Jeremy Irons on the Henrys Shakespeare Uncovered

More than 400 years ago, at the height of his powers,

William Shakespeare sat down to write three plays for his company.

These plays tell a story that still resonates today -

a story of fathers and sons, friendship and betrayal,

rebellion, insurgency, and war.

It's a story about a king who stole the crown

and is tormented by his guilt.

It's about his son, a feckless young Prince

who is forced to grow up and face his destiny.

Then, on succeeding to the throne,

the new young king takes his country to war.

He becomes the greatest warrior king in English history.

Cry God for Harry, England...

and St George!

It's a story of people facing an uncertain future

and of a country searching for a new sense of patriotic identity.

But, Shakespeare being Shakespeare,

these plays are also sceptical and ambiguous,

and somehow extraordinarily modern.

In 1599, William Shakespeare's company

had a problem that some of us might sympathise with.

Their landlord refused to extend the lease

of the site where their theatre stood.

Their theatre was imaginatively called The Theatre,

and it was in Curtain Road - at that time some way north of London.

But the actors owned The Theatre, because they'd built it themselves.

So, when their landlord was away, they dismantled The Theatre

and carried it, piece by piece, across the Thames

and rebuilt it, rather like a giant kit,

on the south bank of the river.

The newly rebuilt theatre was called The Globe,

and, by all accounts, the first play to be performed here was Henry V.

TRUMPETED FANFARE

Not far from the original site of Shakespeare's reassembled Globe

is this modern replica.

PERIOD MUSIC

This Oscar-winning British film of Henry V

was made at the height of the Second World War,

partly as a piece of inspiring propaganda.

It was directed by and starred a man with a legitimate claim

to be the greatest Shakespearean actor of his age -

Laurence Olivier.

The film opens as if the play were being performed

in Shakespeare's newly rebuilt Globe Theatre

at the turn of the 17th century.

But the story of this King Henry starts almost three plays earlier,

with Shakespeare's Richard II.

It tells about how Henry Bolingbroke - Henry IV, to be -

stole the crown from Richard and took over the throne of England.

Then Shakespeare took two plays to tell the story of Henry IV,

before, finally, he could get to Henry V.

But why write all these history plays, anyway?

Well, the most obvious answer is that they were good box office.

History plays were the big hit shows of the 1590s.

The Shakespearean stage is the first moment

when big questions of politics, social structure, national identity,

are explored in public for a socially diverse audience.

If you try to sort of think about what it was like to be

an ordinary Londoner in Shakespeare's lifetime.

How did you get your news?

All the stuff we get from the television, the internet, newspapers.

There were two places where people gathered together

and matters of great concern, public concern, were explored.

One, of course, was the Church, but obviously what you're getting

in a sermon is very much the party line.

But then the second place where people gather together

is the theatre, and there, of course,

there is much less state control.

It's a really exciting, dangerous forum.

It was in this dangerous forum that Shakespeare presented his new plays.

But telling the story of a badly behaved Prince called Hal

and of his father, King Henry,

and giving them both only a dubious claim to the throne,

was a risky choice.

He began at the beginning, with Henry IV Parts One and Two.

I've just been playing that character of Henry IV

in a new film of the plays.

But I wonder what it would have been like

to have told that story on a stage like this.

Shall we be merry?

# Take no scorn to wear the horn

# It was the crest when you were bore

# Your father's father wore it

# And your father wore it, too

# Hal-an-tow!

# Jolly-rum-ba-low!

# We were up

# Long before the day-o... #

Henry IV Part One is one of the greatest plays

Shakespeare ever writes.

Because I think it's got so much for the actors,

so much for the audience.

# For summer is a-coming in

# And winter's gone away-O!... #

It's a play that has comedy in it, it has tragedy in it.

There's almost nothing Shakespeare puts in

every other play that doesn't find

some trace element in Henry IV Part One.

Lay thine ear close to the ground and list if thou canst hear the tread of travellers!

Not to mention the great part that is Falstaff.

Have you any levers to lift me up again, being down?

LAUGHTER

You don't have two really know very much about English history

to care deeply about what is going on in that play.

Though I be but Prince of Wales, yet I am the king of courtesy!

It's about a young man who is a prince,

but who is clearly disaffected from the role

he's being asked to play, and finally having that role

thrust upon him in a way that is inescapable for him.

I will redeem all this on Percy's head,

and in the closing of some glorious day be bold to tell you that

I am your son!

I think it is an absolutely magnificent play.

