“Few die well that die in a battle” | Henry V Review

I realise, as I finally sat down to write this, that I’d been putting it off. 

When approaching Shakespeare, I’ve always been on the deferential side. Knowing a lot about Shakespeare is not a claim I’m willing to make any time soon. I’ve watched a few productions. I’ve studied a few plays. I still don’t think I know anything. 

I’ve always found it hard to understand whether my opinions are my own, or a subconscious parrotting of critics and experts who really do know what they’re talking about. At least, I assume they do. 

I take that to be part of the reason why I was struggling to get my thoughts down on paper this time. 

Henry V: not a play I knew well. But I had enough faith in the RSC at Stratford-Upon-Avon to go in blind, expectations high.

Watching Timothy Chalamet in The King the night before didn’t – alas – sort me out. But there were other forces at play, I now realise, in what had come to feel like apathy on my part towards the production.

It was competent: Alfred Enoch is a great actor, specifically a great actor of Shakespeare. I’d seen him in Pericles in 2024 and I found that, quite seriously, amazing. It was raw; moving; free of the psychological trench foot that comes from long exposure to badly acted Shakespeare. I don’t know a lot, but I do know when Shakespeare is bad. If you’ve seen bad Shakespeare, then you’ll know what I mean. One particularly awful version of Twelfth Night, watched at school, haunts me to this day. 

Henry V wasn’t done badly at all; given that it was the RSC, it was never going to be. I said at the interval, “this is like a well-oiled machine.” And it was. Why, then, did it leave me a bit cold?  

I gave myself a whole week to think about this. Here goes.

I’ve come to think that the most important thing when it comes to Shakespeare, for the uninitiated theatre-goer, is not how much you know, but what you believe you are experiencing when you watch a play. 

The belief kicks in when the experience starts. I don’t think you have to understand every word of a Shakespeare play to enjoy it, but you do have to experience a sense of belief.

Willa Cather said, ‘The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced.’ She wrote this of the writer Katherine Mansfield, but it is true more generally of other second and first-rate writers, Shakespeare (if he was indeed one person, but let’s not get into that) obviously being the latter.

Belief could be mean any number of things. It could be a belief that what you are seeing holds some cultural truth. It could be a belief that directorial choices represent the anxieties of an age. Belief that the fool in King Lear is, weirdly, the only one with real moments of insight (a bit like Baldrick in Blackadder Goes Forth: “Why can't we just say no more killing, let's all go home”?). Why indeed. Whatever it is, belief is important. 

It’s all the more important because a play isn’t real. That’s why, at the start of Henry V, the chorus asks the audience to suspend their disbelief and engage in an act of imaginative collaboration to bring the play to life: 

“And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, 

On your imaginary forces work…

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;

Into a thousand parts divide on man,

And make imaginary puissance.”

To explain: the chorus figure would usually punctuate the beginning of each act. The chorus reminds us that the play is a play, and manages our view of Henry. It summons verisimilitude, helps us make peace with implausibility, and helpfully directs our eye by shaping the events we are about to see. 

Now - this production got rid of the chorus. Instead of having a chorus, these key lines were subsumed into Henry’s lines. 

What this did, in my eyes (eyes no longer helpfully directed by the chorus), was nudge into instability the crucial idea that the imaginative collaboration of the audience is indispensable to the success of the play. The idea, essentially, that our beliefs and suppositions can come to bear on the play in a way that makes it more real. More representative. 

The chorus becomes an ally to its audience because it sets the audience at a slightly ironic distance to Henry. It winks at you and says – he might think he’s this, but actually we know there’s a chance that he’s that. This, crucially, can lend confidence to the under-confident viewer of Shakespeare. It affords them a sense of shrewdness. 

There was none of that. And I think that was part of the problem when it came to the belief system the play set up. 

Henry V is already a hard character to grasp. Not in a Hamlet sort of way, either. Part of what makes Henry tricky is that much of his character development makes more sense in the context of the ‘Henriad’ (the other Henry plays that Shakespeare wrote). You see, across the plays, a young boy become a man. 

The man he becomes requires careful introduction because, as Emma Smith says, he is “irreducibly dual.” She notes that, writing in the 1960s the critic, Norman Rabkin, likened Henry V to the line drawing used by psychologists to interpret people’s mental workings and perception: the line drawing that is both a rabbit and duck. Look at it one way, it’s rabbit; the other, it’s a duck. 

Henry could be either; what you see depends on how you're interpreting him at the time. Which makes him, in my eyes, more of a slippery fish than anything else. 

