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Rating: 
Summary: Seriously disappointing.
Review: At risk of causing my reviewer rating to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged lovers of all things Shakespeare, I must say that I was seriously disappointed by this work; it hardly seems worthy of the Bard. 90% of this story was dialogue in which, alternately, English soldiers spoke of what they were going to do to the French, and French soldiers spoke of what they were going to do to the English. This was followed by a few fight scenes, and then the English crowing about how they'd succeeded in doing what they'd bragged they were going to do, and the French bemoaning their failure to live up to their boasts. Then Shakespeare tried to paste a love story ending onto a play that had absolutely no hint of one before then, and which rang even hollower than Shakespeare's love stories usually do. Granted, the language is typically Shakespearean, if not his most memorable, and the little bit of the story not accounted for in the preceding description was a fairly enjoyable glimpse of the character of King Henry as he was in Henry IV, part I, when as Prince Hal he was actually entertaining, but it wasn't nearly enough to rescue an otherwise thoroughly uninteresting story.I cannot fathom why this is described as one of the most popular of Shakespeare's history plays.
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