Accounts of the battles of Bannockburn,by the anonymous writer of the Chronicle of Lanercost, of Henry V’s battles at Harfleur and Agincourt, by Thomas Elmham or Ps.-Elmham and by Titus Livius, and of Richard III’s death at the battle of Bosworth Field by Polydore Vergil are given here as examples of military historiography of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.A section of a metric poem on Henry V, in elegiac couplets, is also included. The reader must decide as to whether the writers on Henry V and Richard III can be regarded as writing ‘humanist’ Latin.

Chapter four argues these processes of marginalisation represent a feminine, not solely female, mode of storytelling by demonstrating that male characters who are disempowered in explicitly feminine terms are endowed with the same historiographical powers as female characters. I first explore characters like Hotspur and Richard II, who explicitly have their legacies relegated to the histories disseminated by women, thus posthumously becoming the stuff of feminine history. This chapter argues that Falstaff and Henry IV also trace a parallel pattern of feminised disempowerment across the course of the second tetralogy. In contrast are Henry V and Henry VIII, both of whom affirm their masculinised legacies by explicitly avoiding entrusting their histories to female voices. Turning to earlier history plays, shifting gender positions of Queen Margaret and King Henry VI complicate a clear correlation between dramaturgical gender and character gender and demonstrate how certain characters continually renegotiate their relationship to masculine history. Finally, I consider the malleable and unstable position of boy characters, whose ability to shift between identification as young men and feminine boys, and the parallels their embodied presence draws to the boy players in female roles around them, renders them particularly vulnerable to feminised erasure by history.

Shakespeare’s Henry V shapes popular consciousness of England/Britain at war, yet resists accusations of jingoism. Its national imagining involves conscientious doubts about the justice of war itself. Chapter 5 shows that this appealingly inward, conscientious dimension of English national identity on stage is predicated on Scotland’s occlusion. Scotland was a major player in the Hundred Years’ War. Henry IV kidnapped the child heir to the Scots throne, James I. Henry V then forced James to fight his subjects, the Scots, in France. Yet Shakespeare carefully avoids acknowledging Scotland as a kingdom. He develops, from earlier history plays, a metaphorical plot that produces the idea of England’s island integrity as an effect of its king’s chaste reformation. In this plot, England is threatened by the wild incontinence of its royal heir until his reformation effectively secures England’s insularity, enabling English advancement ‘beyond sea’ to France. The analogy between royal self-chastening and English insular sea-power is traced through Greene’s Bacon and Bungay, Marlowe’s Edward II, the anonymous Edward III to Henry IV 1 & 2 and Henry V.

Chapter 1 concentrates on the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and the performance of Shakespeare at the Theatres Royal in London to show how several prominent productions construct a triumphant narrative of the conflict and commemorate Britain’s participation through the figure of the monarch. This period of war involved a number of widely celebrated victories that were seen to solidify Britain’s dominance as a global power, imparting a retrospective unity to the conflict that was marked by growing war weariness, escalating costs, and uncertainty about its justification and aims. This chapter concentrates on John Rich’s Henry V at Covent Garden and David Garrick’s Henry VIII at Drury Lane in 1761, both of which incorporate replicas of George III’s recent coronation, establishing a connection between the histories of the plays and contemporary royal spectacle. It shows how the use of Shakespeare seems to authorize an approving view of British conquests, despite George III’s own interest in peace negotiations and the disparate aims of production and reception agents connected to these performances.

Chapter 6 concentrates on the Iraq War (2003–11) and a resurging critical interest in just war theory, reflected also in the design and reception of Shakespearean productions. Global public protests preceded the coalition invasion, led by the United States and Britain, of Iraq in March 2003, and the arts, including theatre, provided platforms for voicing this opposition. Chapter 6 adopts just war theory as its organizing principle: the first part considers the justification of conflict (jus ad bellum) as it is critiqued in Nicholas Hytner’s Henry V (2003); the second part examines the violation of just conduct during conflict (jus in bello) as explored within Roy Williams’s Days of Significance (2007) and Sulayman Al Bassam’s Richard III: An Arab Tragedy (2007); the final part considers the end of conflict (jus post bellum), the relevance of the term ‘post-war’, and the erasure of Western wartime responsibility through an analysis of Monadhil Daood’s Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad (2012). This chapter argues that these productions, similar to contemporary Iraq War literature, are sceptical of conflict resolution and closure, but that other production and reception conditions shift their interpretative currency through structures of arts sponsorship and the political and cultural views brought to the theatre, all of which qualify the labelling of these productions as ‘anti-war’.

