Para1The fullest of the two earliest versions of Shakespeare’s Henry
V gives the play a title that might seem to misrepresent its subject
matter. Upon opening their expensive new book in 1623, buyers of the large, folio
collection of the late William Shakespeare’s plays were promised
The
Life of Henry the Fift (see F1 H1r). As with Shakespeare’s other
life titles—Julius Caesar, Henry VIII, King John, etc.—what they
went on to read, however, was not a full life in the modern
biographical sense, or even the greatest-hits version of the life that we might
expect in a dramatization. Those who, decades earlier, had bought the shorter,
first-published version of
the play, the inexpensively-printed quarto of 1600, met with a more
specific title that both accurately reflects the play’s subject matter and identifies
the selling points of the play and its printed script: The Cronicle
History of Henry the fift, With his battell fought at Agin Court in France.
Togither with Auntient Pistoll (see Q1 A1r). But the Quarto version’s title is also
misleading: the battle of Agincourt is not an addendum, but the play’s main event;
every scene leads up to or follows directly from the climax of England’s most
one-sided and famous victory.1
Para2Shakespeare’s earlier English history plays could conflate decades of history into
two hours of stage time. The two-part Henry IV, for example,
covers the title king’s entire reign, from 1400 to 1413. The three parts of
Henry VI depict half a century of events, from 1421 to 1471, and
Richard III makes the years from 1478 to 1485 seem like a
few hectic weeks. Admittedly, King Henry V’s reign and life were short; he died in
1422 at the age of thirty-five. Small time, says the play’s epilogue,
but in that small most greatly lived / This star of England (Epilogue Sp1).
But even so, Shakespeare’s Henry V takes a strikingly narrow
focus both chronologically and thematically, depicting a total of some eight months
in the year 1415 and a day in 1420, a small time indeed. Guided by a Chorus, an
early-modern version of the device from Greek drama who serves to mediate between
the
audience and the events depicted in the play, we follow the build-up to King Henry’s
war to claim the French throne, the first wave of that war (the 1415 invasion of
Picardy culminating with Agincourt), and the aftermath of the war with the 1420
Treaty of Troyes, including Henry’s betrothal to the French princess Catherine. The
scenes present little by way of plot, and even the war itself, depicted in acts three
and four, is peculiarly fragmented and short on scenes of actual battle. The
Alarums and Excursions that characterize other Shakespearean
representations of war—offstage noises and players as soldiers running across the
stage or engaging in small skirmishes that represent the larger conflicts—are almost
absent. The only combat we see, Pistol’s capturing of the French soldier Le Fer at
Agincourt, immediately gives way to Le Fer’s surrender and comic haggling over his
ransom.
Para3Despite its subject matter (and despite the Quarto’s title), Henry
V is not a Chronicle History in the sense that it strictly
follows the chronicle sources—it is rather, as Alexander Leggatt puts it, an
anatomy, in whose episodic quality lies its purpose:
we are not so much following an
action as looking all round a subject, often in a discontinuous way. This includes
not only characters and events but attitudes towards them, even ways of
dramatizing them (Leggatt 114).
The play, that is, consists of a set of arguments about kingship, about politics,
about power, and about English identity, all converging on the character of Henry
and
the multiple views of him that the play produces. Henry V
emerges as less a history of England than an exploration of the role of the
individual in history. It is in this way of a piece with the other plays
in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of English history plays: Richard II, 1 Henry IV, and 2 Henry IV.2 His
earlier sequence of four history plays, to which Henry V is
the last of what Hollywood would call the prequels, depicted the
consequences of Henry V’s early death and the unhappy reign of his son Henry VI,
Whose state so many had the managing / That they lost France and made his
England bleed, / Which, as Henry V’s epilogue
reminds us, oft our stage hath shown (Epilogue Sp1).
The earlier tetralogy has the feel of medieval dramatic genres, the morality play
and
the mystery cycle. The primary agent in the plays is divine providence, and their
master plot is one of human defiance of God and divine retribution, carried out
through a series of curses and counter-curses that redound upon the cursers’ heads.
The earlier plays partake in allegory and typology, with symbolic characters such
as
3 Henry VI’s nameless Father that hath killʼd his
Sonne and Sonne that hath killʼd his Father (3H6 2.5.80, 2.5.56; F1 3H6P2v),
and miraculous events (drawn from the chronicle sources) like the ominous appearance
of three suns in the sky in 3 Henry VI (3H6 2.1.25)
or the bleeding of a long-dead corpse in Richard III (R3 1.2.55–56).
Richard of Gloucester even embodies the likable villainy of the medieval vice figure
with whom he explicitly identifies (3.1.82). The more mature second
tetralogy abandons this medieval framework in favour of a more human scale. Bookended
by plays that depict the defining dramatic moments of their title kings’
lives—Richard II and Henry V—the
two parts of Henry IV, despite their title, are less about
King Henry IV and the troubles that attended his reign than they are about the
journey Prince Hal takes to the kingship, and the way he overcomes the legacy of his
father’s crime in deposing Richard II.
Para4The Chorus’s declaration to the audience that ’tis your thoughts that now must
deck our kings (Prologue Sp1) is more than a
plea for imagination to patch the holes in dramatic representation. More than the
life of Henry, the play is about perspectives on Henry, about the way he is clothed
and constructed by the thoughts of his subjects and his audiences. It operates on
a
strategy of parallax: that is, a change in or distortion of perception resulting from
seeing from these different perspectives; the play’s different viewpoints effectively
produce different Henrys. Defining the king, or rather triangulating these
parallactical and often conflicting definitions of him, is the play’s main business,
and its major movements are structured by a logic of viewing, rather
than doing.
Para5We can see the first movement of the play, from the Prologue to 2.1, as the mustering
of perspectives. Indeed, these scenes present a barrage of them. Not a scene goes
by
without someone knowingly asserting some aspect of Henry’s character, but in almost
every case, that assertion is made in ambivalent contexts, or qualified almost as
soon as it is uttered. The pattern is foreshadowed by the Chorus’s portrait of
the warlike Harry (Prologue Sp1), an image subtly called into question by the
curious phrase like himself (Prologue Sp1). What does it mean to be like
oneself? Similarity is, by definition, not equality, so the apparently tautological
simile emphasizes the instability of selfhood; if Henry can be like himself, then
he
can as easily be unlike himself, and being collapses troublingly into
seeming.3 The bishops in 1.1 speak approvingly of the king’s new character:
his learning, his piety, and his diplomatic skill. But they remind us in the same
breath that his reformation was miraculously sudden and that the courses of his youth promised it not
(A1 Sc1 Sp9). Their wonder at the king’s
moral volte-face suggests that it is too good to be true; if
indeed miracles are ceased (A1 Sc1 Sp13), then there must be some more
mundane explanation, and as a theologian Canterbury must recognize that the offending
Adam is never truly whipped out of the mind’s garden.
Para6The mustering of perspectives continues in the council scene of 1.2, which reinforces
both of the contradictory views of Henry that the bishops offer. Henry presents very
little evidence of his true character in the scene other than the apparent weighing
of the right and conscience of his claim (A1 Sc2 Sp9); he speaks
only thirty-one of the scene’s first 136 lines. But the clerics and peers fill in
Henry’s silence to construct him as the perfect warrior-king in the image of his
ancestor Edward III. He is the heir of these valiant dead (A1 Sc2 Sp11) and their
deeds, with his own puissant arm (A1 Sc2 Sp11) and in the very May-morn of
his youth, / Ripe for exploits and
mighty enterprises (A1 Sc2 Sp11).
He is a lion of the royal blood, with the cause, and means, and might
for the war (A1 Sc2 Sp12).
This English portrait of Henry is immediately contrasted with a French caricature,
as
the dauphin’s ambassador draws an outdated picture of Henry as a man who
savours too much of his
youth (A1 Sc2 Sp25), fitter for the dance floor and the tennis court than for the
battlefield. That the English, and Shakespeare’s play, embrace one of these
perspectives over the other is inevitable, and the disjunction between the dauphin’s
view and that of the English peers fuels Henry’s final, magnificent, rhetorical push
into war. The parallax remains, however: both perspectives on Henry are plausible
and
both remain in play as the drama continues.
Para7The second Chorus speech reinforces the play’s multiplicity of viewpoints by
describing Henry with a rather ambiguous optical metaphor. On the surface, the
epithet mirror of all Christian kings seems complimentary (A2 Sc0 Sp1). The
primary sense is that Henry will be an exemplar for Christian kings to imitate (OEDmirror, n.5); indeed this sense of mirror
predates the more common sense of reflective surface (n.I). The
play’s chronicle sources repeatedly use the word in this sense to describe Henry’s
qualities, and Shakespeare may have derived this precise line from Edward Hall’s
comment about Agincourt, in which the sense of exemplar (OEDmirror, n.5.a) is
clearly intended: THIS battail maie be a mirror and glasse to al
Christian princes to beholde and folowe (Hall fol. 52). But
a mirror, in the more common sense, is an imitation of reality, not the other way
around; the comparison of Henry to a mirror may suggest two-dimensionality,
falseness, and even, since mirror images are reversed, opposition to whatever set
of
values one associates with Christian kings.4
Para8The Chorus promises a scene set in Southampton featuring King Henry and the
youth of England […] on fire (A2 Sc0 Sp1), but that promise
is immediately undercut, as the scene that follows depicts another group of
characters offering a unique view of Henry, the companions of his former dissolute
life. Neither young nor particularly afire with eagerness for war, Bardolph, Nym,
and
Pistol round out the play’s first movement with another ambiguous, if not
contradictory set of assertions.
The Rejection of Falstaff, from the The Works of William Shakespeare, ed. John Boydell, Charles Cowden Clarke, and Mary Cowden Clarke (1874). Used by
kind permission of the University of Victoria Libraries Special Collections.
Bringing news of the mortal illness of Sir John Falstaff, whose company Henry abjured
upon his accession in 2 Henry IV, the Hostess declares that
the king hath killed his
heart (A2 Sc1 Sp26), an assessment that meets no
objection from Nym, though while he agrees that the king hath run bad humours on the knight (A2 Sc1 Sp41), he cannot bring himself to
complain, openly at least, of Henry’s rejection of Falstaff. The king is a
good king, but it must be as it may, says Nym, who then adds a comment
conspicuous for its careful neutrality: Henry passes some humours and
careers (A2 Sc1 Sp43).
Para9The play’s second movement (A2 Sc2 to A2 Sc4) examines the immediate implications of these
different perspectives on Henry, the high stakes of committing to one view of the
king, and the consequences of failing to choose the right view. In A2 Sc2, Henry teases
from the traitors Cambridge, Scrope, and Grey a series of opinions about the way he,
the king, is viewed: Never was monarch better feared and loved (A2 Sc2 Sp9) by subjects
with hearts create of duty and of zeal (A2 Sc2 Sp10). The
traitors’ opinion is thick with dramatic irony, of course, and it is also
immediately undercut: first by the revelation that at least one subject is capable
of
railing drunkenly against the king, and then by Henry’s exposure of the traitors’
plot. Seeming is not being, Henry himself points out—the traitors, after all,
seemed dutiful, grave, learned, noble, and religious (A2 Sc2 Sp25)—and
the disjunction between seeming and being in these English monsters (A2 Sc2 Sp25) extends even to
the full-fraught man, and best (A2 Sc2 Sp25). The
traitors’ attempt to coin Henry into gold comes from their failure to view
his seeming correctly, and their pleas for the mercy that he had
earlier seemed to have in abundance find no purchase. In the following scene,
we hear of Falstaff’s death, another fatal consequence of taking the wrong view of
Henry, and in A2 Sc4 we see such an error of perspective in action, as the Constable of
France tries in vain to convince his dauphin that he is too much mistaken in
this king (A2 Sc4 Sp3). The constable is the only
Frenchman, and perhaps the only character in the play, with a clear view of Henry’s
seeming and his being, an awareness that his vanities forespent / Were but the
outside of the Roman Brutus, / Covering discretion with a coat of folly
(A2 Sc4 Sp3).
