Shakespeare’s Henry V

Hal, now king, invades France; Agincourt follows. The play gave English culture its great war speeches — “Once more unto the breach”, “We few, we happy few” — but it is far cannier than a recruiting poster: a Chorus keeps apologizing for the theatre’s inadequacy, and the play keeps showing you the cost of the glory it stages.

Whether you read Henry as heroic ideal, calculating politician, or both at once is the play’s permanent argument, and productions have gone both ways for a century. Best read after the Henry IV plays, whose ghosts (one in particular) haunt it.

Henry V on screen