Category: shakespeare

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start.

This. The Saturday I’ve been waiting for! Favorite play ever, favorite actor ever, go!

Rather than start this review with seven pages of frantic keysmashing, allow me to just say: Fuck yeah. With bells on.

There was everything to love about the performances turned in for this version of Henry V. Tom Hiddleston was superb. I’ve already gushed and gushed about him as Hal in Henry IV part 1 and part 2. At this point all I can really add is chocolate sprinkles delivered by a magical sparkling unicorn of pure badassery. Which is to say I thought he made a darn good Henry V.

What I noticed most about this Henry V was a pronounced somberness. Hiddleston shows clearly that Henry feels the weight of all his decisions. At the same time, there were lovely moments of supreme temper (such as in Act I scene 2 when he receives the Dauphin’s mocking present) and at the end of the battle of Agincourt with the enraged delivery of:

I was not angry since I came to France
Until this instant.

And then there was the end of the siege of Harfleur:

What is’t to me, when you yourselves are the cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?

That is one scary as hell speech, and Hiddleston delivers it with terrifying implacability. (And achieves a wonderfully disbelieving look from Anton Lesser’s Exeter, but more on that later.) I also was pleased that he still preserved the hints of playfulness that live on in the more responsible Henry. When he confronts the soldier who picked a fight with him when he was in disguise, and later tries to woo Katharine, we’re reminded that there’s much more to Henry than a stern and bloody soldier.

There’s just so much complexity to the character, so many tones and notes, and it was all there. Of course, I can’t go on without mentioning the two greatest speeches. I actually watched the “Once more unto the breach” speech three times, since the first time the delivery was so different from what I’d been expecting that   I needed another view. The tone was much less bombastic than what I’m used to seeing, which I think is ultimately for the good. It suited Hiddleston’s take on Henry well.

And the Saint Crispin’s day speech. My god. Tears. Perfect.

What really sold Henry’s more scary moments was actually the presence of Anton Lesser as the Duke of Exeter. His reaction to Henry at Harfleur, his confidence in his king, his shock when Henry orders the prisoners to be killed at Agincourt all add up to show even the court didn’t quite understand what they’d get by awakening Henry’s “sleeping sword of war.”

I honestly didn’t feel all that enthused about Lesser as Exeter in Act I scene 2, but by the time we get to Act II scene 4, I was sold:

Dispatch us with all speed, lest that our king
Come here himself to question our delay…

At which point I realized that Exeter is a soft-spoken, fearless badass. I was rather amused in Agincourt as well, when he’s speaking with Henry on the battlefield. Everyone is just coated in blood and mud, and Exeter is clean except for some splashes around his hem. Because he is just too much of a badass for dirt.

Paterson Joesph did very well as the Duke of York, and I was extremely charmed by Melanie Thierry as Katharine. Really, I liked the whole cast, but those are the ones that really stood out to me.

Also, while there was a bit of shaky cam in the battle, I have no objections to it this time. It didn’t make me feel motion sick, and I could actually tell what was going on. I was surprised that there were bits of the battle in slow-motion as well. Overall, I thought it was all right, particularly for a BBC production. Tom Hiddleston, Paterson Joseph, and Owen Teale (hope I’m spelling that right, the credits were kind of blurry) as Captain Fluellen were the ones that really did the heavy lifting on the battle. They all had some serious crazy eyes going.

The acting was good. That’s going to guarantee I’ll be regularly re-watching this when I need a Henry V fix. Some things, I didn’t like so much. The score, for one. I found it intrusive in Henry IV part 2 and even moreso here.

I’m also fairly stunned by just how much they cut from the play. Obviously, this was for time constraints, but it was jarring nonetheless. I actually watched the movie with my pocket Henry V in hand so I could follow along, because I’m just that kind of nerd. It meant that I felt like I was tripping over a rock when something was missing.

Several characters didn’t even make it in, notably Gower, and Henry’s two brothers, Gloucester and Bedford. Which seemed particularly strange to me, since they were present in the two parts of Henry IV. I guess this time around they had something better to do than go murder the shit out of the French with their big brother. Or maybe they just got stuck in the pre-Olympic traffic in London. We’ll never know.

With the loss of Gower as a character, that meant we lost most of the character development scenes with Fluellen, which I think are a shame since Fluellen’s quite fun, and he has an excellent enmity with Pistol that doesn’t get nearly as much play because of the deleted scenes. Act II scene 2, where the traitors are revealed and taken away was eliminated.

