Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What?, October 4, 2004
I disagree. I loved Henry V! I've memorized parts of it because it's just that good. Today Shakespeare's work is almost universally considered some of the best literature written, but he really wrote to entertain and to educate. What more can you ask for?
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Not a play for everyone, but still Shakespeare, January 14, 2005
I can understand how other reviewers would scoff at this play as not one of Shakespeare's greatest works, but it is still a play worthy of merit. The play explores Henry's campaign in France, culminating at the battle of Agincourt, where he defeated a much larger French army. The difficulty of this play lies in the fact that Shakespeare asks us to "imagine" all of the actions of a bloody, gruesome war within the confines of a stage like the Globe. This is not an easy feat, and I'm not sure that Shakespeare is able to relate the epic nature of the medieval battlefield on the stage.
I would definitely recommend reading this play for the crisp, and often funny, Shakespearean dialogue and the powerful monologues given mostly by Henry himself. The Crispian's day monologue is one of the most memorable in Shakespeare and is still required memorization for many British school children.
However, if you just want to hear the best parts and avoid the drawn out nature of _reading_ drama (something Shakespeare wouldn't have dreamed of), go see the play at a good local theatre or check out Kenneth Branagh's movie version, which is extremely watchable.
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0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Seriously disappointing., July 4, 2004
At risk of causing my reviewer rating to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged lovers of all things Shakespeare, I must say that I was seriously disappointed by this work; it hardly seems worthy of the Bard. 90% of this story was dialogue in which, alternately, English soldiers spoke of what they were going to do to the French, and French soldiers spoke of what they were going to do to the English. This was followed by a few fight scenes, and then the English crowing about how they'd succeeded in doing what they'd bragged they were going to do, and the French bemoaning their failure to live up to their boasts. Then Shakespeare tried to paste a love story ending onto a play that had absolutely no hint of one before then, and which rang even hollower than Shakespeare's love stories usually do. Granted, the language is typically Shakespearean, if not his most memorable, and the little bit of the story not accounted for in the preceding description was a fairly enjoyable glimpse of the character of King Henry as he was in Henry IV, part I, when as Prince Hal he was actually entertaining, but it wasn't nearly enough to rescue an otherwise thoroughly uninteresting story.I cannot fathom why this is described as one of the most popular of Shakespeare's history plays.
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by William Shakespeare
by William Shakespeare
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