[Transcriber's note: Guizot presents a history of Henry V. in "A Popular History of England, From the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria", Volume II, Chapter XIII. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61828/61828-h/61828-h.htm#Page_9. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_monarchs.]
King Henry V.
(1599.)
It is erroneously that most critics have regarded "Henry V." as one of the weakest of Shakspeare's works. The fifth act, it is true, is empty and cold, and the conversations which compose it possess as little poetic merit as dramatic interest. But the progress of the first four acts is simple, rapid, and animated; the events of the history, plans of government or of conquest, plots, negotiations, and wars, are transformed in them without effort into dramatic scenes full of life and effect. If the characters are not completely developed, they are at least well drawn and well sustained; and the double genius of Shakspeare, as a profound moralist and a brilliant poet, even in the painful and fantastic forms in which he sometimes clothes his thought and imagination, retains, in these four acts, all its abundance and its splendor.
We also meet, in the words of the chorus which fills up the intervals between the acts, with remarkable proofs of Shakspeare's good sense, and of the instinct which led him to feel the inconveniences of his dramatic system. At the very opening of the play, he thus addresses his audience. "Let us," he says,
"On your imaginary forces work;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times;
Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass."
And in another place he says,
"Linger your patience on; and well digest
The abuse of distance, while we force a play."
The popular and comic part of the drama, although the originality of Falstaff's wit is absent, contains scenes of perfect natural gayety; and the Welshman Fluellen is a model of that serious, ingenious, inexhaustible, unexpected, and jocose military talkativeness, which excites at once our laughter and our sympathy.