Is Henry a war criminal? A brutal predator who enacts physical, emotional, and sexual violence? Or, is Henry a stirring leader, invoking camaraderie among his men, relatable and admirable, all in one?

Herein lies the problem in relation to the belief paradigm. The bottom line is that Henry V should be a play that holds chilling resonances for us and our time. It demonstrates the horrors of combat. In the present context of a world at war, it should make us think, “Here we are at it again. This is how violence is enacted.”

It sort of did. But that’s not really what I felt. It felt more like a fairy tale. 

Enoch’s Henry, without the ironically distanced chorus looking on, is effectively not that bad a character. He’s good natured, naive but courageous, steps up when he needs to, and wins.  There’s a scene at the end of the play where he’s wooing Catherine of Valois, which will never not be a bit rapey, but even then he seemed more playful than anything, albeit coercively.

What the chorus would do, had it been there, is say to the audience: bear in mind this character might only be as good as his worst decision. And if you listen to the last few lines of the play, usually read by the chorus, the justness of Henry's decision to go to war with France is surreptitiously called into question.

We’re told: 

“Fortune made his sword,

By which the world’s best garden he achieved

And 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 had the managing

That they lost France and made his England bleed..."

I translate, that a generation after Henry’s  victory over France, France was back on top. 

What then, was the point of it all? All that death for nothing. 

To return to Baldrick, “Why can't we just say no more killing, let's all go home?” Well, clearly we find that difficult. Henry V might have been an excellent opportunity to hammer this home. It just didn’t. And I believe the reason I didn’t believe in, or feel strong affiliation to the play, is because Henry needed to be more despicable. 

I think the Henry we needed, as an audience living in a world being dismembered by corrupt men, was a man who came across as a perpetrator of pathological and bloody violence. Not just a king perpetrating violence, but a man.

Whilst the violence on-stage was well-orchestrated in powerful, physical scenes of flaying, bodily confusion, I think it needed to translate more emphatically into the violence happening off-stage. The violence of now. It needed to forge a more incriminating link between its brutal repercussions and the fact the war was a direct consequence of Henry’s tyrannical delusion.

If there is one way to draw together the opposing facets of his character, dual as it is, it is that Henry is both a man, and a king. It’s exactly this which allows his more positive readings to permeate through. He talks to ordinary men, he cares about his friends – he has many redeeming moments. But whilst the character does offer itself up to a more redeeming interpretation, I still think the audience of today needed more of the other Henry, the duck and not the rabbit, or vice versa. 

I don’t think we’re an audience, at this moment in time, who consider much of the violence happening around us in the world to be just. Much of it seems unwarranted, unsolicited. The great victories of history plays seem like, well, fairy tales. And so did this. 

Fairy tales can be useful in teaching us to work through human anxieties; to lend a kind of narrative frontice piece to the depths of human psychology. But I don’t think that is the best use of Henry V for the audiences of today. 

Enoch was brilliant in many ways; but the limber, sympathetic figure he cast, spared from the watchful eye of the chorus, allowed him to get off slightly scot-free. And we don’t live in a world where people who incite unprovoked violence should be getting off scot-free. 

We needed a man more vile. A king who, when he says, “Every subject's duty is the King's; but every subject's soul is his own,” makes us feel the full and insidious force of unaccountability; of relinquished liability for the ordinary men who will die under his command. What he means here is, if you die on my watch, it isn’t my fault. And so – for all the rhetorical propulsiveness of the play, the assured machinery of the production and the good acting, I just don’t think the Henry the RSC brought to the table was one we could sink our teeth into as an audience; one we can believe in, for better, or for worse.

We needed someone past the point of critical immunity; a tyrant whose voice resounds with the truth of today, and not a genial leader who wins at a cost, but wins nonetheless. I say this not because because fatalism should win out; but because at a moment when communitarianism often resiles into frontier-minded hostility, the theatre still stands as bastion of  shared experience in a positive, galvanic way. A less subdued Henry might have brought to the table an opportunity to collectively consider violence and its repercussions, but more importantly its genesis, which is frequently the myopic hungering of one, to the detriment of many. There is power in the collective recognition of that fact in the auditorium of a theatre. What you believe you are watching will never cease to be important.

The soldier, Williams, says in Act 4, Scene 1 over a sleepless night ahead of the assault on France: “Few die well that die in a battle.” He’s right, be those battles just or not.

 

BY FREYA MORRIS