Gone Medieval - Henry IV & Henry V: Shakespeare's Version

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Did Shakespeare teach us about England's greatest kings, or fabricate its greatest historical myths? How much of what you think you know about Henry IV and Henry V is actually true?Shakespeare's history plays continue to define our understanding of medieval England, the Plantagenets, the Hundred Years' War, and the rise and fall of England's warrior kings.But Dr. Eleanor Janega separates history from drama with Professor Emma Smith to reveal how Shakespeare transformed Prince Hal from a wayward youth into England's greatest warrior king, invented the legendary Falstaff, and immortalised Agincourt with the stirring "Band of Brothers" speech.MORE:The Battle of AgincourtListen on AppleListen on SpotifyThe Murder of Henry VIListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcastHistory Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianica and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. we delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here.

If I was to ask you what you know about the Plantagenet Kings, what would you answer? Maybe it's that Richard III was some sort of hunchbacked monster cackling his way to the throne over a pile of bodies. Maybe it's that Henry V was a motivational speaker on the eve of the Battle of All Battles. Perhaps it is that when he was known as Prince Howell, he spent his youth merrymaking with Falstaff in the taverns of Cross London, before magically transforming into a great warrior monarch. The fact is that a lot of what we think we know about these kings doesn't come from the chronicles or court records or battlefathers. dispatches. It comes from William Shakespeare.

It probably doesn't need an introduction, to be fair. Let's be clear. Shakespeare was not scripting documentaries. What he was doing was turning a century of messy, complicated, blood-soaked English history into probably the most dazzling plays ever written. And look, we all know that drama needs villains. It needs hearing. It needs the speeches and betrayals, comic relief, shocking deaths, and ideally, someone shouting about a horse.

So, Shakespeare made stuff up, compressed timelines and mashed and mashed real-life characters together. He bolstered some reputations and character-assinated others. And he cheerfully bent the facts whenever the drama demanded it. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Wilf. Shakespeare also had the added joy of writing under the Tudors, using sources that were already stuffed with Tudor propaganda. That meant the Plantagenets, and especially the Yorkists, didn't always get a great deal. While some were turned into legend, others had their reputations absolutely trashed for centuries. Over the next two episodes of Gone Medieval,

Matt Lewis and I will be looking at the Plantagenet Kings through the lens of William Shakespeare. Matt will be exploring the Richards. Can't possibly say why. And today, I'm getting to grip with Shakespeare's Henry's, numbers four, five, and six, to be precise. To find out where history ends and Shakespeare begins, we're joined by the brilliant Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hartford College, Oxford. There is no one better to have with us to explore what the bard got right, what he made up, and whose good name he managed to demolish along the way.

Emma, welcome to God Medieval. Thank you. We have a lot to get through today, as per usual. I only like to bring people on if they're going to have the most difficult conversation of their lives, condensing things down. But I suppose a good place to begin would be talking about. the sequence of the Plantagenet plays that Shakespeare has written. We've got Richard the 2nd, Henry the 4th, Henry the 5th, Henry the 6th, and then Richard the 3rd.

Would you say that this is a single and overarching story about Civil War and kingship, or can we be looking at this as smaller threads in a larger tapestry? It's a great question. I think at the time in the Elizabethanian, period, these are small threads, these are individual plays. They, maybe the word is tessellate in a way with the other plays and with other history plays by other writers to give a picture of medieval kingship and so on. But I don't think they're linear. They become linear because when they're published altogether in the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, the book we call the first folio, one of the major acts of editorial intervention into the plays,

don't quite know why, is to order them like a long sequence. Trevor Nunn, the theatre director, calls this Shakespeare's box set. Yeah, how you would repackage to say, yeah, this is one overarching narrative full of repeated incident. But I think at the time, they're much more individual, and that does have an effect on how we interpret them. I think that's really important, and it's one of the reasons why things like book history are so important, because if we, think about these plays now, we'll just throw them out the histories, things to this nature. And that is a result of particular choices that were made by people who were doing publishing. It's not a natural collection in any way, shape, or form.

This is something that has been made by people who are attempting to present what they think Shakespeare meant, which two very different things, two very different things, no? Absolutely two very different things. And sometimes that creates problems as well as solving them, because if you put the plays together, you think that the Henry plays that we're going to go on to talk about, the plays from Henry IV through to Henry V, represent a kind of coming-of-age story. We expect that there will be continuity across the characters who appear in more than one episode. And that may not necessarily be a realistic expectation. They may be more occasional than that. What would an Elizabethan audience actually know about these kings or even about the Wars of the Roses more generally? You're coming to the theater and you are seeing a play about a king, but do you have a way of thinking about these that is influenced by anything else?

