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.
