The Frame

This paper discusses the 1944 and 1989 film adaptations of Henry V; it contains spoilers for the play and both film versions.

In 1944, Laurence Olivier did something that had not yet been done: He created a successful cinematic version of a Shakespeare play. Up to that point, Shakespeare adaptations like The Taming of the Shrew (1929), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), Romeo and Juliet (1936), and As You Like It (1936) had suffered from stilted productions and miscasting. By the early 1940s, Shakespeare was considered box office poison. But Olivier’s Henry V would change that. Because of the history of failed attempts to bring Shakespeare to the screen, Olivier was very aware of the difficulties he would have to overcome in order to reach a mass movie audience with Shakespeare’s 400-year-old words. His solution was to demystify the Elizabethan theatergoing experience.

The film opens with a close-up of a playbill announcing that “The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with his battell fought at Agincourt in France by Will Shakespeare will be played by The Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the GLOBE PLAYHOUSE THIS DAY The FIRST of MAY 1600,” followed by a pan across sixteenth-century London, and a zoom into the Globe Theatre itself. After the cross-section of London society that made up the patrons of the theatre gets settled, the play begins. The early scenes of Henry V are filled with extensive speeches about a bill to take land from the church and the convoluted royal lineage which may or may not lend credence to King Henry’s claim for the French throne. Realizing that this information is important but unlikely to command the audience’s attention, Olivier uses these scenes to depict the relationship between the actors and the Renaissance audience, making them broadly comedic in tone. This strategy accomplishes a number of things: firstly, it removes the aura of reverence that makes Shakespeare seem inaccessible; secondly, the vociferous groundlings give the modern audience an example of how to react to Shakespeare; thirdly, by making the bishops objects of ridicule, it reduces the cynicism inherent in their plot to distract Henry from the bill by sending him to war with France.

Throughout his adaptation, Olivier systematically reduces the cynicism and complexity of Shakespeare’s play, mostly in order to appeal to an audience immersed in World War II. Henry V was produced partially as a propaganda film, a necessary concession in order to acquire the resources to make it—Technicolor film was not cheap, and movie studios did not consider Shakespeare a good investment. But Olivier’s portrayal of Henry as an upright, brave, and merciful English war hero struck all the right nerves, with both producers and audiences. In order to achieve this view of Henry, virtually all of the negatives about his character have been eliminated. In the play, Henry pardons a man suspected of treason in order to trap three traitorous nobles into condemning themselves; Olivier retains the pardon, but eliminates the three traitors, making Henry’s pardon purely merciful. The speech threatening Harfleur with pillage, rape, and naked babies stuck on pikes has been eliminated entirely, as has the scene of Bardolph’s hanging. The only scene, in fact, that remains to cast doubt on the justness of Henry’s war with France is the one the night before the battle, when a disguised Henry visits his men and they speak of the king’s responsibility for all the deaths in battle. By vastly reducing Henry’s cruelty, Olivier focuses closely on his heroism. This may make for a less interesting Henry, but Olivier is consistent in his portrayal, and it works for the film itself, which is very colorful and lighthearted.

The film contains three distinct sections, which fit inside each other, creating a chiasm of stylistic structure. The opening scenes are on the Elizabethan stage. Just before Henry’s first entrance, the camera moves backstage, hinting that the film is not going to be just a filmed stage play—nevertheless, the film remains stagebound throughout the first act. When Henry prepares to depart Southhampton, the camera zooms into the backdrop, which fades into a painting, and thence to a real-life ship in front of very obviously two-dimensional set paintings. These painted backdrops and flat sets continue until the battle of Agincourt. This section is modeled on Les Tres riches Heures du duc de Berry, a Book of Hours commissioned by Jean de Berry, uncle of King Charles VI, and completed around the same time as the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Olivier especially models the scenes at the French court after medieval paintings, which is instantly obvious by the careful composition of actors, as if they were in a still picture. The third style is the naturalistic Battle of Agincourt itself, which is realistic in art design if not in gore. In fact, the scenes give an excellent sense of the differences in size between the French and English armies, though the weariness of the English, who have been marching through mud and rain since Harfleur, is talked about but not really believably portrayed. After the battle, a return to the painterly backdrops accompanies the return to the French court, and the film ends up where it began—with the Chorus’ epilogue on stage and a reverse pan across London. This structure highlights the centrality of the battle itself, and also creates a thorough-going Renaissance aesthetic, keeping it light and colorful and showing the heroism of past English kings in order to raise morale in a country five years into a devastating world war. Tellingly, the Chorus leaves out the lines of the epilogue telling that during Henry VI’s reign France would be lost and England would bleed. It would not do to remind a Britain struggling against Germany in WWII that Henry’s victory was temporary and his war was ultimately in vain.

Comparing Olivier’s Henry V with Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film of the play yields fruitful ruminations. Branagh gives a fully complex portrait of Henry, leaving in virtually all of the cruel and borderline bloodthirsty speeches which Olivier excises. His Henry is intense, conflicted, and comes home less a victorious hero than an exhausted king whose victory is costly. Branagh’s film is dark, both in tone and cinematography, there is little comedy, and the war scenes are brutally realistic. Yet, Branagh does not turn his back on Olivier’s earlier version, but homages it openly by having his Chorus begin backstage in a theatre before throwing the doors of the theatre open into the real world in which the rest of the film takes place. Also, comparing the texts of the two film versions with the text of the play shows that, excepting the lines that Olivier leaves out in order to keep Henry’s image pure, the two use and excise almost the same lines (for example, both leave out nearly all of the classical references so rife in the play, despite the use of the Chorus, a staple of classical drama). Branagh also mirrors almost exactly Olivier’s use of specific lines from the various prologues to introduce each scene, rather than the block of text Shakespeare has introducing an entire act. Branagh certainly makes Henry V his own, but he very clearly utilizes the editing work done by Olivier in 1944. Both film versions sparked a revival of interest in cinematic Shakespeare adaptations. Together, they prove the versatility of Shakespeare in his ability to inspire two films so different from each other, yet both excellent films in and of themselves.