think the king is but a man as I am, and I am the king.
He didn't say that last bit. But I think the king is better a man as I am.
Lots of critics are very moved by this this statement. It seems to me completely evasive statement to say as the king, the king is but a man as I am.
You're not saying the king is a man at all. You're saying the king is king.
The soldiers, however, are unmoved by this, and they continue to articulate the question that this play cannot either suppress or answer.
Is the war in France just so that's what happens at the beginning of the play?
Is it? That's what the point of the Archbishop of Canterbury is.
That's the point of the long say lick law speech in Act one, scene two.
Is this a just war? So is Henry's campaign in France.
Just Henry's answer to this. Is in some long defensive speeches which argue every subject duty is the king's sorry.
Every every subject's duty is the king's. But every subject soul is his own.
So he says the king can't be held responsible for the souls of the people who die in war any more than the master can be held responsible
for the soul of the servant who dies while he's on his business or a father responsible for the son has killed on his errand.
This is a world long before health and safety legislation.
Now, Henry Williams can't agree whether the king does have responsibility for the souls of soldiers or not.
And their quarrel turns to violence and they fight. They vow that they will fight each other after the battle with the French is over.
But what Henry does in this encounter is very notably not answer.
The question is the cause. Good. He could have settled the quarrel by saying, yes, the cause is good.
This is a just war. But he doesn't. Instead, he says anybody who dies, it's not the king's fault.
Henry then withdraws into a soliloquy.
So we're still going through what happens in act for the chorus telling us how great Henry is with his soldiers.
This very uncomfortable encounter with the soldiers. And then Henry's soliloquy.
This is his only soliloquy in the play. And it's a lament about the burden and the loneliness of a.
Which is very familiar from the history place.
History play kings are always saying how awful it is to be king and how great it would be to be poor and not have all these worries.
Prince Charles cites this speech in a wonderfully barking collection of his favourite bits from Shakespeare, which is called The Princes Choice.
He says Shakespeare has a remarkable insight into the mind of someone born into this kind of position, which presumably is Prince Charles himself.
Kingship is but ceremony, Henry says, in this soliloquy.
And he makes a comparison between the king and the commoners in which he seems to forget entirely that he's just met a bunch of commoners.
And their response is quite different. Not no, not all these.
He says thrice gorgeous ceremony. Not all these laid in bed Majestical can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave who,
with a body filled and vacant mind, gets him to rest crammed with distressful bread never seems horrid night.
The child of Howl. But like a lackey from the rise to set sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night sleeps in Elysium.
So Henry says people aren't burdened with office sleep like babies.
But he seems to forgotten that he's just met three soldiers who are sitting up at night sick with worry.
It seems that Shakespeare wants these men and their challenge to Henry's authority to echo in Henry's soliloquy here.
I think we're supposed to see that Henry Henry soliloquy is is not is not true to the situation itself.
Deluding is not a moment of revelation and self-knowledge for him.
And as Henry thinks about himself and his position,
he caricatures the wretched slave in a manner which is rather different from the gestures of brotherhood.
But the play wants to assert. So the point of thinking about Act four in that way is to suggest that the chorus,
which seems so hyperbolic in favour of Henry so clearly on the side of the admirable king,
may actually be a kind of self sabotage sort of booby trap within the play itself.
A structural scepticism which which draws attention to the failure of Henry to live up to the idealised view the chorus presents.
Now, the idea that the play may not be as it seems and that the chorus may point out, a less admirable Henry, even while it seems to be praising him,
found its first expression in an important article first published in 1919, which can claim to be the first sceptical reading of Henry the Fifth.
Now, the date of this critical intervention, 1919 is really important.
It's particularly important when you look, say, at electronic archive [INAUDIBLE] archives of journals,
not to just compress all the criticism into some sort of continuous presence.
These things were written over a long period, and the period in which they were written is really important,
which is not to say that somehow we're in some narrative towards enlightenment and that more recent stuff is better in some way.
But if you can think about why current critics are writing in the way they are,
in the way that we can understand how previous critics wrote, that's very worthwhile.
But the days of this intervention, 1919, is really important.
