[In the following essay, Wilcox comments on Henry's character through an analysis of Katherine, demonstrating how Katherine's personality and role within the play are used to salvage Henry's image.]

Criticism of Henry V has long concentrated on two issues: the “epic” structure of the play and the moral character of Henry himself. The latter has provoked critical attacks and rebuttals of remarkable stridency since Hazlitt first raked the king in 1817.¹ Henry has been viewed as everything from a ruthless, irresponsible military adventurer to the model Christian prince.² Henry so dominates the play, and his actions are so morally ambiguous throughout, that it becomes almost impossible to discuss any thematic implication of the work without passing some sort of judgment on him. By the same token, no discussion of any other character in the play can pretend to completeness without considering that character's function as a foil to the king. In this essay I consider the personality and situation of Princess Katherine of France and how these help to illuminate aspects of Henry.

Shakespeare's inclusion of Katherine in his Henry V pageant was inevitable. His audience's anticipation of a scene depicting the king's courtship would have been too strong for Shakespeare to omit it. Katherine's attraction for the playwright's audience stems in part from her position as a direct female ancestor of their own Queen Elizabeth's. His audience furthermore would have expected her appearance after seeing her not ten years before in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, the source of much of Shakespeare's dramatic material. Finally, if the force of legend and the precedent of the Famous Victories were not enough, Shakespeare had already promised her to his audience in the epilogue of 2 Henry IV: “Our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katherine of France.” That Shakespeare should mention Katherine in the same breath as Falstaff in the advertisement for his sequel suggests how central to the Harry Monmouth legend she had become.

Despite her importance for the Elizabethans, however, the critics have generally ignored her. The reason is not far to seek. Shakespeare did not create in Katherine a character of any great profundity or power. She is an attractive girl, but her appeal is entirely and somewhat simplemindedly aesthetic, as opposed to moral or intellectual. She is no Lady Macbeth and she is hardly Rosalind. In style she is eminently French—the “sprightly, Gallic Katherine” Rose Zimbardo calls her³—although she does not share the clownish arrogance of the Dauphin and his compatriots. Larry Champion dismisses her as the “rather pallid and acquiescent Katherine, whose primary dramatic value is her difficulty in pronouncing the King's English.”⁴ Marilyn Williamson, on the other hand, notes Katherine's “healthy skepticism” in the face of Henry's flattery, and what Champion sees as acquiescence Williamson interprets as the “realistic acceptance of her role” as a political creature.⁵ To be sure, though, there is little of the grand or heroic about her. For whatever reason, Shakespeare has created in Princess Katherine practically the stereotype of an Englishman's fantasy of a French debutante.

So why has Shakespeare portrayed Katherine as a bubbly, girlish Parisienne? How does she change over the course of the play? What sort of light does she reflect back on Henry? And why, after four vigorous and heraldic plays concerning medieval politics and warfare, does Shakespeare choose to conclude his work with a scene of giddy romance more befitting the early comedies than the Wars of the Roses? In order to answer these questions and to come to some understanding of the princess, we must first consider certain themes recurrent throughout the play, particularly those dealing with sexuality and war.

Rarely has any author dwelled so insistently on the evils that befall a civilian population visited by war as Shakespeare does in Henry V. This is not a favorite theme for the chronicler of military exploits, particularly when the chronicler's hero is the leader of the invading army. We, nevertheless, find Shakespeare in this play portraying realities of such sordid ugliness that not even Tolstoy was willing to record them. It is more surprising still that Shakespeare should make Henry himself the principal mouthpiece for this mature and brutal realism. Henry's understanding of these realities is first evident in his response to the Dauphin's gift of tennis balls:

And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turned his balls to gunstones, and his soul
Shall stand sore chargèd for the wasteful vengeance
That shall fly with them; for many a thousand widows
Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands,
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;
And some are yet ungotten and unborn
That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's scorn.

