Shakespeare and King Henry V: Historical Research Informing Artistic Decisions

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) remains simultaneously the most produced and most studied playwright in the English-speaking world. With so many Shakespeare festivals spread across Canada and the United States, it seems that there would be ample opportunity for the artistic and academic communities to partner with each other. However, in my experience, very few scholars practice as professional theatre artists, and conversely there are very few theatre artists that have taken the time that many academics have done in studying and researching Shakespeare’s plays. My thesis asks: Would productions of Shakespeare’s plays be better served by bringing together artistic and academic methodologies? Using one of Shakespeare’s great history plays as the “subject,” I have spent the duration of my graduate studies researching Henry V (1386-1422) and the medieval period in which he lived, and I have studied and read scholarly materials that cover his life as well as the literature that would have been available to Shakespeare when he wrote his play Henry V (1599). All this was done as the preparation for a production of Henry V that integrated specific research that was discovered by utilizing methodologies from the three departments that make up my Interdisciplinary studies (Drama, English, and History) along with the creative insights that I brought from my own professional experience as a working theatre artist since the completion of my undergraduate studies. The Greystone Theatre production of Henry V had its theatrical run in the Emrys Jones Theatre on the U of S campus from November 22 to December 1, 2018