The author of this piece, Gerald Gould Geo You Weldy Gerald Gould, had recently returned from the First World War.
World War One was a war which crawled over the same geographical territory in northern France as Henry's military campaign.
The same the same names, Picardy and so on, are the same in both conflicts.
But obviously, the First World War moved through France with devastating consequences.
And was the war, which, as you'll know, poetry by, say, Wilfred Owen submitted heroic military and patriotic ideals to a very scathing critique.
So Gould's essay on Henry the Fifth struck a chord with those post-war sensibilities, having been through the First World War.
It was possible to see something different in this play. And what Gould saw was a play that was decidedly ironic.
That's his word for it. Ironic.
So he argues that Henry the Fifth is ironic and satirical, a satire rather than an endorsement of imperialism, patriotism and the glories of war,
and suggests that for more discerning spectators, there's a kind of anti patriotic play being smuggled in with an ostensibly patriotic one.
Google thinks that this is Shakespeare's intention. We don't necessarily need to think that it's an intended duality.
Think to find his is reading compelling. And in this article, he mentions three particular aspects of the play in particular to support his argument.
The first is act one, scene one.
If you remember how the play starts, it starts with a conversation between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Ely.
And their plan is to die, to divert the king from his plans to strip the church of some of its funds by making him go to war,
because it sets up the the interest in the in the French war right at the start as being politically motivated.
It's Henry is being used to keep him away from interfering in church business.
So that's Gould's first example of how the how the play sets up this war as as an unjust one.
The second is the exposition of the so-called, say, lake law in Act one scene to the source of Henry's legal claim to France.
This is a hugely long, long set of speeches.
Often the Archbishop of Canterbury is presented as a buffoon, always forgetting things and getting confused in these long genealogies.
Although an interesting production of modern production by Nicholas Hytner with
Adrian Lester as Henry around the time of the dodgy dossier about the war in Iraq,
very much made. It made a lot of this that the case that was made for war but by the by the authorities
was actually really important and not to be laughed at as it is in Ensay Olivier's film.
We know that the Salik law is meant to be utterly complicated because there's a great joke in it where the archbishop says.
And so it's as clear as a summer's day and it's clearly not as clear as a summer's day.
The third of Gould's suggested locations of an anti Henry reading of the play is the repeated allusions to Falstaff.
So here you need to know a bit about the Henry.
The fourth plays parts one and two, which precede Henry the Fifth in Shakespeare's career and which bring to the theatre the most popular character,
probably of the period from the period before the closing of the theatres in 16 in the 16 forties.
So Falstaff is a kind of reprobate, drunken, satirical, lovable, fat rogue.
He's a kind of the easiest way to think of armies as a kind of Homer Simpson sort of figure.
He does everything wrong and everything badly, but he's very lovable because of that.
Falstaff is not present in Henry the Fifth, although the epilogue to Henry the Fourth who says he's going to be.
And instead, we hear that he's he's sick and he's dying. But we're never allowed to forget him.
And it may be that he calls false, starts to decline, is is connected to the king, rejecting him to Henry, turning his back on his old friendship.
This, this, this these allusions are intended to remind us that we don't like Henry very much.
We liked his old pal Falstaff, and we don't like the way Henry has treated him now positive.
It's interesting that positive readings of Henry's conduct need to work on these particular episodes.
One one they say like law and the representation of Falstaff, they need to really work quite hard to make those episodes sympathetic.
And if you look at stage versions of Henry the Fifth, which have been pro Henry, which I've thought, yes, Henry is admirable.
Those stage versions have achieved that clarity by cutting the things that are difficult.
OK. So there's a lot of material that you need to cut if you want to make Henry look a kind of idealised figure.
If you look at Laurence Olivier as famous wartime film, for example,
there's a fabulous bit where he goes to the walls at half fleur to threaten them to to surrender.
And so it is a long speech full of violent, hugely violent imagery about what will happen.
And it's been a great problem for readings of Henry, which have tried to make him sympathetic.
Olivia cuts the whole thing is completely cut the amount.
Compare that with what Branagh does, which is to cut selectively, but still to reduce the length of that of that problematic speech.
OK. So if Henry is to be admirable, that's to say he tends to need to be airbrushed.