Chapter 3 examines the fighting over Shakespeare that takes place during the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815). This period of prolonged conflict is characterized by an obsessive interest in position-takings and labelling, such as revolutionary/loyalist and Jacobin/anti-Jacobin; but, as this chapter demonstrates, these wartime binaries are protean. By deploying them we are at risk of under-interpreting the conflict. The performance of Shakespeare at the major and minor theatres in London reveals this distinctive political malleability. The chapter begins by considering pressure points in the conflict when Shakespeare seems to have been loudly mobilized in support of the British war effort – such as the resumption of conflict in 1803 – but concentrates for the most part on the contested political valence of Shakespeare. It examines the opposing political sympathies and theatrical interests of John Philip Kemble and Richard Brinsley Sheridan who were both connected to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, as well as the operations of the minor theatres that position Shakespeare within a battle over the democratization of culture and politics that strongly resonates with the period’s domestic and foreign conflicts. The chapter concludes by proposing that ‘conflicting Shakespeares’ become united through the vagaries of patriotism, a powerful and uncertain concept during this period and beyond.

This Interlude between Part 1 and Part 2 of the book briefly considers the use and delayed currency of Shakespeare in the aftermath of the Russian War of 1853–56 (also known as the Crimean War), an unpopular conflict that nevertheless did not dampen the appeal of rousing militarism in Britain or position Shakespeare as a cultural figure through whom critical perspectives about the conduct of war could be presented. The Interlude concentrates on Charles Kean’s post-war Henry V at the Princess’s Theatre, London, in 1859, a production that does not contemporize the play’s events, but rather historicizes and distances them from its own time, reflecting a Victorian nostalgia for medieval history. It shows how the conditions of war and developments in war reporting can affect (and delay) the use of theatre for immediate wartime commentary. Shakespearean productions can be as much about forgetting or displacing contemporaneity, as invoking the specific contexts of a conflict or crisis, a pattern that recurs in the second part of the book.

The Afterword considers the ways the Chorus to Henry V focalizes the temporal and representational resonances of Shakespeare at war, in his own time and across the succeeding centuries.

The interview with Maggie Smales explores the approach and directorial decisions taken in her all-female production of Henry V at 41 Monkgate, York in 2015. Smales set the production at a munitions factory operated by women during the First World War in order to focus on the home-front perspective of female war workers and their sacrifices, drawing on the history of a local factory and the lives of local women who worked there. The women’s enactment of the text is the device used for a re-examination of Henry V’s significance in the context of the First World War.

This essay gives a fresh account of a pivotal moment in the events that led to the outbreak of the Iraq War in March 2003, when Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins addressed his troops – the Royal Irish Regiment – paraphrasing off-the-cuff the speech that Shakespeare’s Henry V gives to his men on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. In this essay, Collins reflects on the power of Shakespeare’s language to move not only his audiences in theatres around the world but also soldiers on the battlefield. He explains how important it is for a military leader to be able to inspire his troops into action, especially when the reasons for going to war and the complexities of a conflict like the Iraq War can prove problematic and divisive.

This interview with Nicholas Hytner concentrates on his 2003 production of Henry V at the National Theatre, which opened a few months after the US–UK coalition invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Hytner reflects on the production decisions that responded to the immediacy of the conflict and the strong public opposition to it witnessed in the historic 15 February protests. The interview considers whether theatre can influence public opinion during wartime and how our use and understanding of Shakespeare’s plays has changed over time and through different conflicts.

This essay explores how Laurence Olivier’s filming of the battle scenes of Henry V in neutral Eire during the Second World War was part of a broader plan by the British Ministry of Information (MoI) to influence the Irish people. Jack Beddington, of the MoI’s Film Division, worked with John Betjeman, then press attaché at the UK Representation in Eire, to facilitate Olivier’s journey to the Powerscourt estate in County Wicklow, which became a Shakespearean filmset. The essay shows that, in addition to the benefit of filming a medieval battle in a land devoid of modern warfare, the filming process itself was an ingenious way of getting around the Irish Censorship. The presence of so many filmmakers and the utilization of hundreds of Irish horses and horse riders, could not go unnoticed. Reporting of Olivier’s presence and speculation about aspects of the filming abounded, with multiple references in the Irish press – from the Irish Times to local papers – including reporting of the visit to the filmset by the key decision-maker on the island, Taoiseach Éamon de Valera. The essay demonstrates that, unlike other forms of propaganda, the making of Henry V played a key role in improving Anglo–Irish relations.

This chapter examines Shakespeare’s dramaturgical “cuing the past” through spoken directives to recall things preceding the play’s chronology. His ingenious staging of “the tug of memory” – grounded in traditional mnemotechnic oratorical tactics – elicits and guides the audience’s affective response to some specific aspect of a character’s backstory. Special attention is given to “invention” and “memory” from classical rhetoric (where the relationship of affect to emotion is shown to function analogously to that of invention to invented text), by way of illustrating how the appositive yet complementary tropes of “augmentation” and “abbreviation” in Merchant of Venice and Comedy of Errors, for example, can be used to unpack the rampant play of proverbs in Henry V (3.7). Shakespeare’s affective cueing of the past sets memory to work, tugging at what is to be recalled and yanking it center stage for all to see and then factor into their judgment of the character.