This is a time before universal education. It's certainly a time before we have GCSE history in any way. Are there things that Shakespeare needed to work with parameters that he's. would need to understand before he presented this to an audience. I think all we can say with certainty about people who go to the theatre is that they go to the theatre. And I don't mean that to be completely reductive, but that the best source for these plays is other plays. And certainly a preceding theatre company called the Queen's Men who were so influential actually on Shakespeare's own repertory that we, some people think that he must have been part of that troop, or perhaps

that was the way he got his break into the London theatre. The Queen's Men are very interested in historical dramas. Largely I think because they're interested in fighting. I think fights are what people enjoy on the stage. I think that's part of the appeal of these plays. So whereas we tend to see the arc moving through Civil War to Peace, probably the Civil War part was the bit that they really enjoyed. So although there's loads of really fascinating work about how Shakespeare changes

the Chronicle History sources, The Elizabethans perhaps are the first age to really write their own history and to try and understand that history in a sustained way for lots of reasons that in a sort of gone Elizabethan podcast we could talk about. So you can certainly say that there were chronicle histories that Shakespeare reads and that other people read, but I'm not sure how much people who went to the theatre did read that. And sometimes people now assume that this history was so close in time

to Elizabethan audiences that they must have known more about it. I think that's actually completely wrong. It's 200 years, more or less, between the coronation of Richard the 2nd and the time that those plays are being performed in the Elizabethan period.

I had a quick look that for us. This would be the Greek War of Independence, the Republic of Fredonia in Texas, the first passenger railway. These are things I do not know much about. Yeah. and don't feel close to me in any way. So I think people didn't come with a huge amount of knowledge

or came with perhaps some themes about kingship, which didn't need to be part of a linear chronology, historical chronology in order to make sense. And also the other, I suppose the last point on that is that these are plays almost certainly not performed in medieval dress, whatever that is. You would have looked at them and they would have looked like Elizabethan people on an Elizabethan stage. That is actually quite interesting.

So everything is the same as when you see Elizabethan productions now and people brought them up to the present day. They're doing the same thing. They're absolutely doing the same thing. They don't have, I don't know when that moment, I'm sure someone listening will know, when does that moment of historical verisimilitude become the thing? When is it that if you have an adaptation of Jane Austen now, someone writes in and says, this took place in 1811 and this billiard table was not invented until 1814? The kind of precision about that has become a thing.

Not so, I think, for them, the cost, but also the aesthetics of historical reconstruction, I think, were not where they're at. And that also makes sense of something people often talk about as if it's separate from this, which is the anachronism Shakespeare uses. He's not interested in finding out, did they actually know about this then? Was this a thing then? There's a much more palimpsest-y, present and past going on, I think.

This is a man who's fundamentally trying to find a way to get martial arts on the stage in front of an audience. I guess he's not going to sit here and worry about if you've got the right kind of hose on. It's fair enough. There's a lot of balls in the air, I think, in a Shakespeare production. I think we have to think, though, and I think one of the big things that historians tend to relate to when we talk about these Shakespeare plays is he is writing under the reign of Queen Elizabeth. She's a Tudor Queen, probably a term she would object to, but one that we used to describe her. And her claim to the throne, I think we can say, is sensitive. She says she's not got an heir. She is a queen, which is odd in and of itself without a king. What sort of context is this going to give the plays that they happen?

Clearly, if you're Shakespeare and you're trying to curry favor with Queen like this, you're going to be presenting themes that are not going to get you in trouble with a woman like this. So can we definitively say that the themes we've seen at like usurpation or the fragility of succession is a choice here? is made in order to placate her. It's often said, isn't it, the whole, the idea of the Tudor myth, that the Tudors were the providential sort of conclusion to this period of civil war to the end of the war to the roses and that they reached their sort of peaceful imperial high point in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. That's been a really prominent way of thinking about these plays.

And that's, it's for a reason. but I'm not sure it's the whole story. Firstly, I think these are all plays which are much more interested dramatically and ethically in fragile leadership rather than in established leadership. They're much more interested in war and conflict than they are in peace. Now, that may be a version of every happy family is happy in the same way. That may be just a dramatic version of his a king or who everybody likes and who is in control of all his nobleman. you don't have a play. And there's also the point that too much Tudor myth at a point when, as you point out, the Tudors are over. Whatever happens, whoever you think is going to be the

successor to Elizabeth, and this is not allowed to be talked about publicly, and so part of that discussion gets diverted, I think, into these historical investigations on the stage. Whoever it is, it's not going to be another Tudor. That Tudor myth, even if it exists, is coming to an end. It's not an entirely positive line to be pushing. I think Shakespeare is a very careful playwright and it's interesting to see him weaving between different audiences or different kind of constituencies. But by the end of the 1590s, the period in which he writes all these plays, the Privy Council have woken up to this and in the Bishop's Ban in 1599 they add fictions or writings on English history, including drama, to the band list along with satires

and other things. So they have come to see that the writing of English history is not about the past but is about the present and sometimes even dangerously about the future. And Shakespeare is probably a kind of, he's a kind of evasive figure. I think he ducks below that, but I think the players definitely allow for those readings. I think this is an incredibly important point that you've just made, though, because we have this tendency to relate to all of these plays, as though what Shakespeare is doing is he is establishing a favorable relationship to the crown.