Para10The constable’s moment of awareness leads into the play’s third act and its third
major movement, as Henry’s invasion begins in earnest. The audience is imaginatively
pressed into service as part of his army—Follow, follow! / Grapple your minds
to sternage of this navy (A3 Sc0 Sp1)—and
forced into an unmediated perspective on Henry, even as his behaviour becomes most
difficult to interpret: is the unto the breach speech (A3 Sc1 Sp1) inspirational,
or is it shocking in its reduction of men to tigers, cannons, cliffs, and so much
building material with which to close the wall up (A3 Sc1 Sp1)? How are we to take
Henry’s brilliantly calculated good cop / bad cop routine before Harfleur,
alternately threatening its most vulnerable citizens and piously solicitous for their
safety? This third movement, meanwhile, extends the problem of perspective—of judging
between seeming and being—beyond Henry: Macmorris does not know Fluellen to be as
good a man as himself (A3 Sc2 Sp30); the French cannot justify
their preconceptions of the English with their experience of fighting them (A3 Sc5 Sp5);
and Gower warns Fluellen to be on guard against the Pistols of the world, lest he
be
marvellously mistook (A3 Sc6 Sp23).
Para11Just before the climactic battle of Agincourt, we briefly get a fourth movement, in
which Henry’s own perspective on kingship threatens to emerge. The king is but a man, he opines to his
soldiers, His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a
man (A4 Sc1 Sp47).
This sentiment, repeated in the play’s only soliloquy, a disquisition on those
ceremonies’ feebleness and lack of substance, seems to get at the heart of the
matter: Henry is aware that kingship involves skilful manipulation of the
parallactical views of his subjects. This revelation of self-awareness, though, is
heavily ironized by the fact that Henry is in disguise as but a man
when he makes these observations to his soldiers, and ironized all the more by the
context of the preceding Chorus speech, which describes a Henry visiting his host
openly, thawing cold fear (A4 Sc0 Sp1) with
his largess universal, like the sun (A4 Sc0 Sp1). We never see this version
of Henry, but even in the Chorus’s speech, his kingly qualities are compromised by
the suggestion that they are mere seeming: the speech draws attention to the
difference between his fearless royal face and his internal dread of
the upcoming battle (A4 Sc0 Sp1);
Henry overbears the attaint of the pallor that fear
should give him, not with bravery, but cheerful semblance (A4 Sc0 Sp1).
Para12During and especially after Agincourt, the play moves into its fifth and final
movement, in which the perspectives of the other characters on Henry, and the
perspective of the audience, are both replaced by the inevitable perspective of
history. Starting with Gower’s declaration that, whatever Henry’s battlefield
actions, ’tis a gallant king (A4 Sc7 Sp2), the end of the play hardly
relents in its presentation of Henry as the epic hero of the brightest moment in
England’s past. Whatever his motives for the invasion of France might have seemed
to
be, Henry’s reaction to the miraculous victory is one of modest piety. Arguably for
the first time in the play, the Henry we see on stage seems consistent with the
Chorus’s celebratory historical view in A5 Sc0, which rehearses the patriotic narrative
of English victory for those who have not read the story (A5 Sc0 Sp1); the
last perspective the play offers on Henry, that is, is the perspective of the
chronicle. Likewise, the play’s epilogue privileges the unified perspective of
history, reminding us again that what we have been watching is not reality, but a
story that the playwright has only roughly pursued
(Epilogue Sp1). But in their injunction to
the audience to accept this dramatic version, the Chorus’s final lines remind us of
the contingency of any one perspective. The meaning of the character of Henry depends
even at the last upon the audience: it is our thoughts that deck this king.
Theatre and Kingship
Para13Given its focus on audiences and its episodic nature, the lead actor of Henry V might be forgiven for struggling to find the character’s
arc. At first glance, Henry seems not to change from scene to scene, but rather to
start each situation from a similar place, distanced from his interlocutors by his
office, his singular perspective, and goals and motives that are often difficult to
fathom. Only once does the king take the audience into his confidence, and his sole
soliloquy—itself bemoaning the fact that he can never be one of us—feels, for all
its
beauty, like rhetoric, rather than revelation (Granville-Barker 292), as if trying to accomplish a
schoolboy’s exercise of proving that kings suffer more than their subjects do, with
their blissfully ignorant, carefree sleep.
Para14Nowhere, even in Henry’s repeated assertions that his soldiers are his brothers, does
Shakespeare allow his audience to partake in a semblance of Henry’s emotional life;
we share neither his elation nor his suffering, in the way we do Hamlet’s, Antony’s,
and even Brutus’s. One of the reasons that King Henry seems almost a different man
than the Prince Hal of the Henry IV plays is this refusal to
bring the audience (to use an anachronistic metaphor) behind the curtain. Famously,
in 1 Henry IV, Hal interrupts his madcap adventures with
Falstaff and his cohort to declare his motivation to the audience and absolve himself
of the accusations of immorality levelled at him by his rivals and his family alike.
He maintains the humour of […] idleness (1H4 1.2.151) only to deceive
expectations, but in doing so he’s playing a long con that he reveals only to the
audience:
Audiences familiar with the Henry IV plays might expect to
remain backstage, as it were, in Hal’s confidence even after the pretended
reformation does come, as confirmed by the bishops in Henry V’s first scene, but as this play continues, it becomes
clear that we are all as much victims of the con as anyone else. As King Henry, he
keeps the audience firmly in their seats, the stage’s fourth wall (to use another
anachronistic metaphor) firmly erected.
Para15Critics, especially in the mid-twentieth century, have traced a perceived falling-off
in quality in Henry V to this theatrical distancing and the
attendant flattening of the character (Granville-Barker; Van Doren
170–179). As Una Ellis-Fermor puts it, Henry is never off the
platform, a king, but not truly a man, who automatically delivers a
public speech where another man utters a cry of despair, of weariness or of
prayer (45). But
Henry’s lack of a private self is part of the play’s argument about the inherently
theatrical nature of politics, of warfare, and of all social life. Henry may not
speak to us as equals, but he does implicitly invite us to marvel at his theatrical
virtuosity; the play is a master class in dramatic artifice, a point explicitly made
before Harfleur when he equates warfare with theatre, instructing his soldiers in
the
art of actorly deception: they are to imitate the action of the tiger
(A3 Sc1 Sp1), to
disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage (A3 Sc1 Sp1), to transform themselves
from men into something else—beasts, machines, rocks—suited to the violence of the
task at hand.
Para16The apparent lack of an arc to Henry’s character, the disconnection from scene to
scene, is a result of the play’s subordination of overarching plot to the dramatic
moment. As Adrian Lester says of his performance in the role at the National Theatre
in 2003, Never before have I played a character where it is so essential to
play every scene for all its worth, without trying to make connexions with other
scenes (151). Henry’s
journey is a series of plays in miniature, performances with escalating stakes. In
council he performs the role of pious yet warlike king for the French ambassadors
and
for his own peers. Before Harfleur, with its governor as audience, he stakes the
lives of his men and the city’s inhabitants on an elaborate, sadistic bluff. His
performance on the eve of Agincourt convinces his dejected, almost rebellious
soldiers of their duty and the morality of their cause.
Para17Both the climax and the resolution of the play come in the form of performances.
Henry’s God of battles prayer (A4 Sc1 Sp79)
is less supplication than bargain, a declaration of the pious actions that make him
a
king deserving of divine intervention on his behalf: re-burying the body of Richard
II, building chantries, and funding constant masses for the murdered king’s soul.
This is one more performance, this time for an invisible audience of one, and a
performance that Henry explicitly admits is an attempt to divert attention away from
the taint of his father’s sins: Not today, O Lord, / Oh, not today—think not
upon the fault / My father made in compassing the crown (A4 Sc1 Sp79).
And the upshot, as with all of Henry’s performances, is presented as resounding
success: God favours Henry to the tune of ten thousand French casualties to the
English twenty-nine.
Para18The only audience that challenges Henry and interrupts his broken train of successful
performances is the princess, Catherine. When Henry is left alone with her, we may
be
as sure as he is that he will—or shall (see A5 Sc2 Sp42 n.)—get his way. But
Catherine repeatedly resists his theatrical manoeuvres and forces him into changing
tactics. His initial attempt to perform the role of wooer, in blank verse, is stymied
by her lack—pretended or not—of the English to understand him. He responds by
shifting into prose, and into the pose of bluff English yeoman, less capable of
wooing eloquently than of playing leapfrog. Catherine proves too shrewd, despite her
broken English, to fall for this tactic, and she neatly exposes Henry’s theatrical
shape-shifting for what it is: he does have false French (A5 Sc2 Sp40) enough to deceive (A5 Sc2 Sp39),
but she will not be pulled from the political realities of the moment, and her
objectification as an article of the treaty, into the genre of romantic comedy. When
she calls Henry’s bluff, his final response is to invite her backstage, so to speak:
if he succeeds in wooing Catherine at all, he does so not with a virtuoso
performance, but by making you and I into we (A5 Sc2 Sp54).
Catherine, having refused to become another gullible audience, becomes one of the
actors, one of the makers of manners that cannot be confined by a
country’s fashion (A5 Sc2 Sp54).
Haunting Us in our Familiar Paths: Henry V as a Haunted
Play
Para19In 1997, when the newly-reconstructed Globe Theatre in London opened its doors, its
management—enthusiastic about the prospect of christening the new Wooden
O with the Chorus’s opening words—chose Henry
V as its inaugural production. An audience anecdote relates that during
one performance, when Mark Rylance knelt as King Henry to deliver his prayer to the
God of battles, his desperate, anguished plea for God to pardon his
father’s sins in determining the outcome of the upcoming battle (A4 Sc1 Sp79), one of the
groundlings standing in the theatre’s courtyard broke the
silence of the moment by shouting, Oy Rylance! You’re Henry, not
Hamlet!5 For this
audience member, agonized soliloquies were the stuff of tragedy, the province of the
self-doubting, melancholy prince of Denmark, not of King Henry, crowd-pleasing
stirrer of patriotic fervour.
Para20That audience member’s discomfort in the face of King Henry’s one soliloquy in the
play, however, reflects a dark counterpoint to the play’s patriotic, celebratory
narrative. In 1599, the year in which he wrote Henry V,
Shakespeare’s turn to tragedy was underway as he wrote Julius
Caesar—with its protagonist haunted by the ghost of a father figure he has
killed—and he may already have been in preparation for the following year’s Hamlet, the tragedy of a man driven to distraction by the
incursion of his father’s ghost into his world. Even his two turn-of-the-century
comedies, As You Like It and Twelfth
Night, operate under the shadow of dead fathers, Rowland de Boys and
Sebastian of Messaline. Henry V, the last chapter of
Shakespeare’s great cycle of histories, is the story of a man and a world no less
haunted by the ghosts of the past.6
Para21As the characters repeatedly emphasize, the French campaign that culminates in
Henry’s miraculous victory at Agincourt is an echo of past glories, a later phase
of
English action in France during the dynastic struggles that would come to be known
as
the Hundred Years’ War. King Edward III, the great-grandsire from whom Henry claims
(A1 Sc2 Sp10),
had initiated open military conflict in the Hundred Years’ War by invading France
in
1346 with his son Edward the Black Prince, defeating the French decisively at the
Battle of Crécy. Or at least that is the neat, heroic story that Shakespeare’s
characters make of the messy struggle for dominance, turning a period of war actually
characterized by raids, backstabbing treaties, and petty alliances into a triumphant,
near-mythic memory of spectacular chivalric victory. The Battle of Crécy is mentioned
or alluded to four separate times in the play, by English and French alike. Crécy,
with the fathers that killed and died there, is the symbolic impulse for Henry’s war,
the battle that wouldn’t die.
