Even though I admire my friend, Mr. Shakespeare, a great deal, he was a lousy historian! He wrote about a dozen historical plays about England and Scotland and a few more about ancient Greece and Rome. However, due to his reputation as England's greatest writer, these often historically inaccurate plays have influenced how we refer to several (in)famous personalities and events of the past.
Of course, it must be remembered before I tell you about several English kings such as Henry V, Richard III and others that our Will was writing for the theatre, an institution in which he had shares, i.e. a serious financial interest therein. Therefore it must be remembered that despite my remarks below, he was writing as a dramatist and not as a history teacher. He had to make his plays popular as 'bums on seats meant cash in pockets.' And that is what he did - and very successfully too.
He also had to succeed as a playwright simply because he wasn't the only playwright on the scene (or on the stage). His chief rivals included Christopher Marlowe, before he was killed in a pub brawl in 1593, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont (who died a week before WS did) and John Webster. There were also many other minor scribblers around whose names and plays have disappeared o'er the passage of time.
But now I wish to deal with one of his most performed plays about one of England's most famous soldier-kings: King Henry the Fifth. This valiant man was put up on his pedestal by the Bard in about 1598/99 (to the chagrin of lit. crit. scholars ever since, WS never dated his plays so we have to date them through internal clues and incidents) and this king has stayed high up there ever since.
Of course, Henry V's claim to fame is based on leading his "poor and starved band" (French pre-battle opinion) of five to nine thousand sickly men against a much larger French army of thousands of well-armoured mounted knights. As history and the Bard tell us, by the time that cold October day was over, Henry had absolutely wiped the floor with his French opponents. So what is wrong with this play?
The answer is not in the main action; it is in the details. In the king's well-known pre-battle warm-up speech beginning, "If we are marked to die..." Henry refers to "the happy few" - the nobles who were due to fight with him that day. These included the Dukes of Bedford, Gloucester, Exeter and York as well as the Earls of Salisbury, Westmoreland, Warwick and Sir Thomas Erpingham. Please note: Shakespeare got this list completely wrong! Of the eight nobles mentioned here, only three of them, the Dukes of Gloucester and York and Sir Thomas Erpingham were there on that fateful day. Of these three, the Duke of York, Henry's younger brother was (probably) smothered to death by other bodies lying on him in the mud in the heat of battle, the Duke of Gloucester was severely wounded 'to the hams' and only the sixty year old Sir Thomas survived that grim battle relatively unscathed.
Where were the other members of the "happy few?" Some were left behind in England to 'look after the shop,' i.e. to make sure that France's allies, the Scots, didn't attack from the north during Henry's absence, while some of the others were left behind to make sure the king's recent victory at Harfleur ("Once more into the breach, dear friends..." didn't unravel.
To be honest, Shakespeare was more historically accurate when dealing with the French aristocrats who were present on that October day. However, he did make a mistake mentioning that the French King Charles VI's oldest son, the Dauphin, also fought at the Battle of Agincourt. He didn't. He was presumably back home with daddy, getting himself ready to meet Joan of Arc some fifteen years later.
Enough for today. Next time I will tell you that not only was our William a lousy historian, he also wasn't very good at military statistics!
For more about Henry V and the Battle of Agincourt, see: Website:www.dly-books.weebly.com
and also my novel, "ARROWS OVER AGINCOURT" available through amazon.com/co.uk etc
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