He is playing into this Tudor myth. He is arguing for an idea of Tudor stability after terrible civil war. but what we see in terms of the reactions of the authorities is bringing this stuff up at all is borderline seditious. And I suppose that makes a lot of sense within this context where nobody knows what the error is going to be. So how it's not a stable situation fundamentally. So you don't want to be feeding that. Absolutely. And if you look through these history plays at Shakespeare's that we're talking about

and saw them as experiments in different kinds of regime chains, You know, what happens? A child comes to the throne, or there are two competitors and they fight over it, or there is a claim from a foreign power. These are all scenarios that these plays are really interested in working out. So you have to take a very long view of the sequence and really focus your attention on the last 10 minutes of Richard III. If you're really in, it all gets better when the Tudors arrive,

because what these plays love and are fascinated by dramatically and I think politically is the uncertainty and the different, the ways the past can give us different possible futures. Gosh, he's just like me. What can I say? It's interesting, though, because we do see him looking at more established chroniclers in order to write these plays, right? So a lot of what he is relying on are Holland Sheds Chronicles or sources like this. So what do you think these particular choices say about what he's attempting to do with the plays, because he's definitely imagining future worlds, future monarchies, but how does his use of the past inform that? I think he must have felt that Hollichet's Chronicles was a huge playbook and that this would

furnish lots and lots of different stories. Of course, he's operating in an imaginative milieu which sees the retelling of existing stories as the height of what an author does. We now feel that might be to be a big dependent on your sources or not to be very creative, but for those writers, that's exactly what they have to do. And I think he is a really interesting question because at this relatively early point in his career,

perhaps the first five or six years of his playwriting career, we can start to see how he shapes stories out of an ongoing narrative history. How do you scoop out the bit that's going to make sense? Where do you start or where do you finish? History and Shakespeare's own history plays follow lots of different shapes. They're not really like tragedies or comedies which kind of write themselves with where you need to begin and end. So I think Hollinshed must have been a hugely exciting volume. organised by the reign of different monarchs filled with these characters who could be quarried out and made to interact in 3D.

I think one of the things I like about looking at what Shakespeare does with those is not so much thinking he's not very accurate here or he doesn't follow it here, but more what is it that sparks his imagination about this person that he wants to fill them out and get them on their feet and get them on the stage. Speaking about the people that he gets on the stage, I suppose we better dig into the varying kings. And what better place to start than with Henry IV, right? This is an interesting one because it's got a lot going on in terms of the history of it, but also what is going on when Shakespeare himself writes it, right? Because we've got Richard II, who comes before Henry the 4th, Richard the second enemy of this podcast, just to be clear, but that's fine. And we're going to leave Matt to deal with Richards the Seconds and Thirds, though, but that's going to happen next time.

So I think that we don't talk about Henry IV very often as a society now. He isn't one of our more dramatic, Plantagenic Kings. So can you give us a little bit of a potted synopsis of what Henry the Fourth's one and two cover? Actually, the two parts of the Shakespeare's version don't challenge what you've just said. They're not very interested in Henry IV, either. So he gets his name on the title page, but he is not really, he's not even the hero of his own play, which is, bless him indeed. So Henry the 4th has usurped his cousin, Richard, of whom we do not speak, and taken the throne. And he begins, part one, full of sort of woe and heaviness.

and the ongoing civil war ramifications of this. And that burden is on him all the way through the two parts. So the historical material, the material in the court, is all about strife and warfare and different parts of the country, sending messengers, sending armies and so on. It's very burdened, and I think Henry VIII's reign is seen to be a constant struggle to secure the throne that he has taken. And so no wonder his own son and heir, Prince Hal,

who's going to become Henry V, just wants out. He doesn't want anything to do with it. And so we find him in what are also much more congenial dramatic circumstances, which are in the tavern in East Cheap, hanging out with ordinary people playing practical jokes, living a kind of a life of, if not exactly, ease then certainly a life of irresponsibility. And the clouds are gathering though on Prince Henry. There's a sense he's not going to be able to do this forever and that becomes more and more clear as the two plays

continue. And we end Henry IV, part two, with the accession of the prince as Henry V. And he does then something which is really important and casts a long shadow back over the two plays. He banishes his great companion in revelry and mischief, the character of Falstaff. And I think Falstaff is such an important element of Henry the 4th, that I think it's probably down to the success that he enjoyed on the stage that we get this part 2 and part 3. Really, if you look dispassionately at these three plays together, Henry the 4th, Part 1, Henry the 4th, Part 2 and Henry the 5th, I think if you were being generous, you would say there is two plays worth of material there. And Shakespeare is stretching it out and he's stretching it out because of

the extraordinary impact that this irreverent, dissolute knight Falstaff had on Elizabethan culture. This is really interesting because I think Falstaff is certainly much more of a touchstone now. When we talk about these plays, it tends to be talking about Falstaff. He certainly comes up a lot for me in my work. He does things like he goes to Cock Lane, for example. which I'm constantly having to write about and that kind of a thing. But I found it interesting because we get him through

