deed, tradition has long centered on the contrast between Henry as heir and henry as ruler (Saccio 67). Too often in productions of the play, Hal is allowed to be dwarfed by the brilliance of Falstaff and his father, Henry IV, though in fact Prince Hal is the central figure and must be seen in this light.
Stoll says that Henry V belongs to one of Shakespeare's more human and genial periods, with plays reflecting "a joy in life and an exuberance of spirits, which then, for some reason, suddenly pass away" (Stoll 123). As a result, this is a play in which the sense of doom or fate is absent, and instead the work mixes the serious and the comic in a lighter way. Stoll says this is seen in both the substance and the style:
The expression now is highly colored, lavish of poetry and the beauty of phrase and figure. In the great tragedies ornament seems to be disdained, and the sweetness of the master's style is sometimes almost lost in its Titanic strength (123).
Stoll also finds that the play presents a series of tableaux rather than a plot, with the different scenes illuminating aspects of the character of the monarch, much as the two eariler plays presented Hal in somewhat different ways in the course of his development. Indeed, in Henry V the power of the monarch is made so absolute that there is no external struggle as such because there is no enemy able to withstand him. Stoll says this is a patriotic drama designed to elevate the ruler to a high plane, and he says its value as drama thus derives from the quality of the life and character pres
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