1 00:00:02,530 --> 00:00:07,830 OK, so thanks for coming back to this second lecture in the series Approaches to Shakespeare. 2 00:00:07,830 --> 00:00:17,070 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. 3 00:00:17,070 --> 00:00:23,880 Last week, I asked a question about the significance of Othello's grace to that play this week. 4 00:00:23,880 --> 00:00:29,970 The critical question I'm trying to think about is again directed to the play's main character. 5 00:00:29,970 --> 00:00:41,340 I think I'm asking, is Henry admirable? Is Henry admirable as last week and then to try and use some different critical approaches. 6 00:00:41,340 --> 00:00:47,450 In part, the play's relation to its source material, its iterations in print and on the stage, 7 00:00:47,450 --> 00:00:53,280 its critical history and its own structure and imagery to provide different ways of addressing that question. 8 00:00:53,280 --> 00:01:01,140 And again, I think my ultimate aim is to show that the play asks rather than answers the question. 9 00:01:01,140 --> 00:01:08,370 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 10 00:01:08,370 --> 00:01:15,180 address questions or that we think about questions rather than providing answers. 11 00:01:15,180 --> 00:01:27,170 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. 12 00:01:27,170 --> 00:01:33,060 The duck. Unlikely as it may seem, provides us with another useful, critical paradigm. 13 00:01:33,060 --> 00:01:41,430 This week, writing in the 1960s, the critic Norman Rabkin likened Henry the Fifth to the drawing, 14 00:01:41,430 --> 00:01:46,800 much used by psychologists to discuss mental processes in visual perception. 15 00:01:46,800 --> 00:01:51,330 It's a line drawing that is both a rabbit and a duck. 16 00:01:51,330 --> 00:01:53,700 You may be able to recall this image. 17 00:01:53,700 --> 00:02:00,330 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. 18 00:02:00,330 --> 00:02:05,730 Strikingly, if you can't visualise this, you're like the first readers of Rapkin essay, 19 00:02:05,730 --> 00:02:10,680 which makes a great play on this, but never reproduces the image. You can Google it quite easily. 20 00:02:10,680 --> 00:02:15,390 Rabbit to duck the point of the image and its suggestiveness. 21 00:02:15,390 --> 00:02:22,410 For Rankins analysis of Shakespeare is that it is irreducibly Deuel. 22 00:02:22,410 --> 00:02:28,140 We can't say that it's really a rabbit, but just looks a bit like a duck or vice versa. 23 00:02:28,140 --> 00:02:37,140 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. 24 00:02:37,140 --> 00:02:43,590 We often have a literary instinct, which I think is often taught to us at school and but highly valued at school, 25 00:02:43,590 --> 00:02:48,510 which is the instinct in matters of interpretation to compromise, to sit on the fence, 26 00:02:48,510 --> 00:02:53,400 to say, I can see that you're right and I agree with you a bit and I agree with you a bit. 27 00:02:53,400 --> 00:03:03,540 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. 28 00:03:03,540 --> 00:03:13,050 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. 29 00:03:13,050 --> 00:03:20,730 It's not a debate and it's not a ruck. We can't combine it into a single image. 30 00:03:20,730 --> 00:03:25,290 It isn't a combination of the two, because in order to see one of its meanings, we have to suppress that. 31 00:03:25,290 --> 00:03:32,820 The other one even exists. And whereas we can probably each make ourselves see the rabbit and the duck. 32 00:03:32,820 --> 00:03:42,050 Each of us probably sees one first and the other second. We can't make ourselves see both at the same time. 33 00:03:42,050 --> 00:03:47,160 There's a huge psychological literature on this. If you'd become more interested in the rabbit duck than Henry the Fifth, 34 00:03:47,160 --> 00:03:53,550 including that if you give people the image on Easter Monday, most of them see the rabbit. 35 00:03:53,550 --> 00:03:56,490 But I'll leave you to explore that for yourselves. 36 00:03:56,490 --> 00:04:02,070 The metaphorical reading, the metaphorical value of this symbol for the reading of the play, I think is quite clear. 37 00:04:02,070 --> 00:04:08,400 Rapkin reading of the play is nothing like as good as this inspired analogy might suggest, and actually particularly, I'm afraid. 38 00:04:08,400 --> 00:04:17,490 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 39 00:04:17,490 --> 00:04:23,600 of our response to the presentation of Henry in the question of whether he is admirable. 40 00:04:23,600 --> 00:04:29,270 Rabkin allows us to see or maybe forces us to see that Hendry's presentation is both rabbit and duck. 41 00:04:29,270 --> 00:04:34,880 He is both admirable and deplorable. I think they could be attached variously to the rabbit or the duck. 42 00:04:34,880 --> 00:04:41,870 I don't think rabbit is a better thing than a duck in any existential sense. 43 00:04:41,870 --> 00:04:45,300 The analogy means that A, we can't say one of these takes priority. 44 00:04:45,300 --> 00:04:52,400 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. 45 00:04:52,400 --> 00:04:57,860 So that's quite important. And also, we can't see both the meanings at the same time. 46 00:04:57,860 --> 00:05:01,580 You have to toggle between them. It may be possible for us to see. 47 00:05:01,580 --> 00:05:07,780 Yes. A presentation of the play in which Henry is admirable and yes, a presentation in which he's deplorable. 48 00:05:07,780 --> 00:05:16,010 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. 49 00:05:16,010 --> 00:05:28,580 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, 50 00:05:28,580 --> 00:05:34,130 with rhetorical energy, and with the winning creation of camaraderie. 51 00:05:34,130 --> 00:05:40,070 A man who takes the men into apparently impossible battle situation from which 52 00:05:40,070 --> 00:05:44,630 they emerge victorious under a man who dedicates this victory not to himself, 53 00:05:44,630 --> 00:05:51,320 but to God. A man who deals fairly with his men shows no favouritism to his friends, 54 00:05:51,320 --> 00:05:56,240 and a man who ends the play by turning himself into a tongue tied and embarrassed 55 00:05:56,240 --> 00:06:02,090 romantic suitor trying to win a haughty bride turning more into love. 56 00:06:02,090 --> 00:06:07,940 So that's one version of Henry that I think the play gives us. But it also gives us the opposite. 