SOURCE: Jensen, Pamela K. “The Famous Victories of William Shakespeare: The Life of Henry the Fifth.” In Poets, Princes, and Private Citizens: Literary Alternatives to Postmodern Politics, edited by Joseph M. Knippenberg and Peter Augustine Lawler, pp. 235-69. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1996.

[In the following excerpt, Jensen presents an overview of Henry V from the point of view of politics, concentrating on Henry's rhetorical appeal to English audiences. The critic contends that with this play Shakespeare sought to render “a king worthy of our admiration both for his unflinching realism and for his righteousness.”]

INTRODUCTION

To defend the claim that Shakespeare's plays are appropriately treated as political texts, it may be helpful to indicate what Shakespeare's poetry has in common with such students of politics as Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Rousseau. These thinkers equate the study of politics and what is at the heart of how people live; in their view politics establishes the fundamental opinions of a society and shapes human aspirations accordingly. Shakespeare agrees with this orientation and, thus, sees an intimate connection between his characters and the political contexts in which he places them. His characters live in various political settings, with events in their lives subject to influences that could only arise in those settings. Because the plays depict political principles in concrete or applied rather than theoretical form, we can observe and compare the effects of different political arrangements on human beings. By entering imaginatively into the characters' lives, we can learn more about how to evaluate various political alternatives, an enterprise in which we must engage in order to see our own situation clearly. Further, by considering the choices made by the characters, we can refine our own ability to make sound political judgments, which are always constrained by circumstances and always occur within a particular time and place. I will demonstrate in just one case, The Life of Henry the Fifth, how Shakespeare contributes to our political education, by discussing some of the things he leads us to think about when we read or see the play.¹

I know of no other Shakespearean play whose commentators are as concerned about the author's political judgment as this one. Virtually all the principal dramatic questions raised by Henry V resolve themselves into political questions. Above all, they ask, what does Shakespeare think about the king he portrays? And, as a related question, what ought we to think about him? Claims about Shakespeare's assessment range from the view that he intended to glorify an icon of English history to the view that he meant ironically to subvert the king. Some say that Shakespeare's artistic freedom was restricted at the outset—by the theatrical medium, by the need to defer to his queen's Welsh forebears, or, generally, by the Elizabethan cultural context.²

The major episodes of Henry's life were well known in Shakespeare's time, its legendary outline already drawn. Shakespeare had as sources a number of Elizabethan accounts: the anonymous, crudely drawn comic play called The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (1598), Samuel Daniel's patriotic poem The First Fowre Bookes of the Civile Warres (1595), and the stately historical chronicles of Holinshed and Hall.³ In the play, the various episodes in Henry's life roll by us like a series of tableaux appropriate to epic, punctuated and strung together by a personified chorus, but they roll by in a uniquely altered form. It is true that Shakespeare's fidelity to Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles extends even to the repetition of Holinshed's errors. And there are numerous close parallels between the structure of Shakespeare's plays about Henry and Famous Victories, particularly in its juxtapositions of court and tavern and its seamless commingling of chronicled fact and comic fiction. But in both cases, what is derivative in Henry V only throws Shakespeare's originality into greater relief. His reinterpretation of the story produces a different kind of king from either the chronicles or popular legend. Shakespeare's refashioning of his source material evinces the desire both to represent for his audience the actual politics of medieval England and to supplant other accounts of the king.⁴ Rather than imitating, Shakespeare's representation rivals the accounts of those whose labor he employs. He blends deference to history with creative self-assertion. I will show that Shakespeare seeks neither to debunk Henry's high reputation nor to sentimentalize his portrait, but to make a king worthy of our admiration both for his unflinching realism and for his righteousness.

Shakespeare levels his judgment on Henry V in light of the two kings—Richard II and Henry IV—who preceded him, and whose lives he presented in the three earlier plays in the so-called second tetralogy (Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV). Henry V combines the strengths of both his predecessors without the weaknesses of either.⁵

As prince, Henry made himself invisible, obscuring attentiveness to his royal responsibilities “beneath a veil of wildness” (I.i.63-64).⁶ Nothwithstanding Henry's love of playacting, Henry V makes clear that hard political necessities prompted his counterfeit of his true nature. Especially vulnerable to those who would have sacrificed him—the heir and first-born son—in his father's quarrels, Henry hid himself “as gardeners do with ordure hide those roots / That first shall spring and be most delicate” (II.iv.39-40). Likening him to the founder of the Roman republic, who was called “Brutus” because he seemed stupid, the French constable insists that Henry wore “a coat of folly,” the better to conceal his prudence (1.38). To avoid becoming embroiled in his father's self-destructive quarrels, the prince sacrificed his father's friendship during his father's lifetime and took up with Falstaff, his surrogate father.⁷ Consorting with Falstaff's crowd at Eastcheap conferred positive political benefits on Henry as well, foremost among them the advantage to be gained from an adjustable political lens. Unlike kings who simply look down, Henry has also seen the high from below and the low at eye level.

