How Shakespeare rewrote the past with Henry V
By Jonathan Sumption for The Telegraph, 22 October 2015
October 25, 2015 marks 600 years since Agincourt – but there was more to Henry V’s triumph than the Bard to chose to tell in his epic and inspirational play.
Henry V was the last of the eight plays Shakespeare wrote about the English kings of the Hundred Years War, and it is the key to the whole series. The play’s central event, the Battle of Agincourt, which took place on October 25 1415, provides the patriotic climax to a century of history. The dissolute youth seen in both parts of Henry IV comes into his own, a reformed character, as the greatest warrior-king that England has ever seen.
After that, as the chorus foretells in the final lines of the play, the rest will be a sorry tale of decline: Henry V’s heroic achievements undone by the squabbles of the lesser men who tried to fill his shoes, the corrosive effects of human ambition, and the wounds of a divided nation.
On this day: October 25th, 1415 – Agincourt: the battle immortalised by Shakespeare
By Eileen Battersby for The Irish Times, 25 October 2015
Conflict inspires great literature as Tolstoy, himself a soldier, demonstrates in War and Peace, a human epic on a grand scale which draws on the Napoleonic wars. Tolstoy’s approach is both panoramic and philosophical. Prince Andrei lies dying on the battle field at Austerlitz and ponders the futility of war. Before that Milton looked to what could be considered the defining confrontation of all time as the good angels and the bad compete for supremacy in Paradise Lost and a poetic masterwork was born. Centuries earlier a poet, or a group of poets, known as Homer had shaped The Iliad, describing how the gods had laughed heartily as mere mortals killed each other, sending vast armies to appease a man’s slighted honour over an errant wife.
Yet it was no less an artist than Shakespeare who was to look to an episode which took place during the 100 Years War – an ongoing period of hostilities between England and France lasting from 1337 until 1453 – to not only make art but to set history’s stamp on an event that was certainly important, although just one of several battles in a lengthy sequence.
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