SOURCE: Corum, Richard. “Henry's Desires.” In Premodern Sexualities, edited by Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, pp. 71-97. New York: Routledge, 1996.

[In the following essay, Corum offers a “homosocial” reading of Henry's character in Henry V, analyzing phallic desire as a motivating force in the play.]

… not the physical past whose existence is abolished, nor the epic past as it has become perfected in the work of memory, nor the historic past in which man finds the guarantor of his future, but the past which reveals itself reversed in repetition.

—Jacques Lacan

Let me begin with a brief account of the materials on one's desk when one sits down to work on Shakespeare's The Life of King Henry the Fifth. First, the figure Henry. Too visible after the fact, and altogether unrecoverable as a fact, Henry, “like himself,” is by 1415 already a legendary figure inherently vulnerable and inescapably defensive, a vanishing point in the real not to be separated from the imaginary/symbolic orders which constructed him nor to be untangled from those imaginary and symbolic orders which unfold from him.¹ Then, the various pre-Shakespearean, post-Henrician textualizations of this figure: chronicle histories, earlier plays, poems.² Despite destabilizing genealogical differences, these texts construct Henry as a miraculously reformed Prince “applyed … unto all vyce and insolency [who became] a majestie … that both lived & died a paterne in prince-hood, a lode-starre in honour, and mirrour of magnificence.” As an object of government control, censorship, containment, Henry's life is a site for the production of an official history that registers and adjudicates competing points of view in order to speak with “full mouth” of the figure it holds up as a “paterne” for, and of, those who wield power.³ In the face of this official historiographical project, another group of representations/valuations comes quickly to mind: those dissenting knowledges and voices that this official, totalizing, and territorializing narrative of perfection was constructed to make illegitimate and inaudible; subversive points of view and antithetical judgments of Henry, that is, which, despite state power “descending to the most recalcitrant fibers of society,” have nevertheless been to a degree recovered—“nomadic” valuations (to use Deleuze and Guattari's term) which neither idealize Henry, nor praise him (Foucault 1982, 795; Deleuze and Guattari 1987).⁴

When we place Shakespeare's play(s)—three quartos and a folio; Globe and Jacobean Court performances—in the context of this official history/unofficial histories binary, we realize that for a common actor-playwright to write and produce, not just a life, but The Life of King Henry the Fifth in early modern England was a risky undertaking to the extent that his Life did not reproduce the official version. So it is (and long has been) of considerable interest, reading the folio and the sources, to see that although the play gives us the official life, it also supplements this life with extensive additions, changes and omissions. What can be said with complete confidence about this Folio text is that there is nothing in it (given the dangers, there could be nothing in it) that can conclusively prove that Shakespeare was not wholly committed to the official version of Henry's life, and much to suggest that he was. On the other hand, there is also nothing in this text which conclusively proves that Shakespeare was committed to this official version, and much to suggest that he was not. If in dramatizing the official version Shakespeare added a parallel, unofficial and destabilizing version/valuation of Henry's life and actions, this version, by the logic of censorship, would have had to be officially invisible, however unofficially accessible.⁵

When we turn to the extensive critical/performative materials surrounding Shakespeare's play, it is not surprising to discover that, apart from those who found the play a disappointment, critics and producers have been sharply divided into three principal groups: first, those who read the sources, the stage tradition and the play, and see no significant difference between the official Henry and Shakespeare's Henry except that the latter serves the state as a more powerful ideological vehicle than the chronicles or the earlier dramatizations; second, those who read the sources and the play and perceive a profound difference between the official representation of Henry as ideal and the play's ironic rerepresentation of Henry as a manipulative, conscienceless autocrat who masked his will to power and consequent predations under a carefully constructed “godlie” image. For this group, Shakespeare's semiotic excess, voicing subversive knowledge and transgressive values, radically negates the official version of Henry's sovereign ideality which of necessity it must also articulate. Thus Shakespeare stands, not as a self-effacing handmaid of the state, but as a powerfully articulate subversive who brought text/performance critically to bear against a dominant formation of power, its construction of identity and subjectivity, its apparatuses of representation and dissemination, its appropriations of theatre and so on. In brief, a second Henry, a second Shakespeare and a second logic: not the official logic of sovereign ideality supplemented by Shakespeare's dramatic genius, but an unofficial, deconstructive logic of Shakespearean supplementarity identifying a fissure between dominant myth and historical fact.⁶ Finally, there are those who argue, in an attempt to mediate this longstanding controversy, that Shakespeare's text gives us both an eagle Henry and a hyena Henry because, as Kantorowicz argued, kings have two bodies (1957). The text, Norman Rabkin asserted, is indeterminate, and although there are those who will insist on determining it one way or another, the wiser critic will step back and see that the play gives both views of Henry in tension, and that Shakespeare's text, far from taking one or the other side of this difference, is caught up, as Shakespeare and his culture were caught up, in what Anthony Brennan and Graham Bradshaw term the “complex multiplicity” of sovereignty itself.⁷

What general observation can we make about this controversy, and what role can we say postmodern theory, particularly queer theory, plays when it enters the space of this debate? The Henry V controversy has not been primarily about Shakespeare's Henry. Instead Henry has long functioned as a particularly charged archaeological site where English-speaking cultures have recorded, layer upon layer, their deeply contestatory attitudes towards one or another manifestation of masculine aggressive sovereignty. As Rabkin (1981) implicitly understood, the controversy has always had a powerful displacement effect. When Henry ceased being useful as an object for Tudor and pre-Tudor discussions of monarchical sovereignty itself, he became a site for discussions of the value of human (as opposed to divine) monarchical sovereignty in a Protestant state; then, with the decline of monarchy, the value of bourgeois England's nationalistic opportunisms in, and imperial aggressions against a radically expanding Third World; and, more recently, after the partial decline of two English-speaking empires, the value of masculine authority in a variety of domestic spheres, particularly, on this side of the Atlantic, patriarchal institutions (Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the family, marriage) and professions, including, of course, the profession of English itself.⁸ From 1415 to the present, the debate about Henry has been a debate about the value of various forms of masculine sovereignty and has been fueled in part by the need to enlist the foremost literary genius of the culture on one or the other side of one of the most important issues of the last several hundred years: absolute patriarchal sovereignty and its monopolizations of identity, rule, aggressivity, logic, and representationality.

When postmodern theorists entered this deeply layered and massively contested field, they did so, in the main, to further destabilize dominant masculine sovereignties as well as the subjectivities and memory constructs (the “histories”) such dominance has produced. Postmodern theorists engaged in this analytical/deconstructive enterprise work to prevent the return of such sovereignties and their sociopolitical consequences, and to understand and represent (as well as legislate against) the culture's long attraction to, its dependencies on, its identifications with, and its endless imitations of patrilogosovereignties. One could say, in brief, that postmodern theories are the most recent powerfully articulate return of those intellectual/cultural activities that absolute patriarchal sovereignties have long repressed. Thus, whereas among other things, new historicists and cultural materialists decenter “Shakespeare” as an effect of cultural appropriation in order to reposition a rehistoricized Shakespeare on the subversive/transgressive margins of Elizabethan/Jacobean culture, and whereas deconstructionists and feminists decenter Henry as an effect of essentialist and misogynistic cultural formations, queer and psychoanalytic theorists decenter Henry as an effect of desire and the unconscious, political or otherwise.⁹

As a general theorization of sexuality and the cultural production and use of sexualities, queer theory makes visible the private parts, so to speak, of the language that constitutes a textual/theatrical phenomenon like Henry V. Queer theory interrogates Henry's, Shakespeare's, critics', directors', editors', and audiences' sexualities—their libidinal, erotic investments, their desires and pleasures—as a function of their knowledge/power/unconscious and its production of actions, texts, performances, critical representations, cultural constructions, and pedagogical interventions. For example, Jonathan Goldberg's “Desiring Hal” section of Sodometries addresses (among numerous other issues) a question raised a century and a half ago by Hazlitt: “How then do we like [Ha]?”¹⁰ Working from the rich resources of postmodern queer theory (particularly the work of Foucault, Bray, and Sedgwick) as well as alongside Lacan's mirror stage and aggressivity papers, Goldberg's answer is that those critics and audiences who like Hal do so (to put a complex argument very briefly) because they desire Hal, identify with him, and construct themselves after his “paterne” in order to manifest his ideal Christian, heterosexual image while acting out the homophobic, misogynistic repressions this image necessitates and disguises. That is, dazzled by an “imaginary … identification” with Henry “that founds the ego in its desire for sovereignty,” those who endorse Hal “as the very locus of [their] identity” do so to be Hal, and to blind themselves, as Hal does, to the homonarcissistic foundations of this identification (Goldberg 1992, 147).