And you can see that very clearly in most clearly in performance, I think.
Now, last week I suggested that looking at title pages of early corto publications of Shakespeare could
tell us about their marketing to first readers and perhaps give us an insight into what was a.
Really interesting about them.
And if you're not really sure how to go about finding these, but would recommend that you go to the Faculties IBRD information sessions only an hour.
It's a really good investment of time. That's one on Wednesday this week and one on Tuesday.
I think in six weeks I sign up in the library if you want to do that.
So Henry the Fifth is published in Quarto in sixteen hundred and it's described as the Chronicle History of Henry the Fifth, with his battle,
fought a dashing corps in France, together with ancient pistil as it has been sundry times played by the Right Honourable,
the Lord Chamberlain, his servants. So we can see here the ancient pistil, comically aggressive figure in the in the play is a selling point.
The proper nouns, the title page stresses are Henry Ajin Core France pistil.
But what I want to stress about this edition of the play is Sixteen Hundred Quarto
edition of the play is that it differs from the Folio text in a number of ways.
So I want to just have a little bit of a digression into how we might use textual criticism,
textual variance to focus in on particular questions about Shakespeare's plays, not just this one.
So it's going to go on a slight tangent, which is about how to approach textual criticism.
And so, as I mentioned last week, about half of Shakespeare's plays are published during his lifetime in Quarto format.
And just to remind you, quartos of those small, cheap pamphlet editions of individual plays in sixteen,
twenty three, seven years after his death, Shakespeare dies in sixteen.
Sixteen. Two of the actors from The King's Man Shakespeare's company collect together the complete dramatic works of Shakespeare.
So the two actors are called John Hemming and Henry Condell,
and they collect together the complete dramatic works of Shakespeare as M. William Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies.
So 36 plays are published together in this folio of 16 23, and that includes 18, which have not previously been published.
So that's the book we call the First Folio.
Introducing our collected edition, Heming and Condell have something to say about plays which have already been available to the buying public,
has quartos under here printed again in the Folio, in their epistle to the readers.
They tell us that they've collected all the plays together and published them as well before you were abused with diverse,
stolen and surreptitious copies maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealth of injurious impostors.
Even those are now offered to your view, cured and perfect of their limbs.
Publish them as well before you were abused with diverse, stolen and surreptitious copies.
Even those are now offered to your view, cured and perfect of their limbs.
This is from the epistle to to the reader in the First Folio, easily found online.
It is clear that what Hemming and Kandal are getting out here is not an academic or
neutral description of the provenance of different versions of Shakespeare's plays.
It's a hard sell. We might pirate paraphrase it as you've got half these players already.
So why would you pay Guiney for a new version? Answer because the versions you've got aren't the proper ones you've been had.
Here's a chance to get authoritative, authoritative copies. It's a telling.
It's a selling technique that anticipates, for example, DVD rereleases, digital remastering director's cuts,
those kinds of things as a way of selling essentially the same product by making out that the
one you've already got is in some way lacking compared to the one which is now available.
Now, despite this obvious agenda,
textual critics have tended to take Heming and Condor's account of the different printed versions of Shakespeare for the truth,
and thus where a quarter version of a play is different from, which usually means shorter than the Folio version.
From that, we get the bibliographic idea of bad quartos bad quarters because the phrase bad quartos has been.
We now have bad in inverted commas to show a that we don't really believe in it, but B it's kind of a useful thing to say anyway.
The idea of the bad quarters and they usually thought to be different because they'd be mangled somehow by people who aren't the author,
actors, pirates in the illegal copying sense of pirate rather than the walking the plank sense and printers, a bad quartos backwater show.
The mark of other people other than the author.
And that's what makes them. But more recent textual criticism has been a bit less certain that bad quarter.
Should be thought of as bad and more willing to think that different versions of Shakespeare's plays may
give us insight into how the theatre worked or even how Shakespeare might have revised his own plays.
The truth is, we don't know why we've got the texts we've got and we don't know why they're different.
But we can use them for comparative purposes without trying to identify.
This one is authoritative. This one is corrupt. This is better. This is worse.