this particular portrayal of Prince Hal as this ne'er-do-well. He's a bit of a pub regular. He's this kind of, I guess as you say, not necessarily a luxuriator, but it's almost like his every madness. His wild boy aesthetic

is part of the issue. here, right? So is there any reality to this, or is this just something that Shakespeare is doing to say, oh, and then look, he can become a king. There's something that we can reach to deep inside in order to become this, or was Hal actually hanging out on East Cheap? There's no evidence that Hal was on East Cheap. One of the stories Shakespeare is drawing on, which is not a solely medieval one, I think, but he's hugely popular in this period, is the story of the prodigal son. The Elizabethans love to think of themselves as prodigals, and they love to contextualize it in this biblical parable. So I think there is a sort of prodigal son story going on there. And knitted into that, of course, is the expectation of repentance. So it's a comforting framework if you're worried about the good of the crown, because it tells you, yeah, the prince is doing all this stuff now, but it's really preparatory to a repentance which will bring him more in line with his obligations and his

responsibilities. Yeah, so there's no evidence for that. Just as there's no, the historical precedent for Falstaff is very, very distorted, let's say, in Shakespeare's retelling. So it's really striking, as you say, that the touchstone from these plays is a-historical, is invented by Shakespeare rather than drawing on the history. I would you say it's also a historical that Henry the Fourth and Hal actually did quarrel? Is this just a way of instituting this idea of the prodigal son, giving a kind of familial story that we can all understand? Or would you say, I do think that there are some differences in terms of the reins of Henry the Fourth and Fifth.

They do have differing policy, for example. So is that just a way of humanizing what are ultimately political differentiations? That's a really good question. I think the humanising is important, and I think it's important for the way in which Shakespeare's history plays tend to be pretty human plays rather than high political plays. I don't tend to think that in the history plays, Shakespeare's characters are mouthpieces for particular viewpoints. They sometimes are in other plays, but not here. It is tempting to think about Shakespeare, the son of a Glover, who does not want to be a Glover. who does not want to be a Glover.

But conflict, father and son conflict is pretty universal, isn't it? So I think that is a humanizing element. It makes the transition between eras feel a kind of matter of human generations rather than political tendencies or political outlooks. Yeah, I think that's true. Another human part of that is this idea of this murky friend. And my father's got a great thing that he would throw around to us if you've got a wild friend, which is that bad companions make bad luck. And I suppose that's what Falstaff is doing here is dramatizing these conflicts that people may have when they're out with their wild friends.

But as you say, Falstaff is entirely almost an invention, right? We don't think that the actual Henry V is hanging out with some boozehound knight, right? So who is Falstaff? Is there any historical personage who influenced this at all? So we said before that Shakespeare is really good at dipping and diving under the radar. He makes a rare mistake, I think, in the drafting of Henry IV, where he calls this dissolute companion figure the name of a historical knight called Old Castle. So it seems as if the first name for Falstaff was Old Castle. And Old Castle is a person from the historical record.

He was one of the early sort of proto-protestants known as Lollards. I don't need to explain that for listeners here, obviously. So he was a man of strong religious principles, acetic, probably very thin. And there's obviously some joke in reversing all of those to make this impious, luxurious, luxuriant, in your lovely word, figure that we now know as false stuff. The old castles were still a powerful and influential family. They took up the cudgels and said this was not acceptable. And clearly the Chamberlain's men retracted that and renamed. There's a couple of little fossils of this Hal teases Falstaff as my old lad of the castle,

which is a line which makes no sense at all except in the context of this lost name. So there was, that's to say, there was a sort of historical reference. But because the figure of Falstaff was such a travesty of that, it became buried in more and more invention. That's an interesting one, isn't it? Because really, Sir John Oldcastle, this is, like, he's a martyr, right? Like, he's a really, like, a good kind of very priest guy. And it's funny to associate him with Falstaff, who we all know and love.

Absolutely. And the Admiral's Men, the sort of rival theatre company, they do a really great piece of swooping in with a great suck-up drama called Sir John Old Castle, which is a much more reverential account of this historical figure. So I suppose Shakespeare has really, he's really overlaid that figure, along with other things that he does to these stories, to emphasise generational differences. So usually false stuff is played as a generation older than Hal.

