It is only natural to expect from Shakespeare a clear and consistent point of view on these and other questions; he is, after all, our greatest writer. But Shakespeare's genius is as a dramatic writer: his phenomenal ability to present on stage a whole matrix of opposing yet equally persuasive points of view is the very essence of his art. That is why, as James Shapiro has pointed out in his book A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599, we cannot sum up Henry V as being either for war or against war. Rather, it is a play about war, in all its myriad aspects - probably the greatest play about war ever written.

 

Shakespeare is a master of paradox and ambiguity, and the questions he raises in Henry V are as troubling today as they were four hundred years ago. At the beginning of the play, the Church obligingly provides Henry with a tortuous legal opinion that appears to justify an invasion of France. Is that opinion to be trusted, and is Henry sincere in adopting it as his rationale? Shakespeare leaves those questions open - but, however we answer them, we cannot fail to notice the parallel in our own times with Iraq and its alleged weapons of mass destruction.

 

Henry is a brilliant battlefield orator: it is impossible not to be stirred by his resounding calls to arms. But he is also capable of using atrocity - or at least the threat of it - to get his way. In his siege of Harfleur, he offers its citizens a stark choice: yield now and be treated honourably, or continue to resist and see your daughters raped, your fathers' brains dashed out and your children impaled upon pikes. The violence of such imagery is unsurpassed in even the darkest of Shakespeare's plays; yet as soon as Henry achieves his goal, he reaffirms his promise of mercy.

 

Equally troubling is his summary execution of Bardolph, one of his drinking cronies from his Eastcheap days in the Henry IV plays. Even as he condemns Bardolph to hang, Henry extols the uses of leniency - "the gentlest gamester is the soonest winner" - yet that precept is later thrown to the winds on the field of Agincourt, when Henry escalates from the mere threat of atrocity to the deed itself by ordering his soldiers to kill their prisoners. He does so because the French have regrouped for another attack against the badly outnumbered English, who need every soldier available for fighting. This act of battlefield barbarity is matched by the French force's subsequent slaughter of the boys in charge of the baggage train, which in turn prompts Henry's bitter vow of further vengeance: "Not a man of them that we shall take / Shall taste our mercy."

 

Whether he gained his experience first-hand or merely from talking to soldiers in the taverns of London, Shakespeare had an uncannily precise understanding of what it means to go to war, and to return from it. The contradictory nature of his dispatches from the field of human conflict mirror the profound moral complexities of war itself. Our aim, as his present-day interpreters, is likewise to conjure up the perplexing moral fog of war, with all its glory, its horrors and its outrages, within the little "wooden O

 

Orderly succession was an understandable preoccupation when Shakespeare wrote these plays in the last decade of the aging Elizabeth I's reign. He knew how to please his monarch with flattering references in his work, but his history plays are more subversive than their surface presents. "History" was Shakespeare's cover. It allowed him to write about contemporary Elizabethan politics without getting into trouble. Shakespeare observes the mechanisms of power with such an astute eye that his observations about the nature of leadership and machinations of government still resonate with us today.

 

Sometimes he cut too close to the bone. In the deposition scene in Richard II, for example, Shakespeare dared to show a weak monarch forced to give up his crown by his successor. That scene was controversial enough to be omitted from the first three printed editions of the play. Forced succession was a dangerous topic as Elizabeth's reign drew to a close, and after the Essex rebellion nearly overthrew her, performances of Richard II were closed down.

 

Elizabeth was a remarkable leader, but a series of wars against Spain and rebellions in Ireland depleted the royal treasury and created the need for unpopular taxes from an already war-weary nation. We see this reflected in the opening scenes of Henry V. Two bishops express their concern about a bill in Parliament that would impose new taxes on the Church and seize Church land. The Archbishop of Canterbury, however, has a plan, and a backroom deal is struck with the King. Canterbury knows Henry is looking for support for an invasion of France, a campaign started by his great-grandfather. The English monarchy claimed the throne of France through Edward III's mother, a French princess, but the French denied that succession was legal through a woman, even though some of their monarchs assumed reign in that way. In a meeting with Henry and his counsellors, Canterbury declares that Henry's claim to the French throne is just and offers to fund the invasion of France because it is a less costly alternative for the Church than losing land.