Now, I can understand doing away with it for time constraints, but it’s a really good scene for Henry:

The mercy that was quick in us but late,
By your own counsel is suppress’d and kill’d:
You must not dare, for shame, to talk of mercy…

If nothing else, it’s another big point in his development as being so merciless as we see him later.

Also missing is Act V scene 1, where we find out the sad fate of Pistol (his friends are dead, his wife is dead, he’s going back to England to be a thief). While again this isn’t important to Henry, sine we’ve had Pistol throughout the play it does bother me that he’s just left without any kind of conclusion.

Act III scene 7 is also mostly absent, which I was disappointed by. It’s the French camp scene, which always seemed to me to be important setup for the battle at Agincourt – it shows how overconfident the French were, how outgunned the underdog English seemed. That also takes a lot of development away from the French characters, since they really only have a couple of scenes, so seeing them die in the battle later has a lot less impact I think.

I’m also puzzled about the choice to leave out the bit where the French kill all the boys at the English camp and set fire to the baggage. While Henry does order the English to kill their prisoners before that, it’s actually the catalyst for him screaming about how utterly enraged he is. (“I was not angry since I came to France…”) This has the effect of making what was previously Henry’s reiteration to kill the prisoners seem much less justified. So I suppose if the point was to remind us that the man is absolutely brutal when he feels he needs to be, it does do that.

Anyway. I wonder if those scenes are gone entirely, or if maybe some might have been filmed and we’ll get to see them when there’s not the time constraints of television. I guess we’ll find out.

And of course, the inevitable comparison to Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 Henry V. That movie was my first love, so to speak, so it’s not really fair to compare the two. I’ll be watching both movies when I want a Henry fix. I hope they can manage to take turns and not fight, because I do love them both and they have very different qualities.

But I will tell you this. Man, I miss Patrick Doyle’s score for the movie. (And sorry, John Hurt. Derek Jacobi wins. He will always be Chorus in my heart.)

If you want to watch this wonderful Henry V, here’s a recorded livestream, which has something like 10 minutes of sports in front of it. Also a direct download. And you can still watch it on the BBC iPlayer if you get Expat Shield, which is how I did it. (I actually started watching an hour late – shame on me! – because I was out carb loading for tomorrow at a Chinese Buffet.)

As of this writing, by the way, Branagh’s Henry V is available on instant play for Netflix. If you haven’t gotten to watch it, you should. It’s 23 years old but still fantastic.

Henry V is probably the most straightforward of the history plays (less politics, really, more Henry being a shiny badass on a horse) but if you had trouble following it here’s a quick synopsis.

The Hollow Crown blogging:
Richard II
Henry IV part 1
Henry IV part 2
Henry V

Finally got to watch this, and not a moment to soon! Darn field work for standing between me and Shakespeare anyway. It’s okay, baby, I’m here for you now. I’ll never let them tear us apart again.

Henry IV Part 2 starts off with scene 1 and 2 being intercut again, as it was in Part 1. This, I like less than I did. It made more sense in Part 1 so we could understand a bit better why Henry IV is having such problems with his son. In this, it’s making Falstaff being, well, Falstaff with what is the setup for the political conflict for this play, and it seems really unnecessary. They also trimmed a bit off the start of scene 1, including the opening monologue of Rumor. Which is a nice speech that’s fun to read aloud, but its loss doesn’t bother me so much, particularly since we only see Rumor once. (It did give me a moment of concern about Chorus in Henry V, but considering John Hurt is on the cast list in that role, I think we’re safe.)

Anyway, little tweaks (and they did exist here and there, probably many more than I realized since I don’t know this play nearly as well as Henry V) like this are normally necessary. I just mentioned the first one because it struck me rather wrongly.

And while I sound like I’m complaining, the only other potential complaint I’ve got is that for some reason the score felt very intrusive in this one, far more than in the previous two plays. I already felt incredibly moved by  Hal’s final scene with his father; I didn’t need all the strings to tell me I ought to be. The music for the coronation scene also made me cringe slightly; I half expected the classic record scratch news when Falstaff breaks through the crowd and stops Hal. Oof.

But other than those minor quibbles? Perfect, perfect, perfect.