In this paper, queer theory is again brought to bear on Henry V, but the question I address concerns Henry's desires as these desires are articulated by the language of the play. My argument assumes that Shakespeare's theatrical resources are not limited to an official historicization of Henry's life and actions as a public figure; rather, Henry V is seen as a particularly brilliant historicization of a subjectivity whose “deep truth” (to use Foucault's phrase) is its sexuality.¹¹

To plot the actions by which Henry traverses homosocial space is not to repeat the history Henry V is ostensibly telling us; rather, it is to articulate an alternative history that Shakespeare's text is showing us. This unofficial history (to borrow a sentence from Harry Berger, Jr.'s discussion of Lear) is not the history Henry prefers to hear about himself, but an account of his life, as I read it, “which strikes closer to home and which [Henry] would find harder to bear,” though how hard will not become fully clear until the third section of this paper (Erickson and Kahn 1985, 210-29).¹²

Having lingered outside homosocial space (as we know from 2 Henry IV, if not from the chronicles) as an associate of prostitutes, thieves and a dissolute, ex-homosocial man, Falstaff, in whose company he has been addicted “to courses vain,” Henry has lost phallic stature except in name.¹³ In this exterior space he has become, in effect, penile, and, content to be little more than penile, he has enjoyed the sodomitical pleasures afforded by the penis.¹⁴ Thus his position at the death of his father (that is, at the end of 2 Henry IV) is a precarious one. Neither his homosocial God—the Phallus—nor his homosocial lords can be pleased with his performance, though his defeat of Hotspur at Shrewsbury (in 2 Henry IV) proved an exception to his dissoluteness. Thus, at the beginning of Henry V, most of Henry's lords do not respect or fear him. Probably none of them love him, and several love his cousin, Mortimer, a man who has a better claim to the throne than Henry. No doubt others also desire to take his place. In this position Henry has options. He can stay “outside” and die, since if he does not come in, one of his cousins—Mortimer, Cambridge or York—will take his place and he will be too dangerous to be allowed to live. Or he can “come in.” But because there are doubts (“Can I/he possibly be/come phallic?”), and because there are desires (“I/he can be/come phallic”), Henry must quickly and thoroughly phallicize himself if he is to survive and rule.

How does Henry do this? First, at the end of 2 Henry IV, he reestablishes homosocial space by re-drawing its boundary with “himself” inside. In Holinshed's account, he banishes his “misrulie mates of dissolute order and life … from his presence … inhibiting them upon a great paine, not once to approoch, lodge, or sojourne within ten miles of his court or presence” (280). For Henry to have brought any of these sodomitical outsiders inside would have violated a fundamental rule of homosocial space and would have destroyed him as surely as such behavior destroyed Edward II and Richard II.

Once back inside (and prior to the beginning of Henry V), Henry labors to purge himself of his penile habits, desires, pastimes, vices. To quote Canterbury's account of this “mortification,” this “scouring [of] faults,” we are to understand that:

Consideration like an angel came
And whipped th'offending Adam out of him,
Leaving his body as a paradise
T'envelop and contain celestial spirits

(1: 2, 28-31)

Rather than an “offending” sodomitical vessel containing mortal spirits (sperm/alcohol/money), Henry's body, given a clean new mythic interiority, is reimagined as an Edenic “paradise,” a granary, to be filled only with celestial, phallic seed.

Thus, having emptied himself of “th'offending Adam,” Henry must now fill his paradisical body with celestial spirits, and he must prove to his homosocial God that it is so filled, so that this God will embrace, love, empower, and protect him. Of the available technologies for interiorizing the phallus—cannibalism, necrophagy, positive and negative predation, inheritance, self-sacramentalization, education—it seems, from Ely's account (1:1, 38ff.), that Henry's first attempt is to fill himself with knowledge.¹⁵ This gives him some phallic status (“when he speaks, / The air, a chartered libertine, is still, / And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears / To steal his sweet and honeyed sentences”), but not enough to suffice. In 2 Henry IV Henry had also turned to positive predation, trading some of his dark, wet, penile stains for Hotspur's hot and dry phallic fame and glory; but clearly, only limited resources of this sort are available to him in England. Nor is reliance on his inheritance a sure solution, since his father was a usurper and a murderer, and one of his cousins has a better claim to his throne than he does. Given these obstacles, Henry must go to war. Aggressivity, in the ancient form of trial by combat/trial by ordeal, is the only viable way Henry can weed out his rivals, regain his legacy in France, and achieve phallic dominance.

Henry's next problem is how he is going to persuade his lords to follow him into battle. It does not seem likely that homosocial men will be eager to wage war under the direction of a young man who has been lingering outside, who lacks the phallus, and whom, as a consequence, they cannot fear, respect or love. Clearly, Henry will have to manipulate them into making him wage war. But how will he do this? From what the first two scenes of the play give us, we can infer (if we have not been blinded by official representations of Henry as ideal, “godlie” sovereign) that before the action of the play begins, Henry has sent ambassadors to France insultingly and arrogantly demanding his properties there, and that he has also reintroduced a bill from his father's reign, which, if passed, would empty half of the church's coffers and massively reduce its power and influence. With this threat in his hands, we can also infer that Henry then lets it be known to Canterbury that if he does not produce a compelling argument to accomplish Henry's desire, Henry will prosecute this bill. Henry waits to convene council until the French reply to his demand is in his anteroom. Then, in council (as the second scene of Henry V documents), Henry, presenting himself as a pious young king facing a difficult crisis, first humbly and dutifully seeks the advice of his spiritual lord by asking Canterbury, on the life of Canterbury's soul, what he should do about the French matter, as if this matter had just come to his attention, and then summons the French ambassadors so his temporal lords may hear their reply, knowing that the insults and arrogance he sent to France will have provoked sufficient insults and arrogance in turn to provoke his temporal lords. In response to the urgings of these lords, Henry declares his intention of going to war if his property in France is not returned immediately, a demand he knows will be refused. Thus, although Henry seems to follow textbook protocol (faced with a difficult problem, a young king requests, listens to, and accepts sage advice), Henry is in fact manipulating his lords into creating the political fiction and the war it entails that he needs if he is to phallicize himself.

Having declared war, Henry must figure out how to win it, and the solution he adopts is (to use Lacan's phrase) to make his desire the desire of the phallic Other, by constructing the war he is about to wage not as his war, but as his God's war. And since this intolerant phallic God wants a pure and unified homosocial England, one with an unstained, phallic identity (just as he wants Henry to have a pure, unstained, phallic identity), Henry will use war as a way of doing to England and France what he is doing to himself. As God's angel, Henry will whip “th'offending Adam” out of the body of England (a body symbolized by his army), making England a “paradise / T'envelop and contain celestial spirits.” He will also use war to whip “th'offending Adam” out of England's other “garden,” France, making it, too, a paradise to envelop and contain his celestial spirit.

Who are these offending Adams whom Henry must whip out if he is to rewrite England as a perfect homosocial paradise? Needless to say, they are the French, who wrongfully penetrated and sodomitically fill what was once England's “paradise” with thousands of offending, penile Adams, and, among these thousands, most particularly a Dauphin who loves, who writes sodomitical verses to, a horse that is his “mistress” (3:7, 42). Needless to say, too, they are also the Eastcheap occupants: Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, Nym and Mistress Quickly, those very uncelestial spirits fouling the interiority of England. And, among others, they are Cambridge, Scroop, and Gray, traitors to Henry and to homosociality itself.

