SOURCE: Hart, Jonathan. “Shakespeare's Henry V: Towards the Problem Play.” Cahiers Élisabéthains 42 (October 1992): 17-35.

[In the following essay, Hart contends that Henry V contains many aspects found in Shakespeare’s problem plays, most notably its unstable genre, which includes elements of tragedy, comedy, and satire.]

When in the 1890s Frederick Boas first called attention to problems in some of Shakespeare's plays and laid the critical groundwork for the debate on the problem plays or problem comedies was he uncovering a division in Shakespeare's mind or representation or in the audience of the modern period?¹ C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard in England and W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in the United States debated the authority of the author's intention decades before the advent of reception theory, which argued for the importance of the role of the reader.² Possibly, the rise of irony as a critical and theoretical concept in the past two centuries has contributed to the destabilization of the text and its meaning.³ Drama complicates the complex relation between author and audience because it is a literary and theatrical text, is written and oral. The audience is singular and plural. Psychoanalytical criticism has made us more aware that literary and dramatic texts are complex interactions of the conscious and unconscious.⁴ It is difficult to understand the reader's interpretation of the text, even if it is translated into a full written response, as well as the relation of reader and auditor. To state the division between author and reader in terms familiar to the Renaissance: rhetoric is the relation between speaker and audience, writer and reader. This rhetorical relation can involve communication and persuasion, a sharing of common assumptions or a manipulation of one party by another. Rhetoric was at the centre of the education of writers like Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton and existed well before Aristotle helped codify its rules, so that its importance to poetry and criticism is as great as it is to politics and the law.⁵ Although no text can be hermetically sealed from history and is as much a product of social and historical forces as those of personality, for the purposes of exploring Henry V as leading to the problem play, this essay will assume that a dramatic text involves a representation in language and a reception that is complex and not easily reducible.

Broadly speaking, all texts represent the problems that exist between the author and audience, but problem plays draw attention to that debate as well as to the difficulties of genre, of representation itself. Whether Shakespeare was divided in his representation of the reign of Henry the Fifth, as the culmination of that of the previous divided reigns in the Second Tetralogy, or whether readers, especially in our century, are divided in their reception of the way Shakespeare represents history, patriotism, love and war, becomes a dilemma that is, perhaps, unanswerable. If we cannot reconstruct Shakespeare's intention with any certainty, we cannot dismiss Boas and his followers by saying that others before them had not seen the critical problem and thus it does not exist because to do so would be to advocate the abandonment of all fields that have been thoroughly considered such as classical and Shakespearian scholarship. Contrary to the wish of theorists like E. D. Hirsch and Terry Eagleton, that we should give up criticism for the former's authorial authority or the latter's idea of rhetoric, each generation reinterprets the past in terms of itself and the converse.⁶ Whether Shakespeare used the Chorus in Henry V as a proto-Brechtian alienation effect, so that his audience would experience its distance from the civil wars of an earlier era as well as from the stage and the history play, the Chorus does sometimes distance the present from the past, the world from the theatre. The present can only use its own language, no matter how much derived from the past, to speak about past events, as the previous sentence implies. This essay will, then, assume that the text represents signs that can be interpreted and will discuss the problems Henry V represents rather than deciding what may be undecidable: what is the cause of the problem.

Problems also occur in the earlier plays of the Second Tetralogy. If Richard II tends towards tragedy but extends that tragic fall from the individual to the state and includes the comic episode of the Aumerle conspiracy; if 1 Henry IV develops the comic communal element but also contains the germs of satiric isolation and self-criticism in the tavern parodies of Hotspur and Glendower as well as in the division between Hal and Falstaff; if 2 Henry IV represents the negative discipline, blind fallenness and increasing incommunication of satire because Hal and Falstaff meet seldom but also includes a mixture of the tragic and the comic as well as a crisis in the relation of fiction and history in the rejection of Falstaff; Henry V continues this generic friction that is characteristic of the problem play, its crisis being especially apparent in the disjunction between the comic marriage of Henry and Katherine and the tragic fall that the Epilogue describes.

In part, Henry V attempts to sum up the earlier plays of the second group of histories. It represents the problems of unity and division, offering a problematic ending to the Second Tetralogy, attempting to give its manykinded histories a unified shape.⁷ The history play is an unstable genre, partly because history is a continuum of time and therefore hard to capture within the limits of a work of art, and partly because the history play is always tending towards something else or, at least, is always incorporating other genres—such as tragedy in Richard II, comedy in 1 Henry IV and satire in 2 Henry IV. Although each of these plays contains less prominent aspects of other genres in them, it is Henry V that balances or, rather, makes the different genres collide more equally. By doing this, it pushes out the boundary of its genre in a way that many critics would agree to be a primary feature of the ‘problem play.’⁸ Critics mix the terms ‘problem comedies’ and ‘problem plays,’ admitting the difficulty of defining them, and do not always concur on which plays come under these headings. Even though some critics include Hamlet (1600-01), Antony and Cleopatra (1606-07) and Timon of Athens (1607-09), the usual ‘problem’ triad is Troilus and Cressida (1601-02), All's Well That Ends Well (1602-03) and Measure for Measure (1603-04). Shakespearian scholars recognize several other aspects—which I take to be subsidiary to pressing at the bounds of the genre—that characterize problem plays.⁹ These elements are numerous. Incongruities of generic conventions and structure, especially endings that are theatrically achieved or do not answer the ‘problems’ the play poses; the relation of appearance and actuality or reality, often illustrated through acting and disguise; an involved and intellectual language and discussion in which the debate and probing of ideas (often about the relation between sex and war or politics) are conducted apparently for their own sake; and the raising of complex problems that do not have easy answers—all contribute to the vexed enigma of the problem plays. As William Witherle Lawrence says, these plays demonstrate that “human life is too complex to be so neatly simplified” and show an anti-heroic, dark and critical side to life and to human nature in ways that perplex the audience.¹⁰ Irony has already been used to cause the audience perplexity in the earlier plays of this tetralogy by showing the black humour of tragedy and the dark sides to comedy and satire in a complex view of history. Henry V goes beyond its predecessors in this respect and is the play in the Second Tetralogy that most resembles a problem play.

Although no critic seems to have developed an interpretation of the strong elements of the problem play in Henry V, a few scholars have pointed to 1 and 2 Henry IV as containing the origins of the problem play, or at least some of its effects.¹¹ Closer inspection shows, however, that Henry V pushes much more radically at the bounds of the history play, for in this work tragedy, comedy and satire collide with one another, the language of debate appears to exist for itself or, perhaps, to emphasize the problems of the play as in the clerical debate on Henry's claim to France in I.ii or the debate between Henry and his soldiers at IV.i, the anti-heroic and heroic constantly qualify each other, the relation of sex to war is uneasy, the public and private personalities of the king seem to lack integration, the ‘tragic’ death of Falstaff, Henry's violent sexual imagery, and the satire on war (especially the objections of Bates and Williams and Burgundy's description of devastated France), all serve to modify the heroic king and his comic marriage to Katharine. Other subsidiary resemblances to the problem plays also occur in Henry V. Like Troilus and Cressida, this play shows the seamy side of war and questions the kind of heroism that had been exalted since classical times—Fluellen comically likens Pistol to Mark Antony (III.iv.15). Some problem elements in Henry V also anticipate those in All's Well That Ends Well, most notably the relation of sex to war and a theatrically achieved ending to what begins and proceeds well into the play as a tragic action. Troilus also explores sex and war whereas Measure for Measure looks at the relation of sex and government. Measure, too, has a theatrically achieved ending and although not comic, the ending of Troilus also appears unable to resolve the proceeding action with satisfaction. Like the Duke in Measure, Henry is a disguised ruler who manipulates other characters, but by doing so is brought to a more profound idea of his own responsibility.¹² The audience and critics of Henry V are as divided and perplexed over its forms and ideas as they are over similar matters in the problem plays.