While I already gushed about Jeremy Irons and Tom Hiddleston in Part 1, this performance requires even more glee and sparkles. Jeremy Irons was incredible. There is so much pain and marrow in that performance: all the guilt that Henry feels about his acquisition of the crown, all his conflicts with his son, the weight of the crown bearing down on him, his palpable worries that his death might hand the throne to someone who will never be ready for it. The last moment when he reconciles with his son was beyond beautiful.

And of course, his entire monologue:

…Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude,
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

The delivery was wonderful. Though there was part of me that found it disturbingly cute to see Henry wandering around in his pajamas.

I feel as if Tom Hiddleston’s performance in Part 1 was really just the teaser for this. Hal lets go of his wild days and finally grows up, when it’s almost too late. It comes back to act iv scene 4, when Henry IV is on his death bed. Hiddleston does an amazing job of taking us through Hal’s grief. It’s that realization that’s unfortunately common to so many of us, that we spurned and insufficiently loved those closest and dearest to us because we thought they would always be there tomorrow.

…And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,
I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: ‘The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father;
Therefore, thou best of gold art worst of gold:
Other, less fine in carat, is more precious,
Preserving life in medicine potable;
But thou, most fine, most honour’d: most renown’d,
Hast eat thy bearer up.’

The words are powerful enough on their own. The delivery killed. I cried. Not ashamed to admit it in the slightest.

Though if I thought that was the best, then there was the final scene, where the newly crowned King Henry V officially turns his back on Falstaff and the life he once knew. I always thought, “I know thee not, old man,” would be the most powerful line. But in this rendition, I found:

I have long dream’d of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.

Ouch, ouch, ouch. The more subtle expressions from Hiddleston (showing this isn’t all that easy for Henry) and the stunned disbelief from Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff just sells this. Of course, a lot of the play focuses on Falstaff being old and his impending death – paralleling the mortality of Henry IV, the father that Hal ultimately chooses. Falstaff and Hal are only in two scenes together; I think even in the first one, there’s a sense of Hal already distancing himself from Falstaff, continuing the process that started in the previous play.

Beale makes Falstaff complex through the end. I was never quite certain if the majority of Falstaff’s upset at the end was because he lost someone he actually cared about, or if he saw his long-cultivated meal ticket walk away without so much as a backward glance. That I’m still not sure reflects incredibly well on the performance, I think.

Also, a shout-out to Alun Armstrong as Northumberland. While the political setting of the play is very much overshadowed by the family drama aspect of it, he turned in a good performance at the grieving father of Henry Percy.

This was excellent, and I recommend it heartily, though you should watch Part 1 of the play first so you can get the full arc of Hal’s character development. It’s definitely worth the time investment.

I watched this and Part 1 on the BBC2 iPlayer with the use of a little program called Expat Shield. If you don’t want to go that route, there’s the whole episode on youtube as of this writing. There’s also an upload of Part 1 on  youtube, but it’s cut into 15 minute sections. You can watch it via playlist here.

Henry V tomorrow. My favorite Shakespeare play ever. I can’t even. I can’t begin to say how excited I am.

…yeah, something like that.

The Hollow Crown blogging:
Richard II
Henry IV part 1
Henry IV part 2
Henry V

Henry IV part 1 today. Hilariously enough it was delayed by an hour because of Wimbledon. A tennis delay seems like something that would be so much more appropriate to Henry V…

…not that I’m in any way asking for a tennis delay by the time we get to that play. I might implode.

I don’t need to start here with a litany of complaints about the play like I did with Richard II. I loved both parts of Henry IV when I read them – and as with Shakespeare, I expected to like them even better with a proper performance. (Because let’s face it… these works were meant to be viewed, not just read like normal books. Quit torturing those kids in high school.)

Casting was perfect, just as it was for Richard II. Jeremy Irons as Henry IV! Incredible. (Does Jeremy Irons ever get to be king when he hasn’t deposed the rightful monarch first? Just asking.) The man can brood like a champion, and Henry does that a lot in this and the next play – because let’s be honest, he has a lot to brood over! His son is a smarmy, shameful party boy, he’s still torturing himself with guilt over what happened to Richard (as necessary as it was) and he’s dealing with open rebellion that’s only going to cost more lives. Jeremy Irons does a fantastic job of depicting the utter weight that constantly sits on Henry without making him morose.