57 00:06:07,940 --> 00:06:17,600 A monstrously efficient war machine. Even a war criminal, as John Sutherland has provocatively put it, in more contentious modern terms. 58 00:06:17,600 --> 00:06:23,420 A man who orders the killing, the pre-emptive killing of French prisoners against military law, 59 00:06:23,420 --> 00:06:28,010 who rejects with complete callousness his old companions, 60 00:06:28,010 --> 00:06:32,660 who is capable of pathological sexualised violence, 61 00:06:32,660 --> 00:06:40,490 who talks about brotherhood but distinguishes between the dead of name and those not worthy of memorial. 62 00:06:40,490 --> 00:06:50,540 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. 63 00:06:50,540 --> 00:06:55,160 And I want to start by thinking about the chorus. 64 00:06:55,160 --> 00:07:04,540 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. 65 00:07:04,540 --> 00:07:12,300 It gives the play a marked epic structure, unlike, for example, the part chorus we get in Romeo and Juliet. 66 00:07:12,300 --> 00:07:24,200 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, 67 00:07:24,200 --> 00:07:27,680 those which attend to the play as a play. 68 00:07:27,680 --> 00:07:38,170 OK, so those which are reminding us that what we're watching is theatre and those which describe and manage our view of Henry. 69 00:07:38,170 --> 00:07:39,140 The opening prologue. 70 00:07:39,140 --> 00:07:46,520 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. 71 00:07:46,520 --> 00:07:55,840 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, 72 00:07:55,840 --> 00:08:03,470 a princess to act and monarchs to behold the swelling seen then should the war like Harry, like himself, 73 00:08:03,470 --> 00:08:11,870 assume the Port of Mars and at his heels leashed in like hounds should famine, sword and fire crouch for employment. 74 00:08:11,870 --> 00:08:19,910 But pardon gentles all the flat and raise it spirits that have dead on this unworthy scaffold to bring forth so great an object. 75 00:08:19,910 --> 00:08:25,940 Can this cockpit hold the varsity fields of France or may we cram within this wooden. 76 00:08:25,940 --> 00:08:30,890 Oh the very casks that did affright the air at ajin core. 77 00:08:30,890 --> 00:08:41,300 Oh pardon. Since a crooked figure may attest in little place a million letters cyphers to this great account on your imaginary forces work. 78 00:08:41,300 --> 00:08:48,890 Suppose within the girdle of these walls are now confined to my two monarchies whose high up rear road and abutting front the perilous, 79 00:08:48,890 --> 00:08:56,510 narrow ocean parts asunder. Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts into a thousand parts. 80 00:08:56,510 --> 00:09:06,150 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. 81 00:09:06,150 --> 00:09:07,950 Tis your thoughts that now must deck. 82 00:09:07,950 --> 00:09:16,790 Our kings carry them here and they're jumping our times, turning the accomplishment of many years into an hourglass for the which supply. 83 00:09:16,790 --> 00:09:22,080 Admit me chorused to this history who prologue like your humble patients. 84 00:09:22,080 --> 00:09:34,990 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. 85 00:09:34,990 --> 00:09:44,630 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. 86 00:09:44,630 --> 00:09:51,370 But in its repeated injunctions to the audience to work the illusion of theatre, piece out our imperfections with your thoughts, 87 00:09:51,370 --> 00:09:56,920 his your thoughts, which now must deck our kings in that those repeated injunctions. 88 00:09:56,920 --> 00:10:04,960 The chorus strangely undermines that effort of verisimilitude by pointing out the material aspects of the stage itself. 89 00:10:04,960 --> 00:10:11,650 The wooden o, the girdle of these walls, the absent present horses. 90 00:10:11,650 --> 00:10:18,640 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. 91 00:10:18,640 --> 00:10:25,330 What is the role of the chorus in relation to the events that he or sometimes she reports? 92 00:10:25,330 --> 00:10:33,670 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? 93 00:10:33,670 --> 00:10:38,410 Is the chorus a figure of history and historical process itself? 94 00:10:38,410 --> 00:10:43,720 Should the chorus exist in the same temporal world as the other characters? 95 00:10:43,720 --> 00:10:51,220 Derek Jacobite, for instance, made a striking modern figure in an overcoat striding around the film set in Kenneth Brunner's film. 96 00:10:51,220 --> 00:10:56,650 In contrast to the mediaeval costuming of the rest of the of the movie, 97 00:10:56,650 --> 00:11:02,290 Olivier in his film had the chorus as an Elizabethan figure on the global stage, 98 00:11:02,290 --> 00:11:08,500 even as his film moves interestingly away from its early theatricality. 99 00:11:08,500 --> 00:11:16,000 It's the chorus apart which is doubled. It's certainly not enough stage time, really, to earn a day's pay. 100 00:11:16,000 --> 00:11:20,260 This is an actor who has to do something else in the play as well. 101 00:11:20,260 --> 00:11:25,180 One view of doubling is that this actor does all the small parts, the kind of messengers and stuff, 102 00:11:25,180 --> 00:11:29,710 and doesn't really that doesn't that that doesn't really register with us. 103 00:11:29,710 --> 00:11:33,640 But there've been some interesting, more significant doublings, perhaps, 104 00:11:33,640 --> 00:11:40,180 where the chorus is, the Archbishop of Canterbury or the French king or even Henry himself. 105 00:11:40,180 --> 00:11:45,340 They each talk in those exalted Terry kind of terms. Henry is always telling people what to do. 106 00:11:45,340 --> 00:11:53,370 So is the chorus saying work harder to achieve this great achieve this great things are kind of parallel between them. 107 00:11:53,370 --> 00:12:01,180 They're these different performance echoes can articulate quite different interpretations of the chorus. 