Critical Essay | Critical Review by Robert Lane

Critical Review by Robert Lane

SOURCE: Lane, Robert. “‘When Blood Is Their Argument’: Class, Character, and Historymaking in Shakespeare's and Branagh's Henry V.” ELH 61, no. 1 (spring 1994): 27-52.

In the following review, Lane attempts to show that Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film version of Henry V softened the elements of class conflict and concerns regarding the justifiability of war that appear in Shakespeare's play.

That [these events] had a real truth in history, sharpens the sense of pain, while it hangs a leaden weight on the heart and the imagination … [W]e think that the actual truth of the particular events, in proportion as we are conscious of it, is a drawback on the pleasures as well as the dignity of tragedy.

—William Hazlitt¹

Premised on the antagonism between history's “real ground” and the imaginative pleasures of tragedy, Hazlitt's meditation reveals a tension that underlies much discussion of Shakespeare's history plays. Hazlitt's polarizing of...
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