Shakespeare's "King Henry V" from "The War of the Roses" (English Shakespeare Company, UK, 1990) is a direct filming, from the stage, of Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington's 7-play sequence based on Shakespeare's history plays.
Andrew Jarvis as the Dauphin,
Clyde Pollitt as the King of France,
Ian Burford as Exeter,
Hugh Sullivan as Constable of France,
King Henry - Michael Pennington
Chorus - Barry Stanton
Director Michael Bogdanov
from "Henry V" by Robert Balmain Mowat:
Meanwhile the king had held a council of his barons and had put to them the question: should the army return by sea to England, or should it push forward through the land of Normandy to Calais ? The majority of the council, considering the great losses which the army had sustained, the number of sick who must in any case return to England, and the large forces which the Dauphin was known to have collected, advised that Henry should withdraw his forces from France, leaving only the garrison of Harfleur to uphold his power for the present. This decision must have troubled the king, for although he was an experienced soldier and general, yet it is no easy thing for a man of twenty-eight years to reject the advice of all the experienced and senior officers of the army. Yet he seems not to have hesitated for a moment. Being used to making decisions and to facing responsibility, he stated his view shortly and clearly to the council : "I have a great desire to see my lands and places that should be mine by right. Let them assemble their greatest armies, there is hope in God that they will hurt neither my army nor me. I will not suffer them, puffed up with pride, to rejoice in misdeeds, nor unjustly, against God, to possess my goods. They would say that through fear I had fled away, acknowledging the injustice of my cause. But I have a mind, my brave men, to encounter all dangers, rather than let them brand your king with word of ill-will. With the favour of God, we will go unhurt and inviolate, and, if they attempt to stay us, victorious and triumphant in all glory." 1
With these brave words the king made known his decision. It was the greatest crisis of his reign. For had he returned to England, with a decimated army and overwhelmed with debt, he could not have escaped bankruptcy, nor, what is worse, a loss of confidence among the people, which would have more than shaken the unstable Lancastrian throne. So he took the heroic decision to go forward and win another realm to add to England, or to die at the head of his men, fighting in the heart of France. Leaving his uncle, the Earl of Dorset, in command at Harfleur with 1200 men, he set out on 8 October, with his little army, " in three divisions and two squadrons, as was the habit of the English."
It was a desperate venture, which speaks volumes not merely for the determination of the king, but also of the men who ungrudgingly followed him against their own judgment. There was a curious buoyancy in the Englishmen of those days. Their fathers had followed the Black Prince and John of Gaunt through the length and breadth of France; now they themselves were ready to plunge into that populous kingdom, not as it seems in any vainglorious belief in the superiority of the English, but with the indifference of men to whom war is on a footing with any other means of livelihood and for whom death has no terror.
The army was nothing more than a flying column of 900 lances and 5000 archers.1 For many had died of sickness during the siege, even well-cared-for nobles like the Bishop of Norwich and the Earl of Suffolk. Others, no less than 5000, including some of the king's barons, his brother the Duke of Clarence, and the Earls of March and Arundel were so ill that they had to be sent back to England. Besides the losses, it is said that desertions had not been infrequent during the siege, so that altogether the king's fighting men were reduced to less than half their original number. Each man was to carry with him food for eight days. The distance between Harfleur and Calais, with hostile forces said to be converging on every side,2 with unbanked rivers to cross, swollen by the autumn rains, could not by any route be less than 200 miles.
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Shakespeare's Henry V (1990, Michael Bogdanov) pt 5 of 17by ShakespeareAndMore2,246 views
Wasn't the wars of the roses.
Flags61 10 months ago