If in personal terms, then, war allows Henry to invert his status as sodomitical object of homosocial law into scouring agent of such law, and if in narrative terms the plot of the play is Henry be(com)ing the chosen, only begotten, phallic son whose homosocial identity is no longer obnubliated by any sodomitical stain whatsoever, the other plot of this play is the construction of England as a pure homosocial space. The objective of Henry's weeding, pruning, limbing, lancing, and burning is not to steal or destroy France, but to create for England a national homosocial identity, and thus the kind of unity, purity, maturity, and completeness which will enable Henry and England not only to be “the mirror of all Christian kings” and all Christian states, but also to be the mirror in which Henry's God will see nothing but his own “ideal image.” The objective here is not just that Henry, having rid his God's England of penile, sodomitical difference, will surely be chosen and blessed by this God; it is also that Henry's kingship will be a sacrificial ritual of purification: those homosocial men who survive Agincourt will have proved themselves to be the celestial spirits who alone will be enveloped and contained by the English paradise Henry's God is creating through the instrumentality of Henry's acts. And this is the tableau we witness at the play's end: a happy band of celestial brothers occupying a homosocial Christian paradise, with Henry the most celestial, the most phallic, the most homosocial, standing on top of an enormous pile of dead sodomites who had to be pruned from the sacred tree in order for Henry and England to blossom. In short, Henry “like himself” is one of the chief architects, if not the chief architect, of that reactionary rise of intolerance which radically reshaped English homosociality in early modern England.¹⁶

We are now in a position to analyze specific aspects of Henry's reactionary homosocialization and homonationalization of himself and England as these are illuminated by the play. Of the numerous scenes, episodes and passages about which questions have been asked and answers given, there is space here to look at only three: why Henry takes only one quarter of his army to France, why he orders his soldiers to kill their prisoners at Agincourt, and why he hangs Bardolph. These scenes are important to address because they typify the textual detail which tends to be ignored or simplified in modernist discussions and productions of this play, erasures that have the effect of deleting Henry's subjectivity/sexuality from the play's historiographical project.

The official explanation for the first of these is that Henry must leave three quarters of his army in England to deal with the unruly Scots: “We must not only arm t'invade the French, / But lay down our proportions to defend / Against the Scot …” (1: 2, 136-37). The way “proportion” is argued in council makes it seem that Henry is doing what he can under the circumstances: he would take a larger proportion if he could. From the perspective of homosociality, however, we realize that Henry's purpose for taking only one quarter of his army is that Henry chooses to reduce the size of his army, despite the fact that if a military leader is facing two opponents one of which is three times larger than the other, he ought to put one quarter against the lesser threat, Scotland, the rest against the greater, France, other things being equal. Henry, a man schooled in military strategy, knows this, yet he does exactly the opposite. What, then, is Henry's strategy, if this action seems calculated to lose the very war he must win? The answer is that the war Henry must win is not the war we see him fighting on the ground. Henry has to find out if and prove that his God is on his side, and the only way he knows to do this—the only way he knows to make his God reveal his choice—is to make his English army so small that it cannot possibly win without his God's blessing and help. In short, Henry takes one quarter of his army to effect a religious miracle. If he wins with an army too small to have a chance of winning in its own right, he will know beyond doubt that his God has forgiven him. War is his God's instrument of judgment, and Henry is determined to prove himself “straight” in its crucible: “be he ne'er so vile [Agincourt] shall gentle his condition” (4:3, 62-63). Knowing that “the man whose mind is backward” will perish in war (4:3, 72), Henry has good reason to insist that the victory at Agincourt is “none but [God's]”: “be it death proclaimed through our host / To boast of this [victory], or take that praise from God / Which is his only” (4:8, 109-111). A victory that is not God's would be useless to him because it would not prove what Henry must prove, namely, that he is no longer a sodomite. Agincourt, that is, is Henry's way of writing himself as exemplary, and France is the fatted calf Henry's God slaughters to honor his rephallicized prodigal.

Of course, there is also a practical, manipulative side to this matter of proportions. What Henry needs to produce is a victory he can retroactively represent as (and, to the extent he can dominate representation, will be read as) a divine blessing/gift. So Henry studies history, not the myths of England's legendary past, but the practical military history of numbers, positions, probabilities: how Edward III won at Crécy. So Henry learns exactly how many men he will need, exactly where to put his archers, exactly how far his lines will have to be from the French (and how muddy it will have to be) to slow the French advance to an exhausted crawl, and exactly how much to reduce his own army to get it stuck in just a tight enough corner to insure that his soldiers will fight in phallic fashion or die. But this manipulative aspect of Henry's behavior should come as no surprise. Henry at war, like Henry in the council scene, is staging a theatrical show, The Miracle of Agincourt. Playwright, producer, set designer, chief actor—what role is Henry not performing? And although the “new man” whom this victorious war produces has seemed to many to be a complete transformation of Henry's prodigal adolescence into solid Christian/homosocial maturity, it is necessary to recognize that this war, this victory, this new man are no less theatrical productions than the prodigal Hal we saw in Eastcheap, except that here Henry, not Falstaff, is writing the script, and that here the script Henry writes is a homosocial masque, not the antihomosocial antimasque Falstaff wrote in the past. To set aside childish things for adult things is, for Henry, setting aside apprenticeship in one kind of transgressive theatricality for a sovereign appropriation of theatricality itself. And though the official view is that this appropriation produces a noble, mature, complete Henry as Henry's aggressive, manipulative performance plays itself out in the real, it would be more accurate to say that Henry assumes (and has been contained by) the despotic structure of power that he and Falstaff had previously mimically subverted.

Critics have long been troubled by Henry's reasons for ordering his soldiers to cut their prisoners' throats.¹⁷ The official version, worked out in the chronicles and in modernist criticism/performances against doubts about the morality of such an action, is that Henry gives this order either because a fresh attack by the French would overwhelm an English army heavily burdened with prisoners, or because Henry's rage requires revenge for the slaughter of his baggage boys. From a homosocial perspective, however, what Henry sees as playwright and director when he looks over his battlefield is that men like Pistol are contemplating how rich they will become when their prisoners are ransomed. The only way Henry can put an end to this theft of his inheritance (“France is mine,” he is saying to himself, “and it is not penile money; it is my phallic wealth/inheritance”), the only way he can keep penile men like Pistol from getting rich at his expense, and prevent them from penilizing his war, is to force them to kill their prisoners. To phallicize his men rather than merely enrich them—to get the phallus inside them rather than French gold in their pockets—Henry orders this castration of the penile, sodomitical other. What this act also means, of course, is that if the English are captured they will be killed, not ransomed. So, by forcing his men to kill their prisoners, Henry powerful induces them to stop thinking about making money and to start turning themselves into aggressive, celestial spirits capable of whipping the French.

A third incident queer theory is in a position to illuminate is Bardolph's execution (3.6). In defiance of Henry's edict against plunder, Bardolph has stolen a pax from a French church. He is tried, found guilty, and hanged. Why does Henry not pardon his old friend? One pro-Henry answer is that Henry needs to send a strong message to his soldiers or run the risk of having his decrees trifled with in a situation where trifling could destroy his chance of victory, and what stronger message could Henry send than the one being sent by the execution of Bardolph? From a homosocial perspective, however, Bardolph, a man with no phallic essence, is penile, and, worse, a man immune to phallic penetration: his ears do not take in Henry's edict against plundering. What Bardolph perceives as stealing a piece of gold from a French altar in order to enrich himself in a base, material, nonhomosocial manner is in fact a blasphemous misperception of a synecdochical piece of the phallus as a source of monetary profit. Moreover, since this small piece of France is part of Henry's phallic inheritance, Bardolph is stealing Henry's legacy in order to engross himself financially outside, and at the expense of, an economy of homosocial aggressivity. This mistake is, of course, the same mistake Bardolph and his associates made in the past with respect to Hal. They took the prince to be a means of profit and were unable to perceive that, despite his stains, Hal was part of the phallus. Hanging Bardolph restores this theft, revenges this misrecognition, reconstructs this eroded difference, and thus marks Henry as an extension of the omnipotent Phallus.

Hanging Bardolph also functions in another register of Henry's imaginary. To prove that he has moved from outside to inside, from prodigal son to phallic leader of the chosen people, Henry must consistently produce greater and greater differences between the past and the present—differences he can then record as history, differences which he can use official “history” to reify as fact. In the present theatre of Agincourt, he needs a band of happy brothers, whereas in the past theatre of Eastcheap, he needed a ragtag, stained band of happy rogues. Thus, given his needs at Agincourt, he cannot allow a homosocial army to plunder the countryside in the manner his Eastcheap's army had plundered Gadshill in the past. To allow such a sameness would be to let his stained past stain his present, collapsing the boundary between outside and inside, past and present, and thereby to destroy the binary differences (phallus/penis) he has worked hard to construct. To execute Bardolph, then, is to execute the past, construct a difference, and transform a former penile “love” into a phallic/aggressive love. It would be a mistake, however, not to see that, both at Gadshill and at Agincourt, Henry's script satisfies the same will to power in the same theatrical fashion. The reason Henry must compulsively enforce with repetitive acts of violence the difference he is trying to construct is that the difference between these two wills to power inevitably keeps collapsing into a terrifying sameness: his repetitively repressed sodomitical stains keep returning no matter how many times he whites them out. Thus, no matter how many times he whips those offending Adams out of his domains, they have an uncanny way of returning, a return (a sameness) against which Henry defends by writing a history of his life and actions in which a deeply wished-for perfection fictively triumphs over the real.