108 00:12:01,180 --> 00:12:07,810 Just as the decision in Michael Bogdanoff sequence of history plays where Henry the Fifth was the final part. 109 00:12:07,810 --> 00:12:15,670 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, 110 00:12:15,670 --> 00:12:22,480 the figure who is otherwise much missed from this final part of the story. 111 00:12:22,480 --> 00:12:30,290 So the choruses function is to direct our eye by shaping the events we are about to see. 112 00:12:30,290 --> 00:12:37,300 But is it reliable? It is a reliable narrator. We all understand the concept of unreliable narrators in fiction. 113 00:12:37,300 --> 00:12:45,400 Here we have a narrator figure in inner play who might be susceptible to the same kind of analysis. 114 00:12:45,400 --> 00:12:52,960 I just want to look in particular the chorus to act for and the scenes which follow it. 115 00:12:52,960 --> 00:13:01,840 So the chorus to Act four is charged with describing the English and French encampments the night before the battle of Arjan Core. 116 00:13:01,840 --> 00:13:07,930 It's a long speech. The chorus to Act four, which is all about the difference between the two sides. 117 00:13:07,930 --> 00:13:20,800 The French are, broadly speaking, arrogant and certain of victory, and the English are worried, prayerful, pale, anxious about the day to come. 118 00:13:20,800 --> 00:13:30,700 So the poor condemned it. English like sacrifices by their watch for fires, sit patiently and only ruminate. 119 00:13:30,700 --> 00:13:39,310 The morning's danger. So amid this demoralised army, the English army, who feel sure that they won't be successful. 120 00:13:39,310 --> 00:13:45,040 The chorus tells us that King Henry moves full of comfort to his men. 121 00:13:45,040 --> 00:13:54,160 So the chorus tells us Henry bids them good morrow with a modest smile and calls them brothers, friends and countrymen. 122 00:13:54,160 --> 00:13:58,240 Everyone, the chorus says, plucks comfort from his looks. 123 00:13:58,240 --> 00:14:06,460 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. 124 00:14:06,460 --> 00:14:13,750 A little touch of Harry in the night is the English secret weapon. 125 00:14:13,750 --> 00:14:21,980 It's an ethics of companionship and solidarity. It's morally as well as militarily opposed to the presentation of the foppish friend. 126 00:14:21,980 --> 00:14:29,580 Should you read reviews of the of the plane performance, read reviewers, reviewers and in fact, 127 00:14:29,580 --> 00:14:36,390 directors love anti French representations in in versions of Henry the Fifth. 128 00:14:36,390 --> 00:14:43,410 So the chorus is here in the role of the propagandist for Henry. 129 00:14:43,410 --> 00:14:53,700 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. 130 00:14:53,700 --> 00:15:00,750 And the agenda is to show Henry's selfless devotion to his men and the comfort they draw from his presence. 131 00:15:00,750 --> 00:15:04,950 So this may seem a Henry who is utterly admirable, who, unlike the French, 132 00:15:04,950 --> 00:15:12,630 who are sitting around making sonnets to horses and that kind of pointless aristocratic chat. 133 00:15:12,630 --> 00:15:14,940 Henry is moving around talking to ordinary men. 134 00:15:14,940 --> 00:15:23,850 So Henry seems really admirable, but I think then Shakespeare compromises, or at least he allows us to compromise that initial presentation. 135 00:15:23,850 --> 00:15:27,150 By the way, he structures the scenes which follow the chorus. 136 00:15:27,150 --> 00:15:37,230 So having told us about Henry moving between his troops, this is the next scene shows us this first Henry encounter pistol. 137 00:15:37,230 --> 00:15:45,090 He's in disguise disguised by Thomas Arms Cloak. And he tells Pistol that his name is Harry Le Roy. 138 00:15:45,090 --> 00:15:53,430 Then Henry meets a group of free soldiers. John Bates, Michael Williams and Alexander Court. 139 00:15:53,430 --> 00:15:55,620 Something about the detail of those names here, 140 00:15:55,620 --> 00:16:02,220 I think suggests that these these characters who are only on stage for five minutes or something don't appear again. 141 00:16:02,220 --> 00:16:04,800 Apart from Williams, but Bates and court never appear again. 142 00:16:04,800 --> 00:16:12,660 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. 143 00:16:12,660 --> 00:16:17,440 They're not like the plebeians one, two and three in Julius Caesar, for example, 144 00:16:17,440 --> 00:16:21,810 or gentleman one and gentleman two, there's a mouthpiece kind of characters. 145 00:16:21,810 --> 00:16:28,380 These characters, I think, do serve as a mouthpiece of a sort. But they're also given an individual dignity. 146 00:16:28,380 --> 00:16:36,510 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. 147 00:16:36,510 --> 00:16:41,400 But in fact, as you if you've read the play, as you'll remember, this isn't what happens. 148 00:16:41,400 --> 00:16:50,370 In fact, far from bringing good cheer and comfort to his man, Henry gets in an unseemly row with these stoic English soldiers. 149 00:16:50,370 --> 00:16:57,930 And their sense that they're going to all going to die really outweighs the propaganda of the chorus. 150 00:16:57,930 --> 00:17:04,130 They ask the newcomer, the king in disguise, what does the king think of their chances in the battle? 151 00:17:04,130 --> 00:17:11,310 And the disguised king pleads for the essential humanity of the king in a wonderfully circular argument. 152 00:17:11,310 --> 00:17:16,560 I think the king is but a man as I am, and I am the king. 153 00:17:16,560 --> 00:17:22,140 He didn't say that last bit. But I think the king is better a man as I am. 154 00:17:22,140 --> 00:17:30,690 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. 155 00:17:30,690 --> 00:17:34,850 You're not saying the king is a man at all. You're saying the king is king. 156 00:17:34,850 --> 00:17:42,480 The soldiers, however, are unmoved by this, and they continue to articulate the question that this play cannot either suppress or answer. 157 00:17:42,480 --> 00:17:46,050 Is the war in France just so that's what happens at the beginning of the play? 158 00:17:46,050 --> 00:17:49,290 Is it? That's what the point of the Archbishop of Canterbury is. 159 00:17:49,290 --> 00:17:53,790 That's the point of the long say lick law speech in Act one, scene two. 160 00:17:53,790 --> 00:17:59,100 Is this a just war? So is Henry's campaign in France. 