This comes first. This comes later. In fact, the rabbit duck might be quite a good analogy again.
So if you're going to use the on folio text or different quarter readings of Shakespeare's plays,
I would really counsel you against trying to work out whether it's bad,
whether it's wrong, which is better of two versions because two contentious and two two likely to get wrong and also kind of a zero sum game.
What do you know? What do you know? Not very much. But what you can do is to use this material to get behind the work of editing.
That's been done to smooth out the text in the forms which we access them.
So if you look state at stage directions in early printed, that takes almost every stage direction in the modern edition.
It's put there by editors. So if you're making an argument about what happens on stage because of stage directions,
you're almost certainly using the stage the actions of a modern editor rather than the early text.
I go back and look at what they look like, or in the early text,
characters often have slightly different names or they called different things during the course of the play.
They're called different things in speech, prefixes or whatever.
So they turn out to be characters who are less coherent and less concrete perhaps than than than we would than we would think.
Different versions have different lines can open up quite different meanings.
And if you want to be persuaded of this last point, look up perhaps what's become the most famous example of textual variation?
The first quarter of Hamlet dated 16 03 and its version of the most famous soliloquy to be or not to be.
Which gives us to be or not to be I. There's the point to die.
To sleep. Is that all I all know? To sleep.
To dream. I'm married. There it goes. That both is and is not recognisable, I think as.
As the version we're more used to. I guess that's a long way of going round.
What might we get from getting the six. Looking at the sixteen hundred quarto of Henry the Fifth.
So what would we get from looking at that version of the play? Given what I've been discussing for much of the lecture so far,
it's really important that the Quarto version of Henry the Fifth does not have any chorus's does not include the chorus's at all.
Not the muse of fire, not the epilogue, not the mirror of all Christine Kings.
Zilch, no chorus's. So it's a historical story without the mediation of the chorus.
I've been talking about as a way of maybe sharpening our perspective on Henry's character.
Maybe the quartos. Henry is a more straightforward figure than he doesn't have this ironic counterpoint.
There isn't the sense of the clash between the way the chorus presents him and the way he actually emerges in the play itself.
As we saw through the discussion about four I just made. So if you wanted to make an argument about Henry's presentation, is he admirable or not?
You could argue that he is more admirable in the quarter than he is in the FOLIA.
So that's just just one line that maybe is worth thinking about. Now,
most critics who have speculated about why the choruses are not present in the quarto
have argued that they are cut because they have become uncomfortably topical.
The chorus to Act five in the Folio text makes an allusion which is very unusual for Shakespeare and explicit political contemporary allusion,
and it's a reference to a contemporary event.
The Earl of Essex is huge expedition to quell what the English called the Irish rebellion for the Earl of Essex
leaves London with a huge army 16000 troops in mid 15 99 to go and fight the Isle of Tyronne in Ireland.
Here's the bit from the chorus.
It's telling us how we'll just have to imagine what it was like when Henry the Fifth went back to London, having been successful.
Ashin Cole case is another of the choruses saying We can't really depict this.
You've just got to imagine it. You've just got to think what must have been like. And in order to help that imaginative process.
The chorus offers assimilate as by a lower but loving likelihood were now the general of our gracious Empress Elizabeth.
As in good time, he may from Ireland coming, bringing rebellion, broach it on his sword.
How many would the peaceful city quit to welcome him? Much more and much more.
Cause did they this Harry. So.
Hard to imagine what would be like when when Henry gets back after I call think what it would be like when Essex comes back from Ireland successful.
So the chorus to Act five fixes the play quite specifically within a few weeks in the summer of 15 99.
And the possibility that the Earl of Essex says expedition to Ireland could be successful was still alive.
By the time Essex returns in September 15, 99, it's clear that his military campaign had been a failure.
The reference to Essex here with the future conditional were now the general of our gracious empress.
As in good time, he may. That tent still allows a positive outcome.
Reminds us, perhaps quite usefully, that Shakespeare's plays, like those of his contemporaries, are written for performance over a very short period.
They might might expect 10 ish performances over a period of a month or six weeks so
they can afford to be topical since they're consumed in a very specific period context.
Perhaps because this context had fallen away by sixteen hundred.