(I.ii.282-89)⁶

On his arrival in France he bids the French king:

                                                            … take mercy
On the poor souls for whom this hungry war
Opens his vasty jaws; and on your head
Turning the widows' tears, the orphans' cries,
The dead men's blood, the privèd maidens' groans,
For husbands, fathers, and betrothèd lovers
That shall be swallowed in this controversy.

(II.iv.103-09)

Nor is Henry alone in his knowledge. One of Henry's soldiers, Michael Williams, powerfully expresses the meaning of war not only for the soldiers but for the civilians left behind in the homeland of the invading army.

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, “We died at such a place,” some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left.

(IV.i.127-33)

The strongest statement of this theme comes in the last act from the Duke of Burgundy, who has called Henry and the king of France together to negotiate an end to their struggle. He opens the talks with a lengthy ode to peace, which nicely counterpoints the glittering, romantic speeches of the chorus, as well as Henry's stirring military rhetoric. Burgundy describes a France, once the “best garden of the world,” now overgrown with weeds, ugly and useless from want of care, “corrupting in its own fertility.” Nor have the civilians escaped war's baleful influence:

Even so our houses and ourselves and children
Have lost, or do not learn for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country;
But grow like savages, as soldiers will,
That nothing do but meditate on blood,
To swearing and stern looks, diffused attire,
And everything that seems unnatural.

(V.ii.56-62)

These speeches provide a dark, chaotic, frightening background against which to portray any creature of such innocence and delicacy as the princess. Katherine is a kind of hothouse orchid poised before this devastated garden. This contrast provides our first clue as to Katherine's thematic function in the play. To appreciate her full significance, however, is to confront yet one more of the ugly realities of war presented in Henry V, and this perhaps the most appalling—that is, war as the occasion for massive sexual aggression; in essence, war as rape. This theme Shakespeare develops both literally and figuratively. Widespread sexual violence not only represents one of the commoner afflictions of war on a civilian populace; it comes to stand as a symbol for invasion itself.

The literal fact is announced in the gaudiest terms in Henry's speech before the walls of Harfleur. Henry, having besieged the city, now offers the citizens one last opportunity to surrender before he launches his attack. He informs them of what they have to look forward to, if he should be forced to do this.

The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fair fresh virgins and your flow'ring infants.
.....What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
.....Take pity of your town and of your people
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command,
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil, and villainy.
If not—why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters.

(III.iii.10-35)

This speech is characterized by Goddard as a “verbal orgy of blood lust” and a “picture of violence and licentiousness let loose such as would be hard to duplicate in Shakespeare.”⁷ His description is none too strong. Henry would maintain, of course, that he is merely forecasting, as it were, his soldiers' behavior if they should riot out of his control, and that no blame can attach to him for their actions. Furthermore, although Henry's penchant for dodging responsibility for his actions has long been noted, certain critics would doubtless sustain him in this.⁸ But it requires a very short memory to be taken in thus. Only minutes before, we heard Henry exhorting his soldiers to “Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood / … set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide” and “imitate the action of the tiger.” If his soldiers were to riot and rape after such a speech, it would be, in Williams's words, a “black matter for the king that led them to it.”

The theme of rape appears in a metaphorical version during the battle of Agincourt. The French nobility, bemoaning the drubbing they are receiving at Henry's hands, declare:

          … he that will not follow Bourbon now,
Let him go hence, and with his cap in hand
Like a base pander hold the chamber door
Whilst by a slave, no gentler than my dog,
His fairest daughter is contaminated.

(IV.v.13-17)

To stand idly by while the bestial English overrun fair France is no less than to abet the rape of one's own daughter. The English are compared by implication to the slave performing the “contamination”; the invasion itself, to sexual violation.

The symbolic equivalence of war and rape is established definitively by the king of France when he refers to “maiden cities,” so called because “they are girdled with maiden walls that war hath never entered” (V.i.308-09). The corollary, of course, is that cities such as Harfleur that have had their walls broached in battle are no longer “maidens”: The invasion constitutes a sort of military deflowering. The comparison is particularly suggestive when one remembers that such “deflowering” is accomplished either by cannon (“murdering basilisks”) or by battering ram. With this system of imagery in mind, Henry's cry of “unto the breach” takes on both military and sexual overtones, as do its various burlesque repetitions.