161 00:17:59,100 --> 00:18:08,910 Just Henry's answer to this. Is in some long defensive speeches which argue every subject duty is the king's sorry. 162 00:18:08,910 --> 00:18:14,250 Every every subject's duty is the king's. But every subject soul is his own. 163 00:18:14,250 --> 00:18:20,280 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 164 00:18:20,280 --> 00:18:28,020 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. 165 00:18:28,020 --> 00:18:32,610 This is a world long before health and safety legislation. 166 00:18:32,610 --> 00:18:38,280 Now, Henry Williams can't agree whether the king does have responsibility for the souls of soldiers or not. 167 00:18:38,280 --> 00:18:46,920 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. 168 00:18:46,920 --> 00:18:50,370 But what Henry does in this encounter is very notably not answer. 169 00:18:50,370 --> 00:18:56,730 The question is the cause. Good. He could have settled the quarrel by saying, yes, the cause is good. 170 00:18:56,730 --> 00:19:05,190 This is a just war. But he doesn't. Instead, he says anybody who dies, it's not the king's fault. 171 00:19:05,190 --> 00:19:06,930 Henry then withdraws into a soliloquy. 172 00:19:06,930 --> 00:19:11,850 So we're still going through what happens in act for the chorus telling us how great Henry is with his soldiers. 173 00:19:11,850 --> 00:19:15,750 This very uncomfortable encounter with the soldiers. And then Henry's soliloquy. 174 00:19:15,750 --> 00:19:21,910 This is his only soliloquy in the play. And it's a lament about the burden and the loneliness of a. 175 00:19:21,910 --> 00:19:24,310 Which is very familiar from the history place. 176 00:19:24,310 --> 00:19:33,220 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. 177 00:19:33,220 --> 00:19:41,400 Prince Charles cites this speech in a wonderfully barking collection of his favourite bits from Shakespeare, which is called The Princes Choice. 178 00:19:41,400 --> 00:19:50,170 He says Shakespeare has a remarkable insight into the mind of someone born into this kind of position, which presumably is Prince Charles himself. 179 00:19:50,170 --> 00:19:55,230 Kingship is but ceremony, Henry says, in this soliloquy. 180 00:19:55,230 --> 00:20:03,520 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. 181 00:20:03,520 --> 00:20:07,920 And their response is quite different. Not no, not all these. 182 00:20:07,920 --> 00:20:15,670 He says thrice gorgeous ceremony. Not all these laid in bed Majestical can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave who, 183 00:20:15,670 --> 00:20:23,140 with a body filled and vacant mind, gets him to rest crammed with distressful bread never seems horrid night. 184 00:20:23,140 --> 00:20:32,910 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. 185 00:20:32,910 --> 00:20:36,040 So Henry says people aren't burdened with office sleep like babies. 186 00:20:36,040 --> 00:20:42,430 But he seems to forgotten that he's just met three soldiers who are sitting up at night sick with worry. 187 00:20:42,430 --> 00:20:50,080 It seems that Shakespeare wants these men and their challenge to Henry's authority to echo in Henry's soliloquy here. 188 00:20:50,080 --> 00:20:57,340 I think we're supposed to see that Henry Henry soliloquy is is not is not true to the situation itself. 189 00:20:57,340 --> 00:21:04,280 Deluding is not a moment of revelation and self-knowledge for him. 190 00:21:04,280 --> 00:21:06,730 And as Henry thinks about himself and his position, 191 00:21:06,730 --> 00:21:12,520 he caricatures the wretched slave in a manner which is rather different from the gestures of brotherhood. 192 00:21:12,520 --> 00:21:19,900 But the play wants to assert. So the point of thinking about Act four in that way is to suggest that the chorus, 193 00:21:19,900 --> 00:21:27,400 which seems so hyperbolic in favour of Henry so clearly on the side of the admirable king, 194 00:21:27,400 --> 00:21:33,340 may actually be a kind of self sabotage sort of booby trap within the play itself. 195 00:21:33,340 --> 00:21:45,040 A structural scepticism which which draws attention to the failure of Henry to live up to the idealised view the chorus presents. 196 00:21:45,040 --> 00:21:54,340 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, 197 00:21:54,340 --> 00:22:05,420 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. 198 00:22:05,420 --> 00:22:09,260 Now, the date of this critical intervention, 1919 is really important. 199 00:22:09,260 --> 00:22:16,540 It's particularly important when you look, say, at electronic archive [INAUDIBLE] archives of journals, 200 00:22:16,540 --> 00:22:21,640 not to just compress all the criticism into some sort of continuous presence. 201 00:22:21,640 --> 00:22:28,290 These things were written over a long period, and the period in which they were written is really important, 202 00:22:28,290 --> 00:22:37,150 which is not to say that somehow we're in some narrative towards enlightenment and that more recent stuff is better in some way. 203 00:22:37,150 --> 00:22:41,800 But if you can think about why current critics are writing in the way they are, 204 00:22:41,800 --> 00:22:46,600 in the way that we can understand how previous critics wrote, that's very worthwhile. 205 00:22:46,600 --> 00:22:49,420 But the days of this intervention, 1919, is really important. 206 00:22:49,420 --> 00:22:58,630 The author of this piece, Gerald Gould Geo You Weldy Gerald Gould, had recently returned from the First World War. 207 00:22:58,630 --> 00:23:07,630 World War One was a war which crawled over the same geographical territory in northern France as Henry's military campaign. 208 00:23:07,630 --> 00:23:15,550 The same the same names, Picardy and so on, are the same in both conflicts. 209 00:23:15,550 --> 00:23:20,200 But obviously, the First World War moved through France with devastating consequences. 210 00:23:20,200 --> 00:23:32,050 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. 