Context: Tudor Propaganda & the History Play
Shakespeare & the History Play
Shakespeare wrote Henry V around 1599, at the height of his career and during a period of English military anxiety. The Earl of Essex was leading a campaign in Ireland, and Elizabethan audiences were hungry for stories of English military triumph. The history play was a genre Shakespeare helped create, and Henry V is its culmination: a play that dramatises England’s greatest medieval victory at Agincourt (1415) while forcing the audience to question what that victory cost.
The play draws heavily on Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), but Shakespeare reshapes the material for dramatic effect. In Holinshed, Henry’s claim to France is straightforward; Shakespeare adds the comically long Salic Law speech to make the Archbishop look self-serving. In Holinshed, the battle is a clear victory; Shakespeare adds the common soldiers’ doubts and Henry’s agonised soliloquy the night before. The play can be read as patriotic propaganda celebrating English glory, or as an ambiguous exploration of the human cost of war. This duality is essential for the exam.
Henry V was written around 1599, during the Earl of Essex’s Irish campaign. Elizabethan audiences saw parallels between Henry’s French war and England’s current military ventures. The Chorus explicitly references Essex in Act 5 (“the General of our gracious Empress”). Shakespeare flatters Elizabeth I’s regime while also questioning whether military glory justifies its cost.
Tudor Propaganda & the Myth of Agincourt
The propaganda function of the play is clear: the Tudors were a Welsh family, and Owen Tudor married Henry V’s widow, Catherine of Valois. Their grandson became Henry VII. Celebrating Henry therefore flattered Elizabeth I. Agincourt (25 October 1415) was already a legendary English victory — a small, exhausted army defeating a vastly larger French force. Shakespeare transforms this historical event into a myth of national identity, using Henry’s speeches to create an imagined community of “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”
But Shakespeare complicates the propaganda. The Chorus’s Epilogue reminds the audience that Henry’s son, Henry VI, “lost France and made his England bleed, / Which oft our stage hath shown.” The triumph is temporary. The cycle of war continues. Shakespeare refuses to let patriotic celebration have the last word.
Henry V is a sequel. In Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Prince Hal is a wild young man who drinks with Falstaff and his disreputable companions in the Boar’s Head Tavern. His transformation into the ideal king is one of Shakespeare’s great character arcs. But the cost of transformation is high: in Henry IV Part 2, Henry publicly rejects Falstaff (“I know thee not, old man”), and in Henry V, we learn that Falstaff has died, broken-hearted. The question of whether Henry’s kingship requires the sacrifice of his private humanity runs throughout the play. Is he a great king because he puts duty above personal feeling, or is he diminished by his coldness?
Ambiguity: Patriotism or Anti-War?
The play has been performed as both a patriotic celebration and a critique of war. Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film version was made as wartime propaganda, emphasising Henry’s heroism. Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film version emphasised the mud, blood and moral ambiguity. Shakespeare gives evidence for both readings: the St Crispin’s Day speech is genuinely inspiring, but the threat to Harfleur (“naked infants spitted upon pikes”) is genuinely horrifying. The strongest responses hold both readings simultaneously, arguing that Shakespeare deliberately creates a play that can be read in contradictory ways.
The play supports two contradictory readings: patriotic celebration (the St Crispin’s Day speech, the Chorus’s enthusiasm, the victory at Agincourt) and anti-war critique (the Harfleur threat, the common soldiers’ doubts, the Epilogue’s reminder that everything Henry won was lost). Top-band responses hold both readings together.
The Shakespeare question prints an extract and asks two questions: part (i) on the extract and part (ii) on the play as a whole. Together they are worth 40 marks. Both questions assess AO1 (understanding), AO2 (language, form and structure) and AO4 (accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar). Context is not assessed here, so do not hunt for context marks. This is a closed-book exam — you will not have the text. Prepare 3–4 memorised quotations per topic, and practise close analysis of them: “Henry’s ‘we band of brothers’ makes the plural pronoun do the work, folding every listener into one imagined family of equals.”