Para22Understandably, when viewed from a French perspective, the image of the first phase
of the war as a spectre is most explicit. The French King is still troubled by
English ghosts: as he fearfully reminds his court, young Henry is descended from
that bloody strain, / That haunted us in our familiar paths / […] When Crécy battle fatally was struck (A2 Sc4 Sp5).
It is not only the French, however, who feel the burden of the past as a haunting:
Edward III haunts the English king as much as the French. King Edward, as Canterbury
relates (closely following Holinshed’s chronicle), watched happily from a hill as
his
son Edward the Black Prince defeated the whole power of France (A1 Sc2 Sp10) seemingly single-handedly. It
is specifically this image of King Edward’s fatherly approval that the bishops call
to mind to press Henry to war, and they do so explicitly in the language of conjuring
the dead. Go […] to your great-grandsire’s tomb,
Canterbury advises; Invoke his warlike spirit (A1 Sc2 Sp10).
Ely calls upon Henry to awake
remembrance of these valiant dead (A1 Sc2 Sp11), and
Henry will enthusiastically undertake this act of memorial conjuration in his famous
rallying speech before Harfleur. He is a king burdened by the question of his own
father’s legitimacy to rule, and a son deeply concerned, as the Henry IV plays demonstrate, with fatherly approval, and his speech calls
the paternity of his soldiers into question, tying their own legitimacy to the matter
of how well they emulate their own forefathers, the near-mythical soldiers at
Crécy:
By the end of the play, the repeated allusions have made Crécy a metonym for all
English victory, one that even threatens to eclipse Henry’s achievement at Agincourt.
Immediately after Henry gives his battle a name, and thus its own place in the
chronicle, Fluellen conjures a reminder of the earlier battle:
King Henry
Then call we this the field of Agincourt,
Fought on the day of Crispin Crispianus.
Fluellen
Your grandfather of famous memory, an’t please your majesty, and your great
uncle Edward the Plack Prince of Wales, as I have read in the chronicles,
fought a most prave pattle here in France.
Haunting fathers, in Shakespeare’s play, come to impel history itself.
Para23In the broadest understanding of Tudor historiography, the deposition and murder of
Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, was the primal sin that could only
be expiated by the Wars of the Roses. If Shakespeare had concentrated in his first
tetralogy on that expiation, and on the redeeming power of the Tudor dynasty as
represented by Richard III’s defeat by Henry Tudor at Bosworth field, the second
tetralogy focuses on the aftermath of the sin itself, which haunts both Henrys’
reigns and is redeemed only contingently and temporarily—as the epilogue of Henry V admits—by the glory of the younger. Through the Henry IV plays, Shakespeare never lets his audience forget the
ghost of Richard II; the guilt of his death shapes the character of Henry IV and
impels the plots against him. The ghost is even imagined to join his power to the
rebels that trouble Henry IV’s reign: in 2 Henry IV, the
Archbishop’s uprising is enlarged […] with the blood / Of fair King Richard, scraped from
Pomfret stones (Connor, The Second Part of Henry the
Fourth 1.1.173.D16–D17).
King Henry IV’s last advice to his heir is to avoid the dissension that troubled his
own reign by using war to distract his subjects’ attention from the usurpation of
the throne:
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels, that action hence borne out
As circumspect as this royal advice is, for Shakespeare’s audience there could be
no doubt that the giddy minds the king speaks of were haunted by their allegiance to the king he had usurped.
Para24With his royal father’s advice in mind, Henry’s invasion of France, which makes up
almost the entire action of Henry V, may be seen as a
successful attempt to avoid Richard’s ghost. But although it is mentioned only once
in Henry V, the deposition of Richard sends ripples through
the play, an undercurrent that loses no strength for being repressed. When Henry’s
lords and advisors discuss his claim to the throne of France, Charlemagne gets more
attention than Henry’s own father, whose usurpation of the throne is glossed over:
Richard II and Henry IV are as conspicuous by their absence in the discussion as the
prior two royal generations, Edward III and the Black Prince, are by their ubiquity.
The bishops of Canterbury and Ely seem unable to refer to the civil wars that plagued
Henry IV’s reign in anything but oblique terms, but they nevertheless remind us in
the very first lines of the play of the scambling and unquiet time (A1 Sc1 Sp1) of
the last king’s reign (A1 Sc1 Sp1).
Para25The most explicit expression of this haunting comes in Henry’s prayer on the eve of
Agincourt. Henry thinks of himself as complicit in, and his reign as dependent on,
the fault / his father made in
compassing the crown (A4 Sc1 Sp79), and he gives us here the play’s only glimpse of his early reign, in which he
seems to have been primarily concerned with laying Richard’s ghost to rest: he has
re-buried the murdered king’s body in Westminster and devoted considerable treasure
to praying Richard’s soul out of purgatory. The climactic battle is staked on the
wager that God will weigh these attempts favourably against the sin of Richard’s
murder, and the play suggests that the gamble is successful, though the epilogue
reminds us that the ghost of Richard would continue to haunt England after Henry’s
glorious but all-too-brief reign.
Para26The epilogue to Henry V also reminds us that Shakespeare had
already dramatized that haunting, in the first tetralogy’s depiction of the Wars of
the Roses and the disastrous reign of Richard III. Just as Henry and his
contemporaries struggle and ultimately fail to put the historical ghosts of past
glories and murdered kings to rest, Shakespeare is also in competition with the
shades of their past, haunted by ghosts of his own making.7 These ghosts suggest their presence in
various ways, both subtle and obvious. The traitor Cambridge hints obliquely that
his
treason was motivated not primarily by gold, Although I did admit it as a
motive / The sooner to effect what I intended (A2 Sc2 Sp28).
What he intended was to supplant Henry as king in favour of his own progeny, and as
Shakespeare’s audience would have known primarily from his earlier history cycle,
that progeny was the house of York, one side in the civil wars that cycle dramatized.
Shakespeare’s unhistorical account of Suffolk and York dying in each other’s arms
serves as another reminder of the coming civil wars, and Shakespeare’s previous
dramatization of them: this York’s son would kill this Suffolk’s brother in those
wars (see A4 Sc6 Sp4
n.). Most ghostly of all is the appearance of Talbot as one of the
names that Henry imagines becoming household words after the battle of Agincourt
(A4 Sc3 Sp10). No Talbot fought at
Agincourt, and the fact that the name appears only in F suggests that it may appear
in error. As Shakespeare’s audience were well aware, however, a father and son of
that name are the heroes of the French wars Shakespeare had depicted in 1 Henry VI; whether the slip was intentional or unconscious, the
mention of Talbot is the result of the memory of the earlier play intruding into the
representation of Agincourt (see A4 Sc3 Sp10 n.).
Para27The most insistent ghost haunting Shakespeare’s play is that of Sir John Falstaff,
Shakespeare’s most enduring comic figure, who easily took top billing in the Henry IV plays: Falstaff’s is the largest role in each, and in
2 Henry IV he has more lines and stage time than the king
and Prince Hal combined. Although his role as a sort of chaotic surrogate father to
Hal declines as the plays go on—the two share almost no stage time in the second
part, which ends with the newly-crowned Henry V’s outright rejection of the fat
knight and his banishment from the royal presence—the audience would surely have
expected his continued existence as a comic foil to the high rhetoric and
international scope of the history plays. At some point when Henry
V was in the planning stages, Shakespeare seems to have planned to
continue the story with Sir John (in it), as the epilogue to the
1598 2 Henry IV, spoken by the actor playing Falstaff,
promises (2H4 Epilogue 21). The first audiences of
Henry V could well be forgiven for any disappointment
they may have felt for a play with a gaping Falstaff-shaped hole in it.
Para28Some evidence suggests that the plan to include Falstaff as a character in Henry V may have survived beyond the 2 Henry
IV epilogue. John Dover Wilson argues that in some earlier version,
Falstaff once larded the sodden field of Agincourt but had been cut
from the play, with much of his comic business transferred to Pistol (Henry V 115). Wilson
points to two textual ghosts of Falstaff as evidence for this hypothesis. The act
two
chorus promises to shift the scene first to Southampton and then to France, but A2 Sc1
and A2 Sc3 take place in London instead. Following George Ian Duthie, Wilson
explained that this odd disjunction, which continues to puzzle editors, resulted from
Falstaff’s death having been inserted as an afterthought, and the Chorus’s lines
remaining unchanged (Henry V 113–115). Additionally, in A5 Sc1 Pistol mentions the death
of my Doll (A5 Sc1 Sp27), which many editors emend to
Nell, the name of Pistol’s wife. Wilson sees the Folio’s
reading as an oversight, explaining that when Pistol’s cowardly soliloquy was
delivered by Falstaff, the line referred to Doll Tearsheet, whom Pistol clearly
despises (see A2 Sc1 Sp23),
but who associated enough with Falstaff to be called thy Dol (F1 2H42G8r qtd. in Dover Wilson, Henry V
115).
Para29Whether we accept Wilson’s hypothesis that Falstaff was cut from the play at a
late stage, his absence is undeniably felt in both surviving versions of the play.
Though unnamed in the first act, Falstaff is the chief of the companies
unlettered, rude, and shallow to which the bishops complain that the
youthful Henry was drawn (A1 Sc1 Sp11), and since his
influence lies behind the dauphin’s mocking gift of tennis balls, he is an indirect
cause of the war with France. Act two puts the business of courts and royal chambers
aside for two scenes preparing for and reacting to Falstaff’s death, scenes that are
no less tragic for their low comic contexts or the Hostess’s malapropisms. Pistol,
Nym, and Bardolph are not only Falstaff’s former companions, but also echoes of his
swaggering and his equivocating cowardice, as are the bickering captains who, after
all, do no more charging the breach in Harfleur’s wall than the Eastcheapers do. Even
during the battle of Agincourt, Gower and Fluellen ensure that the fat knight
with the great belly-doublet (A4 Sc7 Sp9)
is seldom out of thought. Falstaff may not lard the field of Agincourt, but his ghost
certainly stalks it.
Para30So heavily does the fat knight’s ghost loom in the play without him that many
standalone productions have found it necessary to include him even though Shakespeare
did not. Both Laurence Olivier’s film of 1944 and Kenneth Branagh’s of 1989 include
flashback sequences featuring lines from the Henry IV plays and
casting George Robey and Robbie Coltrane as their respective
Falstaffs (Olivier;
Branagh);
Olivier’s film additionally dramatizes an original Globe audience vociferously
complaining about Sir John’s absence. Nicholas Hytner’s 2003 National Theatre
production featured Adrian Lester’s Henry watching video of his younger self
consorting with a Falstaff played by Desmond Barrit, who had memorably played the
role at the Royal Shakespeare Company three years earlier.