And so we have the almost psychoanalytic split between Hal, who is responsible to his father, the king, and his tavern father, Falstaff, and is drawn between them. And that's one of the ways this coming-of-age story works itself out between the good and bad father. And that's echoed the figure of Hotspur, who we haven't mentioned, who is one of the northern nobleman, the son of Northumberland and a very gallant, a very medieval knight, actually. I think Prince Henry and Falstaff are not medieval figures, and Hotspur most certainly is. Hotspur is so brave and is so different from the prince that the king wishes that he, Hotspur, also called Henry, had been his son. So just as Prince Hal sort of experiments with these two fathers, his own father experiments with these two different sons or the imaginative idea of these different sons. Can we talk a bit about Hotspur because I think this is another one of those fan-vades.

favorite characters. And he is almost asking the audience a lot of time to imagine an ideal son. Imagine the perfect son. But as you say, it's also a man who historically, he was not really around. He's older than Howell's father than Henry. The real Henry Percy was a guy, and he is a 14th century man. What is Shakespeare doing here? Is it positing a sort of a backer in the day, sons were gallant and chivalrous, etc., etc. Or am I reading too much into that? No, I think you're absolutely right. And I think it comes back to what you said before about humanizing political shifts. Hotspur is presented in the play, Henry Percy Hotspur is presented as a chivalric knight from a past age. He has a kind of poetry about plucking honor from the pale moon

in a phrase which was very echoed around the culture as a kind of sense of a past, yeah, sort of spent Syrian or medieval-e kind of idea of behaviour, whereas the prince is really, it may be too much to call him Machiavellian, but he certainly has an edge of policy. He understands how to manipulate his image and how to look better than he is. He tells us that quite explicitly. So I suppose by making these two men of the same generation in this a historical way, Shakespeare gives us this alternative and of course he puts them together in single combat just to make it clear. They're going to fight it out. Which one is going to be triumphant, this medieval idea of honour or this modern sense of self-presentation and media manipulation and. and Hotspur is killed in that fight, and so the rise of the Machiavel is assured.

What are we meant to understand about that as an audience? Because this huge pivotal moment, because it does change the way that we relate to Prince Howe, because first we're just like, this is a bit of a screw-up, he's down at the bar, he's a barfly, he doesn't care about what his father wants to do, but he does show up and he does triumph over ultimately what is seen as this very honorable character.

Is this supposed to make a statement about what the politics is that is good? Because it seems almost to be a sad moment in a way. I think it is a sad moment. I think it's an ambivalent moment in the play. I think Hotspur's death is the end of an era. It's a bit of a cliche, but something has ended, which is more than just him. and everybody pauses to recognise that just momentarily. But I think there is something about Prince Henry's, in Shakespeare's telling,

there is something about Prince Henry's political nowce, which is going to make him a more successful king than his father has been. And he is going to be the one, I think the play suggests, who will capitalise on what Henry IV has done in taking the throne, The plays make it quite clear that he himself gets almost no pleasure from that. But his son, inheriting, will wipe that away and will make a better job of it. And we've had a presentiment of that right at the beginning when we first meet Prince Henry in the bar in East Cheap in Act 1 scene 2 of Part 1. Everybody else leaves the stage and he, having been wise cracking and joking, he speaks this soliloquy to the audience which is saying,

Borough saying, don't worry, it's all under control. Here in Doth, I imitate the sun, brilliant royal metaphor. He's got it all there, who doth permit the base contagious clouds to cover him. So I'm allowing myself to be covered with clouds for now so that when I shine out, my majesty will be extraordinary. Now, that's a difficult speech for actors to deliver now, because I think for some modern audiences, that makes the prince look scheming, and although that may be good for his future royal duties,

it doesn't seem very nice for him as a person with people who think he's their friend in the taverns. So I suppose it's an example of what's an ongoing theme of these plays, which is to be a good king, you probably have to be not very nice. And how does the behaviour that we accept in a private, person differ from what the king needs to do. And we'll see that in Henry V when, for example, he orders the killing of the French prisoners and so on. Yeah. So I think that's a really interesting point because I do think that we have this tendency now

to see individuals, this part of the kind of liberal espree of the modern or postmodern era, is this saying that there are individuals who have actions, Whereas I think for early modern people and certainly medieval people, the person of the king isn't necessarily a human who's in the pub, right? So what we're seeing from Prince Howell is actually a statement about the fact that a guy who is down on East Cheap getting his rounds in is not the same thing as the person of a king. And you can make a delineation. You can draw a line under it. Because prior to, I don't know, things like being anointed as the king before you have a religious ceremony, you aren't the same person. It's not the same thing.

And I do think that you're right. We have a really hard time coming to terms with that now, this idea that there is of the king's two bodies, as it were, right? Absolutely. It's an example of that, isn't it? And that in a way the whole of these plays, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, are about a time-limited. fantasy that the king or the king in waiting could be our friend, could be our mate in the pub, and we could have access to them and intimacy with them in a way. I love the fact that everybody who talks about these plays talks about the prince,

and I've done it in our conversation, as Hal. And Hal is the nickname that Falstaff gives him. His father calls him Henry. And we are somehow just even in using that name, we're saying, yeah, we're intimates with him. That's a particular position in a monarchical society. That's a good point. Sorry, Emma, you're being too interesting. Stop it.

One interesting thing here, though, is we've got all of these bits of distortion, right? We've got foul staff turned from quite a stand-up Lollard into a dissolute drunk. We have Henry Hotspur transported into the future as a younger man. But we still have some fairly faithful historical pieces in this bit. which is the political reasons behind why Henry the Fourth and indeed how, to an extent, are facing this rebellion. What's going on here that Shakespeare is able to keep that bit about what the politics is, where he's moving everything else around? Yeah, that's a great question.

