A HISTORICAL PLAY, IN FIVE ACTS; BY WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE. AS PERFORMED AT THE THEATRE ROYAL, COVENT GARDEN. PRINTED UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE MANAGERS FROM THE PROMPT BOOK. WITH REMARKS BY MRS INCHBALD. LONDON: PRINTED FOR LONGMAN, HURST, REES, ORME, AND BROWN, PATERNOSTER-ROW. REMARKS. THIS play of Henry the Fifth is the moral to the play of Henry the Fourth; for here, the jocund Prince of Wales, having become King of England, not only forsakes all his companions in vice, but hangs two or three of them. The death of Falstaff also, told in a humorous, but most natural manner, will be as impressive, on some minds, as any of those scenes where the poet has frequently made state, pomp, or bitterest calamity, attendant on the dying man. That pining obscurity in which the supercilious Sir John was compelled to live, when his royal comrade became ashamed of him, is a subject well worth the reflection of many a luckless parasite; and now, this stealing to his bed, stealing to his grave, without one tragic bustle, except that which his conscience makes, so well describes the usual decease of a neglected profligate, that every man, who thinks, will own the resemblance, and take the warning conveyed. The disorderly conduct, and ensuing fate of Sir John Falstaff, is not a more excellent lesson for the dissipated and dishonourable, than the confidence of the French king and his court, in their prowess, is instructive to ministers of state, and every puny politician. A dramatist, who had feigned occurrences, or who had not closely adhered to facts, as Shakspeare in this play has done, might have been charged with burlesquing the human character in the vainglory which is here given to France, and her conse quent humiliation. Fiction, from the pen of genius, will often appear more like nature, than nature will appear like herself. The admired speech invented by the author for King Henry, in a beautiful soliloquy just before battle, seems the exact effect of the place and circumstances with which he was then surrounded, and to be, as his very mind stamped on the dramatic page; and yet perhaps his majesty, in his meditations, had no such thoughts as are here provided for him; but that his opponents had thoughts and expectations equally extravagant with those allotted to them, their every action evinced. The incident of the soldier's glove has a degree of interest not only from itself, but that it shows some slight remainder of Falstaff's merry Hal, in the then great King of England. The famed battle of Agincourt, which this play exhibits, was fought on the 25th of October, the day of St Crispin; to which one of the king's sentences alludes. Here fifteen thousand of the English only, it is said, defeated fifty-two thousand of the French. The consequences of this glorious victory were yet most horrible to the humane Britons; for the number of their prisoners amounting to more than their |