And here you do get a real sense of how the history plays

worked for Shakespeare's audience.

They're carnival plays, those plays.

They're festive and they're quite wild and quite irreverent,

and that carnival atmosphere is a given here at The Globe.

So stuff like Falstaff and the Boar's Head scenes, they just erupt,

because the audience goes wild for Falstaff.

If I tell thee a lie,

spit in my face...

LAUGHTER

..call me horse.

LAUGHTER

And you get that, which is great,

and then when you go on to the epic scale of it,

and the battles and the rebellion and the movement around the country,

this theatre does epic very well, as well.

The most obvious thing here, and the given thing here is that the audience are lit,

by the sun in the afternoon, in the evening we light the audience again.

And then you look into the eyes of the audience,

so they're not an inky blackness that you stare out into.

You're looking out at a carpet of 600 faces.

It's wonderful, this is what Shakespeare wrote for.

That's what he had in his head as he was writing these plays,

this sort of place.

Ahhhh! Welcome, Jack!!!

And so, it's no wonder that his plays could work here...

Where hast thou been!!!

..in a way like they couldn't work anywhere else,

on a screen or in a conventional proscenium theatre.

LAUGHTER

The two Henry IV plays have always been popular

with critics and audiences alike.

Yet, curiously, they've seldom made it into the big screen.

Some stage productions, like The Globe's, have been filmed,

and occasionally the plays have been produced especially for television.

This is a story about a man who deposed the King,

and about a man who has a son, the Prince of Wales, Prince Hal,

who will one day, hopefully, be a king.

So, it's a story about a royal family,

but with the emphasis rather more on family than it is on Royal.

I know not whether God will have it so,

for some displeasing service I have done,

that, in his secret doom, out of my blood

he'll breed revengement and a scourge for me.

At the centre of the play is the story of a father and son.

A son who seems not to live up to the expectations of his father.

Henry may only have had a tenuous claim to the throne,

but at least he behaves like a king,

and is tormented by the fact that his son doesn't.

Thou has lost thy princely privilege with vile participation!

The father and son battle of expectation,

of disappointment, of longing, of love

but also of hatred,

is something that plays out over both parts of Henry IV.

The longing on the part of the King for a different kind of son,

the son's simultaneous rebellion.

You shall not find it so.

One thing Shakespeare does

to throw the father-son relationship into sharper relief

is to provide the King with an alternative son,

a character - Harry Hotspur - who appears

to have all the qualities that the King wishes his own son -

also a Hal - had.

Come, Kate. Though art perfect in lying down.

Hotspur represents the old-fashioned virtues of honour,

courage and no-nonsense.

Hotspur's family, the Percys, had supported Henry

when he deposed Richard II and, initially, Henry was popular.

But there was growing discontent in the kingdom.

In fact, Hotspur was already plotting a rebellion against him.

So it's particularly ironic that, at the beginning of the play,

Henry explores the possibility that Hal and Hotspur

might have been swapped as babies.

O, that it could be proved that some night-tripping fairy

had in cradle-clothes exchanged our children where they lay.

Then would I have his Harry...

and he mine.

And Shakespeare wasn't content with just inventing

an alternative son for the King.

He also created an alternative father for the son, for Hal -

the character of Sir John Falstaff.

And much of what is extraordinary about this play

centres around that character.

Falstaff maybe a knight, but basically

he's little more than a womaniser, a thief, a drunk, and a reprobate.

We love antiheroes, rogues,

people on the margins, people who disobey the rules.

It's interesting that Falstaff is fat, isn't it?

That's a decision Shakespeare makes as a writer

that Falstaff is going to be fat.

How long is't ago, Jack, since thou saw thine own knee?

What is it about fat people, what do they represent?

Well, in some senses they seem to represent

laziness, gluttony, but they often also represent life.

I shall think the better of myself and thee during my life;

I for a valiant lion, thou for a true prince.

But, by the Lord, lads, I'm glad you have the money.

Living life to the full.

You eat, you drink, you laugh -

those are the sorts of things that the fatness of Falstaff can evoke.

It's worth remembering that these are history plays,

based on real people.

Even Falstaff was based on a historical character,

Sir John Oldcastle, although Shakespeare's portrayal of him

caused such offence to his family that he had to change his name.

But where did he find these characters?

His major source

was one of the definitive history texts of the time

the Chronicle of English History by Raphael Hollinshed.

This text hoovers up

all of the available materials

to make a very distinctive narrative of the events.

So, Shakespeare's using an authentic and, for contemporaries,

a very highly regarded text.

