Audiences coming to see Famous Victories next Friday might be expecting the same Henry they know from Shakespeare’s play. They will, however, find something quite different than they expect. To quote 2 Henry IV’s Epilogue, “this is not the man” – or is he?[1]
Both the anonymously written Famous Victories and Shakespeare’s Henry V ran at the same time, making them direct competitors in the early modern theaterscape; while they cover the same events, however, they tell very different stories about Henry V. Shakespeare’s second tetralogy – sometimes called the Lancastrian cycle or the Henriad – presents an in-depth consideration of the maturation process necessary for a future king. Hal’s soliloquies, along with his interactions with his father, King Henry IV, and his friends in Eastcheap, mold him into the hero king of Henry V. Shakespeare’s Henry struggles with his position, however, especially the way that he is expected to balance the king’s two bodies. In my dissertation, I argue that, because he recognizes this perfect balance is impossible, Henry chooses instead to use his performance of masculinity as a disguise for his failures to fulfill the expectations of good kingship, which ultimately succeeds, thanks to his premature death and the praises heaped upon him by the Chorus.
The Henry of Famous Victories, while following the same storyline, is not the same character. Unlike Hal, who comes across as both a playboy prince and a sort of everyman in Shakespeare’s version (despite his early admission that he is merely using his friends as a cloak for his future glory), Famous Victories’ Prince Henry is calculated and cunning. As Brian Walsh notes in his introduction to the play, it “does not include any [ . . . ] gestures intended to soften or excuse the prince’s misdeeds.”[2] Henry blithely dismisses Derick’s case against his servant, Cutbert Cutter, by claiming that “he did [rob Derick] but in jest”; similarly, his rage at the Lord Chief Justice’s refusal to release Cutbert when he asks nicely leads him to pull his rank, and, when that also fails, to slap him on the ear (an event that Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV references, but never actually depicts).[3] Even in the moments where he professes to be a changed man willing to repair his relationship with his father, his actions come across as performative, almost to the point of melodrama.
This does not change after Hal becomes king, either. While Shakespeare’s King Henry voices his struggles with his position, the only moment of interiority audiences and readers receive from Famous Victories’s King Henry is a brief reflection on his intent to marry Katherine, the princess of France. There is no Chorus to support the narrative of kingly greatness; instead, Famous Victories chooses to emphasize Henry’s brilliance as a military tactician, rather than his strengths as a king. In fact, the play specifically mentions in two different locations Henry’s victorious strategy at Agincourt – once when Henry gives the order, and once after the battle has (seemingly) ended, as two men, John Cobbler and Robin Pewterer, reflect on how brilliant the strategy was.
So why, if these two characters are so different, have we chosen to stage this play? Part of it is the bait-and-switch of the title: playgoers might assume that, since Henry V is in the title, that this is Shakespeare’s play, which allows us the opportunity to mimic, in some way, the competition between the two plays in the early modern period. It also allows us to present two different versions of Henry in a single season, as we follow this play with Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV in early November. If audiences are primed for this Henry, how will they react when presented with the same narrative but with a vastly different Hal?
Another reason for staging Famous Victories is the way it examines leadership. As Walsh writes, the play’s depiction of Henry “invites scrutiny; it asks us to think hard about both what we admire in our leaders and how we define heroism.”[4] Ultimately, this is the question at the heart of so many history plays – and of both versions of the Henry V prodigal son to heroic king narrative. If, as the play (and Walsh) suggest, we are supposed to like Henry, why is it that we like him? What makes him so appealing? Or does the play fail in its attempt to make him a popular hero? No matter the choices made by the actors, it is ultimately up to the audience to decide which version they believe.
[1] W. Shakespeare, King Henry IV: Part 2, ed. James C. Bulman, 3 Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2016), Epilogue 2.32.
[2] B. Walsh, “Introduction to The Famous Victories of Henry V,” in The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, ed. Jeremy Lopez (Routledge, 2020), 350. This is not to say that Hal does not also share this sense of humor; his and Poins’s trick on Francis in 1 Henry IV 2.4 shows that he can be just as cruelly comedic as Prince Henry is.
[3] Anon., The Famous Victories of Henry V, ed. Brian Walsh, in The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (Routledge, 2020), 4.39, 52-66.
[4] Walsh, “Introduction,” 351.