Henry IV, Part I features Glendower’s daughter Lady Mortimer, a character who speaks exclusively in Welsh, and whose husband speaks only English, an extreme example of the playwright’s preoccupation with questions of communication and cultural difference. Your majesty says very true if your majesties is remembered of it, the Welshmen did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps which, your majesty know, to this hour is an honourable badge of the service and I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy’s day.įor I am Welsh, you know good countryman.
After the battle of Agincourt, Fluellen emphasizes the Welsh roots of the Monmouth-born King: The History plays, written under the partly-Welsh Tudor dynasty, show a recurring strain of Welsh characters, possibly all written for the same actor – the Welsh Captain in Richard II, whose change of allegiance marks the start of the king’s downfall, the fierce, mystical Glendower in Henry IV, Part I, who claims that he ‘can call spirits from the vasty deep’, and Fluellen (the playwright’s version of the Welsh name Llewellyn) in Henry V, proud and nationalistic, with his constant talk of the rules and scholarship of war. William Shakespeare is today such an icon of Englishness that it’s easy to forget how frequently his plays deal with Wales, and the way in which the Principality appears to its larger neighbour. the plays attest to a lifelong awareness of and engagement with the Principality If Shakespeare remains, even today, a small part of the Welsh question, Wales has always been a big part of the Shakespeare question. The season opened with Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989), followed by a discussion on Shakespeare and Wales.
#Shakespearean call to arms series
As part of the ‘Shakespeare Lives!’ project, marking the 400 th anniversary of the playwright’s death, the British Council collaborated with Chapter Arts Centre on a series of Shakespeare films, accompanied by panel discussions.
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