Henry V -- 1989

Delda W's Review

Dame Judi as Mistress Quickly in Henry V

The role of Mistress Quickly in Shakespeare's "Henry V" is a small one -- 10 minutes on screen -- but what a role. And what a performance by Dame Judi Dench. Had Shakespeare seen her Mistress Quickly, I believe he would have said: "She got it all. She was perfect."

In Judi Dench's hands Mistress Quickly comes alive: earthy, good-hearted, and not very bright. Her famous speech describing Falstaff's death could be lewd, laughable or even dull. Judi Dench's Mistress Quickly butchers the English language just as Shakespeare wanted her to, yet conveys this character's sadness at Falstaff's death with great poignancy. We do not want to laugh. Instead, we are moved by Mistress Quickly's inept attempts at eloquence. In this performance she is a fully believable, richly human character.

The most familiar lines can be the toughest, and Judi Dench has to deal both with the well-known speech cited above, and the one short line: "The King has killed his heart." This line is Shakespeare's pivotal summation, captured in one line, for at the end of "Henry IV, Part Two" Prince Hal, once Falstaff's boon companion, has turned on him with the famous, cruel line "I know thee not, old man." How like Shakespeare to remind us of this by putting words in the mouth of a humble character. And how like Judi Dench to deliver it so well. At the end of her 10 minutes on the screen she bids farewell to her husband and his companions with tears and sadness that foreshadow the grim scenes to come. She is deft, subtle, and moving.

Hold up against this magnificent performance that of Freda Jackson in Laurence Olivier's "Henry V" (1944 -- available on video); or look at Margaret Rutherford's Mistress Quickly in Orson Welles' "The Chimes at Midnight" (1966 -- also available on video). Jackson is flat and wooden; Rutherford is so low-key she is hardly noticeable.

Add to this the fact that Dame Judi delivered this performance at the end of two days' filming beset with technical problems. She is joined by three other terrific performers -- Richard Briers, Geoffrey Hutchings and Robert Stephens as Bardolph, Nym and Pistol -- and certainly they enrich this scene. But she manages to invest her character with a humanity that sets Mistress Quickly before us as a real person and not a caricature. It is this kind of performance that makes one wish every role she has ever played were available to us on film. One cannot imagine this role ever being done so well again.

For those wishing to follow the text, Mistress Quickly appears in:

Henry V -- Act II -- Scene 1 and Scene 3