In much the same way that Troilus' Cressida “is, and is not Cressida,” Shakespeare's Henry V is, and is not a homosocial history, because it records not only the phallic, but also the penile, truth of Henry's life. And (if I may state my thesis before presenting supporting documentation) the penile truth about Henry's life is not just that Henry was an adolescent sodomite in his “bed-pressing” moments with Falstaff and others outside homosocial space, but that, as England's sovereign, he remains a sodomite inside this space. Fueling Henry's actions is the fact that although Henry presents himself (and must present himself) as a person who is free of the offending Adam, he knows this whipping has failed in one fundamental respect: his body is still full of sodomitical desires. The “barbarous license” (1: 2, 272) rumored about his past and officially declared to be a thing of a juvenile past is not just a thing of the past. And though everything Henry does in public appears to validate the claim that his desire has been entirely subjected to the desire of his phallic Christian God, in fact Henry's desire is not, and cannot be, the desire of this Other. He cannot scour this stain from his homosocial identity because it is his identity. As a result, he is no doubt terrified. He knows that (like Pistol) “he is not the man that he would gladly make show to the [w]orld he is” (3: 6, 81-82). He knows homosocial law condemns him. He knows that to be a sodomite (as Goldberg writes with respect to Edward II and Piers Gaveston) is “to be damned, a being without being.” But “it is just such ‘being’ that [Henry] has” (Goldberg 1992, 121-22). Sodomy, in short, is Henry's treasonous subjectivity. To be Henry “like himself” is to be his God's and culture's worst traitor.¹⁸

As the French Ambassador's initial speech makes clear, the French know this to be the case:

… the prince our master
Says that you savor too much of your youth,
And bids you be advised: There's naught in France
That can be with a nimble galliard won;
You cannot revel into dukedoms there.
He therefore sends you, meeter for your spirit,
This tun of treasure. …
KING:
What treasure, uncle?
EXETER:
Tennis balls, my liege.

(1: 2, 250-56, 259)

Tennis balls are “meeter for [Henry's] spirit” because, as the Dauphin's tun insinuates, Henry's body is gendered (in homosocial terms), not with lethal, phallic “gun stone” testicles, but with sodomitical “tennis balls”: “You, Henry, are this tun, and what is inside this tun is, symbolically speaking, inside you; thus we present you with the truth of your sexuality in the form of tennis balls, and we do so as a mockery of your present homosocial, phallic pretensions.” In short, a tun of French treasure has the effect of outing Henry not just as a former sodomite, but also as a present one, and does so in front of Henry's entire homosocial court.¹⁹

Henry tries to “wash [this sodomitical] mote out of his conscience” (4: 1, 169-70) by, for example, fighting and killing Hotspur. By rooting a too-hot political spur out of the body of England, Henry can be seen as trying, in displaced fashion, to root a too-hot libidinal spur out of his own body. Likewise, one could argue that, taken in and by itself, the fact that Henry digs up Richard II's body and reinters it in Westminster Abbey need suggest nothing more than guilt with respect to his father's usurpation, anxiety about his legitimacy, and a penitential effort to put things as right as he can; but in conjunction with a second curious fact, that Henry brings Richard II's body to Westminster and reinters it there with the body of Richard's wife, Anne, does suggest an attempt not only to compel Richard to assume his proper heteronormative identity after the fact, but to map onto Richard's royal body the same reheterosexualization that Henry must enact on his own.

But the task proves impossible. To Henry's despair, his homosocial desire to destroy his sodomitical desire fails. So, filled with fear, guilt, anxiety, he must have told himself that he was finished; that like Edward II, he, too, would lose his crown; that he, the son of the man whom God used to execute sodomitical Richard II, would be struck down; that he, the man who wanted to be, not sodomitical Edward II, but homosocial Edward III, is Edward II. In desperation, urgent to be Edward III, Henry desires to be straight, but because of his desires, he cannot be straight. Not just a problem, this doubleness poses an insoluble dilemma, since as homosocial king it is Henry's duty to destroy sodomites—to train lethal gun stones (to use the play's imagery) against tennis balls—wherever he finds them. Henry's problem, then, is that he is, and yet he cannot be, a sodomite, and the plot as we have it, I am suggesting, traces Henry's compulsively repetitive attempts to “solve” this endlessly recurring, permanently insoluble problem without seeming to be solving any such problem at all. What applications of denial, repression, splitting, and projection will ensure the ongoing fantasy that his homosocially constructed desire not to be a sodomite will be able to make invisible, unconscious, and nonexistent his sexual desire to be a sodomite? By what means, that is, can Henry bring homosociality's lethal apparatuses of power to bear absolutely, and yet not bear at all, on his actual self? As we shall see, one effect of this doubleness is that every signifier attached to Henry has two signifieds; another is that every question a critic can ask about Henry's behavior has at least two contexts of explanation—a homosocial one and a sodomitical one.²⁰

Consider Henry's remarks after declaring war against France:

Either our history shall with full mouth
Speak freely of our acts, or else our grave,
Like a Turkish mute, shall have a tongueless mouth,
Not worshipped with a waxen epitaph.

(1: 2, 231-34)

At first glance this claim that history will loudly and freely proclaim Henry a hero if he wins his war or forget him if he does not seems conventionally heroic, if oddly perturbed. Given a second, queer look, however, this boast also is stating a promise that Henry will control what is said about himself, and will do so by silencing anyone who could say anything other than what the official version shall speak with “full mouth.” We may understand the “full mouth” / “Tongueless mouth” binary not only, that is, in the apparent sense noted above, but also as a defense against the anxieties bred by Henry's fear of exposure: Henry will literally remove the tongue from (will Turkishly “mute”) any mouth which is in a position to expose him. And, by symbolic extension, Henry's act will ensure that never again will “tongues” (that is, penises) be in “mouths” (that is, orifices). In short, Henry's signifiers, oddly perturbed by the multiplication of their unsuspected signifieds, allow Henry to announce the “barbarous license” he must pursue under the guise of glorious war he will pursue. Henry wages war, that is, not only to become phallic (the homosocial and speakable context of his discourse), but to hide under the exigencies of honorable war the murder of anyone who could destroy this assumption of phallic stature (the sodomitical and unspeakable context). Henry's confidence is that no one will be able to see these homicides because, disguised as sovereign martial necessities, they will be wholly invisible. Thus, were we to ignore the perturbations by which Shakespeare's unspeakable history disturbs Henry's history of “Henry,” Henry's “full mouth” would be the only mouth speaking his history (though not, thanks to the ironists, the only mouth valuing the consequences and effects of this history), and Shakespeare's unofficial history would become a tongueless mouth, his text a “Turkish mute.”²¹

Whom does Henry murder? First Falstaff, as Nell (“the King has killed his heart”) and Fluellen tell us:

FLUELLEN:
I think it is in Macedon where Alexander is porn. I tell you, captain, if you look in the maps of the orld, I warrant you sall find, in the comparisons between Macedon and Monmouth, that the situations, look you, is poth alike. There is a river in Macedon, and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth. It is called Wye at Monmouth; but it is out of my prains what is the name of the other river. But 'tis all one; 'tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in poth. If you mark Alexander's life well, Harry of Monmouth's life is come after it indifferent well; for there is figures in all things. Alexander, God knows and you know … did, in his ales and his angers, look you, kill his best friend, Cleitus.
GOWER:
Our King is not like him in that. He never killed any of his friends.
FLUELLEN:
… As Alexander killed his friend Cleitus, being in his ales and his cups, so also Harry Monmouth, being in his right wits and his good judgments, turned away the fat knight with the great pelly doublet. …

(4: 7, 31ff.)