211 00:23:32,050 --> 00:23:39,850 So Gould's essay on Henry the Fifth struck a chord with those post-war sensibilities, having been through the First World War. 212 00:23:39,850 --> 00:23:47,350 It was possible to see something different in this play. And what Gould saw was a play that was decidedly ironic. 213 00:23:47,350 --> 00:23:51,070 That's his word for it. Ironic. 214 00:23:51,070 --> 00:24:03,970 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, 215 00:24:03,970 --> 00:24:14,350 and suggests that for more discerning spectators, there's a kind of anti patriotic play being smuggled in with an ostensibly patriotic one. 216 00:24:14,350 --> 00:24:21,630 Google thinks that this is Shakespeare's intention. We don't necessarily need to think that it's an intended duality. 217 00:24:21,630 --> 00:24:34,740 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. 218 00:24:34,740 --> 00:24:36,760 The first is act one, scene one. 219 00:24:36,760 --> 00:24:44,220 If you remember how the play starts, it starts with a conversation between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Ely. 220 00:24:44,220 --> 00:24:52,980 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, 221 00:24:52,980 --> 00:25:01,350 because it sets up the the interest in the in the French war right at the start as being politically motivated. 222 00:25:01,350 --> 00:25:09,480 It's Henry is being used to keep him away from interfering in church business. 223 00:25:09,480 --> 00:25:16,020 So that's Gould's first example of how the how the play sets up this war as as an unjust one. 224 00:25:16,020 --> 00:25:23,880 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. 225 00:25:23,880 --> 00:25:28,920 This is a hugely long, long set of speeches. 226 00:25:28,920 --> 00:25:37,140 Often the Archbishop of Canterbury is presented as a buffoon, always forgetting things and getting confused in these long genealogies. 227 00:25:37,140 --> 00:25:44,370 Although an interesting production of modern production by Nicholas Hytner with 228 00:25:44,370 --> 00:25:50,160 Adrian Lester as Henry around the time of the dodgy dossier about the war in Iraq, 229 00:25:50,160 --> 00:25:56,850 very much made. It made a lot of this that the case that was made for war but by the by the authorities 230 00:25:56,850 --> 00:26:02,580 was actually really important and not to be laughed at as it is in Ensay Olivier's film. 231 00:26:02,580 --> 00:26:09,090 We know that the Salik law is meant to be utterly complicated because there's a great joke in it where the archbishop says. 232 00:26:09,090 --> 00:26:15,420 And so it's as clear as a summer's day and it's clearly not as clear as a summer's day. 233 00:26:15,420 --> 00:26:27,330 The third of Gould's suggested locations of an anti Henry reading of the play is the repeated allusions to Falstaff. 234 00:26:27,330 --> 00:26:29,700 So here you need to know a bit about the Henry. 235 00:26:29,700 --> 00:26:38,550 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, 236 00:26:38,550 --> 00:26:45,600 probably of the period from the period before the closing of the theatres in 16 in the 16 forties. 237 00:26:45,600 --> 00:26:56,100 So Falstaff is a kind of reprobate, drunken, satirical, lovable, fat rogue. 238 00:26:56,100 --> 00:27:00,750 He's a kind of the easiest way to think of armies as a kind of Homer Simpson sort of figure. 239 00:27:00,750 --> 00:27:06,000 He does everything wrong and everything badly, but he's very lovable because of that. 240 00:27:06,000 --> 00:27:12,300 Falstaff is not present in Henry the Fifth, although the epilogue to Henry the Fourth who says he's going to be. 241 00:27:12,300 --> 00:27:19,950 And instead, we hear that he's he's sick and he's dying. But we're never allowed to forget him. 242 00:27:19,950 --> 00:27:29,600 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. 243 00:27:29,600 --> 00:27:36,480 This, this, this these allusions are intended to remind us that we don't like Henry very much. 244 00:27:36,480 --> 00:27:43,620 We liked his old pal Falstaff, and we don't like the way Henry has treated him now positive. 245 00:27:43,620 --> 00:27:49,550 It's interesting that positive readings of Henry's conduct need to work on these particular episodes. 246 00:27:49,550 --> 00:27:57,000 One one they say like law and the representation of Falstaff, they need to really work quite hard to make those episodes sympathetic. 247 00:27:57,000 --> 00:28:04,350 And if you look at stage versions of Henry the Fifth, which have been pro Henry, which I've thought, yes, Henry is admirable. 248 00:28:04,350 --> 00:28:09,900 Those stage versions have achieved that clarity by cutting the things that are difficult. 249 00:28:09,900 --> 00:28:19,410 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. 250 00:28:19,410 --> 00:28:23,850 If you look at Laurence Olivier as famous wartime film, for example, 251 00:28:23,850 --> 00:28:33,730 there's a fabulous bit where he goes to the walls at half fleur to threaten them to to surrender. 252 00:28:33,730 --> 00:28:40,860 And so it is a long speech full of violent, hugely violent imagery about what will happen. 253 00:28:40,860 --> 00:28:46,110 And it's been a great problem for readings of Henry, which have tried to make him sympathetic. 254 00:28:46,110 --> 00:28:49,830 Olivia cuts the whole thing is completely cut the amount. 255 00:28:49,830 --> 00:28:57,690 Compare that with what Branagh does, which is to cut selectively, but still to reduce the length of that of that problematic speech. 256 00:28:57,690 --> 00:29:03,540 OK. So if Henry is to be admirable, that's to say he tends to need to be airbrushed. 257 00:29:03,540 --> 00:29:10,320 And you can see that very clearly in most clearly in performance, I think. 258 00:29:10,320 --> 00:29:16,200 Now, last week I suggested that looking at title pages of early corto publications of Shakespeare could 259 00:29:16,200 --> 00:29:21,610 tell us about their marketing to first readers and perhaps give us an insight into what was a. 260 00:29:21,610 --> 00:29:24,260 Really interesting about them. 261 00:29:24,260 --> 00:29:33,080 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. 262 00:29:33,080 --> 00:29:37,040 It's a really good investment of time. That's one on Wednesday this week and one on Tuesday. 