A contemporary audience to any of the history plays that drew

from Holingshed would have been struck by their authenticity.

So, it's a history play, but history can be bent to dramatic purpose.

In London, at Ealing Studios,

new film versions of the two Henry IV plays are in production.

They're being made by a man who's directed

many of Shakespeare's plays, both on stage and on screen -

Richard Eyre.

I think if you could say that Shakespeare was obsessed by anything,

it would be by the relationships of father and son.

What Shakespeare does brilliantly, and in a symphonic way,

over the two plays is follow the theme of father and son

in many different directions.

Action!

In this new version, King Henry's son, Prince Hal,

is being played by Tom Hiddleston.

Cut!

Like teenage sons everywhere,

Hal has little appetite for responsibility

and seems to delight in wilfully disregarding his father.

Henry IV is a man of furrowed brow, he's worried.

He's worried about the state of the kingdom,

and the insecurity of his position as king.

And he's desperate for Hal to step up and step into that silhouette

to be the man, to be the cunning man, the great warrior,

and Hal's not ready for that yet.

He wants to mess around in the pub.

Prince Hal has chosen a surrogate father in Falstaff.

Henry IV is all backbone and honour,

but no soft edges, and Falstaff is mostly soft edges with no backbone!

For rehearsal, and action!

Falstaff is being played by Simon Russell Beale.

His disregard for conventional values suits Hal perfectly,

but is Falstaff's almost paternal relationship with the young prince

as straightforward as it seems?

Does Falstaff love Hal? I'm not sure.

One's instinct is to say yes, you know, this gorgeous lad, this...

..marvellous young, energetic, clever man,

is spending time with a man on his way out.

But I'm not sure.

It's muddied by the fact that Falstaff keeps on going on about,

"When you're king, you'll do this for me.

"And when you're king, I can't wait for when you're king."

And you think, Falstaff's too much of a petty crook

not to be taking that seriously, that he's on to a winner

if he's best friends with the Prince of Wales.

It's very, very hard to think of any character who is

unalloyed good or unalloyed bad.

Oh, isn't Hal something of a hero, you know, a golden boy?

Actually, the more you get into it, you think he's a terrible shit.

I mean, he really does some dreadful things.

And then you have the sort of surrogate father, Falstaff,

who is a congenital liar, congenital drunk, and congenital thief.

So, there is no exemplary character.

There are always ambiguities.

I mean, if you say, "What is Shakespearean?"

everything that is Shakespearean is ambiguous.

Today they're about to film one of the play's most ambiguous

but dramatically important scenes.

It involves Prince Hal and Jack Falstaff at the Boar's Head pub.

While Hal is with his surrogate father,

a messenger arrives from his real father, the King,

to demand Hal's attendance at the Palace in the morning.

Falstaff says, tomorrow

you're going to get a right bollocking from your dad.

You should practice an answer. I'll play your father.

That's a great pub game!

Let's do an impression of my dad,

let's see who does the best impression.

Yes!

Hal's split loyalties between Falstaff and his father

are central to both plays.

Falstaff brings out the wayward and irresponsible side of Hal.

But Shakespeare knew that he needed to open up

another side of the young Prince's personality.

How does he solve that problem?

He solves it through a play within a play.

This fantastic scene, to my mind...

Come on, I'll say it - the greatest scene Shakespeare ever wrote -

this fantastic scene where they act out Prince Hal

returning to court,

being interviewed by his father.

It's an amazing piece of theatre, where you have Falstaff and Hal

playing the parts of King Henry IV and Hal.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

There is a virtuous man

whom I've often noted in thy company,

but I know not his name.

Falstaff, being Falstaff, doesn't play the game properly.

What manner of man, alike your Majesty?

A goodly, portly man...

Wearing a cushion and copper pot crown of a king,

he doesn't tell Hal to pull his royal socks up.

Rather, he instructs the young prince

to spend more time with a splendid fellow called...

-ALL:

-Falstaff!

And then I say, oh, right, let me do an impression of my father, and you play me.

Yaaay!

'Then there's the wonderful comic opportunity

'of having Falstaff pretending to be Hal,

'and then you see their mutual affection.'

This moment is actually the turning point of the whole scene,

possibly the play.

Well, here am I set.

And here I stand.

The roles are now reversed, with Hal playing the King.

Whether aware of it or not, Hal's perspective begins to change.

Play-acting the King, he's going to tell Hal,

now played by Falstaff, to banish his fat friend.

