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.
Which edition?
1Arden Shakespeare, Third Series
Ed. T. W. Craik · Bloomsbury
Craik is scrupulous, and refuses to decide for you whether Henry is a hero.
2Oxford World’s Classics
Ed. Gary Taylor · Oxford University Press
Taylor’s is the argumentative Henry V, and the better for it.
3The New Cambridge Shakespeare
Ed. Andrew Gurr · Cambridge University Press
Gurr on the playhouse: what the Chorus was apologising for, and why.
4Folger Shakespeare LibraryFirst read? Start here
Ed. Barbara Mowat & Paul Werstine · Simon & Schuster
The speeches you already know, with the awkward scenes left in.
Henry V on stage
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Henry V on screen
1Henry V (1944)
Film · dir. Laurence Olivier
2Henry V (1989)
Film · dir. Kenneth Branagh
3The Hollow Crown: Henry V (2012)
TV film · dir. Thea Sharrock
4The King (2019)
Film · dir. David Michôd · inspired by Henry V
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Reading Henry V this year?
Mark it in your record when you finish — one seat, kept for decades.