Now, none of this, to say the least, reflects well on Henry. Henry brought these men to France, knowing full well his army harbored not only many potential rapists but others already guilty of “beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury” (IV.i.153). He set them on with his “action of the tiger” speech. And he has no scruples about using the threat of general sexual assault in his negotiations with the citizens of Harfleur. It is not too much to say, then, however strong the expression may sound, that if Henry is indeed the “king of good fellows,” he is no less the king of rapists. Not only is this true in the plainest literal sense, but as I have indicated, it is true symbolically as well. Rape is a metaphor for invasion; and all the Salic Law rigmarole aside, this is emphatically Henry's war.

Where does this leave Princess Katherine? Simply as the flesh-and-blood representative of the civilian population whose suffering is throughout the play so painfully recorded. For all we hear of the miseries of the noncombatants, we see only soldiers, generals, and royalty. Katherine, though royalty herself, represents the “innocent bystanders” whose lives are darkened and destroyed by Henry's conquests. Her first appearance onstage underscores this role. Henry stands at the gates of Harfleur, indulging in his obscene rhapsody on the impaling of infants and the hot and forcing violation of virgin daughters, and then—enter Katherine! At a moment when the most militant Englishman must ache at the ravages to be visited on the French by Henry's soldiers, Shakespeare presents us with this image of Gallic femininity and childlike grace. Like a lightning rod, the girl draws to herself all our troubled concern for the citizenry of France and provides a potential concrete instance of the sordid violence Henry portrays.

The relationship between Henry and Katherine thus appears to us as that between assailant and victim, predator and prey. And here lies, I believe, the central strategic problem the playwright faces in this work: How can Shakespeare reconcile the twin roles of king of good fellows and king of rapists and have Henry emerge as the white-hatted hero he presumably intends him to be?

A clue may lie in the reported threat of the French women to “give / Their bodies to the lust of English youth / To new-store France with bastard warriors” (III.v.29-31). This suddenly sounds much less like the sordid sexual aggression of Harfleur than like mutual attraction, or even outright seduction by the women. If the erstwhile victims of the sexual assault were to become the willing partners of the aggressors, there could hardly be said to have been any aggression or violation in the first place. It is by engineering just such an arrangement that Shakespeare contrives to cast a certain legitimacy, even a certain poetry, over Henry's military cum sexual conquest. When is a rapist not a rapist? When he's a husband. In short, Katherine does her part to redeem Henry's image by apparently collaborating in his conquest of her; and Henry in part redeems himself by his oddly chivalrous treatment of the princess, once she is indisputably his prize.

Katherine's first appearance, while it establishes her credentials as the symbolic French victim, sets her at the same time on the path to becoming Henry's legitimate queen. From her first words, she is following an itinerary that can lead her only one place: to Henry's royal bed. Such a progress could well represent no more than the symbolic rape discussed above; Katherine could be merely one of the spoils of war. On the other hand, it could also represent a romance worthy of the early comedies, and Shakespeare attempts to brighten it with just such colors. While Henry is marching toward Agincourt and eventually Paris, Katherine is conducting her own campaign, if you will, toward Henry. Shakespeare indicates Katherine's progress by changes in her linguistic facility and her development as a sexual being from her first scene, in the aftermath of Harfleur, to her wooing by Henry at the end of the play.

In this section I will be examining where Katherine stands with respect to both language and sexuality at her first appearance, in the language-learning scene (III.iv). In the section following, I will examine where she has come to in each by the time of her courtship by Henry in the wooing scene (V.ii). In the final section, besides tying up a few loose ends, I will assess the effectiveness of Shakespeare's strategy in controlling our reactions to the king himself.

