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In the wake of his father's death, Prince Henry has ascended to the throne as King Henry V. The rebels have finally been overthrown and the civil war has ended. Henry continues to distance himself from the disreputable friends of his youth in an effort to gain the respect of his subjects. After a dispute with the French over territory, Henry decides to invade France. The English fight their way across the country in a bloody series of conflicts that culminates in the legendary Battle of Agincourt. Will Henry be able to inspire the vastly outnumbered English soldiers on to victory against the French? First published in 1600, this unabridged version of William Shakespeare's history play is the fourth and final in his tetralogy about the rise of the English royal House of Lancaster.

Since 1949, the reconstruction had been the brainchild of charismatic American film star and director Sam Wanamaker. [...]references in the epilogue suggest that Shakespeare was very enthusiastic about continuing the adventures of his great comic creation into the sequel; it almost has the feel of a film franchise with proven popular characters signed up for 'the next instalment'. [...]it becomes somewhat relevant to the 1944 Laurence Olivier film version that the great variety star George Robey appears (silently) as the dying Falstaff.\\n13 Branagh himself, in an interview with Michael Billington for the New York Times, has criticised Olivier's version, including the cuts: T feel it has been unjustly treated as a jingoistic hymn to England.

It is now some thirty years since the researches of John H. Fisher and Malcolm Richardson highlighted the importance of the records of the central government in the process of English-language “vernacularization” in early-fifteenth-century England. Their publication of the Anthology of Chancery English provided irrefutable evidence of a linguistic transition that overtook some key types of government records, which began to be drafted in English where previously they had been written in Anglo-Norman French and, to a lesser extent, Latin. But while the existence of these early examples of “official” written English cannot be doubted, the forces that underlay this linguistic shift are less clear. From the very outset, doubts were expressed about the hypothesis advanced by Fisher and Richardson, that the spread of English in the records of the central government could be directly attributed to a “language policy” put into place by the Lancastrian regime and, in particular, to the personal initiative of Henry V, who made the momentous decision—from a linguistic point of view—to have his signet letters written in English rather than French in July 1417. But it is only more recently that a more detailed and robust criticism has been directed toward these ideas. In an article published in 2004, Michael Benskin rightly pointed out that the very term “Chancery English,” or “Chancery Standard,” as applied in the work of Fisher and Richardson is a misnomer, since only a minority of the documents contained within the Anthology were actually produced within the Chancery itself. He also questioned the extent to which the Chancery could be credited with an enlightened attitude toward written English, given that some of its most prestigious records—the close, patent, and statute rolls—continued to be written in Latin or French throughout the fifteenth century.

This essay explores whether Gerald Harriss's conception of 'Lancastrian orthodoxy'—established by Henry IV and his coterie, but extended by his son Henry V—can be explored in relation to the lyric sequence of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 102. Diverging from standard critical accounts of the Digby poems, it argues that, rather than acting as praise poetry for the Lancastrian regime, the lyrics articulate an anxiety over Henry V's attempt to align the authority of the Church with the crown, thus extending his political power. Written within, in Vincent Gillespie's term, a 'milieu of orthodox reform', the lyrics reveal an underlying concern that, under Henry V's rule, the balance between regnal and ecclesiastical authority could drastically shift. The essay considers these poems in relation to other examples of literature that appear to support the Lancastrian monarchy, namely the macaronic sermons of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 649 and, in particular, Sermon 22. The sermon, as in much other praise literature for the Lancastrian regime, provides a traditional view of heresy in its condemnation of John Oldcastle. Helen Barr, the most recent editor of the poems, has suggested that the Digby poet performs a 'textual excommunication' of heresy within the lyrics. The essay considers whether the poet is as much, if not more, concerned with the balance between the 'auctoritas' of the Church and the 'potestas' of the monarch.

This study argues that the experience of government, though more clearly articulated after 1400, did not engender realpolitik and made princes and ministers, both the old nobility of service and the newer graduate careerists, more acutely aware of issues of conscience. It traces the anxieties provoked by political experience, their relation to the new spiritual literature addressed to persons with active responsibility, and their resolution after 1410 in a new, tough, realistic but morally sensitive approach to government, associated above all with Henry V of England.

Richard Dutton discusses Henry Vas a succession play and analyzes the differing registers of that theme in its 1600 Quarto and 1623 Folio texts. He considers its chronicle history genre, noting how such works typically introduced fictional romantic elements that allowed for an oblique (and apparently acceptable) topical allusiveness, by contrast with the \"politic\" histories of Daniel, Jonson, and Chapman in the mid-1600s. Henry V appeared in the wake of the dramatic shifts in European politics in 1598, especially confrontation with Spain, now intent on placing the Infanta Isabella on Elizabeth's throne. This coincided with outright rebellion in Ireland as well as possible threats from Scotland. Dutton traces how the two texts register these issues, arguing that the Folio version (the only one that mentions Ireland) is likely to date from after the decisive Battle of Kinsale (1601) rather than from 1599, and therefore to celebrate Mountjoy rather than Essex. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The origins of the infamous 'Agincourt Carol', celebrating Henry v's military campaign of 1415, have often been the subject of fanciful speculation, but very little concrete evidence has so far been discovered. This article reports the new discovery that the carol's text relates closely to other poems celebrating the event, and may have been their source. It explores in more detail the surviving accounts of the victory pageant mounted in London on the king's return, during which the carol may have been performed. New evidence concerning the carol's earliest musical source has allowed a more precise dating and possible provenance to be established, elucidating the musical and literary worlds in which this most intriguing of medieval songs was composed.

On 22 March 1421, Henry V's brother and heir presumptive, Thomas, duke of Clarence, was killed in battle at Baugé in Anjou by a Franco-Scottish force. Clarence had engaged the enemy without proper preparation and with no archers to support him. For Henry V who had made inexorable progress since the start of his French campaign in 1417, this represented a serious and unexpected reverse. This article examines both contemporary and later reactions to Baugé. On account of the different perspectives – French, Scottish and a range of English reactions – from which the battle has been considered, it is possible to give an insight into the varying ways in which the same events were reported and interpreted. The article examines also the wider impact of a battle which, while having limited military effect, created considerable uncertainty at the time, and remained in the memory as an alarming example of how quickly the fortunes of war could change.