#henry v

(I know it’s not a sonnet, but it is Shakespeare, and thus I thought it to be in the same tone as Sonnetstuck, and if you would post this on October 25th, I would be most grateful.)

This day is called the feast of [S] Cascade.
He that remain’d a fan, and came safe through,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of [S] Cascade.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his Web-friends,
And say ‘To-morrow is [S] Cascade Day.’
Then will he bare his breast and show his pain.
And say ‘These feels I had on Cascade’s day.’
And Ten-Two-Five, Cascade, shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of Homestucks,
For he to-day that sheds his tears with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen on Tumblr now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their fandoms cheap whiles any speaks
That wept with us upon [S] Cascade Day.

-submitted by mortharris

In Act 5 Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One, King Henry IV has implemented a battle strategy in which there are numerous decoy kings impersonating him on the battlefield in order to confuse and frustrate his enemy. It works, as Douglas kills Blunt who was disguised as the king and believes he has triumphed, only for Hotspur to tell him “No, I know this face full well/A gallant knight he was; his name was Blunt,/Semblably furnished like the king himself” (Shakespeare 5.3.20-22).  This occurs several more times offstage and in the following scene, Douglas exclaims “Another king! They grow like Hydra’s heads” (Shakespeare 5.4.25). While there is no number of how many King Henrys are in the fray, based on that statement it is likely a lot.

This strategy King Henry executes also connects directly to both the idea of theatre and throne, and while successful on the battlefield, could lead the audience to some potentially questionable notions about royalty and what it truly means to be king. The decision to insert numerous decoy-kings into the battleground is not something that could have been predicted because sumptuary laws were in place during the time in which the play took place as well as the time it was written and being performed. Therefore, doing so was technically illegal. In general, the theatre was the only place in which somebody of a lower station might dress up as though they were from any higher class, much less royalty itself. In the middle of a war though, King Henry has staged his own sort of theatrical production with several other soldiers playing the role of him. If we are to look at words alone, sometimes the place of battle during war is even called a “theater.” Thus, in a meta-fashion, Shakespeare has staged a performance with a man playing King Henry IV, and the king has staged one of his own and cast other soldiers as him, sumptuary laws broken twice over.

While doing this keeps Henry IV safer on the battlefield than he likely would have been otherwise, the idea that anyone could dress in kingly attire and thus in the minds of those around him, become a king, is perhaps the very reason these sumptuary laws existed. This scene demonstrates that when Blunt and numerous others assume the identity of the king and are truly believed to be the king until they are unmasked. Therefore, if somebody in Elizabethan England acquired the attire befitting a member of a higher class, they could become a part of that class with nobody the wiser. This fluidity in something that those of greater affluence and stature would like to be concrete and unchangeable arguably demonstrates the fickleness of being a member of the nobility. While it was often argued at this time that those of wealth and status had such because of divine right by God, this seems to present an alternative. They have these things because the society they have constructed says they should have these things and should somebody ingratiate themselves into said class with those things that qualify those already there, such as clothing, they could contradict this belief entirely. The play demonstrates in other scenes that this only goes one way– at least for royalty. Prince Hal may hang around with tavern folk, but it is rare anybody around him truly forgets he is the prince. Still, were he disguised while doing so rather than making himself known as the prince, perhaps he would be believed to be just another tavern-goer.

youlackconviction:

theshatteredsilhouette:

Hour and a half-ish Loki sketch because I wanted to draw but wasn’t up to tackling my big wip piece tonight

do not repost!

omg, actuallyLOKI <3 <3

Is it bad that it took Sherlock quoting the entirety of the “once more unto the breech” speech for me to realise one of his most famous catch phrases is from Henry V?

On that note, I could almost see a slightly altered Henry IV/Sherlock crossover with Sherlock as Hal and Mycroft as Henry IV

aethelfleds:

I have ingested nyquil so I am doing this

Alfred the Great: buys just enough canned food and duct tape to the point where you’re not overly concerned but you are pretty sure he’s a doomsday prepper

Aethelflaed: fills three carts with snack cakes, those church basement paper cups, and generic brand soda because no one can negotiate a surrender on an empty stomach

Athelstan: that is far too much coffee 

Aethelred the Unready: just buying every single item on his wife’s list. This is the fourth store he’s been to because Emma is very specific.

