Movie reviewed, and history considered

Watched The King on Netflix on the weekend - the reworking of the Shakespearean Henry V story which was itself a reworking of history.   I didn't really read any substantial reviews of it before watching; just enough to see that it seemed worth watching.

And it is.  It's a really great looking film, and quite engaging, even if not exactly emotionally involving. 

Of course, given my inclination to follow up after viewing historical films to see how true to life they are, and also that I am no huge fan of Shakespeare and keep little of the details of his stories in my head even if I have seen them, this was an obvious target to read up on. 

It would seem that the invasion of France and the key battle scene at Agincourt are more-or-less accurate, in the big picture anyway.  The key dramatic part, though, of the Dauphin meeting his end there is completely made up - he was no where near the battle.

There would seem to be a case for arguing the film is an even bigger fiction than the play, though, given that apparently the real Henry V was no peacenik, and really did want to fight the French.   But the other key dynamic, of young Henry being a lazy lay-about before he took on the Crown seems a dubious proposition for which there is contradictory evidence.   Here, for example, one writer seems completely skeptical about the "mis-spent youth" bit:

 With Henry IV’s ascension, the younger Henry became Prince of Wales and spent eight years leading armies against the rebellious Welsh ruler Owain Glyndwr. In 1403 Henry fought alongside his father against their former ally Henry “Hotspur” Percy in the Battle of Shrewsbury. During the battle, the younger Henry was hit in the face with an arrow but was saved by the daring surgical removal of the arrowhead.

 Stories of the rakish young “Prince Hal” (expanded upon in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV”) are difficult to prove, though there may have been father-son tensions during the last years of Henry IV’s reign.

"Difficult to prove"?  Here's someone at the BBC site giving more highly sceptical commentary on the matter:

After Henry's death, English propaganda constructed an even more elaborate legend: of his self-transformation, after a reckless youth, into a model of responsibility. For the conversion of royal sinner into royal saint - the tale of how 'Madcap Prince Hal' became 'Harry the Great' - there is no scrap of contemporary evidence. Yet the English love it as an antidote to the despair their royal heirs generally provoke....

 Henry's spell of alleged laddishness was a short episode when he was a de-mobbed soldier, twenty years old, with wild oats to sow. Supposedly, he spent time and money in taverns and brothels, in drunken brawls and sordid liaisons, with unsuitable playmates. 'He exercised meanly,' said a late but influential chronicle, ' the feats of Venus and Mars and other pastimes of youth.' The stories are plausible but untrue - part of an imaginative reconstruction of Henry's life which his brother later paid a hack to write up. The models are saintly conversion-narratives: St Augustine's, from an unchaste life, or St Paul's, from wickedness to apostleship, or St Thomas Becket's, from a wastrel 'suddenly changed into a new man'. Adolescent excess was an excusable background against which a born-again do-gooder could shine more effulgently with - in the words Shakespeare put into Hal's mouth - a 'reformation glittering o'er my fault'.

Yet if you go to another website (The Smithsonian magazine), they cite a historian who seems to think the accounts are probably more-or-less true:

Anne Curry notes that “Henry the prince was a far cry from Henry the king.” The salacious antics detailed in Shakespeare’s verses may be dramatized, the historian explains, but near-contemporary accounts validated by ties with the king’s intimate circles echo the play’s description of a “misspent youth and late change of heart.”

According to Vita Henrici Quinti, a biography penned by humanist scholar Tito Livio Frulovisi during the late 1430s, the prince “was a fervent soldier of Venus as well as of Mars; youthlike, he was fired with her torches.” After the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, Henry spent five years in Wales quelling a rebellion. Here, Frulovisi writes, “in the midst of the worthy works of war, [he] found leisure for the excesses common to ungoverned age.”

Back to the BBC guy, he indicates that the film is more true to the spirit of the final relationship Henry V had with his Dad than the play:

Equally legendary is the story of Henry's reconciliation with his father, which the propagandists crafted to resemble the edifying biblical tale of the Prodigal Son. Henry is supposed to have abased himself before his father in a cloak full of needles to signify thrifty intentions and to have earned, in return, a touching benediction. The real scene was much less edifying. Henry's quarrel with his father was not about the alleged youthful peccadilloes on which the propaganda concentrated, but about the usual political agenda: money and power. At a deeper level, Henry had every reason to hate his father, who had neglected him in childhood and slaughtered the father-substitutes to whom the child turned.

 The immediate circumstances surrounding the old king's deathbed were too urgent for sentiment. Factions were manoeuvring for power like buzzards around bones. As the king's health crumbled, Henry and his friends were out of office and excluded from patronage. This was a serious matter for the prince, who had an expensive household of toughs, lackeys, sycophants and freeloaders to keep up. He staged a coup, bursting into the king's presence with a dagger in his hand and an army at his back. What followed was not a reconciliation, but a negotiation. The king got peace. Henry got power.

Shakespeare had this:

The king angrily rebukes Hal for being so quick to seize the crown. He condemns him for his careless, violent, freewheeling life, and he paints a vivid picture of the horrors he thinks England can expect when Hal becomes king. Hal kneels before his father, weeping, and swears that he loves his father and was full of grief when he thought him dead; he says that he views the crown as an enemy to fight with, not as a treasure. King Henry, moved by the speech, lets Hal sit next to him. With his dying breath, he tells Hal that he hopes he will find more peace as king than Henry did.

Anyway, just goes to show, once again, that real life virtually never has the right timing or details to satisfy dramatists, and perhaps the rest of us?