There is a devil haunts thee

in the likeness of an old, fat man...

'And at the end of that game there is a chilling premonition'

that runs down his spine that takes him by surprise.

No, my good lord,

banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins, but...

..for sweet Jack Falstaff,

kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff,

valiant Jack Falstaff,

and therefore the more valiant, being, as he is,

old Jack Falstaff...

...banish plump Jack, and...

..banish all the world.

I do.

I will.

Cut!

If you know the play well, if you love the play, you can't watch it with a dry eye.

It's also technically so brilliant, because he's saying "I do"

within the context of the play within the play, acting the part.

But then, in that instant pause

and the shift of the verb tense, "I will",

he's speaking not within the play within the play, but as himself.

He's giving Falstaff warning that the moment will come.

Depose me?

CHEERING

The "I do, I will" scene raises the whole question

of Hal's real character throughout the plays,

and that can be interpreted in many different ways.

The question that lingers about Hal

is whether he has this all plotted out from the very beginning,

whether he has a master plan,

and the master plan is, "OK, I'm going to lark about for a while.

"I'm going to look really, pretty terrible

"so that when I eventually become King,

"even if I make a botch of it, I'll still exceed expectations."

Oh, my sweet Harry!

I think Hal doesn't have any of it planned out.

He just has an idea of how he wants his life to go.

Give my roan horse a drench.

I think it's just like he's a young guy,

who knows that the fun will have to end one day.

But, for the time being, let's have fun.

Whatever Hals' motivation - and, of course, it remains ambiguous -

he does visit the Palace in the morning to face

his real father's disapproval.

For all the world, even as I was then is Percy now.

He hath more worthy interest to the state than thou,

the shadow of succession.

For of no right, nor colour like to right,

he doth fill fields with harness in the realm...

'In many ways, Henry's a very lonely figure at the centre of this play,

'weighed down by the responsibility of the kingdom,'

and somehow excluded from the warmth of the relationship

he suspects his son has with Falstaff.

And that feeling of exclusion, I think,

only adds to his feeling of melancholy and loneliness.

In time, Henry will come to believe his son

can and will live up to his expectations.

But, meanwhile, he must deal with the consequences

of how he came to be King.

Threading through both parts of Henry IV is the explicit,

tortured guilt of the King, who has deposed the previous king,

who has usurped the throne.

So, he becomes more and more suspicious

of the people who've helped him to become King,

and then more and more paranoid,

because he's more and more certain that they are plotting against him,

and then, of course, they do plot against him.

By the Lord, our plot is a good plot as ever was laid.

Our friends true and constant.

A good plot, good friends and full of expectation.

As happened historically,

Henry gradually loses the support of the very men

who had helped him deposed Richard,

and now they plan to depose him.

Shakespeare takes that historical fact and then weaves in

the dramatic irony that it will be Harry Percy -

Hotspur, the man whom Henry once wished for as a son -

who will lead the rebel army against him.

The battle that inexorably follows

will take place on the outskirts of Shrewsbury.

Henry spent the night before the battle here,

at this Augustinian Abbey of Haughmond,

but before the battle, Henry wanted to negotiate,

if possible, a settlement, so that they wouldn't have to fight,

because he knew that, if they did, it would be carnage.

But the negotiations fail,

and the next day Shakespeare brings together

all his main protagonists Henry and the Prince,

and Hotspur and Falstaff,

in perhaps the defining moment of the drama.

It's the morning of the battle.

Falstaff and Prince Hal will be fighting,

together with the King, against the rebel forces.

But Shakespeare undermines our moral certainty

by looking at the impending conflict

from Falstaff's utterly subversive point of view.

He knows he's a wastrel, he knows he's a cheat.

He might be morally dubious,

but certainly his analysis of lots of situations

are absolutely accurate, including his own.

'Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No.

'Or take away the grief of a wound? No.'

And he knows about honour.

'What is in that word, honour? What is that honour?'

'Air.

'A trim reckoning!

'Who hath it? He that died on Wednesday.

'Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No.

'Tis insensible, then.

'Yea, to the dead.

'But will it not live with the living?

'No.'

He's absolutely right about what he says about honour,

which is that it's just a word, it's just air, it means nothing,

it allows people to behave in despicable ways

and also to risk their own lives

for no other reason than their own pride.

So it's an angry speech.

So, it's with Falstaff's words ringing in our ears

that Shakespeare's Battle of Shrewsbury begins.

CHARGING CRIES

We filmed this battle in the depths of the snowy winter of 2012,

a few miles west of London in Rickmansworth.

