Jack Wetherall (front) and company in Henry V, 2007. Photo by Gerry Goodstein

Director’s Notes on Henry V

I am not inspired to provide copious personal notes on this play for I hope the production speaks all. I will only say this: though Henry V is one of the most celebrated plays in the canon, and though it has met with great success and critical acclaim over its over 407 year history, I think it is so often misconceived, misperceived, mislabeled, misplayed and grossly underestimated. It is a play so rich, so complex, and so thickly layered, that often, the many gossamer layers that lie intertissued within its great depths, are overlooked or never discovered. For me, one of the great joys in working on this piece was the privilege of helming the “dig” for those shimmering, fine layers, and working with the actors to bring them to light.

One British director’s estimation of the play truly made me bridle: “There is little in Henry V to comfort those serious students who look in their Shakespeare for some gritty layer of contemporary significance. Its subject is kingship, not in any constitutional sense but in the strong-arm sense of its time; its background is war and the glory of war, not the pity and horror of it. It takes for granted that patriotism is aggressive and nationalism militant and that on any day of the week one Englishman is worth several Frenchman. …Time and again…I come back to the central issue, how to assess the conduct of this warrior king in modern terms and each time I come back to the same answer, that one cannot. His conduct must be viewed in the context of its time. He made war when war seemed a natural condition of life. He was a conqueror when conquest was proof of a nation’s strength.”

This is such a simplistic, blind view of the play, not to mention of contemporary life, that I was amazed (and affronted on Shakespeare’s behalf!). War has been, unfortunately, a natural condition of life always, no less now than ever, but the play is not about war, nor about kingship. It is about many, many things, including quite centrally, leadership. The play makes no bones that humanity requires leaders but it makes no judgments nor states no opinions on such a need; rather, it poses infinite questions about the burdens, the glories, the responsibilities, the qualities, the sacrifices, the ceremonies, and the repercussions of leadership, not only from the viewpoint of the leader himself, but from the viewpoints of all those for whom leadership has repercussions — and that is all of us. And the ripple effect of those consequences begs greater questions. There are few plays in the canon more resonant than this for our time.

Moreover, the play is as much as about peace as it is about war, as much about loss as gain, as much about heartbreak as glory, as much about bad leadership as good, as much about equality as inequality, as much about ceremony and pomp as the lack thereof, as much about hopelessness and despair as it is about inspiration and miracles. The play demands an examination of what our leaders ask of us, and what we must demand of them. What are their responsibilities and what are ours, and are they not, essentially the same? Or are they? It is most of all a play that refuses to allow anything to be viewed simplistically. There is no black and white, but rather a myriad array of colorful and ever-changing perspectives and surprising twists. The French are not bad and the English good, nor are the English bad and the French good. It is about good men and bad. It is about good men who are bad sometimes and about bad men who are good sometimes. Morality and goodness abound in all corners, as does criminality and ignobility, and not just in every corner of the globe, but in every heart living on the globe. It is this very intricate rhythm of all the hearts in the play that is so often swept aside or not noticed.

Ultimately, Henry V is like all of Shakespeare’s plays, a brilliant depiction of humanity, a brilliant depiction of a society struggling to find itself and to find peace and balance, and a brilliant depiction of those who lead in the midst of those struggles, and those who are led. It shows us the epic and the intimate, the great and the small, and best of all, it unabashedly begs for your imagination to flesh it all out. And finally, I say again, if all this is not relevant to contemporary life, I don’t what is.

--Bonnie J. Monte