The coda considers the effect of the eighteen-year closure during the Interregnum on the commercial theater’s phenomenology of uncertainty. When Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant were granted patents to form theater companies by Charles II in 1660, they did not return to the practices of the earlier theatrical era, instead outfitting playhouses with the perspective sets and proscenium frames of court and Continental performance. The coda demonstrates that heroic drama, the first major genre to emerge under these new performance conditions, favored resolution rather than ambiguity. In John Dryden’s vision of the new genre, majestic spectacles that aimed to control spectators’ imaginations replaced the ambivalent metatheatricality of the earlier theater. The Restoration theater, the coda suggests, ultimately rejected the uncertainty that had defined theatrical experience from the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century.

In this coda, I demonstrate how the model of British national identity associated with Shakespeare could jar with other wartime configurations of national collectivity. I situate Laurence Olivier’s Henry V alongside two films made by the same studio— Nöel Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve and Carol Reed’s The Way Ahead—that develop their own models of national collectivity and social reform. From there, I show how the apparent ur-text of national unity, Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, jars with the late-war collectivist ethos in ways that Olivier has to compensate for through formal means. If, as the wartime politician and future prime minister Anthony Eden said, we see “our history … enacted” in Shakespeare, that history proves to be at odds with the visions of the postwar future on display in both In Which We Serve and The Way Ahead

Numerous Elizabethan philosophical and theological treatises deplored the duplicity, waywardness, and treachery of the imagination. Even Spenser participated in this, filling the chamber of Phantastes with freaks, monsters, and dangerous deceptions. Yet in the new commercial playhouses, from the late 1580s onwards, audiences were increasingly exhorted to ‘imagine’ or ‘suppose’, in a type of speech that we can dub the ‘imagine’ chorus. Originally a device to cover time and space in history plays and travel plays, the ‘imagine’ chorus began to be used not only to conjure unseen spectacles in the mind, but also to celebrate the powers of the imagination. This essay argues that it arose from the unprecedented experience of collective imagining in the new playhouses, and produced new thinking about the imagination as a magical and exhilarating creative force, as explored with particular sophistication by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V.

This chapter focuses upon the ways in which Shakespeare’s play not only engages with historical accounts of Henry V, but the way in which it probes the status and function of violence in the consolidation of a dynasty and the political redemption of a kingdom. As this discussion unfolds, it also become apparent how the investment in violence may not only constitute a deliberate attempt to forge group affiliation, but may also provide markers for gendered identity, political engagement and spiritual allegiance. Shakespeare’s play clearly interrogates the stunted concept of Bolingbroke’s government which Henry V has inherited, questions whether we should in fact demonise those (like Falstaff) who have refused in the past to participate in the Lancastrian political project, and continues to query in a most urgent manner how violence may be legitimised in the public exercise of nation-building.

In his history plays, Shakespeare shows how the hierarchical shame- and honor-based political system called monarchy leads to an endless cycle of violence. But he also shows us through the character of Falstaff and his famous speech about honor how debunking or satirizing honor has no effect on honor- and shame-driven personalities. In the context of current US politics, this can explain the inability of the two sides to hear one another. Henry V, often celebrated as a national hero, becomes a killing machine when he ascends to power, pursuing wars that are as futile as they are bloody. In contrast, Henry VI, the exception that proves the rule, adheres to the guilt ethic of Christianity, which renders him powerless to protect himself from the violence generated by the shame culture in which he lived. Richard III shows the power of shame and humiliation to stimulate violence on a scale that ultimately consumes him as well.

Shakespeare’s canon includes many military figures, but arguably none is more successful than Henry V. In the play, the key to success is shown to lie in the king’s ability to instrumentalize the vehement emotions necessary to wage war. Shakespeare presents anger in Aristotelian terms as a hierarchical emotion reserved for elite men tasked with military leadership. The king’s deft use of anger demonstrates his self-discipline from his decision to invade France until his overwhelming victory there. This self-discipline distinguishes him from the quarrelsome soldiers (like the choleric Fluellen) who serve under him. The efficacy of Henry’s anger becomes evident when juxtaposed with the contrast in 1 Henry IV between his father’s ineffectual coldness and the reckless tempestuousness of Hotspur. In Henry V, the cool performance of hot emotions makes Henry a modern man of wrath.

Taking its lead from a famous scene in 2 Henry IV and drawing upon the latest historical scholarship, this chapter surveys the modernization of England’s military capacity during the reign of Elizabeth I. By contrast with the success of England’s naval revival, the parallel effort to overhaul the antiquated county militia system and to create armies for service abroad achieved only partial success. While bows and bills were gradually replaced by guns and pikes and a proportion of each county’s militia was formed into “trained bands,” the sheer scale of the effort meant that the modernization of England’s military capacity on land always remained a frustratingly incomplete endeavor. Even so, Elizabeth’s privy council and the lord lieutenants of the counties made greater progress in this effort than has typically been recognized and managed to sustain war on multiple fronts over a period of more than twenty years.