SOURCE: Marsland, Elizabeth. “Updating Agincourt: The Battle Scenes in Two Film Versions of Henry V.” In Modern War on Stage and Screen, edited by Wolfgang Görtschacher and Holger Klein, pp. 5-19. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997.

In the following essay, the published version of a lecture delivered at a conference in Salzburg, Austria, in October 1995, Marsland compares Laurence Olivier's and Kenneth Branagh's representations of the Battle of Agincourt in their cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare's Henry V. Although the critic calls attention to the difference between Olivier's romantic view of war and Branagh's more realistic one, she contends that both directors glossed over the negative attributes of Shakespeare's Henry.

Shakespeare's Cronicle History of Henry the fift, a play written in 1599 about a battle fought in 1415, may seem an unlikely starting-point for a conference on the representation of modern war. But since part of my purpose is to...