263 00:29:37,040 --> 00:29:40,460 I think in six weeks I sign up in the library if you want to do that. 264 00:29:40,460 --> 00:29:49,970 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, 265 00:29:49,970 --> 00:29:58,100 fought a dashing corps in France, together with ancient pistil as it has been sundry times played by the Right Honourable, 266 00:29:58,100 --> 00:30:09,620 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. 267 00:30:09,620 --> 00:30:16,850 The proper nouns, the title page stresses are Henry Ajin Core France pistil. 268 00:30:16,850 --> 00:30:20,870 But what I want to stress about this edition of the play is Sixteen Hundred Quarto 269 00:30:20,870 --> 00:30:25,910 edition of the play is that it differs from the Folio text in a number of ways. 270 00:30:25,910 --> 00:30:29,750 So I want to just have a little bit of a digression into how we might use textual criticism, 271 00:30:29,750 --> 00:30:36,200 textual variance to focus in on particular questions about Shakespeare's plays, not just this one. 272 00:30:36,200 --> 00:30:43,210 So it's going to go on a slight tangent, which is about how to approach textual criticism. 273 00:30:43,210 --> 00:30:51,920 And so, as I mentioned last week, about half of Shakespeare's plays are published during his lifetime in Quarto format. 274 00:30:51,920 --> 00:31:00,300 And just to remind you, quartos of those small, cheap pamphlet editions of individual plays in sixteen, 275 00:31:00,300 --> 00:31:04,310 twenty three, seven years after his death, Shakespeare dies in sixteen. 276 00:31:04,310 --> 00:31:13,790 Sixteen. Two of the actors from The King's Man Shakespeare's company collect together the complete dramatic works of Shakespeare. 277 00:31:13,790 --> 00:31:18,800 So the two actors are called John Hemming and Henry Condell, 278 00:31:18,800 --> 00:31:29,510 and they collect together the complete dramatic works of Shakespeare as M. William Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies. 279 00:31:29,510 --> 00:31:41,090 So 36 plays are published together in this folio of 16 23, and that includes 18, which have not previously been published. 280 00:31:41,090 --> 00:31:44,810 So that's the book we call the First Folio. 281 00:31:44,810 --> 00:31:53,240 Introducing our collected edition, Heming and Condell have something to say about plays which have already been available to the buying public, 282 00:31:53,240 --> 00:31:59,330 has quartos under here printed again in the Folio, in their epistle to the readers. 283 00:31:59,330 --> 00:32:07,460 They tell us that they've collected all the plays together and published them as well before you were abused with diverse, 284 00:32:07,460 --> 00:32:15,710 stolen and surreptitious copies maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealth of injurious impostors. 285 00:32:15,710 --> 00:32:19,900 Even those are now offered to your view, cured and perfect of their limbs. 286 00:32:19,900 --> 00:32:24,890 Publish them as well before you were abused with diverse, stolen and surreptitious copies. 287 00:32:24,890 --> 00:32:28,760 Even those are now offered to your view, cured and perfect of their limbs. 288 00:32:28,760 --> 00:32:35,000 This is from the epistle to to the reader in the First Folio, easily found online. 289 00:32:35,000 --> 00:32:39,350 It is clear that what Hemming and Kandal are getting out here is not an academic or 290 00:32:39,350 --> 00:32:44,570 neutral description of the provenance of different versions of Shakespeare's plays. 291 00:32:44,570 --> 00:32:50,780 It's a hard sell. We might pirate paraphrase it as you've got half these players already. 292 00:32:50,780 --> 00:32:57,530 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. 293 00:32:57,530 --> 00:33:02,330 Here's a chance to get authoritative, authoritative copies. It's a telling. 294 00:33:02,330 --> 00:33:09,260 It's a selling technique that anticipates, for example, DVD rereleases, digital remastering director's cuts, 295 00:33:09,260 --> 00:33:15,230 those kinds of things as a way of selling essentially the same product by making out that the 296 00:33:15,230 --> 00:33:21,440 one you've already got is in some way lacking compared to the one which is now available. 297 00:33:21,440 --> 00:33:22,970 Now, despite this obvious agenda, 298 00:33:22,970 --> 00:33:30,140 textual critics have tended to take Heming and Condor's account of the different printed versions of Shakespeare for the truth, 299 00:33:30,140 --> 00:33:37,820 and thus where a quarter version of a play is different from, which usually means shorter than the Folio version. 300 00:33:37,820 --> 00:33:45,600 From that, we get the bibliographic idea of bad quartos bad quarters because the phrase bad quartos has been. 301 00:33:45,600 --> 00:33:53,720 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. 302 00:33:53,720 --> 00:34:00,560 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, 303 00:34:00,560 --> 00:34:11,600 actors, pirates in the illegal copying sense of pirate rather than the walking the plank sense and printers, a bad quartos backwater show. 304 00:34:11,600 --> 00:34:14,990 The mark of other people other than the author. 305 00:34:14,990 --> 00:34:21,520 And that's what makes them. But more recent textual criticism has been a bit less certain that bad quarter. 306 00:34:21,520 --> 00:34:26,410 Should be thought of as bad and more willing to think that different versions of Shakespeare's plays may 307 00:34:26,410 --> 00:34:34,300 give us insight into how the theatre worked or even how Shakespeare might have revised his own plays. 308 00:34:34,300 --> 00:34:39,730 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. 309 00:34:39,730 --> 00:34:44,500 But we can use them for comparative purposes without trying to identify. 310 00:34:44,500 --> 00:34:48,280 This one is authoritative. This one is corrupt. This is better. This is worse. 311 00:34:48,280 --> 00:34:55,090 This comes first. This comes later. In fact, the rabbit duck might be quite a good analogy again. 312 00:34:55,090 --> 00:34:59,950 So if you're going to use the on folio text or different quarter readings of Shakespeare's plays, 313 00:34:59,950 --> 00:35:05,680 I would really counsel you against trying to work out whether it's bad, 314 00:35:05,680 --> 00:35:15,310 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. 