The Pacifist Henry V

Henry V
Writers:  William Shakespeare (play), Kenneth Branagh (adaptation)
Production Companies:  British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in association with Curzon Film Distributors and Renaissance Films
Released Date:  6 October 1989

Shakespeare's tale of military heroism has been remodelled as a tale of moral equivalence.

British actor/ director Kenneth Branagh has made a film of Shakespeare's Henry V, and has turned it into an apologia for pacifism.  This fact has not prevented the reviewers in Australia's mainstream media from greeting the film with clamorous praise, in which it is hard to determine which factor warrants most embarrassment:  these critics' ignorance of Shakespeare;  their ignorance of 15th century history;  their ignorance of modern history;  or the Panglossian antics by which they have once again contrived to pretend for ideological reasons that a cinematic goose is a swan.

Though Shakespeare's tragedies may pulverise the soul even more, and though his comedies may contain more exalted literary beauty, his history plays constitute the section of his output which most clearly separates genuine Shakespeareans from bluffers.  These works' most obvious difficulty lies in their profusion of chronological, genealogical and political references.  Poetical sensibility and the possession of gonads may be enough to get the average adolescent through Romeo and Juliet;  he has not the smallest hope of getting through the history plays if he does not know why Thomas Mowbray was banished, what Salic Law was, why Archbishop Cranmer believed that Princess Elizabeth was the best thing since sliced bread, and so on.

Shakespeare's Values Scorned

Moreover, and still more maddeningly for the modern director, this abundance of detail cannot hide the magnificent unmodern simplicity of the history plays' themes.  Whichever set of characters is being depicted, the themes remain constant.  Though tyrannical rulers may be disastrous, wimpish rulers are always a hundred times more disastrous.  Rebellion is detestable, whoever carries it out.  Kings who marry French wives are asking for trouble.  Practising witch-craft is at all times hateful, and deserves death.  Cruelty on the battlefield can co-exist with feelings of the deepest mutual respect on the part of individual combatants.

It would be difficult to imagine any set of concepts less agreeable to the present-day liberal imagination.  Yet Shakespeare's England, if one may borrow a phrase from a later and more sanctimonious era, "held these truths to be self-evident".  It is no surprise to learn that socialist intellectuals have always been loud in their public detestation of the history plays, Henry V in particular.  Bernard Shaw said that "one can hardly forgive Shakespear [sic] for the worldly phase in which he tried to thrust such a Jingo hero as Harry [sic] V down our throats".  Shaw's Fabian disciple Granville Barker complained, more prissily, that Henry V was "so stodgily good, even a little (dare one say it?) vulgar ... I can imagine the lovers of his work losing hope in the Shakespeare of that year or two".  And for Orwell, Henry V was "a disgusting beefy brute".

How to reconcile contemporary audiences to jingoism:  this is the problem which the late 20th century Shakespeare director imagines he must solve, preferably without endangering his own credentials as a Sensitive Enlightened Warm Aware Guardian-reading Person.

The director's easiest way out is, of course, indiscriminate modern dress:  costuming Hotspur's followers as soccer hoodlums, Falstaffs gang as bikies, and so on.  It is to Kenneth Branagh's credit that he has eschewed that particular racket, at least.  For most of the film's first half-hour, one is led to believe that this, almost uniquely among Britain's recent Shakespeare productions, will actually be a performance intended for adult minds.  Alas, it duly becomes clear that what Branagh has substituted for standard directional puerility is equally pernicious and more oblique.

This first becomes obvious in the second Chorus, before Act II, which describes the new-found English enthusiasm for war against France:  "Now all the youth of England are on fire/ And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies".  Branagh has visually accompanied most of this Chorus by a slow camera-pan:  one that dwells on the squalid unofficial retirement village which those burbling old topers Bardolph, Pistol, Nym and Mistress Quickly now inhabit.  The message is unmistakable:  this decrepit Dad's Army is "the youth of England on fire".  Ha ha.  So much for English war-enthusiasm.  Pretty subtle, eh?  And there's plenty more subtlety where that came from.

Omissions and Distortions

Soon it becomes blatantly evident that whatever elements Branagh imagines may comprise a Shakespeare film, the use of Shakespeare's own text in any but the most desultory manner is not among them.  Whole scenes and whole characters are omitted;  secondary roles are repeatedly conflated (e.g. Orleans and Rambures, Grandpre and the Constable);  several other secondary roles, though not conflated, are abridged to the point of meaninglessness (e.g. Gower, Michael Williams, Westmoreland, the Boy).  Just to add to the confusion, portions of Henry IV involving Falstaff and Bardolph are inserted into the film, and even these segments are rewritten (the character Nym turns up in them, though he never appears in Shakespeare's Henry IV at all;  moreover, one of Falstaff's most famous lines has been changed to "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Harry[!]").  It is unclear what Branagh ever hoped to achieve with all this Sweeney Todd-like mutilation.  He cannot have been seeking intelligibility:  because not only do his chops and changes make nonsense of the play's motives, but the standard of his cast's diction varies to a ludicrous extent.  The best actors in this regard are Paul Scofield (who plays the French king) and Brian Blessed (who plays the Duke of Exeter);  the worst arc Judi Dench (Mistress Quickly) and Robert Stephens (Pistol).  With most of Pistol's speeches it is literally impossible to tell which language is being spoken.  What (for example) HSC students from a state school would make of his utterances is beyond conjecture.

