Cringeworthy Book

Sure, it's a jingoistic pageant, but it's a great jingoistic pageant, and--besides--it is the most melancholy,ironic, self-aware--and laugh-filled--jingoistic pageant ever staged.

In Act V, Henry tells Katherine that together they will produce a son, and that this warlike paragon of chivalry will march to the Holy Land and "take the Turk by the beard." Yet we should know--and Shakespeare's audience certainly knew--that this boy would grow up to be Henry VI, the sickly, prayerful unstable man who lost England's hold on France forever and precipitated the Wars of the Roses.

This play celebrates the wheel of time and the apotheosis of the golden warrior king whom that wheel's many revolutions--in the course if the preceding ten acts of Henry IV--has produced. And yet it never ceases to be conscious of the fact that success is always fleeting and that not even majesty itself, no matter how magnificent it may be, can last forever.