A thorough examination of the different dialects and speech patterns in Henry V would be a rich and interesting study in its own right—particularly because, aside from a few moldy jokes about English soldiers botching their French, there is none of this sort of thing in the Famous Victories. It is all Shakespeare's original contrivance for whatever dramatic purpose. For the present, however, we need only notice Katherine's curious ignorance of English, given the easy mastery of the language by the rest of the French aristocracy. In the Famous Victories all the French, the princess included, spoke fluent English; in Shakespeare's version, all do except the princess and her serving woman. Instead, Shakespeare goes out of his way to show us the princess learning her first handful of words in the new language, and this almost immediately after she has been offered to Henry as his bride (III.Ch.29-31). This offer, along with Henry's subsequent victory at Harfleur, establishes his momentum toward the French crown. In the light of it, Katherine's sudden urge to learn the aggressor's language seems an almost conscious design to meet him halfway.

The first stirrings of Katherine's sexual awareness are implied in certain incidents in the language-learning episode. As if it were not enough merely to show Katherine learning the aggressor's language, Shakespeare contrives (again, in the shadow of Harfleur) that she draw attention to the parts of her own body. This is, to be sure, a convenient way to stage a language-learning sequence, particularly to an audience knowing only one of the languages involved. And, as R. C. Simonini, Jr., points out, the popular language texts of the day generally began with just such material.⁹ But Shakespeare does not stop there. Before she is through, the princess stumbles over English words suggestive of French sexual terms and reacts with playfully shocked innocence and a resolute decision to press on in spite of her embarrassment. More than anything else, it is this decision to go on learning the erotically charged words that indicates her developing sexual sophistication. She is ready to begin facing her sexuality to some degree at least, and the vehicle for the change just happens to be the language of her conqueror and future husband.

Both Brownell Saloman and H. M. Richmond draw attention to this implied sexual development in their treatments of the language lesson. Saloman writes:

Even the Princess' blushing allusions to the obscene words that are the French sound-alikes of the English words foot and gown are more than instances of local humor. They are dramatic expressions of the Princess' sexual awareness, and by extension her nubility, which will have important social implications in the play's final scene.¹⁰

Richmond believes the sexual innuendo indicates Katherine's conscious anticipation of her ultimate destiny: “While she pretends disgust at the sexual association of some of the English words, this physiological awareness itself unmistakably indicates that she rightly expects, one way or another, to be exposed to the embraces of the English.”¹¹ Richmond's gently sinister phrase captures with precision Katherine's impending fate by this point in the play. She will “one way or another … be exposed to the embraces of the English.” The phrase suits her equally as a victim and as the future queen. Her “physiological awareness,” however, suggests that her reaction to such embraces may prove yet another mere pretense of disgust rather than the genuine article. Two of the effects of the erotic puns, in any case, are to modulate the ferocious sexual themes of the Harfleur speech to a gentler, more attractive key and to prepare both the princess and the audience for the meeting of the representative aggressor and victim later in the play.

This meeting takes place, of course, in the final episode of Henry V, the much debated “wooing scene.”¹² This is Shakespeare's last opportunity to present a mature mutuality in the relationship between Henry and Katherine, rather than the predator-prey relationship established in Act III. Having started Katherine on her way by incipient changes both linguistic and sexual in that act, Shakespeare now presents us with a princess far more sophisticated in both departments.

The most striking change in the princess from the first words she utters is, of course, her greatly increased facility with English. She is hardly fluent; but from struggling to remember a half-dozen simple nouns, she is now able to frame full sentences. Her first line establishes nicely her present competence in the language: “Your majesty shall mock at me. I cannot speak your England” (V.ii.101-02)—two clear, correct English sentences, however short, with the exceptions of the substitution of “England” for “English” and the textbook use of “shall” for the more idiomatic “will.”