What did Henry kill? A man who was to Henry what Cleitus, Alexander's sodomitical lover, was to Alexander. Homosocial critics like Richard Levin have enjoyed ridiculing Fluellen's method of comparison—the logical inconsequentiality of his comparison of “salmons” and “rivers”; but, of course, literal salmons and rivers and a literal comparison between them is not the point of Fluellen's wobbling exposition. By the logic of double signification operating in this text, salmons and rivers become simultaneously an innocent way of talking about two geographical regions, Monmouth and Macedon, and an extremely graphic way (“there is salmons in both”) of talking about what Alexander had in Cleitus, and Henry in Falstaff, or vice versa—“Harry of Monmouth's life com[ing] after [Alexander's] indifferent well” (4: 7, 29-30). How did Henry kill Falstaff? By cutting him off cold. “I put my hand into the bed,” Nell Quickly tells us, “and felt [Falstaff's feet], and they were as cold as any stone. Then I felt to his knees, and so upward and upward, and all was as cold as any stone” (2: 3, 21-24). Without desire, without love, the corpulent embodiment of sodomitical love becomes in death a symbol of what (from the perspective of homosocial space) it ought to have been in life, “as cold as any stone,” just as Henry, in turning the fat knight away, himself becomes as cold as a stone. What Nell almost tells us, but does not, is that Falstaff's warm “tennis ball” testicles have also become cold stones. What she might have told us, had she lived, is that, in killing Falstaff, Henry creates the first of many “tongueless mouths.”

Henry is stone cold nowhere more obviously than during the hanging of Bardolph. Here again (if we add the sodomitical to the homosocial context) a single signifier, hanging Bardolph, asserts two signifieds, Henry's official and his unofficial objectives. “We would have all such offenders so cut off,” Henry asserts (3:6, 103). The official homosocial objective of this execution (as we saw above) is to cut Bardolph off as an “offending [thief] Adam”; the unofficial homicidal one is to cut Bardolph, like Falstaff, off as an “offending [sodomitical] Adam.” But why “cut off” Bardolph by hanging him, and why the dark humor about his large red bulbous nose: “His face is all bubukles and whelks, and knobs, and flames o' fire, and his lips plows at his nose, and it is like a coal of fire, sometimes plue and sometimes red; but his nose is executed, and his fire's out” (3: 6, 99-103)? Officially, Bardolph is hanged because hanging is standard for thieves; but unofficially Bardolph's punishment, like Falstaff's, is symbolic in another register of signification. So if a homosocial Henry is satisfied to see Bardolph hanged as a thief, a defensively sodolethal Henry needs to see Bardolph's mortal, penile body grow stiff, his “head” become engorged with blood, his nose become even more penile than it was before.²² It is not that Henry needs to see Bardolph executed; rather, he needs (as the text specifically asserts) to see that Bardolph's “nose is executed” as a symbolic surrogate for the erect, sodomitical penis itself. He needs to see the “sometimes [b]lue and sometimes red” head of an orgasmically twitching penile man snapped and turned cold, its fire put out, its mouth made “tongueless,” its orifices “mute.”

Scroop is a more difficult mouth for Henry to make tongueless, because Scroop is a more recent, a more visible “bedfellow” with standing inside homosocial space, and thus a more dangerous opponent, a mouth that could speak a more damning sodomy than Falstaff's or Bardolph's. For Henry to ask how he is going to hide the murder of Scroop is to ask how he is going to implicate Scroop in a plot along with Cambridge and Grey, so that the three can be exposed as traitors, and leave no one with grounds to suspect that, though three die as traitors, one also dies because he was Henry's lover.²³ It is also to ask how, in implicating Scroop, Henry made sure that Scroop would not prove rash enough to add slander to treason. Scroop's death is also a symbolic execution: Henry must see the stained homosocial head literally cut off, to see that same castration physically inflicted on another, on three others, which he, in a sense, is having to inflict psychically on himself: neither he nor Scroop will ever use his “head” again for pleasure. Without a head, Scroop becomes yet one more sodomite struck down by homosocial justice, one more “tongueless mouth” that cannot speak Scroop's or Henry's real name. It can be objected that all traitors of rank are beheaded, and thus that Scroop's beheading has no unusual symbolic significance. But this is exactly Henry's objective, to leave no trace: the invisible signifieds which Henry is concealing under the visible ones, treason/(sodomy), execution/(murder), escape detection because Henry makes the signifier of the closeted signified virtually identical to the signifier of the uncloseted one. In Shakespeare's text, however, a trace, a difference, is in fact left: Gary Taylor tells us that Henry's reaction to Scroop's betrayal is “so prolonged and excessive that it has almost never been performed in full” (1982, 45). My suggestion is that Henry's execution/(murder) of Scroop's treason/(sodomy) is almost never performed in full because to perform it in full would allow a scene to leave a trace which, when not performed in full, plays altogether straight.

Falstaff, Bardolph and Scroop are not, of course, the only sodomites destroyed in Henry's purge. Consider the boys who are killed guarding the baggage: “Kill the poys and the luggage?” asks Fluellen. “'Tis expressly against the law of arms. 'Tis as arrant a piece of knavery, mark you now, as can be offert” (4:7, 1-3). Did retreating French soldiers kill these baggage boys, as the official version maintains? The French are in retreat, fleeing for their lives. Perhaps it is believable that terrified French soldiers might stop long enough and be cowardly enough to slaughter baggage boys as revenge, but would they have been able, under the circumstances of chaotic retreat, to kill every single boy even if they had wanted to do so? “'Tis certain,” Gower tells us, “there's not a boy left alive” (4:7, 5). Henry, on the other hand, has a powerful motive to have every boy killed. If he is to disguise, as a French atrocity, the murder of the boy he knew in his Eastcheap life, and thereby create yet one more “tongueless mouth,” one more “Turkish mute,” Henry would have had to be absolutely certain that not a single boy survived, since a survivor's tongue could wag in the direction of English, rather than the alleged French, assassins. Henry's objective in staging such an atrocity is not just, however, that there would be no boy left to speak his crime; it is also that there would be no more boys to tempt him, or make him suffer unendurable pangs of desire for what he cannot any longer enjoy, or pollute his band of celestial brothers. For further evidence of Henry's involvement, consider the subsequent scenic juxtapositioning: Fluellen's and Gower's discussion of the slaughtered boys turns directly to a discussion of whether Henry killed Falstaff as Alexander killed Cleitus.²⁴

At (4:3, 129-30), the Duke of York—next in succession once Mortimer dies—petitions Henry: “My lord, most humbly on my knee I beg / The leading of the vaward [vanguard].” At (4:8, 98-100), we learn that “Edward the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, [and] Davy Gam” are the only English dead “of name”—York and Suffolk are being the only dead English nobility. So the play invites us to ask “why York and Suffolk are the only English nobility who die at Agincourt.” And the play is constructed, I suggest, to provide an answer at 4: 6, 10ff., where we learn that by York's “bloody side, / … The noble Earl of Suffolk also lies”:

Suffolk first died; and York, all haggled over,
Comes to him, where in gore he lay insteeped,
And takes him by the beard, kisses the gashes
That bloodily did yawn upon his face,
And cries aloud, ‘Tarry, my cousin Suffolk!
My soul shall thine keep company to heaven. …’
So did he turn, and over Suffolk's neck
He threw his wounded arm and kissed his lips;
And so, espoused to death, with blood he sealed
A testament of noble-ending love.

This quotation, a considerably abbreviated version of Shakespeare's lengthy addition to Holinshed, is, I suggest, a test case of Alan Bray's thesis that it is not possible to tell the difference between male-male friend/lovers and male-male sex/lovers in early modern England (1990). So we can ask: Is it merely a coincidence that the only two noble English dead “of name” are York and Suffolk? And is it a coincidence that it is York who petitioned Henry to lead the vanguard, or may we assume that York's desire became the desire of the royal Other as a result of the same sort of manipulative coercion which shaped Canterbury's desire to Henry's martial desire in Act One, and which will shape Katherine's desire to Henry's heteronormative desire in Act Five? To be sure, it is not possible to conclude with certainty that York and Suffolk were sex/lovers, or that they are being represented as such in this passage.²⁵ In the context of Henry's war, however, given that anyone who dies is a sodomite (since, by definition, phallic men do not die), York and Suffolk are nonetheless what Henry needs them to be: two more “tongueless mouths,” two more dead lovers who will not remind Henry of his identity, and two more who, far from being “celestial spirits,” will not populate/pollute Henry's English paradise or be included in Henry's “band of brothers.”