-Cut!

-And we've cut! we've cut!

Well done, people, back to number ones, please, nice and steady.

It was actually fought a few miles north of Shrewsbury

in the high summer of 1403.

This is the actual site of the Battle of Shrewsbury,

with Hotspur and the rebel forces on the hill behind me

and the King's forces ranged below.

And it was here that Hal showed Henry IV - his father, me -

the first signs of the hero he was to become.

And it's also an example of truth being even stranger than fiction,

because when Hal fought in this battle,

he was just 16 years old.

But, as far as Shakespeare was concerned,

the important fact wasn't Hal's age,

it was that father and son were finally united in a cause

that would begin to rebuild their relationship.

The Prince would be fighting with the King against a common foe -

the rebel army of Harry Hotspur.

Hal's experience alongside his father at the Battle of Shrewsbury

changes who Hal is.

His proximity to his father as a leader of an army

alters his moral compass.

He sees Falstaff in a different light.

he sees Falstaff less as a jolly fat man

and more as a coward and a liar.

In the play - and again, this is Shakespeare's invention -

it is Hal who meets Hotspur face-to-face.

Henry's real son, the loyal Prince,

against his idealised notion of a son, now turned rebel - Hotspur.

Argh!

And then we're into the fight and it's a great mediaeval battle.

Hal's defeat of Hotspur is part of Hal's inheritance

of that martial valour.

By defeating this great warrior,

Hal assumes all of that power and courage and might.

You can see he's already beginning to change.

His shoulders are broadening, not just physically but metaphorically.

He's becoming a man.

Shakespeare chose to be historically inaccurate

in order to heighten the dramatic power of his play.

And called mine "Percy," his "Plantagenet"!

Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.

To have the King compare Hal to Hotspur as a potential son,

and to make them comparable military arrivals,

Shakespeare had to make them the same age,

but he knew perfectly well from his history books

that Hotspur was about 30 years older than Hal.

The notion that Shakespeare has built,

if you like, the dramatic force of his play on a historical falsity

sometimes is very anxious-making for historians today,

but for his own times, powerfully plausible.

This is his slight adjustment for dramatic purposes,

but for important, sort of, dramatic purpose -

he's making a point about those characters.

BELL TOLLS

With the death of Hotspur and thousands more,

King Henry won the Battle of Shrewsbury.

This threatened civil war was over before it began.

After the battle, though he was triumphant militarily,

he also found himself emotionally shattered by the huge loss of life.

He was a deeply religious man.

And so he ordered this church to be built,

possibly on the site of the mass graves.

Shakespeare picks up on the King's shattered emotions, and from here on in,

the story is set against Henry's gradual disintegration.

Shakespeare now focuses on Henry as a man approaching the end of his life.

Rebellions against him continue,

his grip on the crown remains fragile

as he more and more obsesses about the fact

that he became King by deposing a King.

A crime against the law of Divine Right.

A crime against God himself.

I think it's very hard to imagine nowadays the sort of guilt he felt.

But that guilt, certainly one of the things it did was to stop sleeping.

And Shakespeare says...

gives him the lines...

How many thousand of my poorest subjects

Are at this hour asleep!

O sleep, O gentle sleep,

How have I frighted thee,

That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down

And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the shipboy's eyes, and rock his brains

Within the roar and surge of the unruly sea

And in the calmest and most stillest night,

Deny it to a king?

Then happy low...

..lie down!

Uneasy lies the head

that wears a crown.

Running through the Henry IV plays is a vein of poetic imagery...

of disease and decay.

It's disease and decay in the state,

but it's also in the King himself.

The King is sick, the state is sick - the two things go together.

And as the plays unfold, the King gets more and more sick.

As the second play in the trilogy reaches its climax,

the increasingly ill King collapses at Westminster Abbey,

and here, Shakespeare DOES follow the historical truth.

Henry was brought from the Abbey to this room.

'In the play, he asks what the room is called

nd is told that it is the Jerusalem Chamber.

To Henry, this is an oblique fulfilment of the prophecy that he would die in the Holy Land.

He says to his courtiers, "In that Jerusalem will Harry die."

And they laid him on a bed in front of this fire.

So this is where Henry spent the last few hours of his life

on the 20th March 1413.

And, if he was conscious,

then he probably noticed in the roof,

the letter R over and over again.

R for the man who built this room,

King Richard II, and the man who Henry had deposed

and whom, especially at this moment,

must have been lying very heavily on his conscience.

