Famous Victories of Henry V: Scene 10 FV: Scene 10 Director Peter Cockett Author of Annotations Peter Cockett Video Director Holger Schott Syme Video Compiler Peter Cockett Production Company Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men Project Conversion and Remediation LEMDO Team Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada McMaster University Poculi Ludique Societas University of Waterloo University of Toronto Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies University of Victoria Friends of the ISE

Released with Queen’s Men Editions 2.0

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Intellectual copyright in this edition is held by the editor, Peter Cockett. The critical paratexts, including this Scene 10, are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that they are freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the editor, QME, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and/or data; (2) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (3) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of QME, the editor, and LEMDO. This license allows for pedagogical use of the critical paratexts in the classroom.

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Queen’s Men Editions

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Scene 10 is an excellent example of the SQM company clowns mining the details of the text to create comic action. The scene flies by on the page and the humor is latent rather than apparent, implying physical comedy rather than displaying obvious verbal wit. The actors, led by master clown Alon Nashman (Derrick), built on the evidence in the text and took licence to expand on its implicit and explicit stage directions. The simple stage direction: She beateth him () implies the original company would have created a slapstick fight at this moment. The SQM company, lead by Alon Nashman, used their imaginations and training in order to exploit this opportunity for comedy while still remaining true to the story being told. The result depicted a poor man leaving his wife to go to war, a scene both touching and extremely funny, creating a working class counterpoint to the historical narrative driven by Henry V. From this point on, it becomes clearer how Derrick is clerverly designed to be the comic foil for the English king.

The premise of the humor in the scene is that John is terrified of going to war and that his dominating wife might make a better soldier than he would. A lot of the comedy arises from this inversion of early modern gender expectations. The hen-pecking wife is a popular image of misrule and comic pleasure in the play’s original context and Matthew Krist’s broad characterization of the Cobbler’s Wife played fully into the patriarchal stereotype. The impact of all-male companies on the reception of gender in performance is much disputed (Howard). I felt that the SQM company’s all-male cast worked at times to affirm patriarchal attitudes and at others to reveal them as social constructions. In this instance, the effect was conservative as the comedy swept the audience along with the idea that it is funny for a woman to be dominant, but you may watch the video and judge for yourselves. The production notes for this scene will document the specific choices that were made in the creation of the physical comedy and how they relate to the evidence of the text.

 Navigation See Production Credits. Go back to scene index for the SQM production of Famous Victories.