In killing Falstaff, Scroop, Bardolph, the boy, York, and Suffolk, as well as the thousands of soldiers and prisoners who die (and a Dauphin who disappears) at Agincourt, Henry's motive is not just to purify England, not just to project his own sodomitical desire onto others so he can obliterate this desire in the obliteration of the sodomitical other, not just to remove temptations and witnesses, nor just to make impossible any history of his life other than his official one; Henry's motive is also to “prove” to himself that sodomites die—to “prove” that the homosocial God means exactly what he says (“no sodomite can suceed”). How can Henry persuade himself not to be what he is except by causing to happen to numerous sodomitical others that very fate which he fears will be imposed on him if he is not what he must be? It is in this respect that we understand why a victory that is not his God's would be valueless: such a victory could not “prove” what Henry needs to prove, that he is straight and that, among others, York and Suffolk are sodomites.

Critics have often pondered what Henry is doing during the night he waits for trial by combat/ordeal to prove his phallic identity. So we may also ask whether queer theory is able to illuminate Henry's disguised encounter with three common soldiers, Williams, Court, and Bates, or the briefer bracketing scenes, also frequently cut from performance, between Henry and Pistol, Pistol and Fluellen. At the outset of Act Four, the Chorus tells us:

… O, now, who will behold
The royal captain of this ruined band
Walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent. …
For forth he goes and visits all his host,
Bids them good morrow with a modest smile. …
That every wretch, pining and pale before,
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks. …
His liberal eye doth give to every one,
Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all
Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night.

(4: Cho., 28ff)

As numerous commentators have observed, we do not in fact behold any of this. Virtually everything that happens in the scenes that immediately follow this official account of Harry in the night contradicts the picture the Chorus paints. What we do behold is a disguised Henry who, going off (he says) to be alone, comes into contact first with Pistol, and then with three common soldiers, Williams, Court, and Bates. After a lengthy argument with the latter three turns into a heated quarrel, Williams and a disguised Henry each agree to wear the other's glove in his hat until they can meet and settle their differences. In a subsequent scene Henry asks Fluellen to wear William's glove in his hat. In a third scene, Williams challenges Fluellen, thinking him to be the disguised stranger he argued with in the night. Henry intervenes, acknowledging that he was the soldier with whom Williams quarreled, and rewards Williams by filling Williams's glove with gold.

These episodes are complicated enough to cause many directors to cut them, and many critics to wonder why Shakespeare filled his fourth act with such obscure material. If we set aside the content of Henry's and Williams's lengthy political/ethical argument as not irrelevant but secondary to the action taking place, and look instead at the relations of power and sexuality structuring the action of these scenes, we discover, I suggest, that Henry is out at night wandering among his troops for two contradictory reasons. This might be the last night he will be alive and, in his loneliness and anxiety, he is, I suggest, longing for illicit male companionship; he is also deeply worried that his men might be longing for the same thing (“a little touch of Henry in the night”). Henry has a terrible need for what he is afraid he will find: men, like himself, who are succumbing to the temptations of the penile body symbolized, in Henry's case, by the fact that he confronts these men not “like himself” but disguised by a cloak.²⁶ However, for his miraculous victory to transpire the next day, Henry must eradicate any possibility of penile weakness (anxiety, fear, doubt), and, more importantly, any possibility of sodomitical pleasures taking place between his men, as well as between himself and his men. So, when Henry encounters Williams, arguably a handsome enough young soldier for Henry to dally with (in contrast to the very brief, earlier exchange he has with Pistol), Henry must, if he is to live, transform his and Williams's powerful libidinal attraction to each other into homosocial anger and aggression (just as Katherine's libido is translated into aggression in the English lesson and wooing scenes). Hence the quarrel. Then, as a way of permanently fixing this translation of libido into anger and aggressivity, Henry symbolically reifies it. He moves Williams's glove—a symbolic surrogate for bodily orifices that fingers and penises may penetrate, as well as a symbolic surrogate for such penetrating appendages—from Williams's waist to his own cap, and he simultaneously moves his own glove, similarly symbolic, from his waist to Williams's cap. In this way, penile/sodomitical libidos and their bodily organs are sublimated and territorialized by being rewritten as tokens of exchange within that highly aggressive homosocial ritual, the challenge. In order to further defend against sodomitical desire, Henry then fills Williams's glove, not with semen, but with gold (here symbolic of phallic power) in order to transform penetration and filling from sodomitical to phallic acts. In short, the three scenes with Williams act out the ritualistic processes of phallicization that structure homosocial space itself. And by reenacting these constitutive formulae the night before Agincourt, Henry (in Foucault's formulation) produces aggressive homosocial bonding out of sodomitical libido. So if Henry is “thawing cold fear” as the Chorus proclaims, it is Henry's own fears and anxieties that are being thawed; and if anyone is getting “a touch of Henry in the night,” Henry is making sure that it is an aggressive, and not a sodomitical one.²⁷

But because desire is strong and repression “endlesse worke,” Henry's sublimational alchemy must be compulsively repeated. In fact, the scene with Williams is already a repetition of numerous earlier instances of this process, particularly the first scene of this fourth act. Prior to meeting Williams, Henry plays out a brief version of this sublimational process with Pistol (a character, like Hotspur, whose name and “character” create dangerously incoherent conflations of penis and phallus). Rather than recognition, friendship or nostalgia at what may be the last meeting between these two Eastcheap friends, there must now be nothing but the safe lubricants of nonrecognition and aggression, as Pistol's cudgeled head learns yet one more time in 5:1, where Pistol is forced to play out this process in far more violent fashion with Henry's surrogate, Fluellen, a scene in which Pistol's eating of Fluellen's leek (a symbolic staging of fellatio) is visually translated into Pistol's symbolic submission to Fluellen's phallic correction, and in which a penis surrogate (a leek held at Fluellen's waist) is translated into a phallic surrogate (a leek in Fluellen's cap).

We are now in a position to ask why Shakespeare adds four captains—an Englishman, a Scot, an Irishman, and a Welshman—to the Henrician legend, given that none of these four are to be found in any of the chronicle sources. If these captains, like Henry's Eastcheap associates, disappear in criticism and in performance (as they disappear in Olivier's and Branagh's films) into a quotidian military mass, there is no point for Shakespeare's addition except to supply proof that support for Henry's war comes from every ethnic part of an allegedly unified nation. But if three of these captains are beautiful young men, then there is a powerful point to their diversity, their exoticism, their difference. Why would Henry not want to surround himself, at the moment he submits to homosocial law, with the most handsome speci-men in uniform he can find from the four quarters of his empire?²⁸ To love all and to be loved by all of his homosocial subordinates is the least he deserves in repayment for his suffocated desire. So why should not his “band of brothers” be an especially aesthetically pleasing lot, given that Gower, Jamy, and Macmorris, and the Welshman, Fluellen, are homosocial replacements in Henry's life for Bardolph, Nym, Pistol, and Falstaff? The question to ask, I suggest, is who is acting the part of Fluellen? And if the answer is Will Kempe, the actor who presumably played Falstaff, then the transformation of this actor's role from Henry's sodomitical to Henry's homosocial father figure is a particularly vivid theatrical visualization of the sublimational logic dominating Henry's behavior, a logic which transforms sodomitical libido not only into homosocial aggression but also into homosocial aestheticism. Of course, these captains can also be said to be evidence of a desperate hope surviving somewhere deep in Henry's psyche that the universal sameness demanded by homosocial Christianity might still have some room in it for heavily fissured differences, despite the necessity of having to be marked as same.²⁹

From the perspective of those who do not want to witness, celebrate, or identify with Henry's victorious Christian/homosocial/heteronormative absolutism, Shakespeare's The Life of King Henry the Fifth is a tragedy, though, of course, it is also a “comedy” for those who, standing in homosocial space, need precisely to see, celebrate, and identify with such a victory. From a nonhomosocial perspective, the answer to the question, “Why is this history tragic?” is simple. Because thousands are dead. Because Henry, more and more threatened by every noncathected tongue, becomes more and more dependent on violence to perform his hyperideal identity. And because, as a result of this dependency, Henry's economy, psychic and otherwise (not to mention England's economy under Henry), inevitably degenerated into an economy of waste and decline which seemed to prosper only when it was at war, which is why Henry spent the rest of his life fighting “himself” in the fields of France.