With his father's death, Prince Hal finally becomes Henry V,

and Shakespeare makes sure that his first act as King

and his last act in the play Henry IV Part Two

is the one that he hinted at earlier in Henry IV Part One.

Hal has said "I do" and he had said "I will"

so now he must turn his back on - and indeed banish - Jack Falstaff.

My king! My Jove!

I speak to thee, my heart!

I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.

So with the death of Henry IV, we finally get back to where we started -

Henry V. But we're only halfway through the tale.

And Henry V presented enormous problems to contemporary 16th-century theatre,

because apart from its depictions of battles, the locations leap around from England to Wales

to the beleaguered palaces and cities and battlefields of northern France.

And how you do that in a theatre like this?

O for a Muse of fire,

That would ascend the brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act

And monarchs...

Shakespeare's answer is extraordinarily innovative.

He invents a character, the Chorus, who apologises for the problem

and appeals directly to the audience to use their imagination

and suspend their disbelief.

But pardon, and gentles all,

The flat unraised spirits that have dared

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object.

Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France?

Or may we cram Within this wooden O

the very casques That did fright the air at Agincourt?

Probably, it was the first production they did

in the Globe in 1599.

Shakespeare was at a crisis in his career.

He'd come into a new theatre,

he wanted to write in a new way,

and that invitation of the Chorus to use your imagination...

and to "piece out our imperfections with your mind"

is essential to what the Globe is.

Think when we talk of horses, that you see them

Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth.

For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings.

And that's the nature of Shakespearean theatre

is what's defined by the Chorus is a sort of realism where you have to be truthful,

you have to be honest, but you come on and you say, "I am Hamlet."

And the audience goes, "OK."

-Yup.

-You know, "This is Denmark." "All right, I'll go with you on that."

And then you go wherever they want you to go,

led and steered completely by the actors and what's in your own head.

And that's central to Henry V.

And let us, ciphers to this great account,

On your imaginary forces work.

If the first two plays were about fathers and sons,

then in Henry V, Shakespeare shifts his attention

to the subject of how to be a good king.

Almost as soon as the play begins,

Henry sets off to France in pursuit of a claim to the French throne.

War will almost inevitably follow, so why do it?

Historically, for five centuries,

the English monarchs had very strong links with France.

There is no bar

To make against your highness' claim to France

But this...

The English owned large parts of what is now France,

so Henry's claim to the French throne was not completely absurd,

but it was complicated.

The Archbishop of Canterbury's justification

of Henry's claims the French throne

once again reveals

the playwright at work

or, in this case, avoiding work.

He took almost the entire text of the speech from the Holinshed Chronicles.

No woman shall succeed in Salic land.

In Shakespeare, "No woman shall succeed in Salic land,"

and then we have...

Holinshed - "Into the Salic land let not women succeed."

Shakespeare...

Which Salic land the French unjustly gloze to be the realm of France.

Holinshed...

"Which the French glossers expound to be the realm of France."

So, virtually identical.

Yet their own authors faithfully affirm,

that the land Salic lies in Germany.

"Whereas yet their own authors affirm that the land Salic is in Germany."

It's the same stuff.

Charles the Great, having subdued the Saxons...

"When Charles the Great had overcome the Saxons..."

You know, if it's an undergraduate essay,

there would be charges of plagiarism because it's pretty much identical.

So, we know where Shakespeare got this material from,

but what we can't be sure of is what he thought of it.

Blithild...

LAUGHTER

The scene's obviously comic potential does beg that question,

"Did Shakespeare by this justification for war?"

It is, of course, once again, deliberately ambiguous.

May I with right and conscience make this claim?

The sin upon my head, dread sovereign!

It seems with every new production of the play has to come up with

its own answers.

At a time when conflict

and wars around the world remain front page news,

the latest to examine the relevance of Shakespeare's Henry V

is the director of a new film of the play, Thea Sharrock.

Well, it's funny lots of people have said to me,

"Oh, so you're doing Henry V - are you doing pro-war or anti-war?"

As if those were the only two choices!

'I hope I'm not really doing either.

'I'm just trying to tell the story that war happens all the time'

and it's very easy to lose touch with the individuals within it.

'This is a play about a young man

'who has been made king and who, literally,'

learns how to be a king in front of our eyes

during the course of the play, during the course of the film.

Tom Hiddleston, Prince Hal in the Henry IV films

now inherits the crown and becomes Henry V.

This is a play about leadership in wartime

and the challenges facing a new King.