 

By invading France, Henry is following his father's advice to him in Henry IV: "Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels," a tactic that is sadly familiar to us today. When there's trouble at home, start a war. Giddy minds destroyed Henry IV's reign as he fought a series of domestic rebellions. The unification of his peoples is left to his son. This is why in Henry V Shakespeare presents us with a cross-section of the fractious inhabitants of England. The English foot soldiers Henry meets on the eve of Agincourt both revere and challenge him; the Celts of Wales, Scotland and Ireland are united only in their dislike for the English. The drinking companions Henry hung out with before he became king continue their petty thievery, when not fighting with each other, on the fields of France. Falstaff, of course, is not among them. Henry banished that father figure from his life at the end of Henry IV, and we hear in this sequel that Falstaff has died from a broken heart.

 

Henry fails to unite his soldiers into an effective force against the French at Harfleur, and that siege drags on for months, but on the muddy fields of Agincourt he defeats a French army with far superior numbers by rallying his men in a brilliant speech that eliminates divisions of class and ethnicity and forges them into a "band of brothers," a powerful phrase that Winston Churchill cribbed for a celebrated speech in World War II.

 

Henry learns something from his men as well. A foot soldier, Williams, challenges him:

 

But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in battle shall join together [on the last] day . . . some swearing, some calling for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them . . . some upon their children rawly left. I am afraid that few die well that die in battle.

 

"We must bear all . . . O hard condition," the King responds in a soliloquy that follows. The extent of that hard condition is seen in the hard choices Henry makes in the course of the play. When one of his former drinking companions, Bardolph, is caught stealing, Henry must authorize his execution. One by one, the other members of that group die throughout the play, as Henry sheds the last vestiges of his youthful escapades and, as some would argue, his humanity as well. But is that Shakespeare's position?

 

Shakespeare's king is far more complex. Laurence Olivier's film version took the play in the opposite direction. A brilliant rallying cry for the English fighting World War II, it reduced the play by seventeen hundred lines to present Henry as a hero. In his most significant omission, Olivier cut Henry's execution of his French prisoners. The English were so badly outnumbered at Agincourt they could not spare men to guard them, but their execution was against the code of ethics even for those cruel times and it is a disturbing moment in the theatre. Kenneth Branagh made Henry a cooler character, but he also cut the execution from his film version. Three of Stratford's five productions have cut it; a fourth moved it so that the French slaughter of the English boys initiates and excuses Henry's execution of his prisoners.

 

What makes an effective leader was an important topic in the England of the 1590s. As Elizabeth's reign was coming to an end with no clear heir in sight, discussion about her successor coincided with the availability of Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, in translation. The father of modern political theory, Machiavelli asks in a famous passage from that book "Whether it is better [for a leader] to be loved than feared or feared than loved?" This question haunts Shakespeare's history plays, and in this, the culminating play of his history cycle, Shakespeare presents us with a king who is, in the words of the play, both "feared and loved." In Henry V, Shakespeare serves up a leader who is alternately admirable and ruthless. Its portrait of an effective leader is unsettling, and I think intentionally so.

 

At the end of the play, Henry uses his considerable charm on a princess of France - and us. She agrees to marry him, achieving his family's goal of uniting the two kingdoms, but has Henry succeeded in uniting his people? Shakespeare has the last word in the Epilogue.

 

This is not Shakespeare's final thought on leadership, however. More kings, princes and commanders lay ahead. Shakespeare was at a turning point in his career as his history plays morphed into the tragedies, and he turned to writing Julius Caesar and Hamlet. In these plays and the other tragedies that followed, he explored with even greater depth the realm of personal responsibility for our actions and the darkest corners of the human soul.

 

Robert Blacker is Dramaturge for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and for this produ

 

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