Before Henry appears, the Archbishop of Canterbury secretly tells his fellow ecclesiastics that he supports an English invasion of France because it would financially benefit the church.

It is notable that the play’s opening scene immediately casts doubt on the legitimacy of Henry’s war aims. Henry shows that he understands his ultimate political and military success may depend as much on maintaining a narrative about the moral necessity of his war against France and his image as a pious Christian king as it does on battlefield success or terrifying his French foes.

We see Henry’s approach on display as he justifies his decision to invade France, makes operational decisions during the campaign itself, publicly dispenses justice, and engages in moral bargaining with himself and others. Since its debut, readers and audiences have had to grapple with the question of whether Shakespeare’s soldier-statesman Henry V is essentially a moral actor, a cynical political operator, or both at once. president’s executive authority, in practice, foreign affairs and warfare have proven to be spheres of action in which a president can most “be like a king.” The key issue Shakespeare addresses in Henry V is what truly motivates the “king.” Therefore, while Henry V deals with a late-medieval monarch’s military campaign, its most disturbing aspects remain uncomfortably relevant. Whether or not English royal authority is truly a legal or historical source of the U.S. To wit: Scholars have long debated whether the United States’ presidency’s inherent executive power includes the residuum of “sovereign authority” once held by British monarchs or whether the Constitution limits the executive branch to its relatively scant enumerated powers. Shakespeare views the nationalism espoused by his title character at a great remove, and what his play says about leadership and the moral, legal, and political challenges inherent in any military action remains startlingly fresh and complex.

But those portrayals-most famously Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-winning 1944 film, which was explicitly designed to bolster British spirits during World War II-do not take proper account of Shakespeare’s Olympian perspective. In popular culture and film, Henry V is most often portrayed as a patriotic affair, a Shakespearean precursor to today’s underdog sports films, with the climactic pre-battle “band of brothers” speech in the place of a coach’s pre-game pep talk. H enry V, William Shakespeare’s enduringly popular history play, is a study of England’s campaign of 1415 to (re)take France.

King henry v william shakespeare