Henry V is a text bursting with debate so the materials on this page aim to guide pupils, teachers and practitioners through some of the main questions that have preoccupied critics and practitioners who are staging the 2024 production.

We used the Arden Henry V. Its editor, T. W. Craik, remembers how much he enjoyed the play in school,  saying  ‘That still seems to me the most important thing to do with a play, to enjoy it in performance, whether in a reading-aloud, or on a stage, or in the theatre of the mind’ (p.xvii).

This first lecture is about Henry V gives some context about the play as part of a late Elizabethan fascination with history and as part of Shakespeare’s cycle of history plays.

https://estream.lancaster.ac.uk/Embed.aspx?id=96155&code=dQ~LTzZa5GpIkNKJ4k0P66ie6KNSgOd9g