Throughout the scene, Shakespeare represents Katherine as comprehending English more readily than she speaks it, and although she doubtless misses much of what Henry says in his long, involved digressions on his own incompetence, she follows him closely enough to know when she is being shamelessly flattered and when his double-talk threatens to obscure her position as the daughter of his enemy. When the conversation proceeds slowly and steadily, Katherine answers Henry in mixed English and French (“Your majestee ave fausse French enough to deceive de most sage demoiselle dat is en France” [V.ii.212-13]). But when something excites or alarms Katherine, such as Henry's proffered kisses, her English gives way immediately to a flood of rapid French, and her waiting woman Alice is left to pick up the conversational pieces.

Henry, for his part, moves to meet Katherine halfway from the beginning of their dialogue. His first words to the princess are a request for another “language lesson” of a sort, this time with Katherine as the instructor and Henry the student:

                    Fair Katherine, and most fair,
Will you vouchsafe to teach a soldier terms
Such as will enter at a lady's ear
And plead his love suit to her gentle heart?

(V.ii.98-101)

Despite his invitation to her to play the teacher, Katherine moves instinctively into the subservient role, the role of the conquered subject, the bested enemy suing for peace. She assumes immediately that any conversation between them must be carried on in Henry's language—although the necessity of this is far from obvious—and begs him not to laugh at her lack of fluency.

Henry's response to this is curiously two-sided. He takes for granted as unhesitatingly as Katherine that the language to be spoken between them is his, not hers. He has earned his position of power by overcoming the most difficult and dangerous of hardships, and he manifestly enjoys having the advantage of his old enemy in negotiations both political and amorous. But then, having quietly confirmed his advantage, he tactfully offers several concessions on the matter of fluency and articulateness itself. As Samuel Johnson noted, we very nearly forget in this scene that this man is Hal—Hal of the court and tavern, of Lancaster and Cheapside, master of blank verse and bawdy prose. Throughout this scene Henry insists ad nauseam on his clumsiness with words.

I' faith, Kate, my wooing is fit for thy understanding. I am glad thou canst speak no better English; for if thou couldst, thou wouldst find me such a plain king that thou wouldst think I had sold my farm to buy my crown. I know no ways to mince it in love but directly to say, “I love you.” Then, if you urge me farther than to say, “Do you in faith?” I wear out my suit.

(V.ii.122-28)

As Harbage notes in his introduction to Henry V, “Never has anyone advertised his inarticulateness with such loquacity.”¹³ Given what we know of Henry, both in this play and previous ones, this self-deprecation is absolute balderdash, and no one knows it better than he. To a certain extent, all this merely reflects Henry the actor enjoying his own performance in a role he has marked out for himself, just as he did earlier before the bishops, with the three conspirators, and while roaming incognito on the eve of Agincourt. More importantly, however, I think it can only be properly appreciated as an act of courtesy, a “condescension” in an obsolete but attractive sense of that word. He is deliberately disarming himself to meet the princess on her own level of fluency, and the success of the maneuver depends wholly on the convincing thoroughness with which he carries it out.

Henry also moves to put Katherine at ease about her English by carrying on the dialogue for a few lines in French. This, like his pretended inarticulateness, is a means to divest himself of the intimidating aura attaching to his position without compromising his position. He is not moving the dialogue in any real sense into her language, but he is making a deliberate point of revealing his insufficiency therein. Unlike his inarticulateness in English, however, his lack of fluency in French seems genuine enough. Like Katherine, he comprehends more in the foreign tongue than he can express, and any hurry or excitement sends him scurrying back into English. Indeed, Shakespeare has contrived to present the king and princess as possessed of almost identical degrees of competence in each other's language. But although Henry deliberately tips his hand with respect to French, the obliging Katherine again bids for the subservient role: “Sauf vostre honneur, le François que vous parlez, il est meilleur que l'Anglois lequel je parle.” But Henry graciously and correctly evens the balance: “No, faith, is't not, Kate. But thy speaking of my tongue, and I thine, most truly-falsely, must needs be granted to be much at one” (V.ii.184-88).