I'm not absolutely sure what I think the answer to it is. But it feels as if sometimes it feels, in Shakespeare's encounter with his source material, that he experiences it in different categories. And some categories are completely open to remaking. And some actually are structural or causational in such important ways that they can't really be messed with. And I wonder if there's an element of, there's an element that the relationship between Halham-Folstaff, I think, is where Shakespeare is at his most inventive and creative. And the historical context in which,

and the historical conflict into which they have to re-emerge in the Battle of Shrewsbury at the end of part one, they seem to have been completely separated from, completely innocent of all the stuff that's going on, and then they're brought into the absolute eye of the storm right at the end. That needs to be ticking, ticking on. And sometimes it can feel in performance as if those political scenes have quite a lot of information to get over. They're keeping quite a fast-moving political situation across the entirety of England and Wales and Scotland.

In fact, they're keeping all this international or highly regionalised conflict alive and alive for the audience. Well, speaking about conflicts, I think we have to move on to Henry V, although I could probably. talk about foul stuff and hot spur all day. But so we get to Andrew V, we see Shakespeare being a lot more rigid in terms of dates, historical realities that we know are true, especially when we're talking about, for example, the Battle of Ajan Corps, right? We can say that he is sticking with the correct dates. We're talking about 1415.

He's talking about how the English are outnumbered. But it does seem that he is having a nice time exaggerating the extent to which the English are out Normberg, right? Yeah, yeah. This is one of the archetypal underdog stories. This is what gives us all the amateur dancing groups that go to the, all the way to the final or the lower league baseball. This is the template for that kind of story. and, of course, exaggerating the differences in numbers. Shakespeare definitely does that.

He also minimises the number of English casualties and so on. So the numerical calculation, that calculus around Agincourt, is clearly invented in order to deliver a more miraculous victory for the English. But they do also have a technology which is barely mentioned in the play, which is really highly consequential, which is the Longbow technology. And sometimes in modern productions, you see this technological disparity between the armies that I remember the English Shakespeare company doing it, where the French have bayonets and the English have automatic machine guns.

And you think this is not very many people with machine guns can defeat quite a lot of people with bayonets. That's about the technology. Of course, what the play, or at least what, Henry himself, it's hard to know whether the play completely endorses this. What the play wants to say is that this has been a divinely ordained victory. They have won, again, in a sort of medievaly way, they've won because they were right, almost like the duel or that those other institutions which suggest that fighting

will bring out the truth or the proper judgment. So this is really interesting because we want to talk about longbows. We want to have this discussion about tactical and military advantages and technological ones. And Shakespeare's not interested in that. This is something that we have to put that in. You've got to put the machine gun in the actor's hand. And Shakespeare is saying, I'm not interested in that. And are there not echoes this when we see Hotspur and Howell fighting, right?

Whereas we're being presented with. these two clashes of what it means socially at this point in time. And it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the tech. Sorry, everyone. Yeah, I think that's right. And one of the ways that we have used these medieval history plays does echo perhaps the way Shakespeare himself uses medieval history, which is to say something about our present or about a more recent political moment that echoes for us. I suppose another thing that we do see here within Henry V is he is bang on about dates for Agencourt, but we see this sudden truncation collapsing of time between Agincourt and

Henry then marrying Catherine of France. This seems to me that it's got to be a kind of dramatic effect. You can't have sort of five years of just waiting around on stage. We have to keep this thing moving, right? It is still a piece of play. It's an entertainment. We've got people in the audience here, right? Yeah.

And I think one of the things we talked about, what does Shakespeare get from Holland Shed? He gets character, but he doesn't really get structure. And he has to make that structure because the amount of time, we don't have a way really in the theatre in this period of saying five years later, this happened or something we need different forms of causation and kind of intercutting. So the marriage with Catherine is interesting in dramatic terms because it does, turn the play at least for a moment into a comedy. That's how comedies end. It makes an association

that modern critics have been very, properly very fascinated by between of the kind of sexualizing of warfare or the sense that the country is female and that the military action is masculine, but also about sexual violence in war and so on, much more direct versions of that we're all too aware of. So it's an interesting moment. You can play it as with lots of things in plays. It's hard, in Shakespeare's plays particularly, it's hard to say it absolutely means this

because you can imagine it on the stage in lots of different ways. The wooing between Catherine, who speaks mostly French and Henry, who is forced into a broken French, which is probably meant to seem very funny, can be very tender and you think, yes, they really are attracted to each other, or can be absolutely chilling. When Henry makes his attendance withdraw from this wooing scene,

he says, Catherine is our capital demand. As we're doing the peace negotiations, this is non-negotiable. So the wooing is not necessary, and either the not-necessariness makes it into a very uncomfortable and hard scene, or its unnecessariness over-cuddles up that harsher political negotiation into something which is more comic and more like romantic comedy. Can we talk a little bit, speaking about things that are possibly for comedic effect? There's this scene in Henry V, which is slightly confusing, I think,

for modern audiences, wherein, Henry is provoked by the Defon because the Defant sends him tennis balls as a gift. Can you explain what is going on here? So this is an invention. This is not part of the historical sources.

