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King Henry V A Critical Reader
Edited
by Karen Britland and Line Cottegnies
Arden Early Modern Drama Guides Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018 Hardcover. vi+322 p. ISBN 978-1474280105. £75
Reviewed by Anne-Valérie Dulac Paris : Sorbonne Université
King Henry V : A Critical Reader offers an insightful
anatomy of Shakespeare’s history play, bringing together a team of international
scholars approaching most aspects of the play’s critical interpretations and
adaptations from its first performance to the present. The collection
comprises four opening chapters presenting historical accounts and assessments
of the play’s reception, performance and adaptation. James D. Mardock and Emma
Smith’s chapters (“The
Critical Backstory” and “The State of the Art”) show how the “conversation
around Henry V is as robust in the
twenty-first century as it has ever been” [19]. Mardock, who
edited the play for the Internet Shakespeare Editions (2013), perhaps most
notably discusses the varying interpretations of the differences between the
Folio and Quarto versions of the play, arguing they are in fact two full and
separate “authoritative plays” [27]. Mardock’s critical “backstory” is
complemented by Emma Smith’s wide-ranging account of twenty-first century
criticism. Smith focuses on how the play ties in with present-day geopolitics
and anxieties before exploring a vast array of current critical avenues
(religion, metatheatre, histories, nationalities, memory, gender, texts and
performance). The chapter concludes on the importance of new productions in
fostering new interpretations, which resonates nicely with the other two
chapters in in this first part, devoted to the play’s performance history
(Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise and Gisèle Venet) and screen adaptations (Sarah
Hatchuel). Miller-Blaise
and Venet (who co-edited the 2008 French translation of the play for the Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade editions) show how the play has been staged as a “mirror for
political events” [49] across the ages in Britain before turning to the play’s
exportation to the other side of the Channel and beyond, thereby testifying to
the play’s growing global appeal. Sarah
Hatchuel’s contribution looks more specifically into a selection of screen
adaptations of the play from a “contextual, aesthetic and ideological”
perspective [102]. Hatchuel interestingly shows how television has consistently
presented Henry V as part of a
tetralogy as opposed to the stand-alone approach favoured by the cinema. The
chapter also questions remediation by inquiring into Gregory Doran’s 2015
filmed production for the RSC. Also thought-provoking is Hatchuel’s final
analysis of citations of the play in other films and television series,
including some rather unexpected references taken from George of the Jungle 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Star Trek, thus highlighting the
enduring popular and cultural appeal of Shakespeare’s play, if mostly confined
to UK and US productions. The second half of the collection gathers
contributions pointing to “new directions”. John Drakakis’s chapter seeks to
discuss religion in the play, an issue which the “religious turn” in early
modern studies has markedly brought back to the critical fore. Drakakis lays
bare the oscillation of the play between “the claims of ideology and the claims
of religion” [147] and shows how the image of the exemplary Christian warrior
prince is never fully devoid of anxiety, therefore leaving the issue of the
“incontrovertible efficacy of providential power” suspended [155]. Christopher
Ivic, in “Making and Remaking the British Kingdoms – Henry V, Then and Now”, examines the play’s “preoccupation with
England’s imperial status” [157] and how it echoes anachronistic
sixteenth-century conceptions of “empire”. Ivic reflects upon the fluidity of
“Englishness” in the play and its emerging sense of a British identity resting
upon the rejection of a monolithic national identity and the staging of
communal identities instead. Christine
Sukic explores yet another kaleidoscopic dimension of the play by examining the
“Politics of Criminality and Heroism in Henry
V”. Building upon the instability of
meaning she derives from beautiful close readings of some of the metaphors
used, Sukic offers a fascinatingly precise analysis of the “rhetoric of
obligation” and the reversibility of language. This in turn leads her to
investigate the reversibility of heroism and criminality, its (only) “apparent
opposite” [199]. In the next
chapter, Elizabeth Pentland probes into documents “not usually consulted by
Shakespeare scholars” [17]. Pentland investigates into the “rather different
song” sung by fifteenth-century French poets and chroniclers about Azincourt. By showing how the play tones
down the poor leadership and errors of the French side (the better to bring to
the fore the English King’s own skills and strategy), Pentland brilliantly exposes
yet another dimension of the “representational politics” [202] at play in
Shakespeare’s staging of the king’s famous victory. This view from “the
adversary’s perspective” (the title of the chapter) is perhaps the most
striking attempt at opening up new and “defamiliarizing” views (a word used by
the editors in their introduction) of Shakespeare’s history play and it is to
be hoped it will be followed by further investigations into this “neglected
corpus” which has so much to reveal still about the “manipulation of historical
fact” [220]. The collection
ends with a chapter on learning and teaching resources by Gillian Woods and
Laura Seymour, who provide an incredibly useful list of available electronic
and paper resources as well as thought-provoking suggestions of class
discussions and workshops.
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