The complicating irony of Henry V is compatible with its ‘problem’ elements.¹³Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV all reveal aspects of the generic friction that characterizes the problem play but it is the last play of the tetralogy where that friction reaches its highest pitch. The fall of Richard creates problems and the fall of Falstaff creates more. Other falls over the course of these plays also represent the difficulty of a human redemption of history. Multiplicity in Henry V complicates the lines between appearance and actuality, heroism and anti-heroism, conscious and unconscious motive, intention and profession, so that this play ‘ends’ the Second Tetralogy ironically by pushing the history play in the direction of the problem play, extending or bursting (depending on one's view) the bounds of the genre itself.

By inverting, reversing, contrasting and blending tragic, comic and satiric conventions and tones, Shakespeare also raises questions about the multiple, ambiguous and, therefore, ironic nature of history itself. Henry the Fifth would be the hero Richard was not but he cannot achieve unmitigated heroism. Henry's own violent thoughts and Shakespeare's ironic use of imagery and theatricality and the juxtaposition of comic marriage and tragic Epilogue modify the king's heroic part. In the end is the beginning. As in Finnegans Wake, the cycle of history begins again, ‘falls to’ again, for the informed audience knows the fate of the Henry the Fifth before Richard II begins, and if the playgoers do not, the Epilogue tells them, thereby shaping the meaning of the action of the Second Tetralogy (including Richard's fall) and looking ahead to the reign of Henry the Sixth (who falls, and after whom Richard the Third also falls), which Shakespeare had already shown on the stage in the First Tetralogy. The irony in Henry V represents the history play as problem play because it depicts the problem of writing history not only in this play but also in the Second Tetralogy (with hints back to the First Tetralogy). This irony has implications for writing and for writing history generally, for the complex relation and interpenetration of history and fiction. As in the earlier plays of the tetralogy, multiplicity in Henry V extends beyond the established limits of the genre to which each history play is most closely related—in this case the problem play—and explores the study of history and historiography as well as the nature of the history play itself. Although the problem element cannot include all the implications of Henry V, it is important for an understanding of the play. More specifically, we should turn to the ways irony of theatre, structure and words, as well as a close examination of IV.i (Henry's debate with Bates and Williams) help create the generic friction that makes this history play a problem play.

SELF-CONSCIOUS THEATRICALITY

The Chorus in Henry V elaborates self-conscious theatricality in the earlier plays of the tetralogy. He examines the relation of theatre and world, history play and history so much that he raises the audience's awareness of the problems of representing history on stage. That the main action and the Chorus qualify each other also raises questions about the relation of narrative and represented action in the history play. The Chorus to Act Three asks the audience to ‘Suppose,’ ‘Hear’ and ‘behold’ the men and scenes in his description as actually existing on stage. He challenges the playgoers to do the literally impossible so that they exercise their imaginations as fully as possible. They become part of the meaning of the play and of history. The Chorus realizes the complexity of historical shaping.¹⁴ Repetition becomes a reaching or amplification for the Chorus, who, armed with the modest accomplishment of the theatre, at the opening of Act Four, commands the audience to behold, as may unworthiness define, Henry among the troops at night, the disgrace of four or five most vile and ragged foils representing the armies at Agincourt. In addition to this distancing synecdoche, the Chorus also attempts to draw the audience into illusion through the mimetic and onomatopœic descriptions of the busy hammers of the armourers and the French playing for the English at dice. The Chorus to Act Five repeats the view that the play is unable to express actual historical events.¹⁵ The repetition draws attention to itself and stresses the problems of the history play, limiting the genre as being inferior to the world but, at the same time, raising it above the chaos of the world with strong and precise description, ordered couplets and the assumption (from the author's point of view at least) that poetry is more lasting than the memorials of princes. The Chorus also dispels the notion of a monolithic Elizabethan audience, promising to prompt ‘those that have not read the story’ and asking pardon of those who have because this play is a poor copy of life. Shakespeare displaces a conceit and humility on to his Chorus to this history: this play is more or less than its sources and than the world.

Other aspects of the irony of theatre complicate Henry V. Through a character's use of theatrical terms, Shakespeare convey's that character's awareness of ‘acting’ to an audience watching an actor playing the part. A subsidiary element in this problem play is this self-referential role-playing, so that once again the irony of theatre shows the close relation of Henry V to that kind of drama. The other histories, however, also show this characteristic, but this self-conscious sense of theatre supplements in Henry V a choric presence that is stronger than anything in the previous plays. For instance, according to Canterbury, the Black Prince play'd a tragedy for the French in battle and the Boy says that Nym and Bardolph were much more valorous than Pistol, this roaring devil i' the old play (I.ii.105-06; IV.iv.69-74). Most importantly, through the Boy, Shakespeare reminds the audience of morality plays in which the devil is beaten and makes Pistol (not just any old actor) a devil whose vice Fluellen beats out of him with a leek rather than a wooden dagger. Even if the characters refer to role-playing and to early English drama, they cannot understand the application of these references as much as the actors, audience and playwright. This dramatic irony reminds us that this history is dramatic.

Shakespeare's theatrical irony shows that deceit is another disguise, revealing with it the problems of private and public and of government. The history plays especially share this concern with Measure and to a lesser extent with All's Well. In Henry V deceit and disguise test Henry as a ruler (or potential ruler for that matter) more directly and more critically than in 1 and 2 Henry IV. Shakespeare ensures that the playgoers will appreciate the dramatic irony of the condemnation by Scroop, Cambridge and Grey of a man who insulted the king when, unknown to them, Henry knows that they want to murder him (II.ii). The king is self-consciously theatrical. In order to punish the rebels most and to achieve the greatest effect so that he may appear just when sentencing these men, Henry pretends to reward them with commissions when he hands them a list of their crimes. By way of this dramatic irony, Shakespeare links Henry with the audience and thus appears to seek its approval of the king. Deceit and disguise, such as Pistol's deceit and Henry's disguise, relate closely to each other. The ancient's great voice and seemingly ‘gallant service’ fool Fluellen until Pistol curses the Welsh captain for not intervening to prevent Bardolph's death and until Gower remembers Pistol as an arrant counterfeit rascal. Henry the Fourth had dressed counterfeits in battle to protect his life, so that kings and knaves are not always so different in their theft and deceit. According to the English captain, the ancient will pretend to be a war hero, learning his part, playing the ‘roles’ of other soldiers and describing the ‘scenes’ of the battles to be convincing (III.vi.12-82). To compare and contrast this deceit ironically with Henry the Fifth's disguise, the playwright has Henry assume a part among his soldiers before Agincourt and interweaves the incidents of the gloves and the leek. After encountering Bates and Williams, private soldiers, the king complains about the burden of the public man and the irresponsibility of the private man (IV.i). This problem of the relation of public and private lies at the heart of kingship from Richard II to Henry V. With the help of the Boy, Pistol, who did not recognize the disguised king, deceives the French soldier (as Falstaff did to Colevile in 2 Henry IV) into thinking him a great warrior. In a soliloquy the Boy exposes Pistol's empty acting to an already suspicious audience (IV.iv). If Pistol is a hollow man, is Henry? Later, Shakespeare shows Henry ‘playing’ with Williams as Fluellen does with Pistol, so that the playwright once more compares king and Welsh captain and complicates the ironic connections between characters. Henry shares the dramatic irony with the audience at the expense of Williams as well as Fluellen, who is equally ignorant (like Pistol) of the king's earlier disguise and the exchange of gloves and whom Henry asks to be a proxy in a fabricated quarrel with a friend of Alençon, which is an actual disagreement with Williams (IV.vii, viii). Shakespeare uses disguise and deceit so extensively that Henry V seems to foreshadow Measure.