Para31What happened to Falstaff? Why did Shakespeare not continue the story with Sir John
in it, as promised? The historiographical tradition of Henry throwing off his
youthful companions was as old as his reign itself, and through repetition it, like
the likely apocryphal tennis ball anecdote, had become central to Henry’s myth, but
his rejection would not have precluded Falstaff joining the army and following the
king at a distance as Bardolph and Pistol do. Falstaff’s absence may have something
to do with the departure of the actor who played him from Shakespeare’s playing
company. If, as John Dover Wilson and (more extensively) David Wiles have convincingly
argued, the character was created by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s principal comic
actor Will Kemp, then Kemp’s parting ways with the company sometime in 1599 might
have occasioned a Falstaff-less rewrite of the play.8 On the other hand, there is no reason
to suppose that Shakespeare was hampered by personnel difficulties in making the
decision to kill Sir John. We have no evidence for why or precisely when Kemp left
the company; he could as easily have parted ways with them as a result
of Shakespeare having killed off one of Kemp’s most popular characters (Wiles
117).9
Para32Practicalities of casting considerations aside, the critical tradition, for a century
and a half, found Shakespeare’s discarding of Falstaff to have been the single most
important aesthetic decision in the play’s composition. For many readers, Falstaff
has been seen to haunt Shakespeare as much, if not more, than he haunted Henry. A.
C.
Bradley wrote in 1902 that Shakespeare intended us to approve of Henry’s decision
to
discard Falstaff, but that by the time he wrote Henry V, the
character of Sir John, and his audience’s sympathies, had gotten beyond the author’s
control: We wish Henry a glorious reign […] but our
hearts go with Falstaf […] to Arthur’s bosom or wheresomever
he is (260). In this assessment, Bradley echoes both the
practical Samuel Johnson—who remarked in his edition of 1765 that Shakespeare had
to
kill Falstaff because his imagination could contrive no train of adventures
suitable to his character (6:397)—and the sentimental Maurice Morgann, whose long
1777 essay on Falstaff, in attempting to refute the opinion that Falstaff is a
coward, established the tradition of seeking an emotional connection between Falstaff
and the reader or audience (An essay on the dramatic character of Sir John Falstaff). Morgann’s treatment of Falstaff as
if he were a real person only imperfectly represented by Shakespeare was to set a
precedent for a brand of Shakespeare criticism—predominant through the nineteenth
century and well into the twentieth—that focused on making ethical judgements and
drawing morals from the characters, rather than on the historical contexts or
formal aspects of the plays. So, for example, H. N. Hudson, in 1872, sees
Falstaff’s death as a consequence of Falstaff’s psyche as much as a dramatic
decision on Shakespeare’s part (Shakespeare
2:111–112).
Para33Arguments such as Bradley’s and Johnson’s notwithstanding, surely when taken in the
context of the play’s composition in 1599, the absence of Falstaff must be taken as
an intentional authorial decision. As James Shapiro has eloquently argued, the year
1599 was a turning point in Shakespeare’s career, a year whose plays all seem to
prefigure Hamlet in their emphasis on the ghostly influence
of dead father figures. At a time when he was turning from the histories and the
comedies that had characterized his dramatic output for the past decade and toward
a
string of great tragedies and darker, more problematic comedies, the playwright was
preoccupied with his own artistic past. For Shakespeare, Henry
V represents an attempt to lay the ghost of the history play, along with
the ghost of Falstaff, to rest.
Remembering with Advantages: History and Historical Drama
Para34The theme of haunting in Henry V may be seen as an example of
a larger issue in the play, that of memory and its relationship to the telling of
history. Haunting is, after all, merely an aggressive, metaphysical intrusion of
memory into the mental worlds of the living. The ghosts of the dead cry
remember me, and their descendants, among them historians and
playwrights, comply. And Henry V seems particularly concerned
with the workings of memory. As Gary Taylor has noted, Shakespeare uses the word
memorable only four times in his surviving work, all of them in
this play (Henry
V 149), which contains eighteen other explicit verbal references
to memory, more than any other play except Hamlet.10 The climactic passage with this regard is Henry’s
Saint Crispin’s Day rallying speech (A4 Sc3 Sp10) before Agincourt, where he
imagines a future England—the present of the play’s performance—in which the battle
will have become history, the story that the good man shall teach his son not only in 1599, but
in a hyperbolic assertion of permanence, to the ending of the world
(A4 Sc3 Sp10).
In Henry’s fantasy, he and his men will have become secular saints, displacing
Crispin and Crispian as objects of a communal celebration for which their bodies will
become relics, as the veteran strips
his sleeve and shows his scars
(A4 Sc3 Sp10). The performance of the play
itself becomes the fulfilment of Henry’s prophecy. Perhaps
especially in 1599, when composing Henry V, Shakespeare
was keenly interested in highlighting the role of drama in the persistence of
cultural memory. A more blatantly metatheatrical version of the trope of a
character prophesying his own dramatic representation appears in the same year’s
Julius Caesar, where he winkingly has the actors
playing Caesar’s assassins muse, just after the murder, on their own future
reenactment:
Para35This trope is not merely an assertion of patriotic military solidarity, however.
Holding historical collective memory up to scrutiny is the chief method by which
Shakespeare produces the play’s characteristic ambiguities, and Henry’s imagined
veteran, he that shall see this day
and live old age (A4 Sc3 Sp10) is a
metonym for the disjunction between the past and the memory of it. The assertion not
only of the permanence of the memory of Agincourt but of its augmentation—all
shall be forgot, / But he’ll remember, with advantages, / The feats he did that
day (A4 Sc3 Sp10)—is
often played for gentle humour, an acknowledgement of the very human tendency to
embellish the memory of our deeds. But the play also shows that such embellishment
can be transgressive as well as harmlessly celebratory: Gower bemoans the existence
of cowards like Pistol, who memorize the facts of a battle only to lend authenticity
to their pretended valour, as one of the slanders of the age (A3 Sc6 Sp23), and Pistol himself evokes
Henry’s imagined veteran when he promises to show off the cudgelled
scars (A5 Sc1 Sp27) he received from Fluellen, and swear he got them in
the Gallia wars (A5 Sc1 Sp27).
This theme of reshaping the memory of war persists beyond the exaggerations of
veterans real and imagined; the play argues that remembering with advantages, for
good or ill, is the very definition of history. Shakespeare repeatedly highlights
the
workings of historiography, and demonstrates that history does not consist in the
facts as they happened, but in the enacting of a directed, biased, collective memory.
History, that is, is the history play.
Para36Shakespeare himself remembers with advantages, of course, departing from his own
understanding of historical fact when it suits him to do so. But he does not seek
to
hide the fact that history is a construct, and one function of the Chorus’s repeated
emphasis on the inadequacy of dramatic representation is to highlight the artifice
involved in historical memory: the epilogue’s wry self-portrait of Shakespeare as
the
play’s bending author (Epilogue Sp1) recalls Henry’s disingenuous
injunction to Canterbury, forbidding him to fashion, wrest, or bow his
reading of German history and the Salic Law (A1 Sc2 Sp7), and it suggests an intention
that gives the lie to the equally disingenuous apology that Shakespeare has been
forced by the strictures of theatre to reduce the story to episodes, mangling
by starts the full course of their glory (Epilogue Sp1). Shakespeare, like the
French, like Canterbury, like Henry himself, is unafraid to gloss history unjustly
for his purposes.11
Para37Certain conservative critics, particularly in the early twentieth century, sought
to
defend Shakespeare’s bending and mangling from accusations of dishonesty. Thus John
Marriott in 1918 argued that though Shakspeare does subordinate history to
drama; though he compresses and fore-shortens; though he is careless as to
details, he never falsifies the essential verities; he never misleads
(163). And Charles Montague
distinguished between truths and truths, between facts and facts, arguing that what
Shakespeare presents is the moral fact of an Agincourt, which is
perceptible only if we put aside historical fact; Shakespeare depicts
the truth of Agincourt by subordinating the historical events
themselves to the essential nature of the event (171): So, through particular untruth, a
universal truth is achieved (174). E. M. W. Tillyard, one of the
mid-century’s most influential critics of Shakespeare’s history plays, saw
Shakespeare as participating in the propagation of the so-called Tudor myth, a
universally held and still comprehensible scheme of history: a scheme
fundamentally religious, by which events evolve under a law of justice and under
the ruling of God’s Providence, and of which Elizabeth’s England was the
acknowledged outcome (320–321).12 This teleological and historically reductive
reading of Shakespeare’s use of history was dismissed by later critics, particularly
the new historicists and cultural materialists of the 1980s, but even Tillyard’s
detractors agree that Henry V does seem to be involved in
the ideologically inflected production of history. What early critics tended to miss
is the extent to which Shakespeare is aware of the artifice of historiography.
Para38Henry V repeatedly dramatizes the process of making history.
The Chorus speeches that begin every act are notable for their disjunction from what
a modern newscaster would call facts on the ground. Each of the
Chorus’s speeches is a celebratory act of communal memory in which he insistently,
imperatively implicates the play’s audience as co-creators: Think, when we
talk of horses, that you see them (Prologue Sp1); ’tis your thoughts that
now must deck our kings (Prologue Sp1); there in Southampton must you sit (A2 Sc0 Sp1); Work, work your thoughts (A3 Sc0 Sp1); Now entertain
conjecture of a time (A4 Sc0 Sp1); now behold / In the
quick forge and working-house of thought (A5 Sc0 Sp1).
But the Chorus’s portrait of Henry’s war is radically undercut by the scenes that
follow these communal celebrations. In act one, the promise of the warlike
Harry (Prologue Sp1) assuming the port of Mars (Prologue Sp1) gives way to an inglorious
scene of scheming bishops. The second
Chorus promises that all the youth of England are on fire (A2 Sc0 Sp1), but precedes an act filled
with bickering old men going to war only reluctantly and for ignoble motives (not
to
mention three traitors and a dying Falstaff). Act three’s Chorus promises early
triumph for the English—down goes all before them (A3 Sc0 Sp1), but Shakespeare’s siege of
Harfleur is a battle of desperate rhetoric, internecine squabbles, cowardly
foot-soldiers, and sadistic threatening on the part of the king. In act four, the
Chorus’s beautiful portrait of the eve of Agincourt promises a little touch of
Harry in the night, but the king’s surreptitious visits to his soldiers,
which look like nothing so much as panoptic surveillance, result in quarrels with
Pistol and Williams, a far cry from the beneficent inspiration that the Chorus
describes (A4 Sc0 Sp1).
The fifth act Chorus, describing Henry’s triumphal entry into London and his return
to France to make peace is so uncomfortably at odds with the scene that follows
it—the Welsh-English squabbling that results in beating and forced leek-consumption
for Pistol—that many eighteenth-century editors simply relocated the leek scene
before the Chorus. In every case, the audience is encouraged, even ordered to
participate in the Chorus’s vision, only to be confronted with the fact that that
vision, and by implication the history play itself, is an overt act of remembering
with advantages.
Para39The most radical example of Shakespeare’s scrutiny of the artifice of history comes
in act four, where he confronts us with the rewriting of events even as they unfold.
Henry’s infamous order to kill the French prisoners occurs in A4 Sc6, in the heat of
battle, and his reasons are clear: The French have reinforced their scattered
men in order to make another
attack (A4 Sc6 Sp5), and in such a critical moment, guarding prisoners becomes a wasteful use of
manpower. In the scene immediately following, Gower declares that the killing of the
prisoners was in retaliation for the cowardly French attack on the boys guarding the
luggage train, for which Henry is to be praised: wherefore the king most
worthily hath caused every soldier to cut his prisoner’s throat. Oh, ’tis a
gallant king (A4 Sc7 Sp2).
At a remove of only eleven lines in the Folio text, Gower’s reinterpretation must
appear to the audience to be flatly incorrect, but the play never contradicts his
error, and we are confronted with a false historiography that the characters of the
play tacitly endorse.13
The morality of Henry’s order has been much discussed,14 but what is
clear is that Shakespeare alters his chronicle source in Holinshed (see A4 Sc6 Sp5
n.) in order to show that the process of rewriting history has already begun. As the
scene continues, so does its exposure of flawed historiography, as Fluellen’s
mock-Plutarchan comparison of Henry to Alexander the Great—based on each of them
being born near a river containing salmons (A4 Sc7 Sp7)—threatens
to undermine the play’s earlier use of Alexander as a serious typological precursor
to Henry (A1 Sc1 Sp11, A3 Sc1 Sp1;
see Spencer 16). Finally, lest we miss the
point, Shakespeare links this battlefield historiography, the immediate act of
remembering with advantages, to his own dramatic fiction. The discussion of Henry’s
gallantry and his comparison to Alexander leads Fluellen to the fat knight who may
or
may not have been killed by Henry’s dismissal; and in a reminder that strategic
remembrance also requires strategic forgetting, Fluellen admits, I have forgot
his name (A4 Sc7 Sp9).
Para40Henry himself remembers with advantages, and Shakespeare is concerned to
highlight his doing so. An examination of Shakespeare’s strategic alterations of his
chronicle source in the play’s first two scenes will demonstrate this. Canterbury’s
speech in A1 Sc2 is nearly a direct, though versified, quotation of Holinshed’s Chronicles, retaining even Holinshed’s factual errors (see A1 Sc2 Sp8 n.). This might lead readers to
the misapprehension that Shakespeare narrowly followed his source for this scene and
adopted its arguments and biases. In fact, the playwright subtly alters the course
of
events presented in Holinshed in order to present a more savvy, manipulative picture
of Henry as the agent behind the war. In Holinshed, Canterbury is the clear
instigator, and Henry’s voice in the build-up to war is almost entirely absent. In
the chronicle, the
process starts, as it seems to do in Shakespeare’s play, with the Commons’ proposal
to reapportion church property, and in Holinshed the bishops’ ploy to urge war as
a
distraction is much more explicitly stated than in Shakespeare:
to find remedie against it, they determined to assaie all ways to put by and
overthrow this bill: wherein they thought best to trie if they might mooue the
kings mood with some sharpe inuention, that he should not regard the importunate
petitions of the commons.
(Holinshed, 1587 3:545)
The archbishop then delivers his speech regarding the Salic Law to the Privy Council,
and the lords whip the assembly into a frenzied mood, all without the participation
of the king, whom Holinshed presents more as object than agent:
the duke of Excester used such earnest and pithie persuasions, to induce the
king and the whole assemblie of the parlement to credit his words, that
immediatelie after he had made an end, all the companie began to crie; Warre,
warre; France, France.
(Holinshed, 1587 3:546)
And in a passage whose import Shakespeare omits, Holinshed reminds his readers of
the
clerical motive and the priests’ successful gambit: Hereby the bill for
dissoluing of religious houses was cleerlie set aside, and nothing thought on but
onelie the recovering of France, according as the archbishop had mooued
(546). Only after this point of no return does Holinshed’s Henry send ambassadors to
demand the surrender of the French crown and certain dukedoms (A1 Sc1 Sp17).
Para41Shakespeare’s reordering of events makes clear that Henry is the agent behind the
war, and that the bill / urged by the commons (A1 Sc1 Sp14), despite its appearance in the
first scene, is merely a tool for the king’s use. In the play’s second scene, the
archbishop delivers his Salic Law speech, but he does so at Henry’s instigation and,
as Canterbury anticipates, with good
acceptance of his majesty (A1 Sc1 Sp17; see A1 Sc2 Sp27 n.); and unlike in the
chronicle, it is Henry himself who makes the decisive move to war: Now are we
well resolved (A1 Sc2 Sp22. The French ambassador makes
clear that Henry’s demands to France have already taken place—that is, before the
archbishop’s justification of them—and that the purpose of the embassy is to present
the dauphin’s response (A1 Sc2 Sp25).
In Henry’s hands, this response, the mocking gift of tennis balls, becomes the
immediate public impetus for war, and the previous events—the prior English
diplomatic aggression and even the speech on Salic Law that we have just heard—are
swept under the carpet; the king himself, not the bishops, uses rhetoric as a
distraction from less attractive realities.15 The overall
effect of Shakespeare’s alterations of his chronicle source is to change Holinshed’s
picture of a pious king acceding to the influence of his counsellors into a portrait
of a shrewd, unilateral manipulator of piety and polity alike, capable of rewriting
his own history even as it unfolds. In Henry V, the last
play of Shakespeare’s eight-play cycle seems to hold historiography itself up to
scrutiny—particularly the type of communal historiography performed on battlefields,
at public memorials, in political discourse, and on stages—even as he himself
participates in it.
Still a Giddy Neighbour: Englishness and the Foreign
Para42The Old Vic theatre in south London opened its doors in 1951, after a long postwar
closure, with Glen Byam Shaw’s production of Henry V. In his
mostly negative review, Evening Standard critic Milton
Shulman’s most interesting remark concerned the audience’s sensitivity to modern
topicality (2 Feb.
1951). Shulman noted
that the line these English are shrewdly out of beef (A3 Sc7 Sp72),
which had drawn bitter spirit-of-the-blitz laughter throughout the years of meat
rationing, continued to please, but he was disappointed that only he found the
opportunity for a knowing smile in the French lords’ characterization of the English
as Foolish curs, that run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear
(A3 Sc7 Sp70).
By 1951, the enemy had changed, but the Shakespearean inside jokes were expected to
remain current.
Para43That a newspaper critic should be surprised and aggrieved at his fellow theatregoers’
inability to find a cold war context for a sixteenth-century bear-baiting joke
illustrates the curious place that Henry V occupies in the
English historical imagination. Shakespeare’s play has somehow made a brief,
mercenary, politically-motivated campaign in 1415 France into a primary model for
the
fashioning of English identity. As suggested by the lines Shulman’s review
emphasizes, though, despite its stirring rhetorical linkage of Harry, England, and
Saint George, the play produces its idea of Englishness less through the figure of
the titular king than through representations of England in discursive tension with
the foreign. In Henry V, any attempt, however subtle, to
define or celebrate the English character is undercut by the English doing the
celebrating or by the foreigners doing the defining; the enemy, so to speak, has
always already digged countermines. The play does not so much portray English
identity as delimit it by means of rhetorics of difference placed in the
mouths of English and foreign characters alike. Directors who see the play as an
assertion of national identity ignore Shakespeare’s conditional, oppositional,
conflicted view of Englishness at their peril.
Para44Because of its position as the central fulcrum of the eight contiguous English
history plays, Henry V cannot really extricate its central
character—arguably the one successful monarch in the lot—from the dominant arc of
rebellion and civil wars that tie the tetralogies together. Bookended by the clerics’
reminder of the scambling and unquiet time (A1 Sc1 Sp1) of Henry IV’s reign and the
epilogue’s promise that England will bleed again all too soon (Epilogue Sp1), the triumph of Henry V
is only a brief respite from the primal curse afflicting the heirs of Edward III.
Para45Although Henry V contains the words England
and
English
more than any other Shakespearean drama, any elegiac celebrations of the British
island and its glories, in the vein of John of Gaunt’s famous speech in Richard II (R2 2.1.31–68)
are conspicuously absent from this play; such moments are instead reserved for
fair France (A5 Sc2 Sp77), the world’s best garden (Epilogue Sp1),
with her almost kingly dukedoms (A1 Sc2 Sp22).16 The play’s picture of the
English, even in the comparative unity of Henry V’s reign, is characterized not by
concord, but by fracture. We open with a reminder from Canterbury that the government
is factious: commons ranged against clergy and lords, with the crown’s leanings
unsure. The stylized grouping of the four captains—English, Welsh, Scots, and
Irish—sometimes read as a celebration of unity under Henry’s benevolent imperial
rule, is a study in the barely controlled internecine animosity that permeates
Shakespeare’s picture of the Agincourt campaign. Be friends, you English
fools, cries Bates, we have French quarrels enough (A4 Sc1 Sp74),
but his plea goes unheard by anyone, even the king.
Para46At those spots in the play where Englishness is most explicitly defined by English
voices, it is so defined in the negative, or in the subjunctive mood.17 Henry’s most famous speech builds to a
jingoistic battle cry, but it repeatedly betrays the king’s suspicion that his men
are not quite English enough (whatever that may mean). The English may be noble (or
at least, as in the Folio’s spelling, Noblish), and their ancestry may
be war-proof (F1 H5H5r),
but Henry calls that ancestry in question as soon as he asserts its quality:
Dishonour not your Mothers; now attest / That those whom you called fathers
did beget you (A3 Sc1 Sp1).
His praise of the good yeomen, / Whose limbs were made in England
(A3 Sc1 Sp1)
is likewise immediately undercut by his insistence that they prove such nativity to
be an advantage: show us here / The mettle of your pasture. Let us swear /
That you are worth your breeding (A3 Sc1 Sp1).
Henry may claim to doubt it
not (A3 Sc1 Sp1), but
the call to prove the quality of his men’s English upbringing suggests that doubt
persists.
Para47Even the Chorus, whose ostensible role is to beat the play’s most patriotic drum
taps, employs the conditional in his praise of England:
This is, of course, our introduction to the traitors, and so such a tone of lament
is
understandable, but it furthers the ambivalent picture of England in the play,
fatally subverting the speech’s opening claim that all the youth of England
are on fire (A2 Sc0 Sp1) even more
than does the juxtaposition of that claim with Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym, the least
young, ardent, and hearty (and therefore least English?) of the troops.
Para48The traitor scene inserts the three unkind, unnatural children—Cambridge, Scrope,
and
Grey—troublingly into the preparation for war. For all the claims of providential
resolution to the treason crisis that end the scene, it proposes no alternative to
the traitors’ unkindness (i.e., their alien, foreign behaviour), no
sense of true Englishness, no sense of what a kind and natural child would look like.
The king’s accusation exposes them as inhuman: See you, my princes and my
noble peers, / These English monsters (A2 Sc2 Sp25),
but the phrase is intriguingly ambivalent. Are the traitors monsters in their failure
to behave like Englishmen? Or is their Englishness part of their monstrousness? The
etymology of monster—from the Latin monstrare, to show—suggests ambiguous wordplay, as if treason is a
demonstration of Englishness.18 And
the upshot of treason is not to clarify by contrast the nature of true Englishmen,
but rather to call virtue itself into question: And thus thy fall hath left a
kind of blot / To make the full-fraught man, and best, indued / With some
suspicion (A2 Sc2 Sp25).19 Treason taints every Englishman, just as the
first fall of man (A2 Sc2 Sp25) taints every human. What, then, is
natural Englishness, and who, if anyone, has a claim to it?
The scene has no answer to that question.
Para49The chief means of portraying national identity in Henry V,
however, is not this negative and conditional definition of English nature, but the
silhouette of Englishness that emerges from comparative discourse with the foreign.
A
positive picture of England can only be limned, apparently, with reference to the
non-English. Henry repeatedly repays the French in the coin of battlefield taunting;
the English may be unclear on the mettle of their pasture, but at least they know
they are not the French. Their comparative paucity of heraldic feathers is proof of
their courage: Good argument […] they will not fly (A4 Sc3 Sp20). Henry figures the English
constitution quantitatively, using his soldiers’ French counterparts as a unit of
measure: when they were in health, I tell thee, herald, / I thought upon one
pair of English legs / Did march three Frenchmen (A3 Sc6 Sp38),
and even as he admits the blame for his English boastfulness, he attributes it to
a
Gallic infection; in France, even the climate is arrogant: this your air of
France / Hath blown that vice in me (A3 Sc6 Sp38).
In his wooing of Catherine, one of the rare moments when Henry nearly states outright
a positive English characteristic, he again requires a foreign figure—the outspoken
and decidedly resistant figure of Catherine herself—to do so. The princess declares
her distrust of the tongues of men, full as they are of deceits, and Henry replies
with an unexpected bit of praise: The princess is the better
Englishwoman (A5 Sc2 Sp26). In an act of rhetorical
colonization, Henry appropriates her suspicious French response and redefines it as
English virtue.
Para50The French, in their court and in their tents before Agincourt, give voice to
Shakespeare’s idea of foreign stereotypes of the English: they are barbarians,
bastard Normans (A3 Sc5 Sp4); they endure their
impossible weather by drinking barley broth (A3 Sc5 Sp5), A drench for
sur-reined jades (A3 Sc5 Sp5); they sympathize in nature
with the mastiffs they breed (A3 Sc7 Sp71),
subsist on great meals of beef (A3 Sc7 Sp71), and lack
intellectual armour (A3 Sc7 Sp68).
These scenes are rich in dramatic irony, of course, but it is remarkable that the
fullest, most evocative images of Englishmen in the play come from their enemies.
Apparently the English even have a reputation in hell for being easily tempted,
thanks to the traitor Scrope:
Para51It is not only the French who contribute to the play’s silhouette portrait of
Englishness. The character of good Captain James (A3 Sc2 Sp20)
may have been intended as a positive (if anachronistic) portrait of a Scotsman
appropriate to England’s late sixteenth-century alliance with the captain’s royal
namesake King James VI, but the play’s general view of the Scot—Who hath been
still a giddy neighbour to us (A1 Sc2 Sp17)—derives from the historical
animosity between the nations, bred by the auld alliance between
Scotland and France and found in Shakespeare’s chronicle sources (see A1 Sc2 Sp17
n.). When Henry and his counsellors wish to hear England’s glory exampled by
herself (A1 Sc2 Sp18), the Scots become the
villainous vermin in a historiographical animal fable: if England invades France,
the
expectation is that Scotland will attack, Playing the mouse in absence of the
cat, / To ’tame and havoc more than she can eat (A1 Sc2 Sp19).
These Scottish coursing snatchers (A1 Sc2 Sp17), in effect, produce the
image of the eagle England (A1 Sc2 Sp19) by inhabiting the historical
role of the weasel Scot (A1 Sc2 Sp19).
Para52The Welsh presence in the play cannot reflect the same xenophobia, of course, since
its central figure and hero is Welsh, you know (A4 Sc7 Sp26). For the same reason,
Captain Fluellen’s role never quite becomes the comedic butt that his obsession with
the Roman disciplines, his excessively precise humour, and his occasional malapropisms
promise. The conclusion of his role does, however, illustrate the play’s pattern of
employing the foreign to define English national identity, and it does so in the
ambiguously celebratory fashion characteristic of that pattern. The most English
thing about Fluellen, as Gower’s admonition to the well-beaten Pistol attests, seems
to be his affinity for violence:
You thought because he could not speak English in the native garb he could
not therefore handle an English cudgel. You find it otherwise, and henceforth let
a Welsh correction teach you a good English condition. Fare ye well.
(A5 Sc1 Sp26)
This is not a lesson in ethnic tolerance; it is a xenophobic statement of national
identity. Only by beating Pistol—who has himself failed Gower’s test of true
Englishness—does Fluellen finally achieve a good English condition
himself.
Para53In Henry V, the role of the foreign in the making of
Englishness calls all such identity formation into question, and productions that
take assertions of national identity as their starting point must either acknowledge
this aspect of the play or produce anaemic and shallow exercises in flag-waving. By
contrast, Edward Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company production in 2000 perfectly
captured the play’s insistence that Englishness may only be examined through the lens
of England’s discourse with the foreign. As the program’s lengthy opening essay made
clear, the driving force of the production was a consideration of English national
identity. Another section of the program collected quotations of national
stereotypes—both foreign and domestic—under the heading So who are the
English? a question answered most fully (with respect to the play) by
Andrew Marr’s contribution to the program notes:
This is a robust, crowded country of tempestuous and often violent people,
generally skeptical of authority […] but who can be rallied
and directed by inspired leadership […] . What is stunning
about the England of Henry V is […]
just how relevant this old, old story of medieval conquest still seems to the
nation of football hooligans, spin doctors, self-glorifying leaders and migrants
on the make.
Marr
Para54The production was unpopular with critics, largely for the very characteristics that
made it successful in its stated goal of reflecting on the meaning of Englishness,
and particularly relevant to the aspect of the play I have been tracing here. The
staging was broadly, at times cartoonishly, stylized, with cascades of tennis balls
raining from the flies and national flags large enough to drape over the entire
stage. Hall’s dramatization of Englishness, as the constant presence of cast members
onstage as a liminal audience made clear, was always a mediated one, always in
quotation marks. When we saw Nym as a soccer-jersey-wearing thug threatening Pistol
with a switchblade, we were watching a foreigner’s stereotype of English hooliganism,
a stereotype then brought into question by Joe Renton’s generally sympathetic
portrayal of Nym. The running gag of the English inability to pronounce foreign
words—Calliss,Dawfin,Harflurr—came
across as seen through the filter of continental Europe’s stereotype of the ugly Brit
abroad, but the mockery was gentle enough to expose the stereotype as such.
Para55The production was equally effective when it caricatured English attitudes toward
France. Scene shifts from England to France were comically marked, for example, with
accordion versions of La Vie en Rose. The implications of
national caricature were most striking in the English lesson scene, in
which Catherine Walker’s princess, a lingerie-clad teenager, was surrounded by
onlooking cast members in English military uniforms, singing Thank
Heaven for Little Girls in laughably thick Maurice Chevalier accents.
Hall’s production was certainly not subtle, but its playful ironies captured the
complications built into Henry V’s presentation of national
identity. What Hall understood is the intrinsic function of the foreign to the play’s
shaping of an English national identity that Shakespeare’s play could never, in the
contexts of his history cycle, render as simple or monolithic. Englishness, for
Shakespeare, is always a conversation.
Reformation in a flood: Henry V and
Protestant Historiography
Para56In the play’s opening scene, the Archbishop of Canterbury, describing the king’s
seemingly miraculous conversion from a reprobate prince to a king full of
grace and faire regard (A1 Sc1 Sp7),
exclaims that Never came reformation in a flood, / With such a heady
currence (A1 Sc1 Sp9).
The word reformation is anachronistic in the mouth of a
fifteenth-century English cleric (see A1 Sc1 Sp9 n.); for Shakespeare’s audience,
however, the word would have been loaded with significance for the local practices
of
Christianity. Henry V is very much a play concerned with
Reformation, not only that of its title character, but in the sense specific to the
religious contexts of English history.
Para57As many recent critics have argued, Henry V seems more
sympathetic to reformed views than the Henry IV plays had
been. A long tradition starting with John Dover Wilson has seen the portrait of
Falstaff as a satire on the hypocrisy of a certain type of Protestant (Fortunes of
Falstaff 15–35; Poole
65–69; Hunt, 201), but some have traced in the second tetralogy,
or in Henry V itself, a move toward the endorsement of
reformed theology. Timothy Rosendale, for example, sees Henry V as the embodiment
of
a Cranmerian sacramental view of kingship (Sacral and Sacramental
Kingship). Camille Wells Slights traces the specifically Protestant view
of conscience and independence from the Church in King Henry’s character from the
beginning to the end of the play (Conscience of the King; see A4 Sc1 Sp49 n.). Phebe Jensen argues that
the Hal of 1 Henry IV explicitly rejects Catholicism, and
that as king he redefines Crispin’s Day as a Protestant holiday (191–192);
and Michael Davies sees in Prince Hal’s rejection of Falstaff a conversion to a
distinctly Calvinist heroism (Falstaff’s Lateness). As I will argue, while the play, despite
its historically medieval and Catholic setting, is certainly engaged with
sixteenth-century Reformation debates, it presents an irreconcilable tension between
the views of traditional and reformed Christianity, and articulates an anxiety that
is neither dispelled nor replaced by a confident Protestantism.
Para58Like so much of Henry V, Canterbury’s metaphor for Henry’s
apparent moral and political reformation points in two directions at once, to two
apparently contradictory religious connotations of the flood of reform: the deluge
in
Genesis and the flood that proceeds from the mouth of the many-headed dragon of
Revelation (see A1 Sc1 Sp9 n.). Both resonances put the
archbishop’s anachronism into conversation with sixteenth-century religious
controversy, and although Canterbury speaks of the reformation of an individual and
not that of the English church, the fact of a medieval prelate applying the term to
a
heroic English King Henry would inevitably call recent religious history to mind.
Moreover, Shakespeare’s portrait of this particular archbishop and this particular
king plays upon multiple, conflicting strains of popular English historiography, and
it positions his play firmly in the contexts of the English Reformation. It does so,
however, in ways that resist a confessional reading; this is a play about
reformation, both personal and historical, but it is neither Protestant nor Catholic,
unless it is both at once.20
Para59Canterbury, though he appears only in the first two scenes, provides an excellent
illustration of the play’s confessional ambivalence. On the one hand, since unlike
King John, which sets an English king against the Roman
church, no one in this play is marked as an antagonist for his Catholicism, Canterbury’s
role as a specifically Catholic prelate does not set him apart from the
other characters. Timothy Rosendale argues that as far as this play is concerned,
the Roman origins of the
bishops’ power are entirely irrelevant (130). Since he provides the legal justification for Henry’s claim to France,
Canterbury is associated positively with the history of Agincourt and with Henry’s
legacy as a hero of England and Christendom. Canterbury even shows signs of reform
himself. He voices the view of cessationism (see A1 Sc1 Sp13 n.), an anachronistically
reformed opinion that might endear the cleric to an orthodox Protestant, and as
Maurice Hunt argues, his speech on the commonwealth of bees (A1 Sc2 Sp21),
with its emphasis on the virtue of work, might even be recognizable to English
audiences as a Protestant sermon (Hunt 188).
Para60We know from the play’s opening scene, however, that Canterbury’s argument for war
masks the church’s pecuniary interest; he schemes to send the king to France to
prevent the seizure of ecclesiastical property for the crown. Canterbury’s goal, to
keep church wealth from being used for the royal levy and for legitimate charity,
marks him as unpatriotic and morally suspect. Moreover, for an audience whose memory
included the dissolution of religious houses and the seizure of church property by
another King Henry (see A1 Sc1 Sp3
n.), Canterbury is on the wrong side of Christian history, and his Wolsey-like
manipulations of the king lend themselves to a hostile, radically Protestant,
anticlerical response. Moreover, as Shakespeare knew well from his source material
in
Holinshed’s chronicle, this archbishop, Henry Chichele (ca. 1364–1443) was infamous
as a persecutor of Lollards—those followers of Wycliffe who were seen by Elizabethan
English Protestants as their spiritual forebears—and in particular as the signer of
the death warrant of the Lollard martyr John Oldcastle, burned to death in 1417.
Para61The fact that Oldcastle was the original name of the fat Sir John that Shakespeare
later rechristened Falstaff is well established (see, for example, Chambers, William Shakespeare
1:381). The accepted reason for the change is censorship by the powerful Cobham
family that celebrated their descent from the proto-Protestant martyr, but as James
M. Gibson points out in his recent survey of critical arguments regarding the origins
and implications of the change (94), very little
substantial evidence has ever been adduced for its specific motives. In any event,
Shakespeare’s choice to change the character’s name, under compulsion or not, enabled
the play to exploit a peculiar sixteenth-century historiographical paradox. Along
with the battle of Agincourt, Henry’s reaction to the unrest surrounding
Lollardy—focused on the suppression of Oldcastle’s riot and the execution of its
leader—was a defining event of Henry V’s reign. After the Reformation, Henry could
no
longer be positively remembered for both of these accomplishments without
considerable strain on Protestant historiography: the hero of Agincourt could be
reclaimed as a recipient of divine favour and a sign of God’s patronage of England,
but his role in the Oldcastle affair could no longer support a celebratory
treatment.21
Para62Some Protestant historiographers tried apologetically to reconcile Henry’s two
legacies: Holinshed minimizes Henry’s role in Oldcastle’s persecution, having the
king urge the clergy rather by gentleness than by rigor to reduce him to the
fold, and places the blame squarely on the heads of the prelates (3:544; see Holinshed’s account of the Oldcastle
rebellion),
and even the usually fiercely polemical John Bale goes no farther than to say that
Henry acted farre otherwise than
became his princelye dignite (B5r). John Foxe’s Acts
and Monuments, by contrast, condemns Henry in no uncertain terms. Foxe has
Henry personally admonish Oldcastle for his proto-protestant heresy, and when he
hears Oldcastle call the pope antichrist, the king gave the Archbishop his full authority to cite him,
examine him, and punish him according to their devilish decrees (Corbin and Sedge 205). Henry, in Foxe’s narrative, not only aligns
himself with Oldcastle’s clerical enemies, he angrily refuses all
appeals and orders Oldcastle’s arrest before departing on his French campaign,
leaving the Lollard to be executed in his absence (207).
Para63The renaming of Shakespeare’s fictional Oldcastle would seem to free his play’s
portrait of Henry from the taint of Oldcastle’s martyrdom, and allow Shakespeare to
pursue the historiographical tradition that remembered Henry as the hero of
Agincourt.22 But just as Falstaff’s ghost haunts the play, traces also linger of
the more explicitly fatal rejection of the historical Oldcastle by the historical
Henry. The bishops’ praise for the king in the opening scene marks him not only as
a
true lover of the holy Church (A1 Sc1 Sp8) but as a sudden
scholar (A1 Sc1 Sp9), indeed a doctor of divinity:
Hear him but reason in divinity, / And, all-admiring, with an inward wish /
You would desire the king were made a prelate (A1 Sc1 Sp11).
In the immediate context of Shakespeare’s play, this is peculiar; other than Henry’s
rather choplogic response to Williams on the battlefield regarding the king’s
responsibility for his subjects’ souls (see A4 Sc1 Sp55 n.), we see
no evidence in the play of such theological expertise. But an audience familiar with
both the enduring popular legacies of Henry’s life—not only his
victories in France, but his handling of the Oldcastle affair—would hear in
Canterbury’s words the echo of the narrative of Henry personally trying to convince
his imprisoned Lollard friend of the error of his heretical views. Because Oldcastle
was highly in the king’s favor, writes Holinshed, Henry chooses to
discuss with him personally the certain points of heresy that he is
accused of holding:
He himself sent for him and right earnestly exhorted him and lovingly
admonished him to reconcile himself to God and to his laws. The Lord Cobham not
only thanked him for his most favorable clemency, but also declared, first to him
by mouth and afterwards by writing, the foundation of his faith and the ground of
his belief, affirming his grace to be his supreme head and competent
judge.
(Holinshed, 1587 3:544)
Shakespeare’s history plays, since for whatever reason they had erased the name of
Oldcastle, avoid overtly tarring Henry with the responsibility for martyring him.
But
although the epilogue to 2 Henry IV insists that
Oldcastle died a martyr, and this Falstaff is not the man (2H4
Epilogue 24–25), Henry V subtly belies the distinction. As Gregorio Melchiori has pointed
out, Archbishop Chichele, in a grisly, literal way, caused Oldcastle to die of a
sweat, as Shakespeare jokingly suggested would happen to Falstaff (2H4 Epilogue 23).
By underscoring the king’s alignment with Henry Chichele, and putting praise of
Henry’s role as theologian into the Archbishop’s mouth, Shakespeare keeps the
Oldcastle affair in the audience’s minds, refusing to reconcile the two historical
Henrys and their very different interpretations. Henry is implicated by cultural
memory as the killer of Oldcastle’s body as well as Falstaff’s heart. Within the
king’s fictional relationship with the fictional version of the martyr rings the
historiographical echo of Henry as Catholic defensor
fidei—or alternately as the villain of the Lollard movement.
Para64The tendency of the religious aspect of Henry V to point in
two directions at once climaxes in act four, before and after the battle of
Agincourt. On the surface, the history of Agincourt as retold by Shakespeare supports
an interpretation that blends nationalism with a particularly Protestant piety. After
the final death tolls are announced and the magnitude of the miraculous English
victory becomes clear, Henry and his men wonderingly accept the role of grace in the
outcome. The king forbids the boasting of the victory without the disclaimer that
God fought for us (A4 Sc8 Sp36), piously commands the
singing of the Non nobis, giving all glory to God,
and declares the English the most happy men (A4 Sc8 Sp38; i.e., the
luckiest, most favoured by hap (OEDhap,
n.3)).
Shakespeare furthers the sense of the miraculous by eliminating the discussion of
Henry’s famous strategies—the use of the pike wall against cavalry and the
technological advantage of the English longbowmen—that feature in nearly all other
accounts of the battle (see Drayton’s ballad in the online supplemental materials). Instead,
Shakespeare’s Henry suggests that the battle was won without stratagem, / But
in plain shock and even play of battle (A4 Sc8 Sp32).
This strain of piety is traditional to all forms of Christianity, of course, but the
emphasis on grace might appear particularly Protestant. By faith, not works, were
reformed Christians saved. By faith, not by works, do the English achieve
victory.
Para65When we look at the prayer Henry delivers to the God of battles
(A4 Sc1 Sp79) the night before Agincourt (A4 Sc1 Sp79),
however, Shakespeare’s apparently Protestant portrait of the victory is by no means
clear. The prayer is more a bargain than anything else. Henry asks for victory, or
at
least the chance of victory, in exchange for the deeds he has done, the steps he has
taken to assuage the dynastic guilt consequent upon the deposition of Richard II:
In the play, the gambit is of course a resounding success: the English win at
Agincourt with a score of 25,000 slain Frenchmen to twenty-nine English. The deeds
of
penitence that Henry offers here are predicated on the belief in the reality of
purgatory; the chantries and almoners are vicarious penitents, praying on both
Henry’s behalf and his father’s to lessen Richard’s stint. This is how the
historically Catholic Henry would have prayed, and Shakespeare derives the details
from his chronicle sources. But the belief that the living could pray efficaciously
for the dead, was precisely the set of beliefs that Luther sought to challenge in
his
debate on indulgences at Wittenburg. To a Protestant audience, Henry here epitomizes
the papist idolatry that the English Church had shed.
Para66The prayer’s final lines, however, would seem to give the historically Catholic king
a prescient sense of the post-Reformation inefficacy of such works:
Taken by itself, the sentiment seems to marks Henry as an orthodox Protestant.
He abandons his futile efforts to bargain with the almighty, and relies on grace to
deliver him from his enemies. Indeed, the line forcibly echoes Calvin’s view of
predestination: necessitie, if a man haue an eye vnto it, doth alwayes import
a constraint, so that all that euer we can doe shall be nothing worth
(Sermons of M. Iohn
Caluin A4r).
Para67Moreover, the speech is not only a prayer; it is also the tail end of the play’s only
soliloquy. In the Henry IV plays, Hal had taken the audience
into his confidence with direct address a number of times, producing a
congregational, public subjectivity. In Henry V, the
character soliloquizes only here, in prayer, in a moment of debate
between Henry and his bosom (A4 Sc1 Sp6). We are brought into the
space of his conscience—the private confessional space of reformed Christianity—as
Shakespeare conflates Henry’s divine audience with his theatrical one, and both are
asked to pass judgement upon him as a Christian king.23
Para68Camille Slights, Gary Taylor, and David Womersley have argued that the prayer’s end
demonstrates Henry’s conversion to a reformed view of salvation, and by implication
Shakespeare’s appropriation of the national hero for a Protestant nation.24 I would
argue, conversely, that the king’s concession of futility marks a moment of anxiety
about, or even defiance of, the illogic of the Calvinist view of works. Several
editors have remarked on the seeming absurdity of the speech’s closing lines. All
penitence, after all, comes after all (A4 Sc1 Sp79). All penitence implores pardon.
If penitence cannot be achieved or its sincerity bolstered by works, then penitence
itself is futile, and the simple Pauline assertion that if we acknowledge our sinnes, he is faithful and
iust to forgiue vs our sinnes (Geneva 1 John 1:9) is meaningless.
Para69The historical fact of the miraculous victory to follow may or may not obscure the
fact that the prayer resolves nothing in regard to what kind of
Christian this mirror of all Christian kings might be (A2 Sc0 Sp1). It gives no
clue as to a confessional argument on the part of the play, as neither Henry’s
legalistic, Catholic gambit, nor his assertion of Protestant sola fide allays his anxiety. The speech ends neither with the
confidence in the efficacy of Henry’s works or in his own state of grace, but on this
note of unanswered and ineffective penitence. Henry’s promises of penance are
undercut by his apparently Protestant acknowledgement in their worthlessness, but
replaced by nothing other than the knowledge of his own responsibility: for the
outcome of the battle, for his sin, and the burden of his subjects’ souls: all
things stay for me (A4 Sc1 Sp81).
Para70Ultimately, Shakespeare’s Henry is not his historically Catholic original, or the
Protestant hero of a wishfully reimagined English history; he is a both/and,
either/or figure, both the synthesis and the binary opposition, in the same way that
the player’s body reads as both player and character, that the play’s
now is both the then of history and the
time passing in the playhouse. In the final scene, Henry offers his prospective bride
the curious promise of a son that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk
by the beard (A5 Sc2 Sp36)—curious
because the Ottoman Turks would not occupy Constantinople until some thirty years
after Henry V’s death. This son will never exist, of course; soon after he is
mentioned, the Chorus reminds us of Henry’s actual son, who lost France and
made his England bleed (Epilogue Sp1). What Henry offers his
audience, perhaps, is a fantastic vision of confessional as well as national unity
in
a world of religious division: the cross of George and the fleur-de-lis, Protestant
England and Catholic France joined against the common enemy of a foreign religion.
But this fantasy, as the anachronism underscores, is logically impossible. Like
Thomas More’s Utopia, it takes its meaning from its impossibility.