Cnut: only came here for all his Special Haircare Products

William the Conqueror: fills up a cart and just leaves without paying. just fucking books it to the parking lot I hate him

Matilda: comes in with three rowdy boys, tells them to not ask for ANYTHING, buys an armload of 5-hour energies, leaves with two rowdy boys

Henry II: walks around the store eating a bag of grapes he has not bought while Eleanor does the actual shopping

Richard I: will find a way to talk about his study abroad last year with the deli guy if it kills him. Is also texting his mom to ask what groceries he needs to buy because he has no idea

John: verbally berating everyone in customer service because they won’t let him return a dented can of peas that expired 7 years ago

Edward I: tries to use a 24 year old coupon to buy lentils in bulk (he doesn’t even like lentils?) and knocks over an elaborate pepsi display in a fit of rage 

Edward II: has his card declined and demands to know why the cashier had to be so loud about it

Edward III: says “guess it’s FREE THEN HAHAHA!!!” when an item doesn’t scan right away. several items do not scan. Gets a veteran’s discount.

Richard II: that’s uhhh… a lot of advil there buddy 

Henry V: also has his card declined but drops the “DO YOU KNOW WHO MY FATHER IS” line, is dressed like lucky luciano 

Henry VI: begins to panic when Margaret leaves him in line for two minutes because she forgot eggs. the line is moving quickly…so quickly

Edward IV: he has one cart filled with wine. Elizabeth Woodville has another filled with kid cuisines. 

Henry VII: pulls out the fattest binder you have ever seen and it’s filled with coupons. His transactions usually take 2 hours and he tsks the entire time. 

Henry VIII: buys bags of charcoal and dog food just so he can pick them all up and be like “yeah this isn’t even heavy to me I don’t even feel it” also buys condoms and laughs nervously 

Edward VI: literally just buying root vegetables even though he’s 9 because he is so weird

Mary I: just coming in for her weekly supply of “praying for you” cards, always gives exact change thank you mary 

Elizabeth I (if these even count as medieval anymore): no longer allowed to do her own shopping after the sweet n low incident. Now a personal shopper gets her groceries for her. it is robert dudley 

illustratus:

Map of the Agincourt battleground. Taken from Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas’ book

Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas’ 1827 work The History of the Battle of Agincourt, an in-depth account of the battle drawn from further contemporary accounts – and one which includes the ‘roll of the men at arms in the English Army’; or, to give the full description: the “names of the Dukes, Erles, Barons, Knights, Esquires, Serviteuers and others that wer with the Excellent Prince King Henry the Fifte, at the Battell of Agincourt, on Fryday, the XXVth Day of October, in the Yere of our Lorde God, 1415”.” Perhaps your ancestor was one of these men, Shakespeare’s “few…happy few…band of brothers”?

sassyandclassy94:

Henry V; Edward IV; Richard III; Henry VII

sassyandclassy94:

King Henry of England, fifth of his name. From the house of Lancaster

“ , . . ℑ . . . ℑ .”

marat:

henriad art i made as a gift for my old english prof. #hotspurgangriseup

tom-hiddleston-imagines:

Imagine;

King Henry V taking interest in you as you tend to his wounds.

I loved reading this! I totally believe the world needs more Prince Hal/King Henry V imagines

as Henry V at The Theatre Royal, 1938

Time for our final (for now) installment of Pocket Blogs by Kate Pitt! Thanks so much to Kate for sharing her inestimable Shakespearean geekery with me this month.

Last week we explored the early modern world of women (living and dead) caring for each other during childbirth. This week, we’ll find out how deeply medieval men could embed pointy metal objects into each other’s faces and survive. (The answer may surprise you!)

At the end of Henry V, once Agincourt has been won and the French and their fancy horses have been defeated, the scene shifts to the French court where Henry V woos the French Princess to be his bride. This wooing is little more than a formality, given that the marriage is a requirement of the peace treaty and Henry won’t stop killing her relatives without it. However this scene is usually (but not always)played as a meet-cute and Henry pours on the charm. 

