Henry V, King of England 1413-22, conquered much of France, and was made heir apparent to French throne, although he died before inheriting that throne. Henry's son, Henry VI, an infant when he became King of England, lost all the advantage his father had won in France, and although successive generations of English monarchs periodically laid claim to the French throne again, they never succeeded in winning it. Henry's reign has thus represented, in the imaginations of Englishmen of a jingoistic nature, a high point in England's relationship with Europe. Shakespeare's presentation of Henry is at best ambiguously heroic, but, as always with Shakespeare, it ain't just the script, it's the way that you play it.
The earliest draft of the first part of our script for Henry V dates from March 2016. It consists of translations of some sequences from the first few scenes of the play which were prepared for various smaller events, always with a view to an eventual full production, but for a long time with no clear deadline in mind. The process that lead from this to having a full script ready to hand over to a cast and production team then went on for some eighteen to twenty months, until late 2017. Progress was far from continuous, however: The project was taken up again and continued more than once, before something like the final version of the script came into being during a week spent by parts of the translation team either playing cards on the beach or weighing up translational variants between a considerable number of existing French and German translations. Both activities were highly enjoyable.
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