Princes, Pirates, and Pigs: Criminalizing Wars of Conquest in Henry V | Princes, Pirates, and Pigs: Criminalizing Wars of Conquest in Henry V
Princes, Pirates, and Pigs: Criminalizing Wars of Conquest in Henry V
Janet M. Spencer, Wingate University
"The figure who exceeds the law as its master and the one who exceeds it as transgressor," Christopher Pye explains of Henry V and the traitors Cambridge, Grey, and Scroop, "are indeed bound by an unspoken—perhaps unspeakable—knowledge about the origins of power."1 In Shakespeare's Henry V, Henry takes great pains to conceal his capacity to exceed the law by seeking religious legitimation of, or by displacing moral responsibility for, decisions based ultimately on royal prerogative. And for a great number of producers, theatergoers, and literary critics he succeeds admirably.2 Nevertheless, his decisions to exercise royal power mark him as a figure of legal excess, an identity given specific significance by the "figures and comparisons" drawn between England's warrior-king and the celebrated...
[The entire page is 10688 words long]
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