Henry V

The wild and undisciplined young man known as Prince Hal in the two-part Henry IV plays matures into a courageous and deft leader. Based on the life of its title monarch, Henry V chronicles the events surrounding the battle of Agincourt in 1415, part of the Hundred Years' War. This invaluable new study guide contains a selection of the finest criticism of the play through the centuries, including commentary from such important writers as Ben Jonson, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. Introduced by Harold Bloom, this volume also includes an accessible plot summary, an analysis of several key passages, a comprehensive list of characters, a biography of Shakespeare, essays discussing the main currents in criticism in each century since Shakespeare's time, and more. He has become the modern king a modern England needs. Whatever the audience may feel about his character, its calculations and self-dramatizations, the fit between this King and his circumstances is carefully crafted by the playwright, who was writing almost two hundred years after the battle of Agincourt and would have had his own modern monarch, as well as Henry V, clearly in mind.---Marjorie Garber