The King: A Shakespeare film made for — and by — people who don’t like Shakespeare

On a technical level, David Michôd’s The King is a well-made film. It’s a bloody and brutal historical drama in the mould of Game Of Thrones with a star-studded cast, including rising star Timothée Chalamet as the titular monarch, Henry V of England. Michôd and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw have the right sense of epic sweep and intimate enclosure to bring both the film’s large scale battle scenes and court-based political interactions to life. However, with the backing of both Netflix and Brad Pitt’s company Plan B, it would be something of a surprise if The King’s production values were anything but high.
The film is also a critical success, currently enjoying a 71% ‘Fresh’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the site’s ‘Audience Score’ higher still at 86%.¹ You wouldn’t know this from the online reaction of those in the Early Modern academic community however. The tweet below from Peter Kirwan, Associate Professor of Early Modern Drama at the University of Nottingham (as well as an avid cineaste) perhaps best sums up the mood:
So, why the severe disconnect between the wider critical and popular response to The King and that of Shakespearean scholars? Watching even a short stretch of the film’s two hours and twenty minutes, it’s perhaps not hard to understand. Simply put, Michôd’s film is something of a ‘greatest hits’ of everything wrong with Shakespearean adaptation today.
The director began the project back in 2013, writing it with Joel Edgerton (who also plays Falstaff in the film) as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘Henriad’ — Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V. Edgerton’s goal was apparently to make the playwright accessible to a modern audience. Speaking about The King in 2016, the writer and actor suggested that ‘when even the most intelligent people watch Shakespeare . . . [t]hey feel stupid, because he does the kind of roundabout version of telling you simple things. So, we just wanted to let the audience understand exactly what’s going on, and not just some people, but everybody’.³
Numerous filmmakers have modernised Shakespeare’s language in the past, usually when also updating the setting and characters — think West Side Story (1961) or 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), both of which were critical and commercial successes. Julian Fellowes meanwhile recently demonstrated the risk of trying to ‘improve’ the language with his cod-Shakespearean script for Carlo Carlei’s 2013 period film Romeo & Juliet, a box office bomb lambasted by scholars and critics alike. Edgerton’s approach goes one further, retaining none of Shakespeare’s poetry or globally recognisable lines and speeches to create an awkward mish-mash of a screenplay. Vaguely faux Shakespearean language, mostly spoken by Chalamet’s Henry, sits alongside typical highfalutin historical-drama-ese emerging from the mouths of the nobles. Then there’s the artless modern dialogue and occasional F-bombs, such as Henry IV’s (Ben Mendelsohn) threat to Hotspur (Tom Glynne-Carney) in an early scene — ‘I’ll hang you by your fucking neck’.

Whilst Edgerton wanted to update Shakespeare under the misguided view of making it for ‘everybody’, Michôd apparently hoped to escape the playwright altogether. In a recent interview, the writer and director stated that ‘[e]ver since the early stages, we’ve been doing everything we can to move away from Shakespeare’ ³— which begs the question why he joined Edgerton in adapting the plays in the first place. Henry V was of course a real historical figure, so why not just go back to the history books (a bit like a certain Early Modern dramatist and his contemporaries) and write a brand new period piece about the mediaeval king? Michôd again perhaps offers an explanation: ‘It is now probably impossible to think about Henry V in any historical context without, in some way, grappling with the patina of Shakespeare. Of some kind of Shakespearean interpretation of that historical figure’.⁴
There’s undoubtedly some truth in what Michôd says, but a braver filmmaker would have seen this as a challenge: write a new dramatic work about the fifteenth-century monarch whilst being aware of the daunting spectre of Shakespeare that might hang over it. Instead, Michôd accepts the easy option, inviting Shakespeare in whilst constantly pushing him away. Ultimately, this condemns his film as feeling like an inferior hack-job for anyone familiar with the plays hoping for an even partially faithful adaptation. Between them, Michôd and Edgerton retain only the bare bones of Shakespeare’s narrative across the three plays and none of his language. So successful were the two men in ‘moving away from Shakespeare’ that The King is not included in the playwright’s current tally of 1,438 writing credits on IMDb.⁵

Perhaps The King’s greatest crime, however, is its inability to anything either new or progressive in what it actually does whilst attempting to ‘improve’ or ‘move away from’ Shakespeare. The film appears to offer a comment on modern militarism, and the way in which Western powers invade foreign nations for political or economic gain. But Shakespeare’s history plays, and Henry V in particular, has been used as a vehicle to capture the Zeitgeist regarding warfare —the films of both Olivier (1944) and Branagh (1989) are prime examples. Predominantly populated as it is by a sizeable cast of white males, Michôd’s film also comes across as at best ill-conceived, at worst offensively backwards. Released in the same year that Shakespeare’s Globe theatre put on the Henriad featuring a diverse cast across all three plays, with black actor Sarah Amankwah starring as Henry V, The King cannot help but immediately feel like an obsolete relic of past attitudes to filmmaking, history and Shakespearean adaptation.

