ABSTRACT
Twice in the twentieth century, Henry V, one of Shakespeare’s plays about fifteenth-century English history, has provided the basis for a highly successful commercial film. Laurence Olivier’s 1944 production helped to solidify his reputation as the pre-eminent Shakespearean actor of his time. Now, more than fifty years after the event, the ideological implications of Olivier’s project are clear. Produced in a time of national emergency and dedicated “To the Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain” (quoted in Holderness 1985:184), Olivier’s film was explicitly designed as World War II propaganda. It celebrated an embattled English nation in what Winston Churchill had called its “finest hour” (Churchill 1940), confronting the terrifying forces of Nazi Germany. In this context, Henry V’s miraculous victory over the French at Agincourt in 1415 was taken to reveal those strengths of national character that would once again allow Great Britain to prevail over its enemies. In 1989 Kenneth Branagh, a young Irishman who had been raised in England and had made a name for himself as an up-and-coming Shakespearean actor, challenged Olivier’s achievement with his own version of Shakespeare’s Henry V, updated to address the anxieties and to satisfy the desires of his own generation. Like Olivier’s, Branagh’s film was a major commercial success.
