We’re going to Ashland next week during its Shakespeare Festival to watch Henry V. It’ll be the first commercial play I’ve ever seen and also the first Shakespeare I’ve ever watched or read (I used cliffnotes for Romeo & Juliet in high school).
How should I prepare for it in order to receive maximum enjoyment? Should I be fervently studying Shakespearean English at this point? Do I need to worry at all or (unlikely) are the plays already geared towards a less-than-literate audience?
Forget about studying the language. You can’t learn all the nuances of Elizabethan English in a week, it’s 99 percent* the same as modern English** anyway, and it’s the job of the actors and director to make sure you don’t miss anything important. Community theater company’s don’t always succeed, but at that level you should be in good hands.
Some people seem to get confused trying to follow the plots of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s my feeling that watching Shakespeare shouldn’t be about the plot anyway, but it might help you to read a synopsis first so you don’t get distracted and frustrated during the performance.
Henry V is essentially the final part of a trilogy, but it is more popular and well-regarded than the first two installment. Reading the synopsis bring you up to speed on the characters and back story that would have been familiar to Shakespeare’s audience.
I’ve seen more than a couple shakespeare plays. My usual method of preparation is to read the play at least once. It’s ok if you don’t pick up on every single nuance reading it but a copy of oh, No Fear Shakespeare wouldn’t go amiss. But other than that, yeah, if you read a synopsis, you should be good.
I guess you could rent the Henry V movie so you are familiar with it.
Or, you could find filmed versions of Henry IV Part 1 and 2 and watch those. Some of the characters recur.
I wouldn’t necessarily choose one of the historicals for a first watch or read, but Henry V is as good as any. I’d definitely read a synopsis to get an idea for the events and characters beforehand. Don’t worry about the language, good actors will make clear the less obvious parts.
Tetralogy, actually – if you want the whole story, it starts with Richard II and continues through Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V. I like to throw The Merry Wives of Windsor in as well when I teach them, but even I will admit that it’s not an integral part of the saga.
However, Henry V works fine as a standalone – mostly. Here is the Cliff’s Notes version of the bits that are useful to know from the earlier installments.
– In Richard II, Henry Bolingbroke – the father of Henry V – deposes his cousin Richard and becomes King Henry IV. Richard is later murdered in prison, although Henry IV is careful to denounce the murderer in public. (You should imagine Richard’s ghost lurking in the wings the whole time; sooner or later, Bolingbroke’s line is going to pay.)
– Henry IV then spends most of his reign putting down one rebellion after another. On his deathbed, he warns his son to be careful of his fellow nobles and counsels him to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels” (advice which Henry V will take to heart).
– After spending his youth hanging out in taverns and playing practical jokes on his drinking buddy Sir John Falstaff, Henry V has a striking reformation after he’s crowned. He dismisses Falstaff and banishes him from his presence. (Whether this is a painful but necessary decision or a truly callous one depends a great deal on how the scene is played.) Falstaff doesn’t appear onstage in Henry V, but his ghost is arguably lurking about, as well. Falstaff’s gang of disreputable friends – Hostess Quickly, Pistol, Nym, Bardolph, and an unnamed boy – are still around. (The king definitely knows who Bardolph is and has been on friendly terms with him in the past; this is important.)
– Early in the play, there is a scene in which Henry V has to deal with three traitors, one of whom is named Richard, Earl of Cambridge. Richard is the brother-in-law of Edmund Mortimer, who is in prison, but whose claim to the throne is in fact stronger than Henry’s. Richard is also the father of the Yorkist line that will eventually depose Henry’s heirs. (Most of this is not made explicit in the play, but everyone in Shakespeare’s audience would have known it.)
Oh, and don’t worry if you have trouble following the opening scene with the archbishops. It’s meant to be about as clear as mud, but the gist of it is that Henry has a claim to the French throne via one of his female ancestors, which the French don’t recognize because their law forbids succession through the female line.
Well, yeah, but Prince Hal/Henry V & Falstaff are only in three of them, so it made sense to me to call it “essentially the final part of a trilogy” in reference to familiarity with the characters.
I would say, yes, if you don’t already know Shakespearean English, you should read the play and go through all the footnotes.
I went to a University of Hawaii production of the Tempest. I had studied the play in high school and college, and I already fully knew the story. The enjoyment I got was that the director went with an Asian theme, and the actors brought their own little nuances to the roles. The costuming and sets were excellent, and there’s no way I could have fully enjoyed them if I had to decipher what they were saying.
It’s too bad your cheated yourself on Romeo and Juliet. That’s like the only play Shakespeare ever wrote that doesn’t need footnotes for the modern audience.
There’s a few that need little or no prep: Macbeth, Much Ado about Nothing, Merchant of Venice, Taming of the Shrew
If you can, read a good synopsis before you see the play (some Shakespeare productions actually supply one when you turn up). But don’t be referring to it every two minutes or worry about following the story too much. You are there to watch the performance, not read a summary.
Take a relaxed attitude. You won’t understand all the language, you won’t always understand who is who or what’s going on, and THIS IS OKAY. There’s still plenty to enjoy. Remember, you are experiencing an incredibly important part of English dramatic culture - one that is directly connected to all the stuff you enjoy today on stage, TV and movies, but through a 400 year timeline.