315 00:35:15,310 --> 00:35:22,450 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. 316 00:35:22,450 --> 00:35:27,010 That's been done to smooth out the text in the forms which we access them. 317 00:35:27,010 --> 00:35:32,110 So if you look state at stage directions in early printed, that takes almost every stage direction in the modern edition. 318 00:35:32,110 --> 00:35:38,410 It's put there by editors. So if you're making an argument about what happens on stage because of stage directions, 319 00:35:38,410 --> 00:35:43,280 you're almost certainly using the stage the actions of a modern editor rather than the early text. 320 00:35:43,280 --> 00:35:47,500 I go back and look at what they look like, or in the early text, 321 00:35:47,500 --> 00:35:52,930 characters often have slightly different names or they called different things during the course of the play. 322 00:35:52,930 --> 00:35:55,150 They're called different things in speech, prefixes or whatever. 323 00:35:55,150 --> 00:36:02,830 So they turn out to be characters who are less coherent and less concrete perhaps than than than we would than we would think. 324 00:36:02,830 --> 00:36:06,710 Different versions have different lines can open up quite different meanings. 325 00:36:06,710 --> 00:36:13,240 And if you want to be persuaded of this last point, look up perhaps what's become the most famous example of textual variation? 326 00:36:13,240 --> 00:36:20,530 The first quarter of Hamlet dated 16 03 and its version of the most famous soliloquy to be or not to be. 327 00:36:20,530 --> 00:36:24,940 Which gives us to be or not to be I. There's the point to die. 328 00:36:24,940 --> 00:36:28,270 To sleep. Is that all I all know? To sleep. 329 00:36:28,270 --> 00:36:33,920 To dream. I'm married. There it goes. That both is and is not recognisable, I think as. 330 00:36:33,920 --> 00:36:37,720 As the version we're more used to. I guess that's a long way of going round. 331 00:36:37,720 --> 00:36:43,210 What might we get from getting the six. Looking at the sixteen hundred quarto of Henry the Fifth. 332 00:36:43,210 --> 00:36:51,670 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, 333 00:36:51,670 --> 00:37:00,610 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. 334 00:37:00,610 --> 00:37:04,020 Not the muse of fire, not the epilogue, not the mirror of all Christine Kings. 335 00:37:04,020 --> 00:37:10,150 Zilch, no chorus's. So it's a historical story without the mediation of the chorus. 336 00:37:10,150 --> 00:37:18,460 I've been talking about as a way of maybe sharpening our perspective on Henry's character. 337 00:37:18,460 --> 00:37:24,220 Maybe the quartos. Henry is a more straightforward figure than he doesn't have this ironic counterpoint. 338 00:37:24,220 --> 00:37:31,570 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. 339 00:37:31,570 --> 00:37:41,110 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? 340 00:37:41,110 --> 00:37:45,700 You could argue that he is more admirable in the quarter than he is in the FOLIA. 341 00:37:45,700 --> 00:37:50,650 So that's just just one line that maybe is worth thinking about. Now, 342 00:37:50,650 --> 00:37:55,930 most critics who have speculated about why the choruses are not present in the quarto 343 00:37:55,930 --> 00:38:02,800 have argued that they are cut because they have become uncomfortably topical. 344 00:38:02,800 --> 00:38:13,210 The chorus to Act five in the Folio text makes an allusion which is very unusual for Shakespeare and explicit political contemporary allusion, 345 00:38:13,210 --> 00:38:15,970 and it's a reference to a contemporary event. 346 00:38:15,970 --> 00:38:24,130 The Earl of Essex is huge expedition to quell what the English called the Irish rebellion for the Earl of Essex 347 00:38:24,130 --> 00:38:34,360 leaves London with a huge army 16000 troops in mid 15 99 to go and fight the Isle of Tyronne in Ireland. 348 00:38:34,360 --> 00:38:36,320 Here's the bit from the chorus. 349 00:38:36,320 --> 00:38:43,050 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. 350 00:38:43,050 --> 00:38:47,080 Ashin Cole case is another of the choruses saying We can't really depict this. 351 00:38:47,080 --> 00:38:54,160 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. 352 00:38:54,160 --> 00:39:07,570 The chorus offers assimilate as by a lower but loving likelihood were now the general of our gracious Empress Elizabeth. 353 00:39:07,570 --> 00:39:13,450 As in good time, he may from Ireland coming, bringing rebellion, broach it on his sword. 354 00:39:13,450 --> 00:39:18,160 How many would the peaceful city quit to welcome him? Much more and much more. 355 00:39:18,160 --> 00:39:21,480 Cause did they this Harry. So. 356 00:39:21,480 --> 00:39:29,610 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. 357 00:39:29,610 --> 00:39:35,600 So the chorus to Act five fixes the play quite specifically within a few weeks in the summer of 15 99. 358 00:39:35,600 --> 00:39:41,520 And the possibility that the Earl of Essex says expedition to Ireland could be successful was still alive. 359 00:39:41,520 --> 00:39:49,230 By the time Essex returns in September 15, 99, it's clear that his military campaign had been a failure. 360 00:39:49,230 --> 00:39:54,730 The reference to Essex here with the future conditional were now the general of our gracious empress. 361 00:39:54,730 --> 00:40:01,260 As in good time, he may. That tent still allows a positive outcome. 362 00:40:01,260 --> 00:40:09,020 Reminds us, perhaps quite usefully, that Shakespeare's plays, like those of his contemporaries, are written for performance over a very short period. 363 00:40:09,020 --> 00:40:15,630 They might might expect 10 ish performances over a period of a month or six weeks so 364 00:40:15,630 --> 00:40:21,840 they can afford to be topical since they're consumed in a very specific period context. 365 00:40:21,840 --> 00:40:26,190 Perhaps because this context had fallen away by sixteen hundred. 366 00:40:26,190 --> 00:40:30,360 The text printed that year doesn't include the choruses, 367 00:40:30,360 --> 00:40:39,300 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. 