Henry V

"Well, they have always been my favourite Shakespeare plays and they are about a family dynasty and the son of the king who is considered too irresponsible to rule but he, Hal, turns it around and becomes king himself and reverses everyone’s low expectations of him. Like Prince Hal, Bush did go from nothing, from having been written off by his family, to doing what nobody in the family thought he was capable of. But then in Henry V, when he is king, he is the most militaristic and the most religious king of all Shakespeare’s kings. It is a patriotic play and he is a triumphant leader but he drains the country’s resources with war. In reality Henry V was a much less successful king than he is Shakespeare’s play. There is a wonderful scene in Henry IV Part I where Hal picks up his father’s crown and is contemplating it. The whole sequence is full of incredible resonances. I suppose the plays are about the problems of dynastic power. William Hazlitt writes, in his commentary on the plays: “Henry V is a very favourite monarch with the English nation, and he appears to have been also a favourite with Shakespeare, who labours hard to apologize for the actions of the king, by showing us the character of the man, as ‘the king of good fellows’. He scarcely deserves this honour. He was fond of war and low company; we know little else of him. He was careless, dissolute, and ambitious, idle, or doing mischief. In private, he seemed to have no idea of the common decencies of life, which he subjected to a kind of regal licence; in public affairs, he seemed to have no idea of any rule of right or wrong, but brute force, glossed over with a little religious hypocrisy and archiepiscopal advice.”"