Teaching The Henriad
A Professor's Point of View
Dr. Kristen Poole
Shakespeare's history plays are some of my favorites in the Shakespearean canon. The characters have the same rich complexity and subtlety that we find in other plays, but here they are situated in the tense milieu of politics. This means that the inner life of the characters (the human wrestling with feelings of love and rejection, pride and self-doubt, connection and alienation) must negotiate the competing pressures of the social world (loyalty and betrayal, tradition and innovation, honor and disgrace). While the political world is a backdrop for other psychological plays such as Othello and King Lear, in the English history plays the psychological and the political are inextricably intermeshed. The Henriad is, in many ways, a study of the hard personal and ethical choices (or lack thereof) that come with political life.
But, frustratingly, I have found the history plays the most difficult to teach. If the plays are riveting because of this tension between the political and the personal, one needs to understand their political setting. This requires historical knowledge. A story about, say, President Richard Nixon would not make much sense to an audience who had no prior knowledge of the Viet Nam war or Watergate. A story about Abraham Lincoln would make no sense to an audience who knows nothing about the American Civil War. And so on. Yet most students come to the Henry V with scant knowledge about the play's historical context.
And what is this historical context? For us, in the twenty-first century, these plays hold a double temporal location. They are plays about medieval history written in the English Renaissance. King Richard II died the same year as Chaucer (1400); the Battle of Agincourt (1415) was 600 years ago. But Shakespeare was born about 200 years after Richard; Henry V was written just before 1600. So we are reading 400-year old plays portraying events that took place 600 years ago. Teaching the plays on a level that is not just about individual characters and psychological drama, but about the fraught world of domestic and international politics, thus seems to require teaching about Elizabethan England as well as medieval history.
The overwhelming majority of my students, however, have never heard of the Battle of Agincourt. And while Henry V was a legendary national hero in 1599 – a cultural figure of the standing of George Washington today – most of my students have never heard of him, either. In fact, most cannot initially locate the Middle Ages or the English Renaissance on a timeline. I do not mean this as a critique of the students. The teaching of history, which has been steadily downsized in high school education, has moved away from notions of "Western Civilization" and chronological narration to smaller units of social history. This does mean, though, that not only the plays' content, but the very way that they depict history, is alien to many of my students.
The sixteenth century witnessed a revolution in the telling of history. The modern historical timeline was developed by theologians, antiquarianism was all the rage, and the massive English chronicle histories were published. History was fashionable and popular. Shakespeare, who often capitalized on aesthetic and intellectual trends in order to please his audience, participated in this cultural vogue for historiography. These dramas toy with their historical double frame, as the medieval past of the plays' setting and the present of their performance in the 1590's are in complex and shifting relationship. At times the past is decidedly inaccessible; at times it is collapsed with the present of the play; at times the past returns with obvious nostalgia or even campy playfulness.
I had found the burden of teaching these plays in both their medieval and Elizabethan contexts too much for a semester to bear, and had largely given up on them in the classroom. The course that created this website, however, was able to study the Henriad in its multiple timeframes. A month-long viewing of The Hollow Crown, recent film adaptations of the plays using the Shakespearean text but set in the Middle Ages, brought the stories to life in their medieval context. Another month's immersion in the sixteenth-century chronicle histories in our library's Special Collections made visible how Shakespeare was staging and riffing on his source texts. And a month of student independent research and presentations gave the plays vivid context from a variety of historical perspectives. Our hope in sharing this work is that it might help others to become more familiar with the multi-temporal context that makes the history plays that much more fascinating.
But, frustratingly, I have found the history plays the most difficult to teach. If the plays are riveting because of this tension between the political and the personal, one needs to understand their political setting. This requires historical knowledge. A story about, say, President Richard Nixon would not make much sense to an audience who had no prior knowledge of the Viet Nam war or Watergate. A story about Abraham Lincoln would make no sense to an audience who knows nothing about the American Civil War. And so on. Yet most students come to the Henry V with scant knowledge about the play's historical context.
And what is this historical context? For us, in the twenty-first century, these plays hold a double temporal location. They are plays about medieval history written in the English Renaissance. King Richard II died the same year as Chaucer (1400); the Battle of Agincourt (1415) was 600 years ago. But Shakespeare was born about 200 years after Richard; Henry V was written just before 1600. So we are reading 400-year old plays portraying events that took place 600 years ago. Teaching the plays on a level that is not just about individual characters and psychological drama, but about the fraught world of domestic and international politics, thus seems to require teaching about Elizabethan England as well as medieval history.
The overwhelming majority of my students, however, have never heard of the Battle of Agincourt. And while Henry V was a legendary national hero in 1599 – a cultural figure of the standing of George Washington today – most of my students have never heard of him, either. In fact, most cannot initially locate the Middle Ages or the English Renaissance on a timeline. I do not mean this as a critique of the students. The teaching of history, which has been steadily downsized in high school education, has moved away from notions of "Western Civilization" and chronological narration to smaller units of social history. This does mean, though, that not only the plays' content, but the very way that they depict history, is alien to many of my students.
The sixteenth century witnessed a revolution in the telling of history. The modern historical timeline was developed by theologians, antiquarianism was all the rage, and the massive English chronicle histories were published. History was fashionable and popular. Shakespeare, who often capitalized on aesthetic and intellectual trends in order to please his audience, participated in this cultural vogue for historiography. These dramas toy with their historical double frame, as the medieval past of the plays' setting and the present of their performance in the 1590's are in complex and shifting relationship. At times the past is decidedly inaccessible; at times it is collapsed with the present of the play; at times the past returns with obvious nostalgia or even campy playfulness.
I had found the burden of teaching these plays in both their medieval and Elizabethan contexts too much for a semester to bear, and had largely given up on them in the classroom. The course that created this website, however, was able to study the Henriad in its multiple timeframes. A month-long viewing of The Hollow Crown, recent film adaptations of the plays using the Shakespearean text but set in the Middle Ages, brought the stories to life in their medieval context. Another month's immersion in the sixteenth-century chronicle histories in our library's Special Collections made visible how Shakespeare was staging and riffing on his source texts. And a month of student independent research and presentations gave the plays vivid context from a variety of historical perspectives. Our hope in sharing this work is that it might help others to become more familiar with the multi-temporal context that makes the history plays that much more fascinating.