For Katherine and Henry to be “much at one,” a kind of sexual parity will have to obtain between them no less than this linguistic one. Insofar as Katherine remains immaculate, she remains the symbolic “fair fresh virgin” of Harfleur as well, and Henry stays trapped in his role of sexual aggressor. A marriage contracted and forced under these conditions would hardly satisfy either Henry or the audience. The only option left open to Shakespeare is to develop Katherine into at least a subdued version of the women willing to “give / Their bodies to the lust of English youth.” Thus, after presenting this pristine creature amid images of mass rape, prostitutes, and venereal disease, Shakespeare must now render her sexual development without compromising her refreshing purity. In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare allowed the nurse, more reminiscent of Nell Quickly than of anyone else in the present play, to forecast Juliet's sexuality, which she does with a warm, beguiling, Chaucerian bawdiness, delightful in itself, and tending to leave wholly untarnished the idealistic passion of the lovers. An erotic coloring is cast over Juliet without cheapening or coarsening her. Here the task falls to the lewd, smirking Burgundy and to Henry himself, with no such pleasing results.

Henry draws out the sexual dimension of Katherine's character in part through a species of suggestion. He makes repeated reference to the two of them as a mated couple, a sexually procreant pair, before the combined courts of France and England. “Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George, compound a boy, half French, half English?” (V.ii.200-202). Henry already imagines himself and Katherine producing heirs and moves to suggest the notion to the princess. Now Katherine is hardly in a position to repulse his advances, and yet anything short of vigorously rejecting these suggestions must inevitably be seen as avouching similar fantasies of her own.

Henry follows these lines with attempts to kiss Katherine's hands and lips. This time she does try to fend him off, by telling him it is not the custom for an unmarried couple in France. But Henry is not one to take no for an answer, and kiss her he does. Katherine's reluctance, coupled with her statement about the significance of kissing in France, makes the kiss itself seem just that much more intimate than it otherwise would have been. Katherine has again been cornered into public behavior bound to establish her in everyone's eyes as Henry's wife and lover.

Finally, however, it is the coarse bawdry between Burgundy and Henry that proclaims most bluntly Katherine's sexual potential.

BURGUNDY.
If you would conjure in her, you must make a circle; if conjure up love in her in his true likeness, he must appear naked and blind. Can you blame her then, being a maid yet rosed over with the virgin crimson of modesty, if she deny the appearance of a naked blind boy in her naked seeing self? It were, my lord, a hard condition for a maid to consign to.
HENRY.
Yet they do wink and yield, as love is blind and enforces.
BURGUNDY.
They are then excused, my lord, when they see not what they do.
HENRY.
Then, good my lord, teach your cousin to consent winking.
BURGUNDY.
I will wink on her to consent, my lord, if you will teach her to know my meaning; for maids well summered and warm kept are like flies at Bartholomew-tide, blind, though they have their eyes; and then they will endure handling which before would not abide looking on.
HENRY.
This moral ties me over to time and a hot summer; and so I shall catch the fly, your cousin, in the latter end, and she must be blind too.

(V.ii.282-301)

Here is the ultimate guarantee of Katherine's readiness for Henry's bed. The king awaits happily the “hot summer” when he can catch Katherine, the “fly,” in “the latter end.” Why is he so confident? Because, as he tells Burgundy, “love is blind and enforces”—a phrase that spookily recalls the Harfleur speech. In this case, however, the daughter, far from shrieking shrilly, will rather “wink and yield” (that is, “give her body to the lust,” and so forth). In the language-learning scene, Shakespeare intimated Katherine's erotic potential through a couple of mildly off-color puns. Here he indulges in bawdry in a much franker and cruder vein. This increase in the raunchiness of the humor reflects Katherine's advance in sexual maturity; she has become, evidently, the sort of woman about whom one says these sorts of things. Managed with even a little tact, this might have added a comic, earthy, even romantic touch to what is otherwise a rather chilly political union. As it is, however, the exchange, particularly coming from Henry, is too crass and demeaning to produce this effect.

