English history has too often been told from the point of view of the powerful, and in a society ruled by unelected kings, where women are systematically discriminated against, this has meant the struggles of ordinary people have been hidden from sight.
In recent years, productions of Shakespeare’s Henry V have occasionally emphasised aspects of the play that bear witness to an unfair world. Peter Mottley’s plays Before Nell and After Agincourt take this further with an account from the point of view of characters neglected by history.
Before Nell, the first and shorter of the two plays, gives us a young male actor in 1599 played by Arthur Drury preparing for the part of Nell Quickly in Henry V. As a boy actor, he’d performed many female characters such as Bianca and Juliet, but since his voice broke, he is limited to older parts. Playing women’s parts prompted him to pay closer attention to their lives and fostered some degree of empathy for them.
In preparing the part of Nell, he draws on memories of his mother. As he explains, “this play's about things that happened hundreds of years ago. But my mum had the same sort of things happen to her as what happened to Nell Quickly.”
That includes working in a tavern and being sexually used and beaten by the landlord. As he explains, “it's not easy being a woman.” Like Nell, she lost her partner when he was press-ganged into the Navy, and she finished her days dying of disease.
Arthur Drury, donning a woman’s clothes and constantly moving about the almost empty stage, gives a confident and measured performance.
A key event in Henry V is the battle of Agincourt in France of 1415. The second play of the evening, After Agincourt, takes us to a tavern in Eastcheap, London in 1422, where the embittered Pistol, a character from the Shakespeare play and a survivor of the battle, clearly still suffering from post-traumatic stress, hasn’t a very rosy view of what took place. His first words are, “cry God for Harry, England and Saint George!—and to hell with all the other poor fuckers.”
He recalls earlier times when Harry, before he was King, used to hang about the tavern with Bardolph, Nym and Falstaff. Although supposedly long-standing friends, it didn’t stop newly anointed King Harry on his way to his coronation responding to the greeting of Falstaff with the words, “I know you not, old man.” Pistol tells us, “that killed old Jack, you know. He was never the same again.”
He wasn't the only one to suffer the King’s cruelty. During the expedition in France, Harry had Bardolph and Nym executed for stealing a couple of trivial items. Pistol is also critical of the way the enemy was treated, referring to the horrors of the battle and King Harry’s instruction to kill thousands of prisoners, except for the ones for whom he would get a ransom. That created a bit of a mutiny among the English soldiers, requiring extra measures to ensure the slaughter took place. He even blames the King for the murder of the unarmed 14-year-old boy left looking after the luggage. Pistol recalls arriving back at the camp too late to stop the killing. He held the lad dying in his arms.
It is a riveting, well-researched script, given a powerful performance by Gareth David-Lloyd as Pistol, angry and mocking of King Harry. Even his impulsive laughter at the end of some of his comments implies layers of bitterness.
The history books still don’t label Henry V a war criminal for trying to conquer France and murdering thousands of unarmed prisoners, but then the current rulers of Britain haven’t got round to defining Netanyahu a war criminal for his policy of genocide in Gaza.