The text printed that year doesn't include the choruses,
although we might of course think you could make a more surgical cut to the choruses in order to get rid of the ASX material.
But the question of the play's engagement with contemporary politics,
with ethics and with the wars in Ireland brings another historical lens to bear on
Henry's presentation in this play and the question of whether he is admirable or not.
Fifteen ninety nine was a miserable year in London.
High food prices, anxieties about the succession, heavy conscription of men and taxes for Essex's army,
a strain on food supplies and for other other commodities horses, for example, for equipping that army.
One of the forms of entertainment the theatre seems to have provided in this unpromising context is feelgood fairytale style plays.
We might think about much ado about nothing. The same year the war is is firmly pushed into the sidelines.
Remember, the characters in the male characters are much ado about nothing coming back from the war.
That's what brings them into this romantic situation.
And the war is converted instead into a merry war or flirtatious words between Beatrice and Benedick.
Or we might think about Dekkers play of the same year, the shoemaker's holiday kind of Dick Whittington,
combined with Cinderella by the shoemaker Simon Air becomes wildly rich,
becomes the Lord Mayor of London, and a nobleman falls in love with a commoner and marries her.
These are diversionary entertainments.
They're like Busby Berkeley musicals in the Depression era of the 30s or strictly come dancing in our own age of austerity.
They avoid difficult issues. They are ideologically escapist rather than committed.
Henry the Fifth falls into this category. We can see in place of the recalcitrant Irish who would not be quelled.
Shakespeare gives us the arrogant French rooted by plucky English warriors.
The play gives us the classic underdog story to emphasise the magical aspects of this victory.
Shakespeare suppresses the information from the sources which attribute the victory attaching corps to superior English firepower.
The English don't win Ajin Corps because they're right or because God loves them.
They win because they have longbows, which means that the French never get near them to cut them down with with their weapons.
And Shakespeare also bigs up. The disparity between the French and the English dead in a long speech in Act four.
I'll just I'll just fill it in and tell you a bit of it. This note does tell me of ten thousand French that in the field lie Slane says Henry
of princes and nobles bearing banners there lie dead 126 added to these knights,
esquires and gallant gentleman eight thousand four hundred in the 10000, they have lost their all but sixteen hundred mercenaries.
The rest are princes, barons, lords, knights and squires. Here was a royal fellowship of death.
Henry says, hearing the news of the French casualties. What is the number of our English dead?
Edward. The Duke of York. The Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Catley, David Garmisch Squire.
None else of name and of all other men but five and twenty.
Oh God. My arm was here and not to us. But today I'm alone. Ascribe all the fatalities of the ten thousand on the bad side.
Thirty on the good side. It is a fairy tale ending. And just so we don't lose the message that this is a kind of idealised fairy tale play,
the Henry the Fifth changes gear quite surprisingly and quite effortlessly in its final act, attempting to turn into a romantic.
Comedy in which the fact that the princess of France, Catherine,
has no choice about her husband since she is a prise of Henry's victory, this fact is completely forgotten.
And Henry takes on the role of wooing her in order to turn his play into a comedy, or it ends almost as a comedy.
The epilogue brings us back to the chorus again.
Is that cynical, puncturing, sceptical kind of tone?
This is the epilogue small time.
But in that small, most greatly lived, this star of England fortune made his sword by which the world's best garden he achieved,
and all of it left his son, Imperial Lord Henry, the sixth in infant bands crowned King of France and England.
Did this king succeed whose state so many have the managing that they lost France and made his England bleed?
It's hard not to feel that the play thus ends with the sort of pointlessness. What does it all actually been for?
If this miraculous victory was so quickly lost within a generation,
if this is Shakespeare's attempt to write propaganda for the dark days of 15 99, it doesn't quite come off.
It can't quite sustain it. So in today's lecture,
I've tried to think about the question of whether Henry is admirable by focussing in particular on the structure of the play and
the role of the chorus on the plays irony's and on the difficulty of making the rabbit duck into just the rabbit or just a duck.
Next week I'm going to look at another play which seems to dramatise apparently incompatible views that play its measure for measure.
The question I'll ask him that lecture is what genre is this play?