368 00:40:39,300 --> 00:40:43,380 But the question of the play's engagement with contemporary politics, 369 00:40:43,380 --> 00:40:49,500 with ethics and with the wars in Ireland brings another historical lens to bear on 370 00:40:49,500 --> 00:40:54,690 Henry's presentation in this play and the question of whether he is admirable or not. 371 00:40:54,690 --> 00:40:57,810 Fifteen ninety nine was a miserable year in London. 372 00:40:57,810 --> 00:41:06,290 High food prices, anxieties about the succession, heavy conscription of men and taxes for Essex's army, 373 00:41:06,290 --> 00:41:15,900 a strain on food supplies and for other other commodities horses, for example, for equipping that army. 374 00:41:15,900 --> 00:41:24,330 One of the forms of entertainment the theatre seems to have provided in this unpromising context is feelgood fairytale style plays. 375 00:41:24,330 --> 00:41:30,420 We might think about much ado about nothing. The same year the war is is firmly pushed into the sidelines. 376 00:41:30,420 --> 00:41:36,060 Remember, the characters in the male characters are much ado about nothing coming back from the war. 377 00:41:36,060 --> 00:41:40,590 That's what brings them into this romantic situation. 378 00:41:40,590 --> 00:41:47,580 And the war is converted instead into a merry war or flirtatious words between Beatrice and Benedick. 379 00:41:47,580 --> 00:41:52,350 Or we might think about Dekkers play of the same year, the shoemaker's holiday kind of Dick Whittington, 380 00:41:52,350 --> 00:41:57,060 combined with Cinderella by the shoemaker Simon Air becomes wildly rich, 381 00:41:57,060 --> 00:42:03,480 becomes the Lord Mayor of London, and a nobleman falls in love with a commoner and marries her. 382 00:42:03,480 --> 00:42:05,640 These are diversionary entertainments. 383 00:42:05,640 --> 00:42:13,530 They're like Busby Berkeley musicals in the Depression era of the 30s or strictly come dancing in our own age of austerity. 384 00:42:13,530 --> 00:42:20,700 They avoid difficult issues. They are ideologically escapist rather than committed. 385 00:42:20,700 --> 00:42:27,900 Henry the Fifth falls into this category. We can see in place of the recalcitrant Irish who would not be quelled. 386 00:42:27,900 --> 00:42:32,910 Shakespeare gives us the arrogant French rooted by plucky English warriors. 387 00:42:32,910 --> 00:42:41,010 The play gives us the classic underdog story to emphasise the magical aspects of this victory. 388 00:42:41,010 --> 00:42:49,560 Shakespeare suppresses the information from the sources which attribute the victory attaching corps to superior English firepower. 389 00:42:49,560 --> 00:42:53,790 The English don't win Ajin Corps because they're right or because God loves them. 390 00:42:53,790 --> 00:43:02,040 They win because they have longbows, which means that the French never get near them to cut them down with with their weapons. 391 00:43:02,040 --> 00:43:09,750 And Shakespeare also bigs up. The disparity between the French and the English dead in a long speech in Act four. 392 00:43:09,750 --> 00:43:18,690 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 393 00:43:18,690 --> 00:43:25,530 of princes and nobles bearing banners there lie dead 126 added to these knights, 394 00:43:25,530 --> 00:43:32,910 esquires and gallant gentleman eight thousand four hundred in the 10000, they have lost their all but sixteen hundred mercenaries. 395 00:43:32,910 --> 00:43:38,310 The rest are princes, barons, lords, knights and squires. Here was a royal fellowship of death. 396 00:43:38,310 --> 00:43:43,890 Henry says, hearing the news of the French casualties. What is the number of our English dead? 397 00:43:43,890 --> 00:43:49,830 Edward. The Duke of York. The Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Catley, David Garmisch Squire. 398 00:43:49,830 --> 00:43:54,870 None else of name and of all other men but five and twenty. 399 00:43:54,870 --> 00:44:03,540 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. 400 00:44:03,540 --> 00:44:12,330 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, 401 00:44:12,330 --> 00:44:21,110 the Henry the Fifth changes gear quite surprisingly and quite effortlessly in its final act, attempting to turn into a romantic. 402 00:44:21,110 --> 00:44:25,760 Comedy in which the fact that the princess of France, Catherine, 403 00:44:25,760 --> 00:44:32,000 has no choice about her husband since she is a prise of Henry's victory, this fact is completely forgotten. 404 00:44:32,000 --> 00:44:41,300 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. 405 00:44:41,300 --> 00:44:45,260 The epilogue brings us back to the chorus again. 406 00:44:45,260 --> 00:44:51,680 Is that cynical, puncturing, sceptical kind of tone? 407 00:44:51,680 --> 00:44:53,630 This is the epilogue small time. 408 00:44:53,630 --> 00:45:01,770 But in that small, most greatly lived, this star of England fortune made his sword by which the world's best garden he achieved, 409 00:45:01,770 --> 00:45:09,110 and all of it left his son, Imperial Lord Henry, the sixth in infant bands crowned King of France and England. 410 00:45:09,110 --> 00:45:18,530 Did this king succeed whose state so many have the managing that they lost France and made his England bleed? 411 00:45:18,530 --> 00:45:24,500 It's hard not to feel that the play thus ends with the sort of pointlessness. What does it all actually been for? 412 00:45:24,500 --> 00:45:29,410 If this miraculous victory was so quickly lost within a generation, 413 00:45:29,410 --> 00:45:35,480 if this is Shakespeare's attempt to write propaganda for the dark days of 15 99, it doesn't quite come off. 414 00:45:35,480 --> 00:45:41,480 It can't quite sustain it. So in today's lecture, 415 00:45:41,480 --> 00:45:47,210 I've tried to think about the question of whether Henry is admirable by focussing in particular on the structure of the play and 416 00:45:47,210 --> 00:45:56,780 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. 417 00:45:56,780 --> 00:46:03,960 Next week I'm going to look at another play which seems to dramatise apparently incompatible views that play its measure for measure. 418 00:46:03,960 --> 00:46:13,707 The question I'll ask him that lecture is what genre is this play?