As king, Henry proves to need the same talents he displayed as the “nimble-footed madcap prince of Wales”: his ability to hide in plain sight, both to capture the hearts of his friends and to baffle his enemies (I.ii.266-68; II.iv.26-29). Shakespeare takes some pains to remind us of Henry's versatility as a player; his prodigious skill in changing his nature. He can be fox as well as lion, has eyes in the back of his head, and can even parade in sheep's clothing. Since the first two acts of Henry V depict conspiracies directed by those nearest the king and various sorts of masked men throughout, we can say that the political virtue for a king who knows how to deceive by appearances is how not to be deceived (III.vi.79-81). The paramount question in Shakespeare's Henry V is whether or not Henry see his enemies clearly.

ACTS I AND II: FRIENDS AND ENEMIES AT HOME

WAR DELIBERATIONS

We bring to the play the principle that foreign war is the condition of civil peace. As the play opens, England's war with France, which makes up the whole action of the play, is virtually a foregone conclusion. Especially in light of the deathbed advice of Henry's father that he “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels,”⁸ King Henry's own hesitancy is especially striking. He must be assiduously exhorted on all hands, even cajoled into the war. The deliberations occupying most of Act I acquire their particular character from this fact. Henry is punctilious on all points of right and extraordinarily cautious on all points of policy. On behalf of the church, the archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop Ely volunteer to overcome the king's resistance; they vouch for both the justice and the feasibility of war. Only after Henry's scrupulous sense of rectitude has been satisfied and his mind eased on the potential Scottish menace does he commit himself. Thus, the overwhelming impression conveyed by the speeches in Act I is that it is not Henry at all, but the church most definitely that wants this war, and that the clergy has effectively manipulated the king to do its bidding. Appearances notwithstanding, Henry's hesitancy concerning the war with France is dissembled.

Shakespeare retains from Holinshed the clergy's determination to promote war with France in order to forestall consideration of a parliamentary bill to take away its so-called “temporal,” that is, nonchurch, lands. On this hint, Shakespeare draws the bishops as decidedly worldly men, ready to wield their mighty spiritual influence in order to safeguard their wealth.⁹ With heavy irony, the “spiritualty” is the explicit spokesman in the play for men's bodies and money (I.i.79-81; ii.130-35). In the absence of foreign war, in order to throw Parliament off the scent, these clerics would not scruple to foment civil war (I.i.3-5), in which case they could likely count on the aid of France or Scotland. If the clergy were to declare that Henry V was not the legitimate king of England, for instance, it might incite the nobles into open rebellion against him. Even in less extreme circumstances, there could be no bold or vigorous war effort without the church's support. To insure the friendship with the church that is so necessary to his designs, Shakespeare's Henry gives the bishops the illusion that they exert the influence over him—the power to “impawn” him—that they actually wield in Holinshed. The intense orthodoxy and chivalry of the king in the chronicles make him guileless and pliant in the clergy's hands, subject to their leadership and to their limitations. By contrast, Shakespeare's King Henry allows his ostensible reluctance to be overcome by Canterbury and Ely, but only on the grounds he establishes and in a setting he completely orchestrates.¹⁰

Canterbury has sounded Henry out on the parliamentary bill in private and, perceiving him to hesitate on the question, makes an unprecedentedly generous offer of support in the imminent war to the king in order to win him over. While appearing in the main favorably disposed, Henry does not actually confirm to the archbishop whether the offer was persuasive, prompting him to up the ante. Just at the point at which Canterbury was about to lay before Henry his “true title” to the French crown, presumably to tantalize him into battle, Henry breaks off the interview because the French ambassador demands a hearing. In the next scene, however, as Canterbury and Ely go themselves to the court to hear the French ambassador, we find that Henry is calling for Canterbury. The French ambassador has been left outside cooling his heels until the archbishop resolves for Henry “some things of weight,” pertaining to his claims on the crown of France. This is the very same conversation that Canterbury sought to have with him earlier. We must conclude, then, that Henry broke off the private conversation solely that it might be resumed in public, that is, before the assembled nobility. Henry's hesitation on the parliamentary bill in private insures that the archbishop will press Henry's claims with the utmost vigor in public. Above all, in a very adroit move, Henry transforms the archbishop's willingness to make a private bribe into the necessity that the church accept full responsibility for starting the war. By contrast to Holinshed's prelates, who were content to stay in the background, Shakespeare's bishops are thrust into the limelight: “For God doth know how many now in health / Shall drop their blood in approbation / Of what your reverence shall incite us to” (I.ii.18-20; emphasis added).¹¹

Deft evasion of public responsibility is Henry's typical mode of rule throughout the play.¹² This invisible command, an extension of his actions as prince, situates Henry between Richard II, whose notorious irresponsibility brought him down, and Henry's father, whose palpable and unrelenting efforts to protect the crown only heightened his vulnerability further; such that every step he took to strengthen himself had the opposite effect.