Tom will have to get to grips with

some of the most famous speeches Shakespeare ever wrote,

and in the making of this film, he was asked to do that

on the very first day.

Day one, slate one, take one.

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends."

I couldn't believe it. I said to the producers, "Are you joking?!"

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!

Or close the wall up with our English dead!

'It was almost a rallying cry to myself. Or to the whole unit.'

If any of you were in any doubt of the project that we are engaged in,

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.

The game's afoot, follow your spirit and upon this charge,

Cry, "God for Harry, England, and St George!"

These scenes tell the story of Henry's army bogged down

in a siege against the French town of Harfleur.

Henry's campaign is not going well and many of his soldiers

have no great appetite for the fight.

Thea Sharrock and Tom Hiddleston are following in famous footsteps

as their film will inevitably be compared

with two of the most celebrated adaptations of Shakespeare.

Not only Laurence Olivier's wartime classic,

which he both directed and starred in,

but also Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film that he too directed and starred in.

I hope what's exciting about this is that Henry is not directing himself,

and my Henry is being directed by a woman -

I can't tell you what it would be like if I were a man as I have no idea!

I hope that we got to the highs and lows of emotion

that we believe this character was capable of.

When it comes to those highs and lows,

Shakespeare offers no more than the text.

There are no lengthy stage directions.

Directors, actors and scholars have to decide for themselves

what kind of a king Shakespeare meant Henry V to be.

Well, he's not Hal any more, he's Henry. But he's learning on the job

and he, very quickly, is put into extreme circumstances,

and it makes him behave in a certain way, and he's no angel,

I think he get things wrong,

I think he says some terrible things along the way.

There are some really brutal moments in that play.

In the scene where...

At the siege of Harfleur, there's an extraordinary threat that he makes.

How yet resolves the governor of the town?

To our best mercy give yourselves. Or like to men proud of destruction,

defy us to our worst.

For, as I am a soldier, a name that in my thoughts becomes me best,

if I begin the battery once again, I will not leave

the half-achieved Harfleur till in her ashes she lie buried.

This is a truly brutal speech and it's entirely Shakespeare's invention.

There's nothing in Holinshed to justify it.

Why, in a moment, look to see the blind

and bloody soldier with foul hand

defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters.

Your fathers taken by the silver beards,

and their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls.

Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,

while the mad mothers with their howls confused to break the clouds.

Effectively, he says,

"You better surrender otherwise my men will come in

"and rape your wives and mutilate your babies".

While Henry gives the speech of Harfleur to the governor,

I think he shocks himself with what he says.

What say you? Will you yield and this avoid?

Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroyed?

And that will reverberate with him.

If not in the moment, but you can bet your bottom dollar,

it has an effect on him thereafter, for sure.

Our expectation has this day an end.

'If Henry V is about anything it's about the nature of war.'

It's all very well to celebrate and revere homecoming heroes,

but Shakespeare is brave enough, and we want him to be brave enough,

about displaying how those wars are won.

This speech presented Laurence Olivier with a major problem

when he filmed the play at the height of the Second World War.

So how would he handle it?

What Henry is threatening would hardly go down well in 1944.

So what Sir Laurence decided to do was cut it,

or at least cut 41 of the 43 lines.

'How yet resolves the governor of the town?'

This is the latest parle we will admit.

Our expectation hath this day an end...

After a 35-day siege, Henry did take the town of Harfleur

without having to carry out his savage threat.

Depleted and exhausted, Henry's army was reluctant to fight.

But the French Army cut off their retreat near the River Somme,

seemingly determined to provoke a battle

near a town called Agincourt.

There's an extraordinary scene

the night before the battle

where the King goes in disguise among his men

and they debate about what it means to fight for your king,

to die for your country.

It brings King Harry up short.

It's extraordinarily powerful.

Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the King's company.

His cause being just and his quarrel honourable.

That's more than we know.

Ay, or more than we should seek after.

'That scene at the end of Henry V just before the Battle of Agincourt

'is one of the most remarkable scenes'

that Shakespeare ever scripted,

partly because the words of the common soldiers

are so compelling and powerful.

But if the cause be not good, the King himself

hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads,

chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day

and cry all "We died at...such a place".

But he doesn't take it in, he can't quite take it in.

He has to listen and yet not listen.

I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle.

It's a brilliant moment of a certain kind of

Shakespearean vision of leadership -

the leadership that involves being able to put off your kingly crown

and move among the common people and listen,

but not enough to make him freeze in the face of the decisions he'll make.

Decisions that, for all he knows, may lead them all to their deaths.

