[In the following essay, Rebhorn compares the "rhetorical kingship" of King Henry IV, which relies more heavily on visual effects than on words to persuade, with Prince Hal's skillful use of rhetoric to reconcile with his father and, later as King Henry V, to rule his kingdom.]

. . . Shakespeare['s] . . . enlarged view of rhetoric .. . goes beyond that of the rhetoricians to stress the enormously persuasive force of visual displays, for his Machiavellian kings and princes also know that silent spectacles can often accomplish as much as a torrent of words. Richard III, for instance, works on the lord mayor and citizens of London by appearing before them silently reading a prayerbook between two bishops (Richard III, 3.7). Even more striking is Henry IV's decision to parade his army back and forth in front of Flint castle: "Let's march without the noise of threat'ning drum, / That from this castle's tottered battlements / Our fair appointments may be well perus'd" (Richard II, 3.3.51-53).⁴⁵ As Henry goes on to say, his ostensible purpose is to avoid appearing to threaten King Richard, although that, in fact, is just what such a show of force is designed to do. A show thai persuades without any need for words at all, it is far more powerful than the nonexistent legion of troops that Richard earlier insisted the king's name alone could call forth to fight on his side (Richard II, 3.2.85-88). Henry's tactic thus confirms [that] although words may be an important source of a ruler's hold over his people, the silent display of physical force often constitutes a far more potent rhetoric. Richard II dramatizes the way that, in the arena of power politics, a calculating awareness of the rhetorical nature of the game being played is essential for success. Ironically, the voluble Richard is defeated in part precisely because he believes in language. Specifically, he believes in the magic of words, but that magic, although creating a wonderful spectacle for everyone watching it, is not directed at persuasion. For Richard, language is a ritual performance rather than a battlefield maneuver or an instrument of conquest and rule. By contrast, the laconic Henry recognizes that if he is to maintain his "name," he must defend it by the rhetorical manipulation of the world, including, of course, the rhetorical manipulation involved in staging silent spectacles of force.

That Henry sees politics in terms of rhetoric is made clear in the climactic scene of Henry IV, Part 1 (3.2), during which he is reunited and reconciled with the supposedly prodigal Hal. In this scene Henry accuses his son of many failings, including a failure to understand the nature of politics. To explain what he means, Henry offers his own behavior as a model, and as he does so, he elaborates a decidedly rhetorical theory of kingship. He tells Hal how he manipulated "Opinion" (3.2.43) by appearing only occasionally in public.

By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wond'red at,
That men would tell their children, "This is he!"
Others would say, "Where, which is Bolingbroke?"
And then I stole all courtesy from heaven,
And dress'd myself in such humility
That I did pluck allegiance from men's hearts,
Loud shouts and salutations from their mouths,
Even in the presence of the crowned King.
Thus did I keep my person fresh and new,
My presence, like a robe pontifical,
Ne'er seen but wond'red at.

(3.2.46-57)

In this theory Henry, like the rhetoricians, assumes that the realm of politics is the realm of custom and contingency, where "Opinion" rather than inherited rights, let alone truth, determines who will be king. This is a realm in which, as Henry imagines it, sight is the chief sense: one's "presence" affects the "eyes of men" and must be shaped so that it produces wonder as a response. Indeed, Henry's language makes the king a showman and an actor: he dresses himself in humility, maintains the newness of his person—that is, his mask (persona in Latin)—and identifies his presenee as a "robe pontifical." Renaissance rhetoricians normally equate the ornaments of style with clothing, so that when Henry employs such terms to talk about his personal appearance, he is, in effect, treating it as something that can be turned into a trope. In Henry's theory of rhetorical kingship, personal appearance thus constitutes a compelling means of persuasion.

What is striking in Henry's theory is what is omitted: he says absolutely nothing about words. The king's performance, like Richard Ill's silent reading . . . , convinces without the benefit of language. Henry's king operates on the world from a great symbolic distance, no matter how close he may literally come to the crowds that turn out to cheer him. Henry himself knew how to put his theory into practice, at least if one is to accept York's account in Richard II of Henry's performance upon his entry into London after the deposition of Richard.