Even though Henry complains about the trials of kingship, he uses his ‘directorial’ powers, like Duke Vincentio and Prospero, to arrange events and manipulate others. After Henry's good-natured fun is over and Williams and Fluellen have stopped fighting (each having the other's glove), the king rewards Williams, who claims that Henry is at fault for having disguised himself and for not having expected abuse in that guise but who then asks pardon of the king (IV.viii.1-74). It is Henry's power as king that keeps the conflict over the glove from getting out of hand. Whereas the king pretends to be less than he is, Pistol feigns that he is more. The glove gives way to the leek. The hyperbolic and out-of-fashion Fluellen punishes the boasting and antique-tongued ancient. Although Pistol likens himself to a horse-leech and is called vicious, on stage he does little to warrant the punishment he receives, except that, if the Boy is to be believed, he is a devil from the old morality plays and must be beaten.¹⁶ In any event, the Welsh captain is less merciful than the king, who, nonetheless, may not have learned as much from Williams as he might have. The taverners continue to raise questions about the nature of kingship and about Henry's dilemmas as king, but they also reveal their own limitations. Henry's tricks as an ‘actor’ and ‘director’ show that he is still enraptured by the robes of office even if he sometimes sees the shortcomings of pomp and protocol.

If, most importantly, the irony of theatre in Henry V reveals Shakespeare's problematic use of the Chorus, consciously making the audience aware of the limitations and potentialities of the theatre and history play, it also represents other subsidiary elements from the problem plays—theatrical ending, debate and disguise. Henry V often uses these aspects in ways that recall their occurrence in Richard II and 1 and 2 Henry IV as well as looking ahead to their use in the problem plays. Although the irony of theatre affirms the close relation of history and the problem play in Henry V, it also shows that comparisons that are too close are odious. For instance, the disguised Henry is much like the disguised Duke, but Vincentio is more allegorical and shadowy, more of a god out of the machine than Henry is. On the other hand, Henry must deal with a wider range of public and historical experience and his directorial side (although central to his character) is only one part of a complex character who seems to taste blood, feel desire and laugh more readily than the illusive Duke. Theatrical irony raises our awareness of the problems of the history play and so is a problem play with a difference.

STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS

The structure of Henry V is ironic and displays affinities with the problem play.¹⁷ A choric envelope modifies the heroic feats of Henry the Fifth in the main action, for the Epilogue shows that he cannot control the future as his son, born of the marriage to Katharine, lost France and then England. Shakespeare makes structural use of debates, such as the clergy's consideration of Salic law (among themselves and with Henry), the discussion between the king, Bates and Williams about the nature of warfare and of kingship; and the conversation between Henry and Katharine about love, marriage and politics. The main action ironically qualifies the patriotism, optimism and hero worship of the Chorus, and the ways in which the ‘lowlife’ scenes modify the words and deeds of Henry and his party. In other words, a friction occurs between Chorus and main action. The worlds of the captains and of the French also provide other ironic perspectives in a complex play. An investigation of the ironic relation of some scenes in Henry V to the first three plays of the tetralogy casts the eye of the audience backwards, making it an historian, enabling it to observe a modified Henry and to find that in one regard history appears as fallen as humanity, a circle more like the wheel of fortune than the circle of perfection. Henry the Fifth is more like Richard than he would like to think. People change but also stay the same and—relying too much on similarity between past, present and future—find themselves caught by and in time. Shakespeare uses references to the past structurally to create an irony that shows the many limited views of people, the collision of worlds, the forgetfulness and ignorance of characters regarding the past as they move in the unstable present into the uncertain future.

The general structure of Henry V represents an ironic reversal. The play begins with the prologue telling a tale of warlike Harry and the glory of Agincourt and ends with an Epilogue that speaks of the loss of France and the return of England to civil war. This choric envelope qualifies the rising fortunes Henry experiences in France during the main action. Although Shakespeare did not divide the play into acts and scenes, the choruses punctuate the play in such a way as to suggest that a brief examination act by act of the friction in the structure might be helpful. Each act begins with the Chorus, whose simple patriotism becomes modified by complex scenes.¹⁸ For instance, in Act One the mixed motives of the clergy about the war in France, in Act Two the dishonorable nature of the English taverners and traitors as well as Henry's possible and partial responsibility for Falstaff's death, in Act Three Henry's apparent relish in destruction, and the gentleness of Katharine (and she is French!), in Act Four Bates' and Williams' criticism of the king as well as Henry's admission of the dubious Lancastrian claim to the ‘English’ crown and of his family's mistreatment of Richard, and in Act Five the King of France's treatment of his daughter and (not in the main action but in the Epilogue) time's defeat of Henry's glory, all complicate but do not negate the patriotic view of the Chorus.

The structure of Henry V reveals aspects of the problem play but also the characters' special concern with the nature of time and history. The design of the play emphasizes an ironic treatment of problem elements—extensive debate about love, marriage and politics, an especially self-conscious tension between appearance and actuality and between the heroic and the anti-heroic, the theatrically achieved ending that does not seem to answer the play. After the Prologue's examination of the relation of history and drama, the first two scenes display a prolonged interest in debate itself. Canterbury complicates the question of how just the war is when he gives a detailed interpretation of the history of the Salic law, which shows that Henry is the rightful King of France. Through irony, Shakespeare qualifies Canterbury's position. Henry the Fourth recommended this foreign war to his son, Lancaster had predicted it, the Prologue in Henry V confirms it with patriotism, and Exeter and Westmoreland call for war, so that the clergymen are not the only war-hawks and should not be held solely responsible for the designs on France (I.ii, see 2HIV, IV.v.212f.; V.v.105-10). Debate is very important to Canterbury and Henry as a means of justifying the invasion, but the war becomes a tangle. If Henry's advisors are corrupt, the unjust war qualifies the heroic stance; if the invasion is just, Henry's inability to acknowledge that he makes, and is answerable for, the ultimate decisions of government modifies his heroism in France. Shakespeare calls Henry's judgement into question, raising the problem of measure for measure that occurs in Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV as well as in Troilus, All's Well and Measure. Although nearly identical to its representation in the problem plays, this problem has a history in the Second Tetralogy and, consequently, also becomes a problem of time and succession. On the whole, Henry V examines judgement from a more public point of view than do the problem plays. If reports of earlier actions or the earlier plays in the tetralogy, especially at the end of 2 Henry IV, provide one part of the context for Act One, the subsequent acts in Henry V and even the pretext but postscript of the First Tetralogy furnish the other part.