To summarize my argument briefly: Shakespeare establishes in Henry V, both on a literal and a figurative level, a close relationship between military invasion and sexual assault. Henry figures in this equation as the veritable king of assailants and Katherine as the very princess of victims. To bring his play to a happy conclusion, Shakespeare is obliged to metamorphose this relationship from one of predator and prey to that between two mutually romantic partners. This he attempts principally through carefully managed developments in Katherine's command of Henry's language (and vice versa) and in her sexual maturation, although the latter is rather suggested than rendered. He attempts to soften a tale of military and sexual conquest with the colors and trappings of romantic comedy and ends the play, like any good Elizabethan love story, with a marriage. Rabkin explains the significance of this:

The point of the stock ending of romantic comedy is, of course, its guarantee of the future: marriage secures and reinvigorates society while promising an extension of its happiness into a generation to come. Like A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry V ends in a marriage whose blessing will transform the world.¹⁴

Just as sexual aggression has been throughout Henry V a dark symbol for the English military expedition, so the wedding between Katherine and Henry promises political concord between the two realms. In her prayer for their future happiness, the queen of France draws this parallel in no uncertain terms:

God, the best maker of all marriages,
Combine your hearts in one, your realms in one!
As man and wife, being two, are one in love,
So be there 'twixt your kingdoms such a spousal
That never may ill office, or fell jealousy,
Which troubles oft the bed of blessèd marriage,
Thrust in between the paction of these kingdoms
To make divorce of their incorporate league.

(V.ii.343-51)

I have tried to demonstrate how Shakespeare uses Katherine to control the audience's reaction to Henry himself. Shakespeare's success in this venture depends on his ability to evoke and gratify two contradictory impulses in the reader: one, aggressive lust; and two, a sort of protective, even parental, anxiety.¹⁵ To whatever degree we have vicariously enjoyed Henry's conquests, our satisfaction should be complete at the promise of Katherine's gracing the monarch's bed. Our troubled concern for Katherine's welfare, on the other hand, along with that for the French people generally, should be somewhat assuaged by the events of the final act. Katherine accepts Henry as her suitor with no great unwillingness. And Henry, having like Theseus won his love with his sword, nevertheless woos and flatters her as if all rested on her decision alone.¹⁶ From his gallantry toward Katherine, I think we are meant to infer a certain humanity and liberality in his treatment of the vanquished French as well.

But we are finally obliged to face one further question, and that is: Does it come off, this gambit? How satisfied are we by the frothy ending to this otherwise grimly realistic play? Do the comedy and romance succeed in frosting over the accounts of “heady murder, spoil, and villainy”? Rabkin, for one, does not seem won over; writing of the infamous Harfleur speech, he notes: “its sexual morbidity casts a disquieting light on the muted but unmistakable aggressiveness of [Henry's] sexual assault on Katherine in the fifth act.”¹⁷ Godshalk is even more emphatic:

While Henry gains his kiss, the thoughtful reader may well remember his harsh question to the citizens of Harfleur: “What is't to me … / If your pure maidens fall into the hand / Of hot and forcing violation?” The memory undercuts Henry's boyish exuberance in the scene. My reaction is a faint disgust.¹⁸

For myself, Shakespeare's gambit constitutes a near miss: a shrewd maneuver and a bold one, but not finally successful. There is no real pleasure for me in seeing Katherine head down the aisle with the man who can speak so glibly about blind and bloody soldiers defiling the locks of shrill-shrieking daughters. Nor does Henry's crass joking during his actual wooing of Katherine do much to endear him to me, although on the whole I must admit I find the wooing scene more charming than otherwise. Shakespeare's failure to accomplish his whitewashing may, however, reflect a more important artistic success. The courageously honest and powerful portrait of the conqueror in the earlier, grislier scenes proves too impressive for the charming but shallow conclusion ever to conceal entirely.

Notes

1. William Hazlitt, Characters in Shakespeare's Plays (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1906), p. 291.

