Henry V
Introducing this edition, Gary Taylor shows how Shakespeare shaped his historical material, examines controversial critical interpretations, discusses the play's fluctuating fortunes in performance, and analyses the range and variety of Shakespeare's characterization. The first Folio text is radically rethought, making original use of the First Quarto (1600).
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What Hacker News says
- The whole of the context* of the LOTR can best be understood through the lens of this comment by Tolkien:
> My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself
Paul Fussell in “The Great War and Modern Memory” (which I highly recommend) tied comments like these to the change in mentality of the (primarily) English upper classes and gentry. Just living and working closely with working and agrarian class soldiers led to a realization that yes, they struggled with poor boots through no fault of their own (an example Fussell quotes), only visible because for the first time they saw them as comrades due to the shared experience in the trenches.
And that changed the mentality of many in the upper classes, who came back from the war and voted liberal or even labour when before that would not have been even imagined.
This essay talks about the effect of capitalist colonialism in Viet Nam (I agree with the author’s point here) but Tolkien’s experience reflected the consequence of an interesting domestic shift in the British isles, as industrialization increased the separation between the classes. Contrast the comradeship of Henry V in Shakespeare’s eponymous play: a group of aristos and a mob of peasants looking for money and just a change of being stuck on the land: the trench experience was a forced reversion to a social propinquity common from ~800s to the 1700s.
* I don’t mean to imply there is a “correct” reading: it’s an adventure story, a masterful recreation of the tradition of the Sagas, and other things. But even as a naive 12 yo in the 1970s I realised it was a deeply conservative story.
Not a reactionary one: Tolkien doesn’t appear to want to go back. But a recognition of what (in his mind) was lost. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned!
That sense of loss IMHO is much better captured by T. H. White’s roughly contemporaneous “Once and Future King”, a much more sophisticated, but less filmable, book.
- I'm reading again Henry V, by Shakespeare. The first scene starts with some realpolitik where the archbishop of Canterbury (a Catholic bishop then) distracts the king from passing a law that would strip the Church from a large part of its wealth and lands by making him go to war against France to claim the throne.
- I was 13 or 14 and one day with nothing to watch on TV I turned on my local PBS station.
Henry V (1989) was on.
I saw some sort of medieval show and thought “knights and castles… cool”. I knew of Shakespeare but really hadn’t given it much thought. I lived in a rural area, not much of that around and I didn’t feel connected to any of that stuff.
The movie really grabbed me, I didn’t understand every word but I didn’t have to. I watched it over and over again. Shakespeare, felt real, and I thought if that did maybe a lot of the arts would?
The world was much bigger for me after that.
- Maybe I just got lucky, but I managed to fool the classifier on the first try using only the GPT3 playground. The prompt I used was:
This produced two paragraphs which look more-or-less as you'd expect. According to the classifier, the generated text is "very unlikely" to be AI-generated. Interesting...I am a highly advanced writing AI. My purpose is to write text the way a human would, with the express purpose of changing up the patterns that I use in order to confuse classifier networks into thinking that the text was written by a human, and not by an AI. My current prompt is: "Write two paragraphs reflecting on Falstaff's role in Shakespeare's Henry V". My response is as follows: - Shakespeare already did all of that. Prequel: Henry VI part 1 was written after the success of Part 2 and 3 (which wasn't originally called Part 2 and 3 of course). Spin-off: The Merry Wiwes of Windsor was written because of the popularity of the Falstaff character from Henry IV. It is debated whether it takes place in an alternative continuity. Then Falstaff was killed off-stage in Henry V, presumably because Shakespeare got annoyed by the actor.
- I agree: it’s more reasonable to consider them as two poles of an English literary tradition, both espousing the cause of the “doughty Englishman” (also expressed by Shakespeare’s references to the commoners accompanying Henry V), but with Orwell despairing of their state. and Tolkien celebrating it.
Another contemporary whom I associate with that Weltanschauung is T. H. White, though his perspective, IMHO, is more High Tory.