Acts Two through Five show a similar pattern. The problem elements in Act Two occur mostly in Nym's and Pistol's qualification of the Chorus—who praises Henry as the mirror of all Christian kings, extols England and denounces the traitors—when they are involved in verbal combat because the treacherous ancient has stolen Nym's betrothed, Mistress Quickly, who says the king has killed Falstaff's heart (II.i, iii). The king is a modified mirror. Henry's judgement of the conspirators in II.ii may be just but it is also reminiscent of his rejection of Falstaff. By bracketing Henry's judgement of the conspirators with the taverners' discussion of Falstaff's death and the king's responsibility for it, Shakespeare emphasizes the wider implications of Henry's ‘trials.’ The ironic structure of Act Three particularly emphasizes the relation of sex and war, but brings out the tension between private and public more fully than the problem plays. Troilus reduces the public to the private. All's Well and Measure look at the public domain in personal terms. Achilles sulks in his tent and would make war a personal act of revenge. Bertram escapes to the wars to leave Helena, his unwanted wife. Angelo turns government to lust and Duke Vincentio would make marriage the culmination of his experiment in justice and government. The Chorus begins Act Three by saying that Henry rejects as insufficient the French king's offer of his daughter and a few petty dukedoms. Shakespeare qualifies Henry's heroic call to his men into the breach at the opening of III.i with the savagery before Harfleur in the opening lines of III.iii where Henry once again threatens the French in violent images, likening the siege of the town to the rape of its women. What makes this verbal assault even more uneasy is the introduction of Katharine, who is innocently learning a new language (III.iv). In III.v Shakespeare further complicates the relation of men and women, private and public when he represents haughty Frenchmen, including their king, as insulting the English partly as a result of the French women thinking the French men effeminate. Act Four continues to qualify heroism, showing the complexity of war and human nature. The playwright makes the problem element a part of his representation of an historical event and, therefore, asks the audience to avoid oversimplifying history. He also uses the motif of the disguised ruler that occurs in Measure. The Chorus extols Henry for bravery, warmth and generosity, but the disguised king soon encounters the criticism of Bates and Williams, who try to make Henry responsible for the justice or injustice of the war, a responsibility that he has attempted to shirk from the opening of the play. Other problems arise. When Fluellen reports that the enemy has killed the defenceless boys, the French lose the sympathy of the audience. On the other hand, Henry has already ordered the killing of the French prisoners because they are reinforcing their scattered men, a cruel action although Gower praises him for ordering these killings as a repraisal for the slaughter of the boys (IV.vi.35-38, vii.1-11). The reason for the order is ambivalent. Even if the audience perceived the Boy's portentous words that the other boys and he will guard the luggage and that ‘the French might have a good prey of us if he knew of it,’ the playgoers only know that this event occurred and not its relation to the king's order (see IV.iv.76-80). Even though the audience probably cannot untangle this problem, it witnesses a king who may think that he has to be ruthless in defending his outnumbered army or prefers revenge to turning the other cheek. Henry's action tempers the sympathy of the audience, keeping it off-balance and focusing its attention on the king and his problems.

The problem elements that irony stresses in Act Five are appearance and actuality and a theatrically achieved ending. In a charming part of V.ii, Henry woos Katharine, so that if he seemed like a basilisk in war, he appears to be a shy lover in peace (7, 99f.). Nonetheless, the marriage is a theatrical solution, a public and political union under the guise of an entirely personal love, that cannot mend the animus between England and France.¹⁹ Henry is the actor still, for, having spoken so eloquently throughout the play, he now plays the ‘plain king,’ unless he is fluent in war and halting in love: this difference or discontinuity of roles makes it difficult to read his personality (V.ii.121-73). Amid this awkward tenderness, other ironies arise. Even an heroic king can be sadly wrong in his predictions or grimly foiled in his hopes. Henry says to Katharine: Shall not thou and I … Compound a boy, half French, half English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard? shall we not? (V.ii.216-19). This wish for a crusade is as ironic as the similar desire of Henry the Fourth. The last question—shall we not?—which is a negative acting as an intensive affirmative, provides an answer to the king's hopes: Henry and Katharine will not produce such a conqueror. Even though Henry claims modesty, he breaks custom and kisses Kate. The Epilogue reminds the audience of the fall again into ruin in the reign of Henry the Sixth, which Elizabethan playgoers have already seen on stage in the First Tetralogy.

As Henry V is like a problem play, it shows incongruities of generic conventions and structure, especially in an end that is theatrically achieved and does not respond to the problems that the play poses. The sheer amount of discussion about the legitimacy and responsibility of kingship, much of it for its own sake, threatens to frustrate the historical action of the play and the very survival of the genre itself, pushing it into new regions (the First Tetralogy and beyond) and into new problems—such as when a representation can properly end, and, if history is in part circular (for Henry V also turns back to Richard II), how it can end at all. One of the major problems of Henry V is that its ending threatens to explode the play and therefore the Second Tetralogy as a whole and also the Shakespearean history play as a genre because of this tension between centrifugal and centipetal forces. Like theatre and words, structure is a measure of time, of the diachronic and synchronic. Each author represents the problems of time in a different way.²⁰ Here, Shakespeare chooses to look at origins and ends differently, using irony of structure to represent a relation of past, present and future that strains between order and chaos.

Some of the scenes in Henry V show a close affinity to others in Richard II and 1 and 2 Henry IV, so for the audience that sees these plays in succession, the irony of the scenes in Henry V becomes more complex in light of the earlier scenes. The idea of judgement arises out of an intricate ironic pattern between different scenes in these plays, an intertextuality, and is both important to the histories in their assessment of kings, kingship, succession, order and rebellion and to the problem plays, especially in All's Well and Measure, in which human judges are shown to be so fallible, particularly in personal relations, that they compromise their public duty or office. The audience, but especially readers, directors and critics, will find another vantage from which to judge, to understand, Henry's treatment of the conspirators in II.ii if it compares his judgement with Richard's sentencing of Bolingbroke and Mowbray, with Bolingbroke's handling of Bushy, Greene, Richard, Aumerle and the conspirators, with Henry the Fourth's condemnation of Vernon and Worcester, and with Lancaster's ‘trial’ of Scroop and the rebels (RII, I.i, iii; III.i; IV.i; V.iii, v; 1HIV, V.v; 2HIV, IV.ii). The primary irony of these scenes is that a human judge may be judged as he judges others. Henry the Fifth self-righteously condemns rebels though his father was an insurgent and his brother used treachery to condemn Scroop, a relative of the man Henry vilifies most. The execution of Nym and Bardolph, petty thieves, can be viewed in relation to Bolingbroke's theft of the crown and summary execution of Bushy and Greene as well as Henry's use, then rejection, of Falstaff. Even if Fluellen's argument for military discipline were entirely convincing (and it does show merit), Henry forgets that his father's illegal actions did not meet with capital punishment. The rules of the game are ad hoc, discontinuous, and serve those who have power to enforce them. For a moment, if we assume that time is a continuum, we might judge judgement in Henry V a little differently, although it resembles the judging in earlier plays in the tetralogy as well as in the problem plays, which come after it. On these grounds of interpretation, Henry is breaking the same rules that his father did and for which he feels insecurity if not shame. He punishes others for the faults he shares with them. But discontinuity persists with continuity: the judgement in this play also differs from the problem plays because it occurs in the context of history in which it participates with Richard II and 1 and 2 Henry IV.