Theoretically, a Shakespeare performance whose director shared Branagh's crazed fondness for the textual surgeon's knife -- and for letting several of his actors sound as if they have left their dentures at home -- could nevertheless attain a limited intellectual respectability by compensating for its carelessness towards the letter with some fidelity to the spirit.  Chez Branagh, no such luck.  He recently gave a disingenuous pointer to his true intentions by telling an interviewer of his desire to "move people to every possible extreme of emotion".  His finished product makes it abundantly plain which particular extreme of emotion viewers are to be moved to:  namely, pacifist repugnance.  We are to have it dinned into us one more time both that War Is Hell (some of us hardly needed a 26 year-old cinematic propagandist to teach us that),and that War Is Unnecessary.  The tactic by which Branagh hopes to persuade us of his latter belief is the time-honoured, not to say mildew-laden, doctrine of Moral Equivalence.

If this doctrine is to seem internally consistent, Branagh must argue that Our Side is as completely corrupted as, and so even more to blame than, Their Side.  Branagh therefore seizes the opportunity to rub his audience's noses in the alleged infamy of the English well before the battle itself occurs.  His cue for such an action is the hanging of Bardolph (Richard Briers), who has stolen a pax from a French church.  Bardolph's crime is thus blasphemous as well as larcenous;  Captain Fluellen (Ian Holm) refuses to intervene on Bardolph's behalf;  and Bardolph is duly sent to the gallows.  Shakespeare has already taken the trouble to make Fluellen a very sympathetic (if somewhat abrupt) figure, while Bardolph has been given no virtues at all except that of occasional fair-mindedness.  Bardolph then is no martyr;  and to emphasise the squalor of his deed, he is both sentenced and put to death off-stage.  Not, however, in the Branagh version.  First, the nature of Bardolph's theft is left unclear (how many filmgoers would know what a pax is, especially through Pistol's incoherent gargling?).  Second, Branagh ignores Shakespeare's revelation (Act 3 Scene 6) that King Henry knew nothing of the hanging until after it occurred:  Branagh makes Henry order Bardolph's hanging in the royal presence.  Third, Branagh has Bardolph hanged on-screen, with camera-work whose, gruesome detail it is, not unfair to call loving.  Nothing, not even the victim's frantic aitempt to lift the rope from around his neck, is left to the imagination.  The message is manifest:  This Is What Militarism Leads to.  And to italicise Branagh's rhetoric, the execution is carried out by the Duke of Exeter in person.  One wonders if even the greatest teachers on earth could repair the pedagogical deficiencies of any director who believes, that a mediaeval king's uncle moonlighted as a hangman.  (But then Exeter, Henry V's ablest and most articular supporter, inspires in Branagh a special resentment.  When he is shown entering the French palace, Branagh has him entering from behind:  so that, with his suit of dark armour, he looks like the baddie in Star Wars).

In the lead-up to the battle proper, Branagh never fails to show his colours.  Almost every time phrases like "a just cause" or "our cause if just" are spoken, there is a cut-away to the vacant-looking faces of the common soldiery (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, we know where "a just cause" will leave them, don't we).  Another Branagh trick is to have his camera alternate between the English troops' heraldic devices and those borne by the French;  pointing up the similarities of the former to the latter (Moral Equivalence rides again).  The battle itself is everything one would expect, and worse:  combatants are perpetually getting stuck in the mud, they are quite unrecognisable as Us or Them, they stab each other obsessively in the back.  Oh, yes, naturally it's filmed in slow motion.  When it is all over -- though not before Henry, in another magnificently anachronistic howler, has amid his screeching rage tried to beat up the French herald Montjoy --Henry carries the corpse of his slain cousin to its resting place while the camera, in approved Vietnam-movie style;  dwells for nearly 10 minutes on the bodies left behind.  The survivors are singing Non nobis domine, but Branagh has long beforehand left us in no doubt as to where the Catholic liturgy gets off in his book.  Fluellen is presented as a gibbering moron perpetually making the sign of the cross.  (Sneer on camera at Negro or Aboriginal religious observances, and the entire race relations industry will unite to destroy you;  sneer at Catholic observances, and you will be lauded to the skies).  The Duke of Burgundy's Act 5 speech, Shakespeareans will be totally unsurprised to learn,.  provides yet another opportunity for the camera to survey the thousands of war dead.  One could go on to list Branagh's other follies and platitudes -- the way that Henry V and Fluelleti hug each other like members of a victorious football team, the deliberate Basil Fawlty voice in which Henry proposes marriage to Princess Catherine -- but the reader may well consider himself to have supped full on horrors already.

Perhaps it is unfair to blame Branagh for all these horrors, when it is by no means sure that any British director would now be allowed to make a non-pacifist Henry V.  Britain is not only, as Orwell said, the only nation left without nationalism;  it has long since been a nation whose intellectuals are for the most part unencumbered by the smallest patriotic sentiment.  In practice it has not mattered whether these intellectuals call themselves Left or Right:  as the Falklands War revealed.  (The chorus of bellyaches from The Guardian and The New Statesman during :  that conflict were fully matched for cowardice by pro-Argentinian columnists at The Spectator).  If you want to make a film in Britain, you must despise Britain.  For Branagh, the idea of a country defending itself is laughable:  his attitude to Agincourt is "A plague o'both your houses".  One scarcely needs even a film director's inherently comical notions of historical fact to realise where this attitude would have left (say) Britain in 1940.  Yet there is not even the faintest suggestion that Branagh realises as much.  The rest of us can do nothing about his ignorance except protect ourselves -- and,, since his film will be HSC fodder, our offspring -- from its consequences.