Chimes from Morning till Midnight: Shakespeare's Henriad at the Guthrie

Abstract

constructions. Even gender, in Olivier's transitions from boy players to women and back, may be seen as essentially performative in this persistently metatheatrical film. Olivier's declared intention-to serve the War Effort and to perfect Shakespearean practice by making use of the greater resources of realist cinema-was not realized without provision for a more skeptical reading of its imperial and illusionist premises. Branagh's attempt at a darker, harsher Henry V is more modernizing on its surface, more politically and ideologically wary. Deeply cognizant of and alternative Shakespeares, Branagh plumbs more of the play's ironies, more fully engages the dissonance beneath the surface of Shakespeare's epic history than Olivier does. But while Branagh is aware of the play's severe interrogation of its own political premises, he also responds to the more affirmative, optimistic side of Henry V. Branagh begins as an avant-garde film artist, unmasking the cinematic apparatus in a move that parallels Shakespeare's disjunctive treatment of the relation between epic history and its theatrical representation. But this critical stance undergoes a gradual aphanisis, or fading, in the course of the narrative, as Branagh moves from Brechtian counter-cinema to an affirmation of cinema's traditional claim to present real people with authentic feelings; from cynicism about the war to something like acceptance of its tragic necessities. Olivier's Henry V moves from Agincourt to Elizabethan Bankside to the England of Churchill and the Battle of Britain. Branagh's film is less concerned with national destiny and with England's relation to a glorious past; as-political allegory it spans the more modest distance from working-class Belfast to the milieu of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Yet, in negotiating that terrain, Branagh explores dimensions of Shakespeare's play that Olivier's version left relatively untouched-the myth of the king who is also one of his people, whose early experiences provide an intimate link to ordinary life, the king who, though he inherits a crown, must earn his success like a son of the artisan or merchant class making a go of the family business. Reading Henry V partly as an analogue to his own remarkable rise to a position in English theater rivalling that of Olivier, Branagh questions-but ultimately affirms-those aspects of the play that coincide with the values of professional competition and success.