Henry, Prince of Wales

They liked him because he was handsome and brave, and, above all, because he conquered France.

his youth prince hal as the people called him had a number of merry companions who sometimes got themselves into trouble by their pranks once one of them was arrested and brought before the chief justice of the kingdom prince hal was not pleased because sentence was given against his companion and he drew his sword threatening the judge Upon this, the judge bravely ordered the prince to be arrested and put into prison.

Prince Hal submitted to his punishment with good grace, and his father is reported to have said, Happy is the monarch who has so just a judge, and a son so willing to obey the law.

One of Prince Hal's companions was a fat old knight named Sir John Falstaff.

Once Falstaff was boasting that he and three men had beaten and almost killed two men in buckram suits who had attacked and tried to rob them.

the prince led him on and gave him a chance to brag as much as he wanted to until finally falstaff swore that there were at least a hundred robbers and that he himself fought with fifty then prince hal told the companions that only two men had attacked falstaff and his friends and that he and another man who was present were those two and he said that falstaff instead of fighting had run as fast as his legs could carry him there was real goodness as well as merriment in prince hal and so the people found for when he became king on the death of his father he told his wild companions that the days of his wildness were over and he advised them to lead better lives in the future as henry v prince hal made himself famous in english history by his war with france Normandy, you remember, had belonged to Henry's ancestor, William the Conqueror.

Now the story continues with Henry IV, Part 2.

Justin is back with actor and fight director Dan Griffin, who plays Prince Hal, the young man facing the challenge of becoming king.

They join us to tell us more about the production.

Well, last time we spoke, you were preparing for Henry IV Part 1.

So part one tells the story of King Henry IV.

Um, uh, and his son, Prince Howe, who are kind of at odds, Howe's a bit of a, bit of a bad boy.

Um, he, he likes hanging out with, uh, the rogue knight, Sir John Falstaff, and there's a rebellion going on and it sort of gets kind of squashed, but by the end of the play, Things seem like they're looking up for the most part for Henry and Hal and even Falstaff.

And that's where we start part two.

He's only really in one scene.

And so this is kind of going through the looking glass, really, and seeing the story from his point of view, the same events, you know, many of the same characters, you know, obviously Henry IV, Prince Hal, Mortimer, Percy, all those sort of characters.

But also, I think, and quite tellingly, Falstaff, because I think, you know, Falstaff was not a real person, maybe based on real people, but not a real person.

It's a sort of fantasy concoction of Shakespeare and became possibly the most loved character in all of Shakespeare.

And the Leave campaign wouldn't have won without Boris and without his contribution.

I felt, to use a sort of metaphor, that he had been Prince Hal and he was now Henry V.

But in the week immediately after winning the Brexit referendum, when I hoped that Boris would rise to the occasion, there were a number of moments and a number of events where I thought, He's not displaying the grip, the control, the authority that you need to have to be prime minister at a moment like this.

And to this moment, and I'm sure for the rest of my life, I will wonder, would it have been better to stifle the doubts that I had at that time And, you know, just make sure that Boris won.

This eventually transferred to Broadway, where the play won the Drama Critic Circle Award, and Richard himself won the Theatre World Award for his performance, marking his first major award win.

Further plays followed, and eventually Richard was cast as Prince Hal in Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry IV Part II, and these performances won him significant acclaim, with one critic noting that he left people with their mouths agape at the quality of his performance.

And so he continued with more Shakespeare, some of which transferred from the UK to New York and Broadway, and eventually Hollywood began to take notice.

In 1952, the director, George Cukor, was looking for a relatively unknown actor to appear opposite Olivia de Havilland in his adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel.

As he writes in his autobiography, quote, Page's most heinous mistake was to ignore a vital suggestion of mine out of sheer arrogance.

The deus ex machina was the confessional box itself, in which you cannot be seen and can only be heard in a whisper, obviously a form of verbal communication that lacks vocal colour, and this makes it easy for one boy to impersonate another and confess to wholly illusory circumstances and then blame them on him.

Halfway through making the film, I realised that it would be much more terrifying for the audience to know what was really going on, how in effect the priest was slowly being conned into murdering one of his charges.

To this end, I suggested to Page that during a break in filming, we use the time to shoot Die Bradley in the Little Confessional set, rising from his knees by the partition, walking to the door, half opening it, giving us a sly look, closing it again as if he had exited, and then resuming his place, thus at a stroke persuading the priest he was another boy and tipping the wind to us.

That context matters enormously for your exam because Henry in this play is not starting from scratch.

He's the same character we knew as Prince Hal, the wild, tavern-haunting young man who hung around with Falstaff.

By the time Henry V begins, he is transformed.

He's a king.

giving you these opportunities to listen to and perform Shakespeare.

Finally, our long-awaited announcement, Prairie Havoc Shakespeare's production of Twelfth Night will be performing on Friday, January 8th, and Saturday, January 9th at 7.30pm in the Hartnett Hall Recital Hall at Minot State University.

Of course, all performances will be recorded and shown on YouTube and anywhere you find podcasts.

Mark your calendar for all of the upcoming Shakespeare this season.

Like, the English crown is having its own problems.

Uh, and it's in fourteen thirteen when things are settling down enough and Henry V is now on the throne, um, he-- you know, he's the son of a usurper whose, uh, whose father has fought multiple attempts to, to kick them off the throne, including the Battle of Shrewsbury, uh, in fourteen oh three, in which, um, Prince Hal, the, the future Henry V, took an arrow to the face.

Uh, this is the reason I call m- uh, I call my book on Agincourt The Battle of the Scarred King, because Henry V was deeply scarred by this in multiple ways.

Um, Henry needs a, uh, a kind of something to band together England.

... does this, you know?

So let's talk about him as another guy, and let's try to separate the historical King Henry V from Shakespeare's character.

What makes Shakespeare's heroic Henry so compelling a figure is that Shakespeare's audiences had already been introduced to the apparently feckless young Prince Hal in two other plays, and-

In Henry IV, part one and two.

The key word here is sacrifice.

We meet Henry V first as Prince Hal, a young king in waiting, bored senseless with nothing to do, leading him to a life of drunken debauchery.

He hangs out with Falstaff, forces his dad to say, "What am I gonna do with you?" Yes, even then, dads spoke in cliches to their sons.

Right at the start of Henry IV Part 1, the king bemoans his feckless son.

Why can't Hal be more like Harry Hotspur? Now there's a boy whose father I envy.

A son who is the theme of honor's tongue, amongst a grove the very straightest plant, who is sweet fortune's minion and her pride.

Over the course of this Part 2 and Henry V, we'll see Hal develop from one of the lads to a serious and eventually utterly lonely ruler.

He becomes a king who understands how he has to navigate his godlike duties while being aware of his own all too human failings.