The point about Shakespeare is not that everything he wrote was genius. A lot of what he wrote was very ordinary stuff, on a par with the script for a daytime soap. The point is that when he’s good, he’s VERY good indeed. What’s more, his achievements are even more incredible when you remember when he was writing. He had a remarkable insight into what you might call ‘the human condition’, but he was writing hundreds of years before all the psychoanalysis stuff came along in the 19th century. Remember, he’d never heard of Freud or Jung or theories of motivation. Yet his work is infused with a stunning insight into the relationship between character, motive, action, behaviour and language. What’s more, his leading characters are always complex. They don’t have simple ‘I want this’ motives, they are always ‘I am torn between wanting X but also wanting Y’ and they have to discover how to reconcile these inner conflicts (or fail to do so).
Accept the theatrical conventions of the time. We know cop dramas bear no relation to real-life, but we accept the conventions of the genre and the way realism is sacrificed for the sake of a good story. You have to do the same with Shakespearean drama. It has its own conventions and rules, and you just have to go with them.
Enjoy the language, even if you aren’t quite sure about what’s going on. When Shakespeare gets into his stride, he produces incredible poetic language that few writers, if any, have ever been able to match. Enjoy it for what it is.
I strongly agree with everyone who has said read a synopsis of the play.
In my experience, watching a performance of a Shakespeare play is generally very easy to understand. Reading one of the plays can be difficult. I always find when reading one of the plays it is easier to understand and get a feel for the language by reading it out loud. I mean after all, these are plays aren’t they? They are meant to be performed if you follow my meaning.
So, yeah, reading a synopsis would be the main suggestion I would make.
At a good Shakespeare performance, you should be able to enjoy it even if you don’t understand a word of English at all. There’s so much that comes through clearly on stage, that, unless you know to look for it, doesn’t show up on the printed page at all. The absolute worst crime committed by high school English teachers is to force students to read Shakespeare without watching it.
I think Hamlet is easy enough to understand without any prep(at least for adults).
And certainly Twelfth Night.
Thanks, all! I read the synopsis and it seems straightforward enough. This is the first time I’ve ever been excited about Shakespeare, and I’m looking forward to the play quite a bit.
Now I’m wondering if I should pay the $80 for a front-row seat as opposed to the $20 ass-end-of-the-world one. It’s not often I get to see an actual play, and if there’s really so much that goes into a production as opposed to a reading, maybe it’s worth it…
No. Not if it really would be for a very front row seat. You want to sit in the relative center somewhere between halfway to 2/3s back. (Everyone has their own opinion on the sweet spot. This is mine although it varies by space.) If you sit too far forward you risk being unable to see the whole stage at once and things like the makeup will look weird. If you sit too far back, everyone will look the same and it will be difficult to keep track of people.
No Fear Shakespeare is a site that translates Shakespeare into modern English in a side by side comparison. It’s also available at most bookstores and inexpensively. Might be good to read it so you’ll understand everything that’s happening and being said.
No Fear- Henry V
Also, while you don’t need to read the entirety of the Henry IV plays you should read the synopsis. When Falstaff dies (off-stage and early) in Henry V, this would have been a very sad scene in Elizabethan England because the character was beloved- like Fred Sanford or Archie Bunker or Ralph Kramden in classic TV he was a lovable loser/blustering/comical/opinionated/prone to exaggeration [to put it mildly] wise buffoon who deep down had a heart. Elizabeth herself had commissioned the play Merry Wives of Windsor because she wanted to see the old charlatan in love.
This will depend a lot on things like the shape of the stage and the style of the performance, too. If it’s a four-foot high stage like you see in most auditoria, then absolute front row would mean you see absolutely nothing, except the things you aren’t supposed to see. On the other hand, the troupe I see most often uses a stage that’s only about a foot high, with the expectation that the audience will be able to see the boards, so a closer seat isn’t nearly as much of a problem there. And in some performances, the actors will interact with the audience to various degrees, so if you’re into that, a seat near the front can be a good thing.
Octology, if there’s such a word, because after Henry V, there’s Henry VI, Part 1, where Henry V, newly conqueror of France, has just died, and all of his gains in France are endangered by his son’s weak and feuding counselors, the origins of the feud laying in Henry IV’s overthrow of Richard, Henry VI, Part 2, where, France having been lost, the feud has spread back to England and endangers Henry’s throne, Henry VI, Part 3, where first Henry’s throne and then his life are lost, and the new king, Edward IV, incorrectly thinks he’s brought peace back to England, and then Richard III, where Richard, taking advantage of the old rivalries that still exist, schemes to become king himself until he’s finally overthrown by Henry VII, who. with his marriage to the daughter of Edward IV, finally restores peace and harmony to England and ends the old rivalry.
So, in a way, I think all the history plays from Richard II to Richard III are about Henry IV’s overthrow of Richard II, and how that one act of treason reverberated throughout the years and caused all that followed.
It is made explicit in Henry VI, part 1, though: