Nostalgia and the Not Yet Late Queen: Refusing Female Rule in Henry V | Katherine Eggert, University of Colorado, Boulder
Katherine Eggert, University of Colorado, Boulder
Within the last decade, Henry V has assumed a surprisingly prominent place not only in Shakespeare criticism, but in wider critical debates over the relations between literature and hegemonic political power. Prompted by Stephen Greenblatt's widely influential consideration of the Henriad in his essay "Invisible Bullets," various critics have staked out Shakespeare's only real "war play" as their own battlefield for contesting, as Jean Howard puts it, "how and why a culture produces and deals with challenges to its dominant ideologies."1 Whatever their ideological stance, however, these critics have largely left untested Greenblatt's crucial assumption that, in the Henriad's counterpoint between hegemony and subversion (or at least imagined subversion), hegemony resides with and emerges from the Elizabethan monarchy, and subversion (even if illusory) resides with and emerges...
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