The best of Irons (and it was all good, so the best was incredible) was when he was playing more as the father rather than the king. He radiates disappointment and despair that he’s ended up with a  poor excuse for a son like Hal instead of Hotspur, who really is depicted as the paragon of all noble qualities – it’s hard not to like him. (And Joe Armstrong does indeed make him both likable and still hotheaded.)

Of course, Irons wouldn’t be in such a good position to be a despairing father if Tom Hiddleston didn’t do such an incredible job playing Hal as an awful little prick. I utterly adore Tom Hiddleston, but by the time Henry actually slaps Hal across the face, I was about ready to cheer for it. Never has a slap been so richly deserved, and it was preceded by a wonderfully insolent look to boot. The beginning of Hal’s evolution from a waste of space to a great king gets a good start, and I can’t wait to see it continue in the next part.

Which then brings us to Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff, because what would Hal without an utterly awful (yet jolly and hilarious) human being to egg him on? Best Falstaff ever, in my opinion. His self-serving interest in Hal is made so clear, though I think there’s genuine affection there as well. The scene between Hal and Falstaff where they take turns pretending to be Henry IV was simultaneously hilarious and uncomfortable; incredibly well done.

Also, Tom Hiddleston’s Jeremy Irons impression made me snort beer through my nose. Damn you, Hiddleston.

A special shout out to the gentleman who played the Sheriff. I wish I knew his name, but it’s not currently listed on IMDB. When he comes to collect Hal from his den of iniquity, the Sheriff says:

Good night, my noble lord.

And never has the word noble been delivered with such pointed and censorious air quotes. It was lovely.

So the cast? Excellent. I expect to keep repeating this sentiment for the next two plays as well. (If nothing else, one more play with Jeremy Irons and two with Tom Hiddleston? I am a happy girl.)

This had the same quality on costuming and sets as Richard II to my untrained eye, and I have no complaints there. I wasn’t sure how I felt about scene 1 and 2 of Act 1 being intercut originally, but it grew on me. It did make sense to get people clued in to just who Hal was and why he was proving such a thorn in his father’s side.

Some of the other editing/filming decisions, I liked a little less. There were two major monologues that were delivered as voice overs. One was Hal’s Act 1 scene 2 closing speech:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world…

And the other was Falstaff’s Act 5 scene 1 closing speech:

‘Tis not due yet; I would be loath to pay him before
his day. What need I be so forward with him that
calls not on me? Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks
me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I
come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no: or
an arm? no…

Both of these are incredibly important and I’m puzzled why they were delivered that way, particularly since it was basically just a voice over while the character in question just sort of… walked around and took in the scenery. There might have been a little showing in their expressions, but not nearly as much as we would have seen if they’d actually spoken the lines and played them out. It’s not as if there aren’t other times where someone talks to themselves for the benefit of the camera – Falstaff’s dastardly scheme to pretend that he killed Hotspur was spoken aloud. So I’m not sure why that was done, and I felt like it really detracted from the play.

I have very mixed feelings about the battle and the way it was filmed. There was shaky cam in it, which I am beyond tired of but I guess it’ll never go away so I’ll just be a useless curmudgeon about it. But I think during the main part of the battle there was some kind of change on the camera filter… so during the action all of the colors were incredibly muted. This made it harder to tell who might be who – maybe that was the point – but as soon as Hal and Hotspur split off to have their confrontation the colors came back to normal and it just seemed very jarring. I was not a fan of that. There were also people complaining on Twitter that they didn’t feel there were enough people involved in the battle – I didn’t feel like it was too sparse, myself. I just wish I could have seen better what was going on!

These are really the only two complaints I can come up with for the production. I enjoyed it greatly, more than I did Richard II. I’m looking forward to them coming to the US so I can get DVDs. (Though I fear Tom Hiddleston will likely still have to take turns with Kenneth Branagh for Henry V duty. Sorry, Tom. A girl doesn’t forget her first love.)

I’m just incredibly sad I won’t get to watch part 2 on streaming next weekend. I’ll be in Pennsylvania for a field trip, so I expect I’ll be in a quarry, getting eaten alive by bugs when I’d much rather be watching Irons and Hiddleston rule the internet. Hopefully I can sneak a peak at it later.

[I’ve now seen Part 2, and it was good. So very good.]

The Hollow Crown blogging:
Richard II
Henry IV part 1
Henry IV part 2
Henry V