And in a way, I suppose, it does a bit of double duty. It reminds us of the past of these plays that we might have seen or forgotten that we've seen in the Henry the fourth plays. Because remember, if we're in the Elizabethan theatre, we haven't had the chance to say, let's see them all in a day, like you might have with the ring cycle or something now. You're not so able to do that. So it's a serial kind of reminder, it's a bit of a catch-up. It's reminding us that this king presiding over a conversation about whether there is a right

to invade France is the same one that we've seen in East Cheap and the one that we've seen in East Cheap and the one that we've seen, you know, horsing about with Falstaff. And that to, even as we're reminded of that, we're told that to remind him of that past is to provoke him to this great fury, which is what the Dofant does. So I think it works for creating maybe retrospectively a sequence of these plays,

back to your earliest question. And it maybe reminds us that in some ways the psychology of Henry in Henry V is very much structured around the rejection or the negation of how he was as Prince Hal. So we see him rejecting former friends, reminding people that he is not as he was, reminding them how much he expects loyalty and how unflinching he will be, whoever it might be in punishing treachery and so on. If it isn't quite an interesting invention because, yes, I suppose we are understanding it as a way of characterizing the move from Hal to Henry, right? This move from being a sort of lackluster son into being a consummate king.

But it also makes it seem as though the motivations for this war are just personal. You can provoke Henry still. You can insult him and then he'll take one to war. Whereas I think from a historical standpoint, the way that we understand Henry V's campaigns in France is largely commercial. It's about getting a better settlement out of it. Do you think that this is just we need to have a personal motivation because trade wars don't make good theater? Isn't that civil? That's so interesting because the other thing that happens, very oddly at the beginning of this play, and sometimes productions just cut it out because it's so strange, is that we meet two senior, clergymen who are talking about the fact that Parliament is going to take money away from the

church and what are they going to do about it. And they suggest that to distract the king with a war, foreign war, is the way to lift this threat. So they, Shakespeare, we often think of this is, all in a dither about how exciting this is. We often see this as a highly patriotic play. But Shakespeare compromises the reasons for the war right from the start. And I hadn't thought before you just said that, Eleanor, which is just so great, that making the Dofans challenge into a sort of personal provocation to Henry is aligned with the clerics, the archbishop and the bishop, prompting Henry to think that he is entitled to be king of France through their research,

into the Salic law in order to distract him from other things. So there's the patriotic play, the patriotic sense of the English victory against France, has to struggle out from quite an admired opening in this play. I think that we have to talk about also within the morality framework of this play, you've already mentioned it, but we have this scene in which Henry, orders that the French prisoners at Ajancoor all be killed. And this is a really interesting one because the way Shakespeare seems to put it out is somewhat ambiguous. Can we talk a little bit about what's going on here?

Is this a moral point? Is this about the conception of the king and hard decisions that have to be made? What are we looking at here other than a mess? A textual mess that may be about the text conveying different drafts or different thoughts in Shakespeare's mind, because what we actually have is Henry ordering the execution of the French prisoners twice. Once as an act of aggression, or as a saying that as the battle is turning, it's really important that they are not released in order to renew the French forces and so they should be killed in advance of that. And the second time,

it is in anger at the French having attacked the camp of the English. and killed the boys there. So editors have to choose. They can't both be true. If you're not allowed to kill them at all, you certainly can't kill them twice. So you have to decide. And editors who have wanted Henry to be a more admirable figure

have gone for the second, so that it is an angry human reaction rather than a cool, coolly rational but cruel one. Now, depends how you like your kings, doesn't it? In a way, you could make the argument that one is better than the other according to different value systems. Is it better to do something from the heart, even if it is rash and subjective, or is it better to do something from the head? You could argue you either of those. And it looks as if Shakespeare himself was tossing up between them, which would be better?

Do I want my Henry to be a brilliant military strategist, but quite a chilling one, quite frighteningly chilling. A bit like when there's a great speech, terrifying speech, that Henry delivers before the besieged city of Hauffler and the mayor or I forget who it is, but the representative of Haftler is listening to this speech where Henry says, if you let us in, Henry is really channeling Troy, the attack on Troy, which was such a traumatic thing for this period.

And he says, if we get in, my soldiers are just going to, I can't answer for them. They will rape your women, spick your children. kill all your old men. It's going to be awful. And he delivers this long speech and the Hauffler mayor says, we give in. It's not worth it. We sacrifice it. There's a lovely moment in Kenneth Branagh's film of this where when he is shouting all these threats, that the soldiers are looking at him and saying, we would never do that. You would never do that. And what they make clear in that film is that this is an act of extraordinary rhetorical threat in order not to have to fight

because they're so exhausted and they can't fight at all. But you can play it both ways. One is that Henry has access to this terrible savage imagination and that's what carries the day or that he's able to sort of play act that in order to step back from more violence. And it really depends how you want to depict him and his military prowess that he exhibits. Interestingly, I do think that Henry's speeches are a big way that people think about Henry V in general as well, because I think probably the most famous oration from this play is the whole band of brothers speech. And we do know, or at least Hollinshed says, that Henry made some kind of big speech there. But this is Shakespeare working his magic, is it not? Absolutely.