An ironic use of structural references to the past invites us to look at the nature of history in these plays, individually and as a group, not in the temporal isolation of a ‘pure’ problem play. In the opening scene Ely and Canterbury praise Henry's reform from a wild youth and Canterbury also refers to the titles in France that Henry derives from Edward the Third—the king's private and public histories. It becomes apparent from Canterbury's historical account of the Salic law that wars, depositions and usurpations characterize the history of France as much as of England. By telling Henry to go to the tombs of Edward the Third and the Black Prince to gain inspiration from classical times to the present, Canterbury provides moral exempla. Ironically, the Black Prince was the father of Richard, whom Henry's father had deposed, so that this reference can also remind us that Henry's claim to the English crown is tenuous, let alone to the French crown. Characters use history selectively. Gaunt had invoked the spirit of Edward the Third to shame Richard into better government (RII, II.i.104-08). Even if Canterbury invokes the glorious past of England, his motives are not clear—how much does he want to protect the church from taxation? Interpretations of history affect present actions and they can be as mythical as factual. Henry, Canterbury, Ely and Exeter debate past strategies of fighting the French and the Scots that seem to affect both Henry's decision to invade (or at least give him a rationale for it) and the manner in which he will do it (I.ii). There is a part of Henry's personal past that comes to a close: Falstaff is dead (II.iii.5). The king has forgotten the clown, for the audience never knows whether he is aware of the death as he never refers to it on stage. This is a past, if the taverners can be believed, that qualifies Henry's heroic nature. Henry, like his father and the rebels, interprets Richard's role in history as a way of coming to terms with his own part. The memory of Richard is a locus for Henry's doubt and assertion over his own authority and the idea of kingship.

The irony of structure shows the history as problem play, for the fall of England once more at the end of Henry V and the failure of the English to reach a lasting heroic age (even in fallible human terms) create a crisis in history because such an instability in human events threatens to defy or render false any principle of artistic order or any genre applied to (or perhaps imposed on) the chaos of human time. The playwright is caught between a view of his task as supplement to nature, something that fills the gap between humanity and nature after the Fall, and as a reflection or representation of the fallen world. Whatever the solution, it is symbolic because the word can never be the world. It seems, however, that history demands a representational muse because there is a tradition that the language and structure of history conform more closely to conventions of what was long called realism and because there is a supposition that historical representation relates directly to past events and an outside world. Shakespeare explores the relation between invented speeches, characters and events—the actions of Pistol, Bardolph, Williams, Fluellen—on the one hand and those taken from the chronicles, from ‘real life’—Ely, Henry the Fifth, Katharine—on the other. Through irony of structure, Shakespeare represents temporal instability and temporal patterns, shapes and unshapes history, asserts and questions the existence of history. It is the unresolved tensions between unity and dissolution, between history and fiction, heroism and scepticism that make Henry V difficult to interpret but that ultimately give the play its interest and vigour.

THE PROBLEM OF WORDS

Henry's violent images and Burgundy's description of France as a ruined garden most clearly show Henry V pressing at the bounds of the genre of the history play, for they reveal a qualification of the comic marriage at the end and modify Henry's heroism. Besides developing aspects of the problem play in Henry V, the irony of words complicates such historical patterns as the question of time, much as verbal irony has done in Richard II and the Henry IV plays. The problem and historical elements overlap.

Ironic images of war and peace best illustrate the problematic attributes of the play. The major speech that modifies Henry's gentleness in war is the threat against Harfleur (III.iii). Both in love and in war Henry uses violent images. Katharine becomes a sex object and joke about siege and rape (V.ii.309-47). Even the imagery of peace involves strife and ruin as can be observed in Burgundy's image of France as a ruined garden (V.ii.23f.). If this personal violent language spills over into Henry's public conduct of the war and makes his kingship more problematic, references to time also call attention to a crucial question for the history play: how can we best represent and recreate time?

In exploring the problem of representing history in historical drama, we shall concentrate on the views of time expressed by the Chorus and other characters in Henry V, although they share many ideas with characters in the first three plays of the tetralogy and although we shall also glance at Henry's Crispin Crispian speech. These shared problems help unite the tetralogy even if the difference in ironic emphasis and in treating problem elements also distinguishes each play. Once again, irony creates a tension between centrifugal and centripetal forces in a history play. In addition to the Chorus' conscious references to history, the views that the characters hold of the past spur them to ironically limited actions. When the Prologue asks the audience to make leaps of imagination, to turn the accomplishment of many years / Into an hour-glass: for the which supply, / Admit me Chorus to this history, he offers to act as an intermediary in presenting the history play, especially in making the audience aware of the difference between ‘historical’ and ‘dramatic’ time (PR, 30-2). For the Prologue, then, the telescoping of time is important enough to mention at the beginning, suggesting that the representation of this historical period or, more specifically, a play about this reign demands a radical selection of events and swift representation through narrative foreshortening.

The views of time reflect or refract a divided and fallen world. Shakespeare qualifies the triumph of time that the Chorus proclaims and raises questions about the nature of history. When the Chorus invites the audience to help recreate a specific time, each production creates a novel relation between the eve of Agincourt, the performances of 1599 and their references to Essex, and each new audience (IV, V: CH). The words of the Chorus take on different meanings as time passes. If the playgoers take up the invitation to use their historical imaginations, to participate, they will involve themselves in the interpretation of history (which, with past events and the author's representation, is history) and in the change of history, not as it happened but as people perceive it to have happened. The Chorus talks about other written representations of history and asks the audience, with some irony, to accept the limitations of the theatre in representing historical time (V.CH.1-9). The audience can admire the representation of Agincourt, while realizing that it is not the battle as it happened but an interpretation of it. Playgoers can extrapolate for this limitation the shortcomings of their own interpretations. Paradoxically, Shakespeare's interpretation of the reign of Henry the Fifth is for many the only or primary representation of that period even if it calls attention to its limitations. Henry V resembles the Sonnets that are aware of the desolation and constraints of time while defying time with a representation that will survive its human subjects.

Shakespeare modifies the Epilogue's praise of the glory of Henry's ‘Small time.’ The playwright helps achieve multiplicity by creating a tension between the form, rhythm and musical time of the sonnet that the Epilogue speaks with the ruin he must announce for time ahead. The sonnet is also a coda in a score that not only sings the praises of Henry but also criticizes him. Shakespeare's ironic use of time shows the problems of the genre of the history play, especially in the relation between Chorus and the main action, but, perhaps above all, reveals a common ground between the four plays by representing their shared concerns about human limitations in time.

Nor is history one-sided. For the French, unlike for Henry and Fluellen, Cressy represents the memorable shame that Edward inflicted on them at the height of his power and reminds them of Henry, Edward's descendant, who now threatens France (II.iv.53-64). Although the French king states a particular lesson of history—that the Dauphin should learn to respect the English—he later does not follow it himself and rejects Henry's ‘memorable’ pedigree that would give him the French crown (II.iv.88). Memory also fails the characters. It takes Gower a while to remember that Pistol is a bawd, a cut-purse (III.vi.61-62). Here, Shakespeare causes an “unhistorical” character to judge another like him as if to complicate history through the supposition of how things might have been. To inspire his own soldiers in the Crispin Crispian speech, Henry reminds them that although as old men they will forget other events, they will remember this great day, each man recalling his own feats with exaggeration, passing on the story of English honour to his son, who will teach his son, so that Crispin Crispian will never be forgotten until the ending of the world (IV.iii.40-66). Henry shows a subtle understanding of subjectivity, embellishment and myth-making, of the difficulty of keeping history from becoming an epic or romantic narrative, and of the advantages to his situation and to heroism that the difficulty allows. Oral history is important to Henry for reasons of self-interest, patriotism and heroism even as he understands its departure from fact and truth. For Henry, as for many of us, the truth is never plain and rarely simple. The truth of fiction and the fiction of truth interact to the very end of the tetralogy. Irony of words helps reveal the problem play in Henry V, which presses at the bounds of its genre, including from more problematic ‘images’ such as those of war and peace as well as more commonly historic ones like ‘time.’²¹

THE PROBLEMATIC CHALLENGE TO THE KING IN IV.I

This scene represents appearance and actuality, acting and disguise and a friction between heroism and anti-heroism, all of which are problematic and complicate the idea of history in Henry V. It is a scene that looks at the relation of religion and politics, which helps bind together the plays of the Second Tetralogy. For the sake of time and space, our analysis will focus on the debate that Henry has with his soldiers and with himself. The debate between Henry and Bates and Williams raises problems about the responsibility and legitimacy of the king. Henry also admits his doubts about his relation to Richard and regal succession and authority.