Then, as I said, the Duke, great Bolingbroke,
Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed
Which his aspiring rider seem'd to know,
With slow but stately pace kept on his course,
Whilst all tongues cried, "God save thee, Bolingbroke!"
You would have thought the very windows spake,
  So many greedy looks of young and old
Through casements darted their desiring eyes
Upon his visage, . . .

Whilst he, from the one side to the other turning,
Bareheaded, lower than his proud steed's neck,
Bespake them thus: "I thank you, countrymen."

(Richard II, 5.2.7-15, 18-20)

In York's speech, as in Henry's own theory, the emphasis falls on the visual spectacle the king creates, on the "greedy looks," the "desiring eyes" of the crowd, as well as on the actor-like (see 5.2.23-24) demeanor and gestures of Bolingbroke. York finally notes that the latter did speak, but what he says hardly counts as much of a rhetorical display; Bolingbroke's "thank you" is just a tiny note in the great visual show he has been orchestrating.

The end such a show aims to bring about is spelled out quite precisely by Henry in his speech to Hal: he wants to persuade the people to transfer their loyalty from Richard to him. Although Henry never once utters the word "persuasion," he does employ a phrase that recalls the highly charged language used by Renaissance rhetoricians to define the orator's goal: they conceived persuasion as a violent act, an invasion, conquest and possession of the auditor which works on him in the most intimate way imaginable. Henry repeats this notion when he proclaims that he "did pluck allegiance from men's hearts, / Loud shouts and salutations from their mouths." For Henry, persuasion affects the very organ that Renaissance rhetoricians singled out as well. Consider Bartholomew Keckermann, for example, who declares: "The orator especially looks to the heart [cor] that he may excite and move it with varied emotions" (Systema [Rhetorices (Hanover, 1608)], 4). That such affecting of the heart amounts to a violent assault on it is clear not only from the general insistence on the ideas of invasion and conquest running through the Renaissance discourse of rhetoric but from specific passages such as the following one from Nicholas Caussin's De Eloquentia sacra et humana [3rd ed., Paris, 1630]: "The entire force of persuasion is carried by emotion as by a vehicle and penetrates hearts [permeat in pectora]" (3). Henry presents his own rhetoric as having just such a devastating effect on those exposed to it. But there is a difference: whereas the rhetoricians all talk about the power of words, Henry's theory defines a sheerly visual assault. Ironically, the success of that silent spectacle is underscored precisely by the fact that it makes the crowd speak, makes them shout and cheer and ask with wonder "Where, which is Bolingbroke?"

Unlike his father, Hal is a talker. From his experiences in the tavern with Falstaff and his cronies, Hal has learned to "drink with any tinker in his own language" (Henry IV, Part 1, 2.4.18-19), a sentiment with which the Earl of Warwick later concurs when he reassures the sick and dying Henry that the "Prince but studies his companions / Like a strange tongue" (Henry IV, Part 2, 4.4.68-69). Fittingly, Hal is the only character in the Henriad who can move freely through all locales, a physical freedom doubled by the linguistic virtuosity that allows him to jest with Falstaff, utter high-sounding, martial sentiments on the battlefield like Hotspur and Douglas, and talk the language of Machiavellian political calculation with his father. Such linguistic skill would by itself tend to identify Hal as a version of the ideal orator as the Renaissance conceived the figure: someone capable of handling any audience by adapting his performance to the circumstances involved, the master of figures and tropes and of all styles, high, middle, and low. Shakespeare makes Hal's identification with the orator quite explicit in Henry V by having him deliver speech after speech, from the tennis ball rebuff of the French ambassadors in Act 1, through the Saint Crispin's Day oration before Agincourt, to the wooing of Katherine at the play's end. These speeches vary in style from regal, ironic, and angry, through martial and uplifting, to the simplicity and directness of a "plain soldier" (5.2.151). Like his father, Hal clearly regards kingship as a matter of staging spectacles, of performing a public role, but unlike Henry he sees that role not only as centrally concerned with words but as far more various and nuance than the distanced behavior, the "sun-like majesty" (Henry IV, Part 1, 3.2.79), that Henry recommends.

