SOURCE: Hart, Jonathan. “Shakespeare's Henry V: Towards the Problem Play.” Cahiers Élisabéthains 42 (October 1992): 17-35.

In the following essay, Hart contends that Henry V contains many aspects found in Shakespeare’s problem plays, most notably its unstable genre, which includes elements of tragedy, comedy, and satire.

When in the 1890s Frederick Boas first called attention to problems in some of Shakespeare's plays and laid the critical groundwork for the debate on the problem plays or problem comedies was he uncovering a division in Shakespeare's mind or representation or in the audience of the modern period?¹ C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard in England and W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in the United States debated the authority of the author's intention decades before the advent of reception theory, which argued for the importance of the role of the reader.² Possibly, the rise of irony as...