Yeah, this is a real big, wonderful set piece. We see it quoted all over the place now, but we also see its contours. If ever there is an occasion in a movie or something where people have got to do their best, there is a version of this speech, however, parodic or seriousness. I sometimes look with my students at the One in the Lord of the Rings, which is obviously very much based on this. It's a wonderful moment. It's a moment that works by temporary dismantling all of the things that the play actually cares about,

which are hierarchy, the difference between the nobility and the ordinary person, all of that stuff. It levels that to talk about the band of brothers and to address the audience in the theatre to say, you'll be sorry you weren't here. There's a kind of fomo element to this, that this was a thing to be at. This was a thing that will become a story. And there's always that kind of slightly meta moment where Shakespeare, is already thinking about the retelling of this moment, even as he is dramatizing the moment where it's apparently happening for the first time.

Yeah, I find that really interesting because it is such an archetype at this juncture, right? We almost expect this, but here we have Shakespeare doing it, maybe not necessarily for the first time, but certainly one of the more memorable times that it's done. I find it interesting because the way that we talk about this play now is as this specific sort of patriotic thing, which I always have. think is quite funny because obviously there's no such concept as patriotism in the medieval period, right? But there are certainly strange things with what when Shakespeare is writing this play, right? Can we talk a little bit about what was going on at the time when Shakespeare

wrote this, right? Because certainly England is involved in some intrigues abroad at this point in time. Yeah, and if we look at the text of Henry V, it's got a kind of almost sort of Freudian slips. It keeps talking about Ireland. There's nothing to do really with Ireland in War Against the French and in Agincourt, but we get Shakespeare's only Irish character, the Captain MacMorris. Henry calls himself King of Ireland. There are a couple of other mentions of Ireland, and this just seems to be that the thing that's in everybody's mind is Elizabeth's wars against Tyrone in Ireland. The Earl of Essex has gone out in 1599, which we think is the year of this play. And he goes with great fanfare and expectation of success in something like May 1599.

And by about September or October of that year, it's all gone pear-shaped. And he comes back and he is disgraced. And the sort of rise and fall of Essex as a charismatic military, sort of quasi-challenger to the throne, I think is one of the underlying stories. types in all these history plays. And when we get to the moment after Agincourt in the play, you already mentioned that we compress all this time in history between that victory and the marriage to Catherine. And the play does really compress that, but it does have a little wrinkle in it, which it imagines there's a chorus in the play, which is also one of the other set pieces, isn't it,

over a muse of fire, all about just as you have to stir yourself up to fight a battle. So you you have to stir yourself up to imagine an epic play. There's some sort of parallel there. The chorus says, imagine Henry's gone back to London, all in victory, he's doing a victory parade. Everybody's come out to welcome him. Everybody's delighted. And then this moment, Gary Taylor,

who is one of the greatest living Shakespeare editors, says this is the only uncontestable contemporary reference in all of Shakespeare's plays. There are lots that we can interpret, that this is the only one. And the chorus says, as now were the general of our gracious empress, as in good time he may,

from Ireland coming, bringing rebellion, broachered on his sword. But what the chorus does is to compare Henry's return to England after Aschincourt explicitly with Essex's wished-for return from Ireland, having quelled what the English called the Irish Rebellion. So it's an amazing moment. It brings just into focus the ways these plays, as we've been talking about,

we've together a sense of the pastness of the past and the presentness of that past. Emma, I realize that I have been talking your ear off for so long, that we've not even managed to make it to enter at the sixth. Oh, no. There's so much to say about it. I know. This has been such an incredible conversation. I'm wondering if perhaps I can drag you back again another.

time to talk a bit about Henry the 6th because you've made so many good points here. I don't think there's anything I can cut off from that other conversation. So would you be amenable to that another time? I'd love to and I'm sorry to have talked so much. No, I am not sorry. Never apologize for being interesting on this podcast. Thank you very much. And also, I do have to truncate us because the wonderful Matt Lewis is here. And we still do need to talk about the Richards. So I may pass you into his capable hands, provided you promise to come back to me at another time. and talk about 100 the 6th, because this is one of my favorites. Yeah, I'd love to.

I'm going to say I'm looking forward to that as well, because I have been lurking and thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, so I can't wait to talk to you about the Richards next, Emma. Fantastic. I'm going to leave you in Matt Lewis's wonderful and capable Ricardian hands then. Thanks once again to the incredible Emma for joining me, and thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Remember, you can enjoy ad-free podcasts

and unlimited access to all. award-winning original TV documentaries, including my and Matt's recent film, Medieval Summer, by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments or suggestions or wherever you get your podcasts. Until all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.