One Lovely Night of History

Last night, at a small, stunningly beautiful, outdoor theater in Spring Green, WI, I was powerfully reminded why I love both history and theatre (and Shakespeare as a vessel of both these things) during a performance of King Henry V. I know that so much of the history we learn is made up of kings and countries, but I saw one of those history-making kings weep over the body of a young boy, slain by fleeing French in contempt of the rules of war. Even kings are mere men, and it is of the deeds of all men that history is made.

Now, the history nerd in me was astir at the early discussion of the intricacies of Salic law, which I understood all too well, and the common discussion of Henry's royal lineage, with as twisted branches as most royal family trees, intermingled by intermarriage. Before the battle of Agincourt began and the English despaired of returning alive across the channel, I knew how the powerful English long bow would confound French expectations of an easy victory. While Henry wooed Katherine with the words of a soldier and a king, I knew the tragedy that would leave his son fatherless at a tender age, and how the bitter Dauphin would regain his throne with the help of a French peasant girl named Jean d'Arc. But these are the mere cold facts of history, the basic substance of the past, but wrought from them on that empty stage was a story epic in scope and human in nature.

So many people, and I know this because I used to be one, see history as a boring miasma of dates, names, and places. But it is a vibrant tapestry of emotions and people just as human as we are, just as fallible as we wish we weren't and just as capable of the same greatness to which we aspire. When Henry exhorted his weary men once more unto the breach and to cry God for Harry, England, and St. George, I wanted to leap out of my seat and follow him into battle. And that is the power of truly excellent theatre. History may just be words on a page to us now, but it was real to the people who lived it. The blood that was so often talked of, whether in threats against France, or in laments against that already spilled, was drawn from real men and women, who felt as much pain at it as we might.

I have always had a fondness for the Hundred Years War (of which the action of the play is a small part), and I have a deep love for the theater that mounted the production, so I was naturally predisposed to like it. I did not expect to find myself pulled so deeply into the history I have seldom looked at since my graduation this past May. When Henry passed sentence on three traitors early in the play, my history major mind was pleased at the distinction of these men as guilty of high treason, having learned the distinction between high and petit treason from my thesis research. This same research again leaped to mind when a common soldier was condemned to a hanging for stealing a minor sum from a French church. I knew about these laws, and I tried to understand the human cost of them. But nothing brings it home like the pain in Henry's face when a man he has known his whole life sells his king to the French and he must condemn him to death, or the anguish when he hears that the common thief being hanged was a companion of his recently abandoned youth.

I have often wished that I could have some permanent record of plays of have seen, and this wish was most fervent after the play was over. But in this, theatre is like history: once it has happened, it lives on only in the memories of those who experienced it. Just as any record of an event is in some way biased and incomplete, my memories of the play can never truly recreate within me the experience of being there, nor can my description of it to anyone else ever accurately convey exactly what happened. But I will never forget the powerful emotions I was allowed to share a taste of with those actors, and it is such passion that we should never remove from history. We should pursue it with as much passion as was given by those who lived it.

This beautiful production of Shakespeare's play brought the human back into the history, the most important and yet, I think, the most often overlooked aspect of our past. We may analyze events and actions, searching for meaning in the vagaries of human record, but now, more than ever, I am determined to remember that the study of history, first and foremost, connects us to other people who lived as we lived, and that to see that we are the same as them is the greatest achievement we can hope to attain.

Brenna