In view of the awful gravity of Henry's opening speech to the clergy, what is most striking about the ensuing discussion is that, by his design it brings to light only legal and political questions that are patently easy to answer, while shrouding in deep silence every real difficulty. There is a belabored consideration of the traditional objections to English forays into France that, as such, have well-known and well-worn responses. The assembly's focus on them draws all attention away from Henry's real problems. As in Holinshed, Canterbury proves the impeccable credentials of King Henry as claimant to the French throne by demonstrating the groundlessness of the Salic Law; an ancient French statute that disallows claims to the crown made through the female line, which is the source of the claim to France of Henry's great-grandfather, Edward III. Henry actually confines the discussion of his legal claims to the interpretation of the Salic Law, and it is very easy for Canterbury to prove its irrelevance because there have been so many French violations of it in their own dynastic history. However freely one grants the point though, Henry's legal difficulties remain. Edward III may have laid claim to France with impunity. The real legal-political question, which is pointedly circumvented, is whether Henry V is the rightful heir to Edward III in England. England's claim to the French throne is in fact better established than Henry's claim to the English throne. The first claim is, so to speak, an English tradition, while the rule of Henry's family is not, and was indeed hotly contested in the civil wars that flared up after his death. By enforcing concentration on irregularities in the French royal lineage, Henry deflects attention from irregularities in the English royal lineage.

As Canterbury justifies Edward III's claim to France in his long, tedious speech (I.ii.33-95;98-114), he is forced to acknowledge tacitly, without equivocation or question, that Henry is Edward III's rightful heir. It is this public attestation to his legitimacy that Henry seeks above all to extract from Canterbury. This is the prize he needed most to win. The clerics thus note Henry's rock-solid link to his most illustrious forebears, Edward III and his son Edward: “You are their heir, you sit upon their throne” (1.117; emphasis added). But the names of his immediate predecessors Richard II (Edward III's grandson) and Henry IV are nowhere publicly mentioned in the play; instead, they are expunged from the historical record, as if they and the fatal quarrel between them never even existed.

The public silence Henry purchases from the church serves the cause of domestic peace. He does not take the public suppression of the questions, however, as a cue to walk away from “the fault / My father made in compassing the crown,” as he will later reveal in private (IV.1.294-305).

Indeed, for the priests to call Henry “a true lover of the holy Church” says more than they realize. Henry's righteousness, not theirs, supplies the model for piety and rectitude in the realm. Not only does a sense of right enhance his soldier's' readiness to fight for the cause, Henry's strict preoccupation with justice also inspires their trust.¹³ As in the self-government or “grace” he shows the French ambassador (I.ii.241-45), at every opportunity Henry communicates his freedom from arbitrary or capricious actions. “We are no tyrant, but a Christian king” (1.241). The ideal of medieval chivalry, which Shakespeare first brings to light by showing Richard II's betrayal of it, conjoins valor and righteousness; this combination of qualities depends on self-government—keeping one's passions as subject “as our wretches fett'red in our prisons” (1.3). A man as watchful over himself as over others can be trusted to reward and punish evenly.¹⁴ By contrast to his predecessors, Henry wins support by his example, expecting nothing of others except what he embodies in himself.

To assess the justice of Henry's claim to France—whether he really goes forth with “rightful hand in a well-hallow'd cause” (1.293)—we may note, in addition to French provocation, long-standing English tradition.¹⁵ However remote, Henry's claim to France arises with Edward III. He makes use of that claim, but does not invent it.

In the deliberations, Henry also appears to be as unconcerned about domestic problems as he is about his title in England. The sole practical problem he worries over is Scotland. Far from seeking to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, Henry seems hard-pressed to stop thinking about England's “giddy neighbor” Scotland (1.145). By fastening tenaciously on the matter of Scottish incursions into England, a problem that admits of easy resolution on traditional grounds, Henry is able once again to obfuscate the real issues and to avoid pointing to his real vulnerabilities. Henry's actual fears about the domestic danger he might incur by leaving home are allayed in the discussion led by Canterbury.¹⁶

Once having satisfied the demands for justice and prudence in this war, Henry reassures “the noble sinews of our power” that there is room now for all men of merit—those with sufficient courage—to thrive in the realm: the “empery” over which England will rule in Europe is “large and ample”; the dukedoms that are up for grabs are “(almost) kingly” (11.222-27). Even if there remain some disgruntled nobles in the audience, however, they now know the church will not help them. If Henry succeeds, he will be stronger than the clergy or nobility ever imagined; his aims as well as his achievements extend farther than his great predecessors'. If his plans miscarry, the clergy will bear the brunt of the inevitable criticism (1.97). The clergy has given him a great deal. He has given them nothing more tangible than the impression that he is on their side.