2. The history of this controversy could fill a volume in itself. In brief, the arguments break down roughly thus: The “anti-Henryites,” on reviewing the king's actions in the play, find them intrinsically brutal, duplicitous, and destructive, however glossed over with Homeric military glamour: Henry's defenders maintain that such an assessment results from applying twentieth-century notions of morality to a sixteenth-century work, and that the villainizing of Henry is, consequently, based on a fundamental misreading of the play. The most thorough and suave attack on Henry is, to my mind, that by Harold C. Goddard in The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951); the sturdiest defense, that by John Dover Wilson in the introduction to the Cambridge edition of Henry V (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1947).

   More recently, a third position has developed between the original two. Norman Rabkin, for one, believes the moral ambiguity of the portrait of Henry is deliberate on the part of Shakespeare; see his “Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 28 (1977) 279-96. John Palmer describes Henry as essentially Shakespeare's picture of the successful political animal. In his view, Henry is neither a monster nor a hero but simply the sort of dynamic, scruple-free political technician who naturally rises to power in every era. See his Political and Comic Characters in Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1965).

3. Rose Zimbardo, “The Formalism of Henry V,” in Anne Paolucci, ed., Shakespeare Encomium (New York: City College Papers I, 1964); rpt. in Michael Quinn, Shakespeare: Henry V: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 168.

4. Larry Champion, Perspective in Shakespeare's English Histories (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 152.

5. Marilyn Williamson, “The Courtship of Katherine and the Second Tetralogy,” Criticism, 17 (1975), 331.

6. All quotations are from Alfred Harbage, The Pelican Shakespeare Henry V (Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin, 1966). Hereafter references to this work appear in parentheses in the text.

7. Goddard, p. 237.

8. W. L. Godshalk thoroughly examines Henry's penchant for dodging responsibility for his actions in “Henry V's Politics of Non-Responsibility,” Cahiers Elisabethains, 17 (1980) 11-20. For characteristic defenses of Henry at this juncture see either Wilson, p. xxvi-xxvii, or J. H. Walter, introduction to the new Arden Henry V (London: Methuen, 1954).

9. R. C. Simonini, Jr., “Language Lesson Dialogues in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 2 (1951), 322.

10. Brownell Saloman, “Thematic Contraries and the Dramaturgy of Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 31 (1980), 348.

11. H. M. Richmond, Shakespeare's Political Plays (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 177.

12. The theatrical quality of this scene (V.ii) has been as hotly debated as the moral character of the king himself. Curiously, those who admire Henry tend to despise his wooing, and vice versa. Samuel Johnson, a stout defender of the king's, declared, “The great defect of this play is the emptiness and narrowness of the last act, which a very little diligence might have easily avoided.” See Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Walter Raleigh (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1908), p. 133. Hazlitt, on the other hand, having furiously damned Henry as a vulgar military tyrant, goes on to say he likes the scene “exceedingly.” See Hazlitt, p. 291. Rabkin and Tillyard, both of whom offer at least qualified praise for the king, pan the scene. See Rabkin, p. 292, and E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961). Goddard feels the scene “is indeed delightful.” See Goddard, p. 263. “What is Pyramus? a lover, or a tyrant?” asks Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream; if the answer is “both,” perhaps it is inevitable that those who admire the one will abhor the other.

13. Alfred Harbage, introduction to the Pelican Henry V, p. 22.

14. Rabkin, p. 288.

15. Readers of Freud will recognize these as drives of the id and superego, respectively.

16. A somewhat more sinister interpretation of Henry's gallantry is offered by Williamson, who, in brief, interprets Henry's wooing of the hapless princess as representing one of several manifestations of the king's compulsive need to manipulate others into justifying his own decisions. By his pretense of passion for the princess, Henry hopes to maneuver her into playing the role of the courted lady, thereby justifying his demand of her as his wife on something other than the crassly political grounds evident to everyone.

17. Rabkin, p. 292.

18. Godshalk, p. 18.