It is ironic that in a godlike disguise Henry finds even his humanity questioned. Disguised as a captain serving under Erpingham, Henry, who is playing yet another role, answers Bates that Erpingham should not tell ‘the king’ his despairing thought, for the monarch—and here Shakespeare wrings the dramatic irony for all its worth—is but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it doth me; the element shows to him as it doth to me. This speech of Henry's echoes Richard's musings on the “death of kings” after he learns that Bolingbroke has not only invaded the country but has also executed Bushy, Green and Wiltshire: I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends. Like Richard, Henry wants others to see the man beneath the regal ceremony (99-106, cf. RII, III.ii.171-7). It is ironic that Henry still faces the problem of the king's two bodies that Richard experienced and that he is drawn to talk about it in the same terms. In light of Bolingbroke's deposition of Richard, irony also arises when Henry expresses this tension in an image of rise and fall. The memory of Richard throughout the tetralogy affects the action and the characters' notions of kingship. Although the king's affections are higher mounted than ours, yet when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing (106-08). This description can be applied to both Henries as well as to Richard, for Bolingbroke was ‘base’ in deposing his predecessor and Henry descends from and not only maintains a stolen crown but seeks to mount a new throne in France. From a self-interested English vantage, Henry the Fifth is most successful because he helps stop civil war and exports strife to France.

The debate with Williams and Bates brings kingship and the Shakespearean history play to another crisis, for Henry the Fifth, the hero at the culmination of the Second Tetralogy, finds his judgement and policy questioned and wins a limited and not entirely convincing battle over his soldiers. In the meantime, Henry admits that a king must be an actor, hiding his fears from his men so that they will not be disheartened. His acting is political and recalls his father's dissembling more than Richard's histrionics of self-expression. Bates takes to task one of the king's favourite topics throughout the play—the difference between the inward and the outward man—saying that no matter what courage Henry ‘shows’ the world, the king wishes himself home in England (e.g. cf. V.ii). Inside and outside often interpenetrate. In another reminder of dramatic irony, Shakespeare has the disguised king speak the conscience of the king and to say that Henry would wish himself only in France. ‘Conscience’ is also an important word in the king's view of responsibility and of the inward and the outward (cf. 8, I.ii). Having shaken Henry, Bates shakes him some more. He says that the king should be fighting alone so that he might be ransomed for sure and might save the lives of innocent men, a statement that Henry answers with another intense moment of dramatic irony: methinks I could not die any where so contented as in the king's company, his cause being just and his quarrel honourable. Williams grumbles: That's more than we know. As in a dark night of the soul, Henry must reexamine his assumptions, for here are men who view war with France in an opposite way to his position or to the one he professes.

Like Richard, who plays many roles and none contented, the judge is being judged. Henry's example has not resurrected the spirits of the soldiers but has, instead, caused Williams to use the image of the Resurrection against him (135f., cf. 18-23). Whereas Henry had tried Falstaff and the conspirators, he is now on trial himself (2HIV, V.v; HV, II.ii). Whereas Bates says that, owing to the obedience of the soldiers, the king will assume the responsibility for the crime if the war is unjust, Williams describes the dismembered bodies of the soldiers in battle crying at the Day of judgement when Henry will answer if the war was wrong, for the soldiers fought as obedient subjects doing their duty whether their monarch was right or wrong. The literally dismembered body politic takes on theological as well as teleological meanings. The play and the group of history plays are also in danger of flying apart as its own unity is the multiple questioning of kingship. Interpretations clash. Human judgement and design are fallible. Playing at God is a game no human can win, but without trying to achieve a god's eye view, people, including playwrights and audiences, can slip into solipsism and lapse into incommunication. Where Henry has found a righteous crusade in Christianity, Williams finds pacificism: I am afeared there are few die well that die in battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing when blood is their argument? (143-46). Nor will the king accept this accountability although he used a similar argument to remind Canterbury that his conscience is answerable to God (cf. I.ii.14-32). It appears that Henry's response shows false logic for Williams because he does not share the same premiss as Henry, that the war in France is just. A son sent to sea on business who dies in a sinful state is not the same as a man fighting an unjust war who dies in his sins, for only when the business is criminal and unjust is the case the same. But in Henry's public thoughts the war is just, although in his private meditations he is not so sure. Even as the father is not responsible for the state of sin in which the subject dies, he is answerable for the death, if one places the problem in the context of the play and the tetralogy, which is at least in part Christian. Eschatology is at the centre of a central debate in the Shakespearean history play. The question of what is criminal and what is just is not such a simple one and to live by the logician's rule is not easy. The king does not give the voyage or the boy a bad cause or at least a cause that doubts its own justice even when it might be just and so creates a narrative that is more reflective of the complexity of the king's bodies, motives, politics and psychology. A general knows that the probability of death for his soldiers is greater in battle than in peace even if he does not ‘purpose’ their deaths. The king is evading the point. Bates had said that the monarch assumes the crime of the wrong cause and not the personal sins of the men (see 131-33). But then the king is playing a role and, like a playwright, with the part. For the sake of the unwanted discussion, (the king had wanted to walk alone unengaged in the night), Henry has played one of Erpingham's captains, and is and is not the king.²²

In this self-consciously theatrical situation, the king continues his line of argument. He says that even a king with a spotless cause in war will be fighting with some vicious soldiers, whose violent crimes Henry enumerates, including the seduction of virgins, an image (like that of rape) he appears to repeat if not relish in his unconscious if not conscious mind. Henry may be no better than the spotted soldiers in his example (cf. III.iii.20-21, 35; V.ii.318-19, 330-32, 343-47). The king continues to talk about men who have committed violent crimes, saying that if they outstrip human justice they have no wings to fly from God for whom war is a vengeance against such sinful men. The confident appeal to God characterizes the public king, even in disguise. Henry also neglects to consider the good men who perish in an unjust war or to think about the justice of his cause: he wants to have it both ways—Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own. Returning to the idea of individual ‘conscience,’ Henry argues that the soldier should prepare his soul for God because if he dies so, he gains a life in Christ, and if he lives, he has benefitted from such a spiritual exercise (135-92). If in our interpretations of this and the other plays of the tetralogy, we cannot entirely escape Tillyard and cannot neglect Shakespeare's Christian and medieval heritage as well as his increasing use of debate and discontent with genre and form that leads to the problem plays.

