In addition to being an adaptation of Shakespeare's play, a morale-boosting film for the Britain of 1944 and a fusion of historical event and myth and legend, Olivier's Henry V is also a cinematic treatise on the difference between cinema and theatre as media for the expression of drama. This last dimension of the film's complex stature is coming increasingly to be acknowledged as this adaptation's claim to enduring significance. More important than any scenic amplification which cinema is able to afford the original theatrical concept is the organic structure within which the elements of space and time are cinematically organized. This relation of space to time can be usefully examined on two levels: the external level (the reciprocity between the work of art and the historical moment of its creation) and the internal level (the way that spatial details within the film's visualization signal time strata as artistic substance).

In two respects the immediate political and historical circumstances surrounding the film's creation give its spatial strategy a dynamic relevance. Firstly, the film clearly derives certain spatial manipulations from stage productions which preceded it and which established the play's particular theatrical tradition. Tableaux, trumpets, moving dioramas, rich medieval costuming, a prominent musical dimension, an elaborate coronation scene – and even a white horse for Henry – can all be traced back to productions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the spectacular elaborations of McCready, Kean and Charles Calvert marked the play with a particular stamp of epic pageantry in performance.