Given such consequences, one must interrogate the cause of such a tragedy. Is it the fact that Henry is a sodomite? Would things have been different, that is, if Henry had been straight? If by “straight” one means homosocial heteronormativity, no doubt English homosociality would have gone on, nevertheless, in its own direction, and Henry would have been one more monarch hiding under his phallic identity a subjectivity riddled by autoeroticism, voyeurism, adultery, rape, pederasty, fornication, or some other sodomitical activity tolerable when hidden. But if by “straight” one means heteroromantic/reciprocal love/sex, then Henry would also have been in trouble. To be sure, had Henry simply been discovered as being straight in this sodomitical sense he would not have been executed, as Edward II was, with a red hot poker inserted into his anus, but he hardly could have commanded the respect, fear, and love of, nor could he have assumed or exerted sovereign authority over his homosocial peers. So to have kept his crown, a straight Henry (in this sense of “straight”) would also have had to engage in something like the endlessly repetitive dissimulations of desire in which Henry is so thoroughly trapped.

But the larger point is that Henry's sexuality per se is not the cause of this tragic waste; Henry's sodomitical desire is not correctable, nor is sodomitical desire the problem Shakespeare's play is interrogating. The cause of the tragedy that is Henry's life is the cultural demand/introject, “Be straight or die,” and the homosocial formation which necessitates such a demand/introject. This cause is correctable, and it is the problem Shakespeare's text is analyzing. The solution to Henry's problem, that is, is not the sodolethal apparatus of power Henry brings to bear upon his desire displaced onto the other, but the removal of homosociality itself, its “Be straight or die” demand/introject, its identities, aggressivities, sexual roles, protocols, relations of power, monopolies, and histories. To solve Henry's problem, a culture must be created in which a person like Henry might do something more valuable with his energies and intelligence than construct himself as a celestial spirit, England as a fascist paradise and English culture as a happy band of Christian/homosocial brothers, and something more pleasurable with his sodomitical desires than make them fodder for sadomasochistic purgation or fuel for sadistic purifications. So, though it is true that homosocial productions and homosocial readings of Henry V—caring more for Henry and homosociality than they do for the thousands of lives they happily sacrifice on the altars of Henrician perfection—do “draw their audiences irresistably toward the celebration of … power [based on] force and fraud”;³⁰ it is also true that Shakespeare's Henry V was designed to draw its audiences away from “mighty men … in little room … mangling … their glory” (Epi., 3-4), and draw them toward that revisionistic assault on such power, force, and fraud which we now call democracy.

In Misrepresentations, Graham Bradshaw argues that “history never tells us what Henry's motives were, because it can't; in this simple but important sense a history play that pretended to make Henry's motives clear would be historically irresponsible” (1993, 46-47).³¹ I have been arguing, on the contrary, that Shakespeare's play makes a way to Henry's motives available, if not clear. There is in this text that which functions, in censorial circumstances, as evidence—a collocation of traces, coincidences, displacements, repetitions, overdeterminations, and juxtapositionings which register on a nonhomosocial audience. I have catalogued some of this collocation—this semiotic excess that Shakespeare added to his chronicle sources. That Olivier, Branagh, and others have had to cut so much of this excess in order to produce their versions of Henry V as homosocial masterpieces—and their Henries as sovereignty's best piece of poetry—suggests just how much of Shakespeare's play is irresponsible in Bradshaw's sense. Shakespeare's Henry V is and is not irresponsible, but, paradoxically, it is its irresponsibility that makes it so useful to some as history, just as it is its thoroughly coerced responsibility that makes it so useful to others as homosocial History.

Notes

1. Cho. 5; all citations of this play are from The Life of King Henry the Fifth (Henry V), Shakespeare (1972). I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, for their careful editorial attention to the argument that follows.

2. Chronicle histories: Hall (1548); Fabyan (1559); Holinshed (1587); Stow (1580). Poems: The Battle of Agincourt (c. 1530); Baldwin (1575); Daniel (1595). For a discussion of the earlier Henry V plays, especially The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (1598), see Taylor (1982, 3-4).

3. Holinshed (1587), in Bullough (1962; 280, 408). For discussions of Tudor chronicles as history and the complexity of Tudor representations of Henry, see: Levy (1967); Kelly (1970); Smith (1976 3-26); Patterson (1989, 71-92); Hunter (1990); Rackin (1990); and Bradshaw (1993).

4. For a recent account of Henry's life, see Hibbert 1975; for an earlier account, see Wylie, 1914-1929.

5. On quarto/folio differences see: Taylor (1982, 12-26); Patterson (1989); Graham Holderness, et al. (1988); Holderness and Loughrey (1993). On censorship, see: (Hill 1986, 32-71); (Clare 1990). For a discussion of Shakespeare's relation to his chronicle sources, see Tomlinson (1984); Taylor; Walter (1954); and Bullough (1962). Taylor relates the critical controversy to the quarto/folio differences: unlike the 1623 Folio, the 1600 Quarto “removes almost every difficulty in the way of an unambiguously patriotic interpretation of Henry and his war” (12). Brennan 1992 shows that a longstanding stage tradition in which productions are generally as heavily cut as the 1600 Quarto has had much the same jingoizing effect. In other words, the play's critics have seen remove from the play most of what Shakespeare added to the chronicle accounts.

6. Among those attracted to Henry: Wilson (1943); Walter (1954); Humphrey (1968); Aoki (1973); Sanders (1977); Berg (1985). Among those repelled: Gould (1919), (1969); Doren (1939); Goddard (1951); Rossiter (1961); Richmond (1967); Gurr (1977); and Barber and Wheeler (1986, 198-236).

7. Rabkin (1981). Rabkin was anticipated, in the play itself, by Pistol (“I love the lovely bully”); Nym (“the King is a good King … but the King hath run bad humors on the knight [Falstaff]”); Hazlitt (1817), who termed Henry an “amiable monster” [cited in Quinn (1969, 37)]; Traversi (1957); and Hapgood (1963, 9-16). Rabkin's lead was followed by Salomon (1980, 343-56); (Pye 1990, 13-42); Brennan (1992); and Bradshaw (1993).

8. As Rabkin (1981) implicitly recognized, the longstanding debate about Henry V was not so much a crisis created by ironic readings of Henry V as a crisis within the profession occasioned by the new discourses being used to produce such readings. Thus Rabkin's effort to negotiate a solution to the Henry V controversy was implicitly an attempt to resolve a methodological problem which was proving increasingly divisive to the profession.

9. The theoretical work on Henry V to which I am particularly indebted is that of Williamson (1975); Greenblatt (1981); Mullaney (1983); Dollimore and Sinfield (1985); Erickson (1985); Wilcox (1985); Czerniecki (1988); Leggatt (1988); Berger (1989); Rackin (1990; 1991, 323-45); Newman (1991); Helgerson (1992); and Traub (1992a).

10. Goldberg (1992, 145-75). Quinn (1969) cites the relevant passage from Hazlitt (1817, 37).

11. To read Shakespeare's text as sexualizing, materializing, and thus as historicizing its central character is not to read Shakespeare's Henry as a person; rather, it is to perceive Shakespeare's Henry as a theatrical analysis of an historical subject who is recognized as having been embedded in and conditioned by social processes that produced his sexuality as a function of his cultural identity.

12. In addition to Goldberg's, the queer theory to which I am indebted includes: Foucault (1976/1980); Irigaray (1977/1985); Hocquenghem (1978); Cixous (1981); Bray (1982 and 1990); Sedgwick (1985 and 1990); Butler (1990); Bredbeck (1991); Smith (1991); and Traub (1992b).

13. In 1 Henry IV, Falstaff mocks Hal as a “dried neat's-tongue,” “a bull's pizzle,” a “stock-fish”—euphemistic expressions, David Bevington's glosses at 2: 4, 240-42 tell us (1987), which are designed to point out Hal's “genital emaciation”; Falstaff's larger objective, however, as Goldberg notes, is to “point to the phallus Hal lacks” (1992, 174).

14. Holinshed quotes Christopher Ocklund's (1580) Anglorum Praelia. Ab anno Domini 1327 usque ad annum Domini 1558 (R. Neuberie for H. Bynneman): “Ille inter iuvenes paulo lascivior ante” [translated by Bullough (1962) as “Previously he has been somewhat wanton among the young men” (280)].