Hal's virtuosity with language elevates him above his father when they are judged from the viewpoint of tactics: that is, from the viewpoint of their success in manipulating other human beings. Or, at least, that is what the great reconciliation scene between Henry and Hal in the middle of Henry IV, Part I suggests, as the prince, in the short space of just thirty-one lines, is able to shift his father's opinion of him 180 degrees. Shakespeare constructs the scene to give Henry the lion's share of the dialogue, in fact to turn it into a virtual monologue; he rebukes Hal for almost ninety lines before giving him a real opportunity to reply. In those ninety lines Henry details his theory of kingship, then attacks Hal for behaving like Richard and running the risk of losing the crown, and finally comes to the bitter conclusion that Hal is likely to fight against him on Hotspur's side. Hal's reply is masterly. He affirms his love for his father, promises to compensate for his youthful misdeeds, and vows to defeat Hotspur or die in the attempt. The effect on Henry is dramatic as he completely reverses his earlier estimate of his son: "A hundred thousand rebels die in this! / Thou shalt have charge and sovereign trust herein" (3.2.1 58-59). Hal's persuasive words gain what persuasion always seeks to gain according to the rhetoricians: belief, the transformation or conversion of the auditor, as Henry himself suggests when he speaks of "sovereign trust."

What provokes this sudden conversion is less what Hal says than how he says it, for he both echoes the concepts and style of Henry's theory of kingship and matches the emotional intensity of Henry's denunciation. Hal begins by insisting upon his relationship to Henry, promising to demonstrate publicly that "I am your son" (3.2.134) and that he will redeem the reputation of "your unthought-of Harry" (141; emphasis added). But Hal demonstrates that he is his father's child most dramatically through his diction, for no sooner has he promised to avenge himself on Hotspur than he declares: "I will wear a garment all of blood / And stain my favors in a bloody mask, / Which, wash'd away, shall scour my shame with it" (135-37). Here Hal deliberately echoes his father's presentation of politics as rhetorical performance, a matter of dress if not a masquerade, which sometimes requires one to put on the cloak of humility, as Henry did in entering London, and sometimes to don the armor of the battlefield hero, as Hal promises to do. Later, Hal adopts the tones Henry employed earlier in the scene, mingling the martial bravado Henry seemed to admire in Hotspur with the tone of contempt that Henry, the powerful and cunning rhetorician, manifested toward the hapless victims of the spectacles he created. Thus, Hal proclaims: "Percy is but my factor, good my lord, / To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf; / And I will call him to so strict account / That he shall render every glory up, / Yea, even the slightest worship of his time, / Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart" (147-52). Hal's boastfulness and vehemence here respond to the image of Hotspur the warrior, the "Mars in swathling clothes" (112), whom Henry seemed to admire just a few lines earlier. At the same time, Hal turns the heroic Hotspur into a figure of contempt, reducing him to a mere "factor," a merchant's agent, who works unwittingly for Hal's benefit (Henry, of course, saw the public, the king's subjects, as just so many contemptible dupes). Hal's promise to defeat Hotspur ends with an image central to Henry's theory of kingship, the image of the heart. Just as Henry bragged of being able to "pluck allegiance from men's hearts" (52), so Hal declares, literalizing the image, that he will "tear the reckoning from his [Percy's] heart" (152) in mortal combat. Imitation—in this case, a carefully calculated imitation—is the sincerest form of flattery, and in consequence, Henry, who is aching to be reassured of the love and devotion of his son, immediately banishes all doubts and proclaims his complete trust in Hal. What the latter has done is to exercise a form of rhetorical kingship—and to succeed with it against his father!

By conflating the tones of heroic bragging and kingly contempt in his speech, Hal actually does more than merely echo his father, however; he subtly corrects him. Henry has a double and partially incorrect view of Hotspur's character. Although he rightly sees Hotspur as a figure out of epic, he is wrong when, in predicting that Hal will become another Richard, he assigns to Hotspur his own role of cunning, kingly rhetorician. The play makes clear that Hotspur is totally unlike the crafty Henry; indeed, with his volubility and almost magical belief in language, he seems far closer to Richard than to his Machiavellian adversary. Hal recognizes that his father is mistaken about Hotspur, and while he does duplicate Henry's tone of admiration for Hotspur as martial hero, he simultaneously treats Hotspur to the kind of contempt Henry reserved for Richard as well as for the public. In this way, not only does Hal undercut Henry's admiration for Hotspur as a heroic figure, but he recasts the parts Henry assigned Hotspur and himself, identifying Hotspur as a Richard figure and himself, as we have noted, with Henry. Although such a move clearly flatters Henry, it also constitutes an implicit rebuke, a suggestion that the clever, supposedly clear-eyed king is not so clear-eyed after all. In doing so, it also confirms for us what Henry's conversion confirms in other ways: Hal, not his father, is the real master of rhetorical kingship.

