28 November, 1595 - Harry V

Here's what the Admiral's Men performed at the Rose playhouse on this day, 424 years ago...

Henslowe writes: y^e 28 of novmbȝ 1595 ... ne ... R at harey the v ... iij^ll vj^s 

In modern English: 28^th November, 1595 ... New ... Received at Harry V ... £3 and 6 shillings

King Henry V, posthumous portrait
(late 16th or early 17th century)

Today, the Admiral's Men premiered a new play! To judge from its title, it must have told the story of King Henry V, the youthful English monarch who, according to legend, gave up a dissolute lifestyle and led his country to victory against the French at the Battle of Agincourt before his untimely death.

Of course, readers and theatregoers today know this story from Shakespeare's famous trilogy, Henry IV, Parts One and Two and Henry V. But in 1595, those plays were still a couple of years in the future and would be performed by the Admiral's Men's main rivals. For the Rose audience, the story might instead have been remembered from an old play from the 1580s entitled The Famous Victories of Henry V, a text of which survives today.

Indeed, it's possible that Harry V was simply another name for The Famous Victories, if it had been obtained by the Admiral's Men to be revived now. But if so, it would have to have been in revised form, because Henslowe describes it as "new". The simpler explanation is that it was a brand new play on the same subject.

But for what it's worth, let's take a look at The Famous Victories to see one example of a non-Shakespearean play about Henry V.

If the play was The Famous Victories of Henry V

For anyone familiar with Shakespeare's three plays about Prince Henry's journey toward kingship, The Famous Victories feels like a high-speed tear, as it presents the same story in one very short play.

It begins with Prince Henry and his lowlife friends getting involved in a robbery (akin to 1 Henry IV, scene 3.1). One of Henry's friends is an aristocratic ne'er-do-well named Sir John Oldcastle, nicknamed 'Jockey'; Shakespeare would later transform this role into his glorious comic creation, Falstaff, but the Oldcastle of The Famous Victories is a much less interesting figure and appears only briefly; an acorn from which an oak will grow.

Prince Henry ends up in prison because he boxes the Lord Chief Justice's ear (this incident is mentioned in 2 Henry IV but not staged). "Zounds, masters," gasps Derick the clown, "here's ado when princes must go to prison!" But prison produces no repentance in the young renegade. Upon his release, Henry vows that when he is king, he will fire the Lord Chief Justice and allow highwaymen to go free. Oldcastle tells him, "We shall never have a merry world till the old king be dead."

But when the prince visits his sickly father, the old king tells him that "these thy doings will end thy father's days". The prince has an attack of conscience and promises to abandon his "vile and reprobate companions". Visiting him later, the Prince finds his father dead - as he thinks - and takes the crown; this results in some awkwardness because the king is not in fact dead yet, but the two of them have a bonding session and the father forgives the son; Shakespeare repeats the same sequence of events at the end of 2 Henry IV.

Shakespeare also expanded upon is a scene in which Henry acquires a new seriousness. Upon finally inheriting the crown he banishes his old friends, telling them, "your former life grieves me, and makes me to abandon and abolish your company forever".

The Battle of Agincourt illustrated in
the Chronique d'Enguerrand de Monstrelet (15th c.) 

We now move into the play's equivalent of Shakespeare's Henry V: Henry declares war on France and heads off to batttle, while comic characters behave disreputably in a subplot. On the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, the English are vastly outnumbered, and the French soldiers gloat that they are the hardier soldiers:

Why, take an Englishman out of his warm bed and his stale drink but one month, and alas, what will become of him? But give the Frenchman a radish root, and he will live with it all the days of his life.

Meanwhile, Henry gives a short but stirring speech (not a patch on Shakespeare's "feast of Crispin" speech, it must be said), and a stage direction simply reads "The Battle".

The English defeat the French against impossible odds. And then, just as in Act 5 of Shakespeare's Henry V, Henry woos the French princess Katherine in plain-speaking manner ("Tush, Kate! But tell me in plain terms, canst thou love the King of England? I cannot do as these countries do that spend half their time in wooing.") And the play thus ends with a royal wedding in the offing, again just as in Shakespeare's, but with considerably less poetry:

Henry V. Welcome, sweet Kate! But, my brother of France, what say you to it?
Charles VI. With all my heart I like it. But when shall be your wedding day?
Henry V. The first Sunday of the next month, God willing.

The end. If you would like to read The Famous Victories of Henry V, the best way to do so is via the modern-spelling edition contained in Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge's 1991 anthology The Oldcastle Controversy.

What we learn from this

This mysterious Harry V play reminds us that some of Shakespeare's plays should be thought of as parts of a wider theatrical conversation.   The Famous Victories had created a popular version of the Henry V legend and had turned the historical figure of Sir John Oldcastle one of Henry's disreputable friends. The real Oldcastle was nothing like this character - indeed, he was a Protestant heretic who was executed for leading a rebellion against Henry V and the church, and was regarded by Elizabethans as a martyr.

Shakespeare's Henry IV plays expanded - literally - upon the Oldcastle figure, turning him into a lovably corpulent and disgraceful old rogue. During the first performances of Part One, he was still called Oldcastle, but it seems that the martyr's descendants were offended by this portrayal of their venerable ancestor and complained, so Shakespeare changed the character's name to Falstaff, and included a line in the epilogue to Part Two stating that "Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man".

This theatrical conversation continued a few years later, in 1599, when the Rose staged a new pair of plays entitled The True and Honourable History of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle, which contained a more respectful version of his life and martyrdom, and firmly separating him from the fat knight that he had inspired.

What we don't know is where today's Harry V play fits into all this. Is it just another name for The Famous Victories? Was it an mere imitation of it? Or did it have some other kind of take on the legend? And what version of Sir John Oldcastle did it present?

Despite all these mysteries, one thing we do know is that today's premiere was very successful, producing a packed auditorium for the first time in a long while, and proving that the name of Henry V could draw excited crowds.

FURTHER READING

Harry V information

• Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, eds. The Oldcastle Controversy (Manchester University Press, 1991), 28 n.82
• Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company, 1594-1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 43
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 2012), entries 773 and 1012

Henslowe links

• Transcript of this page of the Diary (from W.W. Greg's 1904 edition)
• Facsimile of this page of the Diary (from the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project)

Comments?

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