By mine honor, in true English, I love thee, Kate. By which honor I dare not swear thou lovest me, yet my blood begins to flatter me that thou dost, notwithstanding the poor and untempering effect of my visage. Now beshrew my father’s ambition! He was thinking of civil wars when he got me; therefore was I created with a stubborn outside, with an aspect of iron, that when I come to woo ladies, I fright them.

Henry apologizes for the way his face looks (notoftennecessary onstage) and blames his appearance on his father’s war-like distraction when he was conceived. However there is a much more straightforward explanation for his 34-year-old face looking past-its-best: twelve years earlier, he was hit in the face with an arrow.

The history of English royals surviving arrow-wounds up to this point was notgreat, so when sixteen-year-old Prince Henry was hit at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 there must have been panic. This is the battle where Henry IV’s army defeated the rebel Hotspur and his forces. Shakespeare depicts Henry and Hotspur gloriously fighting to the death, when in reality Hotspur was killed by an arrow to the face and Henry nearly died from the same. 

Henry’s wound was not the “shallow scratch” he dismissively describes in Henry IV Part I when his father asks him to leave the battlefield because his bleeding is becoming conspicuous. Henry’s wound was “in posteriori parte ossis capiti secun-dum mensuram 6 uncharum.” (Ed. note – if blood isn’t your jam, last chance to bail before I start translating things.) In other words, the arrow was embedded six inches deep into his skull.

Someone yanked out the shaft of the arrow so Henry wasn’t walking around with over two feet of wood sticking out of his face, but the metal tip of the arrow (known as a bodkin point) was still firmly stuck in his head. Fifty years earlier, Scottish King David II allegedly survived an arrow wound where the point remained embedded, but it was generally accepted that leaving sharp bits of metal in the body was Not Good and the arrowhead would need to come out.

Henry IV turned to a surgeon named John Bradmore for help with his son’s wound. Bradmore was perfect for the job was because he was a metalworker in addition to being a surgeon and could create custom tools for tricky operations. After enlarging the wound over several days with honey-dipped probes, Bradmore forged a brand-new medical instrument – hollow tongs with an screw in the middle – that he used to grab onto the arrow head and (after a bit of wiggling) pull it from the bone. 

The prince survived, Bradmore wrote a book, and they both – I hope – drank a significant amount of wine (that wasn’t being used to disinfect Henry’s wound) after enduring the unanesthetized removal of a sharp piece of metal from deep inside a sixteen-year-old’s skull. 

Artistic depictions of Henry show bothsides of his face as unharmed, however the surgery must have left a significant scar. Onstage, Henry V usually (but not always) has silky-smooth skin and Shakespeare doesn’t specifically mention a facial wound. The Netflix film The King, starring Timothée Chalamet as Henry V, gave him a tiny wishbone-shaped scar as a nod to the skull-smashing injury but, as oft this blog has shown, The King hasbigger problems.

Shakespeare’s depiction of Henry V onstage has deeply shaped how we see the historical King. Even Henry’s tomb at Westminster Abbey reflects modern media. While most the King’s effigy is original and dates from around 1431, its hands are 1971 replacements modeled on Lawrence Oliver’s. Audiences are accustomed to the noble, unblemished Henry V they see onstage rather than the scarred historical figure. Shakespeare’s Henry V stands in stark contrast both to the evil, “unfinished” Richard III in the Shakespeare canon, and to his ill-faced friend Bardolph in his own plays. 

If Henry truly, as he tells Kate, “never looks in his glass for love of anything he sees there,” executing Bardolph whose face “is all bubukles, and whelks, and knobs” may feel uncomfortably close to strangling the self he saw in the mirror at sixteen. The boy with the broken cheek has become King, leaving behind his old friends and his old face, cutting out all infection to become the mirror of all Christian kings. I wonder what he saw. 

Writing these pocket blogs has been a joy, many thanks to Mya for her support!

byKate Pitt

Today’s play page update features not one, not two, but THREE Henries! I have to confess, these are six of my favorite plays (ok, not Henry IV, part 2, as much as I love the deathbed reconciliation scene.)Olivier’s film of Henry V was my gateway into Shakespeare nerd-dom, seeing an RSC tour of all three Henry VIs andRichard III cemented my allegiance to the history plays, and the title of my webcomic COMES DIRECTLY FROM HENRY IV, PART 1.

Give me that sweet, sweet Plantagenet in-fighting, thank you.