Williams and Bates concede the argument, but Williams continues to take exception to Henry's words. This time he does not believe that the king will be ransomed. Shakespeare plays the dramatic irony for all it is worth as Henry replies that if the king is ransomed, I will never trust his word after. He is a king and no king. Nor can Williams tolerate the pomposity of the caped soldier, scorning that ‘perilous shot’ from a pop-gun, that impotent private displeasure against a monarch, that vain peacock's feather trying to turn the sun of the king to ice with fanning. Williams seems to be getting to Henry. Although there may be some truth in what Williams says soldier to soldier, Henry appears to be taking offence as a king. When Henry expresses ‘potential’ anger, Williams says that there will be a quarrel between them, and then they exchange gages. As Henry's answers are problematic, the comic resolution of this challenge in IV.vii and viii should perplex the audience. The glove incident is resolved comically, but rather than cowering before the king, Williams appeals to decorum. The king, Williams says, came disguised as a common soldier and was answered as one. Williams did not offend the king but asks pardon still, his reward a glove full of gold crowns as well as a royal pardon. Even though the resolution shows Henry's sense of humour, power, generosity and ‘mercy’ and catches the aggressive Williams, who boasts like the French, in a dramatic irony, it does not remove the difficult problem of responsibility in war and makes the comic ending of the plot an uneasy one. Like the theological, political and military debates in the first two scenes and like the debates on military history in which Fluellen finds himself, this debate resolves itself in the English victory but with the irresolution of dissent and fallen nature.

Shakespeare now represents Henry's private considerations of the nature of kingship. After Bates and Williams exit, Henry is finally ‘alone with his thoughts,’ but they are now more disturbed than before (193-235). In a soliloquy the king speaks about the burden of kingship as Richard and Henry the Fourth had before him (RII, III.ii.155f., 2 HIV, III.i.4f.). Even though Henry had described the king as a just man speaking with Bates and Williams, he now differentiates between the king and private men, particularly fools who feel nothing but their own ‘wringing’ or pain, especially intestinal.²³ Like Richard, whom Bolingbroke soon deposes, Henry the Fifth curses ‘ceremony’ for its emptiness. Both Richard and Henry wrestle with the tension between the private and public aspects of kingship. Whereas Richard said, throw away respect, / Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty, Henry apostrophizes ceremony, recalling the nought, the O, the nothing in something that the Chorus conjures. Henry would personify his troubles and doubts and blame them, calling the inside out and censuring it for not being inside, for its alienation. He also apostrophizes the king's two bodies, Twin-born with greatness, and personifies thrice-gorgeous ceremony in a moral allegory of king and man and vilifies it for being pompous and for being a royal burden a common man does not have to endure. Henry asks ceremony, Art thou aught else but place, degree and form, / Creating awe and fear in other men? He questions the very order he has asserted. Although he also discovers the same kind of flattery Richard did, he has more might than Richard, is able to suppress rebellion and can be more concerned with the fear that power causes and how the powerful thus grow unhappy (cf. RII, IV.i.305-10). Like his father before him, Henry also apprehends the idea that Gaunt tried to teach Richard: a king has limited power because he cannot improve the health of another man (262-63, cf. RII, I.iii.226; IV.i.302f.; V.iii.78). Just as his father spoke about the cares and troubled sleep of kingship, so too does Henry (cf. 2HIV, III.i.4f.). Neither the regal clothes nor the titles nor the tide of pomp / That beats upon the high shore of this world make the king sleep as soundly as the wretched slave. The tidal imagery may reveal Henry's recognition that time waits for no man. Henry also implies that the king is like Phoebus who rises to light the world whereas the private man, like a lackey, bears no responsibility for the rise and fall of the fortunes of governments and nations. The king, a little Christ here, illuminates the world and keeps the peace for men. If, as Henry told Bates and Williams, each man must show the king duty but answer for his own soul, then no king should be over-burdened. To rise or fall, a king needs private men, so that they are more important than Henry says and suffer more than he admits in his idyll of the common man. Subjects can suffer exile, death in battle, and poverty. Although Henry inveighs against royal power, he does not mind using it to advantage with Williams, Fluellen, Katharine and the French king (see IV.vii; V.ii, iii).

In private Henry now doubts his relation to God whereas in public he proclaims his special status. After Erpingham enters, tells Henry that his nobles want to see him and leaves, the king speaks a second soliloquy in which he prays to the God of battles to keep the hearts of his men from fear and from counting the superior numbers. Henry would take from them their sense of ‘reckoning,’ which can also mean judgement, as if the soldiers would judge Henry harshly. After all Henry's echoes of Richard's thoughts, Shakespeare seems to be showing that the heroic king is losing his confidence in his special relation with God, asking God's pardon for his father's fault in acquiring the crown and telling what penance he has done for Richard. Lastly, Henry promises to do more penance he has done for Richard's death, but realizes this repenting—imploring pardon—comes after all (or ill as Taylor reads the text). Depending on the reading of the word ‘all’ or ‘ill,’ the meaning is either that the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons or that having himself done ill, Henry the Fifth's penitence is worth little. The asking of forgiveness, if deeply felt, is the first step to absolution. How sincere Henry is, we can only wonder. We may be willing to grant him his new understanding of his own limitation or ask why he waits such a long time to pray that God not punish him, Not to-day, O Lord! / O not to-day, why he is so concerned about the day of battle, why he implies that punishment is something that he can only stave off, and whether he is, like Everyman and Mankind, trying to bargain with God (231-311). This scene follows the patriotic and adulatory Chorus and precedes the French denunciations of the English, so that the context displays the ironic qualification I have been speaking about throughout. Here are different views of history modifying one another. The problem elements of disguise and debate and the historical aspects of time and interpretation are in constant and creative friction. Perhaps most of all, the collision of official and unofficial history, of private and public selves (and other roles that challenge this opposition) make us aware of how much strain persists in the genre of the history play. The idea of kingship helps relate this scene to the rest of the play and the tetralogy. Irony, here especially, creates a situation for the history play and the Second Tetralogy that mediates between unity and disunity without resolution.

.....

It would be foolish to forget the heroic aspects of Henry's character. Irony qualifies and complicates but does not undercut his personality. Henry V possesses the chief attribute of the problem play: it pushes at the boundaries of its genre, in this case of the history play. The Aumerle conspiracy especially represented comedy ab ovo in the tragic history of Richard II. The promises of Hal to redeem time at the expense of others like Falstaff and Sir John's and his parodies in 1 Henry IV, mainly a comic history, begin the satire, with its attendant isolation that predominates in 2 Henry IV. In Part Two the rejection of Falstaff stresses the problems of kingship that Richard's fall began and looks forward to the problem play in Henry V. Although in the last play of the Second Tetralogy different types of irony reveal many of the same problems, irony of structure stresses the tension between the Chorus that praises heroism and the main action that is partly anti-heroic; irony of theatre particularly calls attention to Henry's uses of disguise and acting and to the Chorus' emphasis on the problems of writing and viewing a history play; irony of words uniquely uncovers the images of war and peace that modify Henry's heroic character, a heroism that has been amply documented by Tillyard and others; the examination of IV.i looks at the combination of these ironies and especially the problematic debate between Henry, Bates and Williams. These kinds of irony, as well as the analysis of the representative scene, reveal common subjects among the four plays, such as kingship (right, responsibility and succession) that help mould these plays into a tetralogy. Paradoxically, the problems of the history play serve not only to perplex the audience and induce a crisis in understanding history, but also to unite the plays in a coherent pattern. Apparently, the tetralogy and the history play represent diversity in unity and unity in diversity. Henry V is the most self-critical and self-reflexive of Shakespeare's histories.