Hal's performances can be read as virtual reproductions of the notion from the Renaissance discourse of rhetoric that eloquence is power. In particular, Shakespeare constructs Henry V so that Hal's famous victories seem to result from his command of language even more than from his personal bravery and mastery of tactics—not to mention the technical superiority given the English by the long bow and the good fortune that made the battlefield at Agincourt a quagmire for the heavily armored French knights on horseback. Fluellen and his comrades may debate whether Hal's operations at Harfleur are done "according to the disciplines of the war" (3.2.58), but the play makes such considerations seem almost irrelevant. For Hal appears to maintain the siege not by strategical maneuvers but by the compelling speech that forces his men "unto the breach" and urges them to match their fathers, to be heroes "like so many Alexanders" (3.2.1, 19). In fact, he wins the victory in this case, as Henry IV won his over Richard, not by defeating his opponent in battle but by using rhetoric to persuade him to surrender. Moreover, although the great battle of Agincourt constitutes a genuine military victory, Shakespeare shapes his play to make it seem due to Hal's rhetorical masterpiece, the Saint Crispin's Day speech, as much as to battlefield heroics. For after the speech what we see is a French soldier surrendering to Pistol; the French commanders lamenting that all is lost; Hal instructing his troops to kill their prisoners; and finally, Hal learning from Montjoy that the English have in fact been victorious. What the audience does not see, at least according to Shakespeare's text, is any sort of battle, such as the fighting at Shrewsbury we were treated to in Henry IV, Part I. That Hal actually did participate in that battle and defeat Hotspur shows that he is not all talk, but what Henry V suggests is that talk is mostly what he needs.

And indeed, the play ends with one final, stunning rhetorical performance on Hal's part, the performance by means of which he woos Katherine of France by playing the clearly false role of plain, blunt soldier. His rhetorical move here is to adopt a consciously anti-rhetorical posture that enables him to project an ethos of sincerity and to dramatize the presumably genuine affection he feels for his future bride. Of course, the play reveals that she really has no choice but to marry the victor of Agincourt, a fact to which Hal himself alludes in passing (5.2.249-50). What Hal accomplishes with his rhetoric is precisely what Renaissance rhetors all wanted to accomplish with theirs: by using persuasion as a kind of force Superior to actual force, he brings his auditor to subject herself to him of her own free will, to believe in his arguments and in him, ultimately to love the one who commands her destiny.

Although Hal's virtuosity with language makes him superior to his father as a rhetor-ruler, and Henry V can be read at least in part as a celebration of his verbal mastery, Shakespeare does not let the matter rest at this point. In other words, he does not simply reproduce (with elaborations and extensions) the equation of rhetoric with power and rule which one can find in Renaissance handbooks and treatises. After all, both Henry and Hal also possess real force, whether one identifies that as personal prowess on the battlefield, an army under their command, or the legal power and authority granted by a treaty in which the French king agrees to give his daughter to Hal in marriage. Rhetorical displays of spectacular images and words may enable a ruler to terrorize his enemies and gain the allegiance of his subjects, but those displays are always, finally, connected to that ruler's possession of genuine force. In the end, for all that Shakespeare makes rhetoric alone appear to guarantee the famous victories of the English in France, he never lets us forget that other forces are also at work, forces that have nothing to do with rhetoric at all. The Henriad may stage the triumph of eloquence in many different ways, but it stubbornly refuses to allow eloquence to have the last word. . . .

Note

⁴⁵ All quotations from Shakespeare's plays cite act, scene, and line from The Complete Works, ed. David Bevington, 3d ed. (Glenview, III: Scott, Foresman, 1951).