‘Henry V.’
The spirited character of Prince Hal was peculiarly congenial to its creator, and in ‘Henry V’ Shakespeare, during 1598, brought his career to its close. The play was performed early in 1599, probably in the newly built Globe Theatre. Again Thomas Creede printed, in 1600, an imperfect draft, which was thrice reissued before a complete version was supplied in the First Folio of 1623. The dramatic interest of ‘Henry V’ is slender. There is abundance of comic element, but death has removed Falstaff, whose last moments are described with the simple pathos that comes of a matchless art, and, though Falstaff’s companions survive, they are thin shadows of his substantial figure. New comic characters are introduced in the persons of three soldiers respectively of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish nationality, whose racial traits are contrasted with telling effect. The irascible Irishman, Captain MacMorris, is the only representative of his nation who figures in the long list of Shakespeare’s dramatis personæ. The scene in which the pedantic but patriotic Welshman, Fluellen, avenges the sneers of the braggart Pistol at his nation’s emblem, by
forcing him to eat the leek, overflows in vivacious humour. The piece in its main current presents a series of loosely connected episodes in which the hero’s manliness is displayed as soldier, ruler, and lover. The topic reached its climax in the victory of the English at Agincourt, which powerfully appealed to patriotic sentiment. Besides the ‘Famous Victories,’ [174] there was another lost piece on the subject, which Henslowe produced for the first time on November 28, 1595. ‘Henry V’ may be regarded as Shakespeare’s final experiment in the dramatisation of English history, and it artistically rounds off the series of his ‘histories’ which form collectively a kind of national epic. For ‘Henry VIII,’ which was produced very late in his career, he was only in part responsible, and that ‘history’ consequently belongs to a different category.