Churchill would have understood.
Bell Shakespeare have just begun a season of Henry V and it seems a reminder of what an oddity this battle hymn of a play actually is. Henry V is, after all, the last play of the sequence that gets properly going with Henry IV Part 1 though it also harks back to the high medievalist style in Richard II, Shakespeare’s proto-tragic representation of a drama queen King.
‘For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground/ And tell sad stories of the death of kings; / How some have been deposed; some slain in war, / Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed; / Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d; / All murder’d: for within the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king / Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits, / Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, / Allowing him a breath, a little scene, / To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks, / Infusing him with self and vain conceit, / As if this flesh which walls about our life, / Were brass impregnable, and humor’d thus / Comes at the last and with a little pin / Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!’
Richard is an irresistibly rich character, constantly dipping into the pathos of his own predicament while histrionically projecting it. He is the King of the poignant pageant he projects though the style of this play – so suited to the gifts of John Gielgud – is different from the two parts of Henry IV which in some ways lead into Henry V and in some ways stand apart from it. It’s worth remembering that both parts of Henry IV have huge cameo roles, the sort of thing Hollywood has always indicated by saying at the end of the cast credits “and X.” In the first part of Henry IV this role is played by Hotspur, the Geordie rebel who is dashing and headstrong.
“My liege, I did deny no prisoners. / But I remember, when the fight was done, / When I was dry with rage and extreme toil, / Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword, / Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dress’d, / Fresh as a bridegroom, and his chin new reap’d / Show’d like a stubble-land at harvest-home. / He was perfumed like