Notes

1. Frederick Boas, Shakspere and his Predecessors (New York: Scribners, 1899), p. 345.

2. C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy, cited in W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 1015; see Wimsatt's and Beardsley's view, pp. 1015-22. For reader response theory, see, for instance, Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973) and Reader-Response Theory, ed. Jane Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980). For discussions of the relation of theatre audience and reader, see Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), esp. pp. 208-10 and Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984), pp. 454-515. Carlson calls attention to many relevant works on this relation such as the following special issues: Études littéraires 13:3 (1980) and Poetics Today (1981).

3. See, for example, J. A. K. Thomson, Irony: An Historical Introduction (London: Allen & Unwin, 1926); D. C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969); Lilian Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984).

4. See B. A. Farrell, The Standing of Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981) and Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (London: Methuen, 1984).

5. See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1944); Alexander Sackton, Rhetoric as a Dramatic Language in Ben Jonson (New York: Columbia UP, 1948); Donald Clark, John Milton at St. Paul's School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New York, 1948).

6. E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale UP, 1967) and Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), esp. 194-217.

7. Although I find Norman Rabkin's view provocative, I think that Henry V is a both/and play rather than an either/or play. Richard Levin's views also contribute to the debate but he thinks of irony too much as undercutting. Unlike Levin, I would say that William W. Lloyd's view of irony (1856) is ironic. See Rabkin's, “Rabbits, Ducks and Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 28 (1977), 279-96 and his “Either/Or: responding to Henry V,” in Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981), pp. 33-62. See Levin's New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977), esp. pp. 4-5, 90-142 and his “Hazlitt on Henry V, And the Appropriation of Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 (1984), esp. 138. For other views, see John Jump, “Shakespeare and History,” Critical Quarterly, 17 (1953), 233-44; Zdenek Stribrny, “Henry V and History,” in Shakespeare in a Changing World, Essays on His Times and His Plays, ed. A. Kettle (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1964), pp. 84-101; Pierre Sahel, “Henry V, Roi Idéal?” Études Anglaises, 28 (1975), 1-4; Gordon R. Smith, “Shakespeare's Henry V: Another Part of the Critical Forest,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (1976), 3-26; E. W. Ives, “Shakespeare and History: Divergencies and Agreements,” Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985), 19-37; Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “History and ideology: the instance of Henry V,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. J. Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 206-27; Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance authority and its subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” in Political Shakespeare, ed. J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985), pp. 18-47. All citations and quotations from the primary texts will be from the New Arden Shakespeare.

8. William W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (1931; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 24; Peter Ure, William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays (London: Longmans & Green, 1961), pp. 7-8; R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays: From Satire to Celebration (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 61; Richard P. Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley: U of California P, 1981), pp. 1-2; Northrop Frye, The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1983), pp. 8, 61-63.

9. In addition to these problems of structure and genre, critics have often stated the difficulty of defining a problem play or problem comedy. For instance, see E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1949), p. 1; Ure, Problem Plays, p. 7; Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare: A Study of Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure and Antony and Cleopatra (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. ix, 5-6.

10. For the incongruities of structure, see the references listed in note 8. For the relation of appearance and actuality, see A. P. Rossiter, “The Problem Plays,” in Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. G. Storey (London: Longmans, 1961), pp. 117-20; Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare and the Reason: A Study of the Tragedies and Problem Plays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 73; Frye, Deliverance, p. 63. For the difficult language of these plays, see Ure, Problem Plays, p. 8; Foakes, pp. 61-62; Frye, Deliverance, p. 63. For views of the complexity of the problem plays and their effect on the audience, see Lawrence, pp. 21-22; see also Boas, p. 345; Rossiter, p. 128; Schanzer, p. 5; Wheeler, pp. 1-2. The critics of the problem plays have mentioned the anti-heroic, brooding and dissatisfied nature of these plays. See Kenneth Muir and Stanley Wells, eds. Aspects of Shakespeare's “Problem Plays” (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982).

11. Lawrence, p. 28; Tillyard, p. 6; Rossiter, pp. 124, 128; Frye, Deliverance, pp. 70-72.

12. Tillyard (Problem, pp. 6-7) thinks that two common attributes of the problem play are: a young man gets a shock and the shock or “business that most promotes the process of growth is transacted at night.” The young king, Henry the Fifth, gets such a shock at night when he debates with Williams and Bates.

13. Rossiter, who elsewhere views Henry V as a propaganda play, almost equates ambivalence in the history plays with the definition of the problem play; see Rossiter, “The Problem Plays,” pp. 126-28. Frye thinks that Troilus stresses a fallen world and fails to deliver its audience from it and connects the division and the collision of different worlds in the Henry IV plays, Troilus and Antony; Frye, Deliverance, p. 72; see Hawkes, Reason, p. 73.

14. The complexity of Shakespeare's history plays can be seen in the diverse response to them in detailed discussions from Thomas Courtenay's Commentaries on the Historical Plays of Shakespeare (1840; New York: AMS P, 1972) through E. M. W. Tillyard's Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944) to Graham Holderness' Shakespeare's History (New York: St. Martin's P, 1985).

15. For an examination of temporal crisis, see, for instance, John W. Blanpied, Time and the Artist in Shakespeare's English Histories (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1983).

16. Fluellen exposes Pistol as a “counterfeit”: V.i.69, cf. III.vi.61.

17. For another view, see Brownwell Solomon, “Thematic Contraries and the Dramaturgy of Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 31 (1980), 343-56. For an analysis of satire in the play, see Allan Gilbert, “Patriotism and Satire in Henry V,” in Studies in Shakespeare, eds. Arthur D. Matthews and C. M. Emery (1953; New York: AMS P, 1971), pp. 40-64.

18. For act and scene division, see J. H. Walter, Introduction, King Henry V (London: Methuen, 1954, rpt. 1977), p. xxxv. For other views of the Chorus, see Anne Barton, “The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History,” in The Triple Bond, ed. Joseph G. Price (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1975), p. 92; G. P. Jones, “Henry V: The Chorus and the Audience,” Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978), 93-105; Lawrence Danson, “Henry V: King, Chorus, and Critics,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983) esp. 27-33. For a more general article, see Jean-Marie Maguin, “Shakespeare's Structural Craft and Dramatic Technique in Henry V,” Cahiers Elisabéthains, 7 (1975), 51-67.

19. Laurence Olivier's film captures the theatricality of the courtship and plans for marriage by drawing the scene back from the “fields of France” to the stage. For Olivier's consciously patriotic interpretation, see his “Henry V,” in On Acting (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 90-105.

20. For more general views on time and ending in fiction, see Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford UP, 1967), esp. pp. 76-89 and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968). For a different view of parts of the structure, see Marilyn Williamson, “The Episode with Williams in Henry V,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 9 (1969), 275-82 and her “The Courtship of Katherine and the Second Tetralogy,” Criticism, 17 (1975), 326-34.

21. For the first systematic ironic reading of the language of this play, see Gerald Gould, “A New Reading of Henry V,” English Review 29 (1919), 42-55. See also C. H. Hobday, “Imagery and Irony in ‘Henry V’”, Shakespeare Survey 21 (1968), 107-13.

22. Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1982), p. 208.

23. Taylor, p. 217; Walter, p. 102.