The play may be more than 400 years old,

but in their home barracks,

British combat soldiers preparing to return to Afghanistan

are watching that scene from Henry V,

and for them, it's familiar territory.

You would actually recognise that, definitely.

You will have that sit down and talk between yourselves before you go out,

and there's definitely the fear there before certain ops.

Wars change but the people don't change a lot.

So the fear you just saw is the same, and the confidence as well.

Obviously, war's a dangerous place to be in.

Its a recognisable situation.

At a basic leadership level you'd a have a potter around before a battle,

have a chat with the blokes,

and even if you were doomed, you'd pretend you weren't.

On the morning of the battle in October 1415,

Henry did think that there was a very good chance

that he and his outnumbered army were doomed,

so Shakespeare provided him with one of the greatest speeches

he ever wrote.

And the extraordinary thing is that in Shakespeare's source book,

we can find the very words that inspired him to write that speech.

"It is said that as he heard one of the host utter his wish

"to another thus, I would to God there were with us now

"so many good soldiers as are at this hour within England!"

The king answered, "I would not wish a man more than I have.

"We are indeed, in comparison to the enemy, but a few,

"but we shall speed well enough."

And out of this source material, Shakespeare wove pure magic.

Oh, that we now had here

but one ten thousand of those men in England that do not work today.

What's he that wishes so?

If we are marked to die, we are enough

to do our country loss. And if to live, the fewer men,

the greater share of honour.

God's will, I pray thee wish not one man more.

Henry V is a play about leadership

and what it means to be a great leader and in 2012,

we are very cynical about leadership, it seems to me.

And I certainly am part of a generation of people, I think,

who don't trust rhetoric.

This day is called the feast of Crispian.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a tip-toe

when the day is named, and rouse him in the name of Crispian.

And if you look at what the speech means, all it means

is that it appeals to basic courage which is very old-fashioned.

He that shall see this day, and live old age,

will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

and say, "Tomorrow is Saint Crispian."

Many, many actors, Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh included,

have decided or chosen to do it in front of the whole army.

It's a big speech for the whole army.

This story shall the good man teach his son.

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,

from this day to the ending of the world.

But we in it, shall be remember'd.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

'Thea Sharrock and I decided to do it to a small group of people

'for the band of brothers.'

Wouldn't it be great if we had more men in our army? You know what?

We don't need those men in our army. Why?

Because it is a brave and noble thing to die standing up for your country.

We few.

We happy few.

We band of brothers.

For he today that sheds his blood with me

shall be my brother.

Be he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition.

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

shall think themselves accursed they were not here.

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

that fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

This is the actual site of the Battle of Agincourt.

The English with their much smaller army was lined up on the horizon

facing the French, vastly outnumbered,

and it was clear that, whatever was going to happen,

it was going to be either a triumph or a disaster,

there were no other options.

The Battle of Agincourt was extraordinary

for a variety of reasons.

The bloody effectiveness of the English archers, tactical blunders

by the French, the combination of heavy armour and thick mud.

Thousands died, cut down,

crushed or drowned in the mud beneath their fallen comrades.

And against all the odds, Henry was triumphant.

At the end of the battle, Henry came to about this spot and turned,

and asked what's the name of that church and they said "Agincourt",

and he said "Well, every battle must have a name and we shall call this the Battle of Agincourt".

As part of the peace treaty with France,

Henry married the king's daughter

and was declared heir to the French throne.

Over the plays of Henry IV and Henry V, Shakespeare has told the story

of two great English Kings.

In a simple reading, he enshrined a triumphant

and patriotic view of English history that is cherished today.

But, Shakespeare being Shakespeare, nothing is simple.

His re-imagination of history also provides layer upon layer of ambiguity, subversion and doubt.

To die for one's country is, of course, an honourable death,

but Shakespeare clearly had his doubts about honour.

The battles may be won but he doesn't flinch from revealing

the horror and brutality of war.

Ordinary people with little to gain and everything to lose

often lose everything as they pay the blood price for the ambitions

of their kings.

And even in the most honourable of causes,

great leaders can never be certain what the consequences

of their actions will actually be.

As the final words of the play make clear,

Henry is dead by the time he is 35 and all of his achievements

were lost by the end of his son's reign.

Henry VI, in infant bands crown'd 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.

Isn't this at the heart of what Shakespeare has been saying?

So, as I walk here in northern France, not far from Agincourt,

more than 400 years after these plays were written,

I can't help wondering, "Have we learned anything?"

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