In the Library
Henry V
William Shakespeare, 1600
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 29
- Length
- Length 27k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Iliad
Homer
The Iliad does the same thing, turning a small army's eve of battle courage into legend, but its heroes fight for glory alone, not a king's cause.
£1.99
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front does the same thing, putting a reader inside a war for glory, but shows the mud and fear the Chorus leaves offstage.
£1.99
About the book
An empty stage, and a voice apologising for it: can this wooden O hold the vasty fields of France? The apology is the trick, because Shakespeare then hands the whole war over to your imagination, which obligingly builds it larger than any army he could have marched across a platform of boards. What follows is the most stirring rhetoric anyone has written in English, a king who can talk exhausted men back into a breach in a wall and, on a cold morning at Agincourt, persuade a sick and hopelessly outnumbered army that they are the happy few and everyone asleep in England is the poorer for it. Then comes the thing that makes the play great rather than merely rousing. The night before the battle Henry walks among his soldiers in a borrowed cloak, and a common man tells him to his face that the souls of the dead will be charged to the king's account. Bardolph hangs for stealing a plate. The glory is real, and so is the bill.