15. For an anthropological analysis of these predatory/incorporative technologies, see Bloch (1982a), and Bloch and Perry (1982b, 1982c, 211-30).

16. It is not necessary here to outline the rise of intolerance which Boswell 1980 locates in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe; Boswell's account is brilliant and well-known. It is necessary, however, to note that English homosociality became increasingly intolerant as the crown of England passed from Richard Coeur de Lion (1189-1199), to Edward II (1307-1327), Richard II (1377-1399), and to Henry V (1413-1422).

17. For recent alternative discussions of this matter, see Barber and Wheeler (1986, 227); Brennan (1992, 92-95); Bradshaw (1993, 294n26).

18. After Foucault (1976/1980) and Bray (1982), it has become conventional to distinguish between late modern homosexual identities and early modern sodomitical acts—the former category confining sodomy to an essentialized subset of the culture, the latter regarding it as a sin everyone is capable of committing. Recently, however, this distinction has been questioned by Bruce R. Smith, who observes that in Renaissance satire “the sodomite was a distinct type rather than a universal figure” (1991, 75-76).

19. Many critics of this scene conclude that the Dauphin is simply in error about Henry's present situation because he has not yet heard about Henry's miraculous reformation. However, the unofficial history we are watching encourages us to recognize that the Dauphin is not in error, that he knows the official myth articulating the pastness of Henry's past but simply does not believe it. The obvious reason, apart from needing something to carry them in, that the French Ambassador presents the tennis balls in a tun (OED, s. v. tun: a large vessel in general; a tub or vat; a chest; Holinshed writes, “a barrel of Paris balls” [545]) is to get an insulting tub-equals-Henry analogy in the King's face. Much of the force of this insult is lost, however, if Shakespeare's tun is turned (as it is in the Branagh production) into a small, elegant box.

20. A particularly striking example of this double semiotic is Henry's relation to Salic Law. Why, we may ask, is Henry so troubled by a law that says “‘In terram Salicam mulieres ne succedant’; / ‘No woman shall succeed in Salic land’” (1: 2, 38-39)? The official answer is that if Salic law stands, Henry's claims on ancestral lands in France are invalid. But to recognize only this official, homosocial explanation would be to miss the less visible function of Salic Law in this text. In reading Salic law, Henry finds himself reading the handwriting on the wall, because for him this law bars possession of his inheritance in a sense quite different from the bar being asserted in public. For Henry, Salic Law is seen to stand as a restatement of the divine injunction against sodomy: “no sodomite shall succeed in homosocial land.” Thus, for Henry to circumvent the visible law is, magically, to circumvent the less visible one. Moreover, to circumvent the invisible law is to put himself in the position, as we have seen above, of enforcing it: Henry will now ensure that “no sodomite shall succeed in homosocial space.”

21. “Tongueless mouth” has, of course, other registers of signification. This passage alludes to the myth of Tereus and Philomela in Book Six of The Metamorphoses of Ovid (1955). The more obvious connection is a narrative one—Tereus, having raped Philomela, his wife's sister, responds to her threat—“I shall come forward before your people, and tell my story. If I am to be kept shut up in the woods, I shall fill the forests with my voice, and win sympathy from the very rocks that witnessed my degradation”—by turning Philomela into a tongueless mouth—“But even as she poured out her scorn … he grasped her tongue with a pair of forceps, and cut it out with his cruel sword” (162-163). The less obvious connection is the performative aspect of this barbarity: “The very acts which furthered [Tereus's] wicked scheme made people believe that he was a devoted husband [to Procne], and he was praised for his criminal behaviour” (160). A second subversive connection to Henry V lies in a common historiographical project: as Philomela, unable to speak Tereus' tyranny, weaves a tapestry which tells her story (“Cunningly she set up her threads on a barbarian loom, and wove a scarlet design on a white ground, which pictured the wrong she had suffered” [163]), so Shakespeare's Henry V, unable to proclaim Henry's barbarity, weaves a text which tells Henry's victims' stories.

22. In the place of the conventional terms, homophobic/homophobia, I will be using sodolethal. I do so because a friend of mine asked why a term which voices the anxieties and fears of the aggressor should be used to mark the violent effects of these fears on the aggressor's victims.

23. For a valuable discussion of this scene, see Wentersdorf (1976). For discussions of the commonplace linkage of treason and sodomy, see Bray (1982, 70-80), and Smith (1991, 41-53). For a discussion of the sodomitical puns in the scene (as throughout Henry V and 1 & 2 Henry IV), see Rubenstein (1984). Among the numerous entries Rubenstein indexes (324-25), see, in particular, “Bungle(hole), bungle Anus. … Henry V.” One part of this complex discussion must stand for the whole: a “‘demon’ (homosexual) … ‘gull'd’ (buggered) Scroop … (who, in turn, buggered Henry)” (39-40). The brunt of the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography—SCROPE, HENRY le, third Baron Scrope of Masham (1376?-1415 [11 years older than Henry])—is that Scrope's “complicity … in the plot … caused general surprise. It seemed strangely inconsistent with his character as well as his past career. He himself pleaded that he had become an accessory in order to betray the conspiracy (Rot.Parl.iv.66)” (1077). Is it possible, in other words, that Henry drew Scroop into this plot by “asking” his “bedfellow” to become an accessory, in much the same way that he had “asked” Canterbury to support war and Katherine to accept marriage, and then charged Scroop as an accomplice?

24. Henry also, of course, derives military value from this atrocity. What better way to redouble his soldiers' efforts at a moment of potential defeat than throw a war atrocity in their faces? Henry has already used one tactic to shore up their phallic valor—making them kill their prisoners—so by killing the boys he not only provides a justification for this command but also translates fear into outraged violence.

25. It is possible, for example, that Henry's imaginary constructs York and Suffolk as sodomites in order to justify killing York, a successor to the throne.

26. For antecedents for Henry's disguise, see Barton (1975). One antecedent Barton does not discuss is the Christian one. In Henry's homosocial space the chief paradigm for the ritualistic productivity of disguise is, of course, Christ. Coming disguised as the man Jesus into the night of the fallen world, Christ puts on, like a cloak, the penile condition of man as a preface to the technologies of rephallicization by which he will rehomosocialize himself and the penile other through various forms of aggressivity against self and other. For a medieval parallel, see Fradenburg (1991, 240-41).

27. These scenes are also working in at least two other ways: Henry is making it absolutely impossible for himself to remain “disguised,” and he is proleptically rehearsing during the night the transformation from disguised penile sodomite to victorious phallic sovereign he intends to actualize the following morning.

28. Four geographically distinct captains call to mind the imperial habit of articulating homosocial monuments with nude women, one for each corner of the empire: the Albert Memorial in London, for example, or the figures presently outside the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, or, earlier, the title-pages of Renaissance texts. The homosocial message is that empire harnesses sexuality as a means of producing civilization, even though this message is purposefully transgressed by an illicit exploitation of the colonialized subjects' sexualities. Equally relevant is the recognition that these sculpted nudes offer an illicit reward to the imperial gaze—i.e., dominance over the subjected other's sexual body. Cp. also the figures of Emetreus and Lygurge in Chaucer's “Knight's Tale.”

29. Henry is so compulsive about transforming sodomitical libido into homosocial identity that he seems to have arranged events so that his miracle of Agincourt would take place on October 25, “the Feast of Crispian” (4:3, 40), a feast day celebrating two brothers, Crispianus and Crispinus, who, martyred A.D. 287, became the patron saints of shoemakers. But why this feast day? One answer, I suggest, is that in Henry's imaginary this day could be seen as celebrating penile brothers who become saintly brothers by containing their penile names (“-anus” and “-pinus”) within their saintly phallic names (Crispianus and Crispinus) through the mediation not so much of their martyrdom as of their fetishized craft role, shoemaking. As saints, that is, one brother becomes an asexual cover (a “shoe”) for the foot taken as a fetish substitution for the penis, while the other becomes an asexual surrogate for the anus taken as a fetishized receptacle (a “shoe”) for the fetishized foot. As ‘shoes’ they no longer have a (visible) “-pinus” or “-anus.”

30. Greenblatt (1988, 20). On “territorialization” see Deleuze and Guattari (1983).

31. Bradshaw is echoing Maynard Mack on the subject of motivation. To quote Berger “the essence of Mack's argument … is that since characters are not only imaginary persons but also emblems, archetypes, and exemplars, motivation is beside the point” (1985, 224).

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