Notes
1.In part, the tension between the
goals of presenting a chronicle history and a focused dramatization
of the main events of Henry’s life comes from Shakespeare’s two main sources for
the play, very different from each other in tone, scope, and argument: Raphael
Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), which provided the
historical detail and certain speeches, and the anonymous play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (1598), which Shakespeare
followed for his scene structure, and from which he derived many comic and tragic
episodes, not only for Henry V, but for both Henry IV plays. For quotations from and analyses of
Shakespeare’s use of both of these primary sources, see my online commentary
notes.↑
2.E. M. W. Tillyard is often
thought of as the originator of the idea of eight of Shakespeare’s history plays
as forming two closely linked tetralogies: the first, written in 1591–1593 and
consisting of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III; and the second, written between 1595 (Richard II) and 1599 (Henry V). See
Shakespeare’s History Plays, one of the first major
critical works to address the tetralogies’ interconnection (Tillyard). The idea of the histories as an organic
cycle was developed much earlier, by A. W. Schlegel in 1815 and Hermann Ulrici in
1846, and in fact even the word tetralogy was first used in
relation to Shakespeare’s plays as early as 1864, when for the Shakespeare
tercentenary Frank Dingensteldt directed what is believed to be the first
production of the eight plays in sequence at the Weimar Court Theatre.
Dingensteldt, perhaps borrowing the term from critics of Wagner’s operatic cycles,
described the history plays as two tetralogies (Sarlos 117–131); I am indebted to Catherine Lisak for this observation.↑
3.The phrase, as Jonathan Baldo remarks,
evokes both the actor’s striving to resemble the monarch he represents
and his slippery character’s need to appear, at last, regal (Representing the
Nation 68). Baldo argues that the Chorus presents a complex
commentary on the change in parliamentary rhetoric about representation in the
1590s.↑
4.The
metaphor would have been familiar to readers of The Mirror for
Magistrates (first published in 1559), a popular compilation of
didactic poems about notable leaders of the English past. That work, however,
collected examples of the tragic falls of historical figures—in the tradition of
Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes—so
the mirror of its title suggests images to avoid, not to emulate.↑
6.As Philip Schwyzer argues,
Shakespeare’s histories rarely if ever feature actual ghosts. Yet from
1 Henry VI, which begins with the repeated
invocation of Henry V’s ghost, to Henry V itself,
these plays generate a diffuse and pervasive atmosphere of hauntedness
(129).↑
7.Peter Stallybrass shows that haunt first appears in
relation to ghosts—as opposed to its earlier common sense of “visit
habitually”—in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and
demonstrates that in the dramatic literature in the 1590s the haunting of
ghosts emerges as part of a theatrical apparatus (304). The theatricality inherent in the
then new sense of haunting makes it difficult to ignore parallels between the
ghosts of Crécy and of Richard II and Shakespeare’s own haunting by the revenants
of his earlier history plays.↑
8.Kemp sold
his shares in the company to his fellow players during the move to the newly built
Globe playhouse. For his own account of leaving the company and pursuit of a solo
career as a clown and dancer, see Kemps Nine Daies Wonder
(Kemp). For arguments about
Kemp’s performance of Falstaff, see Wilson (Fortunes of Falstaff 124–125) and Wiles
(116–135).↑
9.At any rate, audience tastes in comedy seem to have been changing
around 1599–1600; Kemp was replaced as principal comic actor not by another
jigging, extemporizing clown, but by Robert Armin, whose roles tended toward
artificial fools like Feste, capitalizing on wit and song rather
than buffoonery.↑
10.Some form of the verb remember occurs
seven times, forms of forget six times (including the
French oublier), and
remembrance three times, plus single instances of
memory and the French recontrai.↑
11.Jonathan Baldo argues that Shakespeare
consciously uses Henry V to illustrate how crucial
memory is for the legitimation and exercise of power (Wars of Memory 133). As
Baldo notes, Henry V is only one of several plays from
the same period—compare 2 Henry IV, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet—which also
dramatize contested collective memory (133). He discusses Henry V, a remarkable study of how a nation
remembers (132), in the contexts of Elizabethan subduing of communal
memory with regard to the loss of Calais, to historical Welsh and contemporary
Irish rebellion, to the manipulation of ecclesiastical and secular calendars, and
to the hagiography of Sir John
Oldcastle (see A1 Sc1 Sp5).↑
13.As René Weis points out in his
introduction to the Oxford edition of 2 Henry IV, the
second tetralogy of history plays contains several such examples of echoic
narratives […] events dramatized in one of the plays which
are then recalled, or distorted, either in the same play or in a later
play (48). The most
striking example in 2 Henry IV comes when we see Prince
Hal coolly take the crown, as his due, from the father he assumes
to be dead, then immediately and radically reinterpret that action to his still
living, very angry father (2H4 4.3.150–177,
4.3.268–306).↑
14.The
killing of the prisoners, as Anne Curry points out, is above all what makes
Agincourt historically distinctive: No other medieval battle is known to
have included the deliberate killing of a large number of men whom both sides
believed would be ransomed (294). Since the earliest accounts of the battle, the exact nature
of the killings and the question of the order’s morality in the context of
medieval battlefield ethics have been debated; see Curry (Agincourt 294–296) and
Keegan (Face of Battle 108–112). For a
discussion of the moral implications of Shakespeare’s portrayal of the incident,
see Sutherland and Watts (Henry V, War Criminal? 108–116). See also A4 Sc6 Sp5
n. and A4 Sc7 Sp2 n.↑
15.Following his
dramatic rather than his chronicle source, Shakespeare conflates the gift of
tennis balls—an earlier, unrelated incident that goes ignored by the king in
Holinshed—with the council session that determines for war.↑
16.Gaunt’s speech
is contingent and hypothetical, of course, the description of an England that
should be, not one that actually exists, but Henry V
denies us even that.↑
17.Even the king himself, as Philip Schwyzer points out, can
never quite bring himself to declare unambiguously that he is English
(126).↑
18.A puzzling crux
in the Folio may suggest further ambivalence, when Henry refers to the treason as
An naturall cause
(F1 H5H3v).↑
19.The usual emendation of these lines, derived from Theobald,
clarifies my point: To mark the full-fraught man, and best indued, / With
some suspicion (Theobald 2.2).↑
20.One of the first responses of the
religious turn in early-modern English studies has been
the reconsideration of Shakespeare’s presumed religious leanings. Richard Wilson’s
2004 study represents the boldest recent attempt to portray a recusant
Shakespeare, trolling the canon for encoded signs of the poet’s Catholicism (Secret
Shakespeare). As a judicious recent essay by John D. Cox (2006)
points out, however, the secondary evidence for Shakespeare’s Catholicism is still
inconclusive, and the plays’ silence on the matter can ultimately only be read as
silence (Was Shakespeare a
Christian).↑
21.David Womersley argues that in post-Reformation
England, Henry’s religious character could not but seem ambiguous. The
leading role he had taken in the religious life of the nation had made him […] a forerunner of Henry VIII. Yet his suppression of the
Lollards also marked him out as an enemy of reformed religion (Womersly 96). Henry’s ambivalence thus split sixteenth-century
English historiography into two camps, and Womersley traces the
tension that faced Protestant historiographers from Tyndale through Bale and Foxe
to Hall, and how the varied and ambiguous positions were synthesized and
accommodated by the different versions of Holinshed’s chronicle
(95–111).↑
22.As Womersley points out, the idea to shift
Oldcastle into the wild prince tradition in order to achieve a
Protestant-friendly portrayal of the Lancastrians was anticipated by The Famous Victories, but Shakespeare has gone further: The Lancastrian monarchs, deplored by Foxe as the first English kings to
burn other Englishmen for heresy, and thus terrible anticipations of Mary
Tudor, became under Shakespeare’s hand and in the person of Henry V (and
against all the historical evidence) a dynasty of recognizably Protestant
piety.
(309).
↑
23.For a
discussion of the Protestant conscience as an internalized, disciplinary
spectator, see Huston Diehl (Staging Reform 202).↑
24.Womersley argues that the speech is uttered at the very
point of reformation, at the precise moment when a biting conviction of
personal unworthiness prompts an insight into the doctrinal triviality of
Catholicism (337). Slights believes that in taking his
problem directly to God without the priestly intercession of Act 1, Henry
demonstrates his reformed conscience, and that the soliloquy’s ambivalence itself
illustrates the basic paradox of the emotional workings of the early
modern Protestant conscience, the simultaneous presence of buoyant certainty
and abject fear (45). Taylor finds no lack of
resolution in the prayer at all, claiming that the apparent ambiguity is
functionless and unintended. He argues that Henry’s
closing confession of his own unworthiness is in fact the final proof to the
audience that he is worthy (Taylor, Henry V 298, 301). But the
fact that in order to support the godly logic of his reading, Taylor has to emend
these lines, whose logic generations of editors have struggled to explain—the
second all becomes the orthographically unconvincing
ill in his edition (see A4 Sc1 Sp79
n.)—rather supports the idea of the lines’ functional ambiguity.↑
Prosopography
Abby Flight
Remediator and encoder, 2024–present. Abby Flight completed her BA in English at the
University of Victoria in 2024, and is now an MA student focusing on Medieval and
Early Modern Studies.
Catherine Lisak
Challen Wright
Chris Horne
Donald Bailey
Eric Rasmussen
Eric Rasmussen is Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at
the University of Nevada. He is co-editor with Sir Jonathan Bate of the RSC William Shakespeare Complete Works and general editor, with Paul Werstine, of the New Variorum Shakespeare. He has received the Falstaff Award from PlayShakespeare.com for Best Shakespearean Book of the Year in 2007, 2012, and 2013.
James D. Mardock
James Mardock is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Associate
General Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and a dramaturge for the Lake
Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Reno Little Theater. In addition to editing quarto
and folio Henry V for the ISE, he has published essays on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Renaissance
literature in The Seventeenth Century, Ben Jonson Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and contributed to the collections Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (Routledge 2010) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (Cambridge 2013). His book Our Scene is London (Routledge 2008) examines Jonsonʼs representation of urban space as an element in
his strategy of self-definition. With Kathryn McPherson, he edited Stages of Engagement (Duquesne 2013), a collection of essays on drama in post-Reformation England, and
he is currently at work on a monograph on Calvinism and metatheatrical awareness in
early modern English drama.
Janelle Jenstad
Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director
of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.
Joey Takeda
Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020
after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.
Martin Holmes
Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVicʼs Humanities Computing and Media
Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities
projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the
Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020.
He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.
Michael Best
Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He is the Founding
Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions, of which he was the Coordinating Editor
until 2017. In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and
huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals,
principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of
texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet
Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia,
and Japan.
Navarra Houldin
Project manager 2022–present. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them)
completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During
their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs
Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and
sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.
Nicole Vatcher
Technical Documentation Writer, 2020–2022. Nicole Vatcher completed her BA (Hons.)
in English at the University of Victoria in 2021. Her primary research focus was womenʼs
writing in the modernist period.
Tracey El Hajj
Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD
from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science
and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched
Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life. Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence
at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships
between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021,
Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in
the English Department at the University of Victoria.
William Shakespeare
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Metadata
Authority title
Henry V: General Introduction
Type of text
Critical
Publisher
University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online platform
Series
Source
This document was written by James D. Mardock and originally published digitally by
the Internet Shakespeare Editions and in print by Broadview Press. It has been converted
from IML (the SGML markup language of the Internet Shakespeare Editions platform)
into LEMDOʼs customization of TEI-XML and copyedited by Janelle Jenstad and the LEMDO
team for republication in the New Internet Shakespeare Editions anthology.
Born digital.
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The Coordinating Editors of the NISE are Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Janelle Jenstad, James
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