The efficacy of the war with France to curtail domestic rivalries and submerge them temporarily in a common cause is underscored in the conversation among Falstaff's followers in the following scene, a comic reenactment and recapitulation of the events of Act I. The “home-bred broils” over who has rightful possession of Hostess Nell Quickly arising in Falstaff's band of confederates, are prorogued without bloodshed by the promise of better trade in France. Bardolph intercedes between Nym, who was engaged to Nell, but never had her, and Pistol, who usurped Nym's title with her willing complicity. Nym's cowardice and susceptibility to Pistol's verbal virtuosity make is easy for Bardolph to convince them that the new quarrel will be better than the old. Like the church, Nym is ready to forgive and forget—forgive Pistol and forget Nell—in return for eight shillings, a small enough recompense as it stands. Under the spell of Pistol's cleverly evasive speech, however, Nym is placated by the ephemeral promise of even less currency, to be extracted in some vague future, and Pistol's current friendship (II.i.105-10).

THIEVES

The final domestic impediment to Henry's designs abroad, the English traitors who have ostensibly been suborned by French gold, is eliminated in the second scene of Act II. The traitors corroborate the effectiveness of Henry's strategy with the clergy. Since they cannot color rebellion against Henry as a righteous cause sanctioned by the church, they must confine their efforts to a covert assassination plot. Their sole chance is to reconcile the country to a fait accompli. The donnybrook at Eastcheap makes the appropriate segue to this scene; moving us smoothly from a low band of thieves of “crowns” to a highly placed one. Depending on how it is read, Henry's disposition of the three traitors either signifies an apparent success that obscures a real failure, or a real success that is deliberately hidden from view. The difficulty arises from the fact that at least one of the traitors, the earl of Cambridge, disguises his real motives; admitting as much in his cryptic allusion to having motives other than money (II.ii.155-57). Since Henry does not expose the ruse, nor even appear to notice it, the question arises, as in Act I, whether Henry sees his enemies clearly or is instead deceived by appearances.

On the surface, the episode is a resounding success. Henry publicly unmasks the traitors in such a way as to deter imitators. Further, by making an example of traitors, he turns back on them their own supposedly well-meaning advice that he should make an example of wrongdoers (11.79-83). They can thus seem to be responsible for their own demise, not the king; to be hoist on their own petard. Having discovered this plot by mysterious means unknown to anyone at court (11.6-7), Henry's efforts to rule remain inscrutable.

The event vividly displays Henry's boldness and his uncanny ability to ferret out secrets, as well as his impartial but implacable justice.¹⁷ And Henry's excoriation of his best friend and, hence, the worst traitor, Scroop, serves notice on the other nobles in the most memorable way that, henceforth, Henry will on principle distrust the outward appearance of chivalry or loyalty. Since the false knight has been exposed, the true knights will be assumed to be false (11.138-41). Once again, in addition to inspiring fear, Henry's vigilance regarding friend and enemy, and the exquisite precision with which he draws the line between justice and vengeance (1.174), inspires trust. Shakespeare confirms the reputation Henry has in the chronicles for giving people exactly what they deserve—the exact inverse of Richard II and Henry IV, whose maltreatment of both friends and enemies was their chief failing. Henry's friends and enemies know exactly where they stand: they can rise by merit, but not by flattery; and no one falls from grace owing either to the king's willfulness or his morbid anxiety.¹⁸

From every angle, then, Henry appears to have orchestrated the whole unpleasant event to his utmost advantage, turning, as only a “good wit” can, and in true Falstaffian fashion, something bad to something good; as Falstaff would say, turning “diseases to commodity” (2 Henry IV, I.ii.248): “We doubt not of a fair and lucky war, / Since God so graciously hath brought to light / This dangerous treason lurking in our way” (II.ii.184-6). In the traditional accounts of this episode, however, it is actually Henry's victory here that is merely apparent. Just as Henry seems in the chronicles to be at least the intended pawn of the church, so is he portrayed there as the dupe of his chief enemy's dissimulation.¹⁹

Cambridge, who is executed along with the other traitors, only counterfeits an interest in French crowns when his real object is the English crown. Because the king did not see Cambridge's motives, it is alleged that he missed an opportunity to secure himself and his own heirs from danger.²⁰ It is likely that an Elizabethan audience familiar with Shakespeare's other plays about Henry V would have recognized the true crime lurking beneath the false one. Here, however, Shakespeare offers nothing about Cambridge's true motive beyond a tantalizing hint. As he had done earlier with respect to the English royal genealogy, however, by skirting the issue, he may point up its importance.

The poet Daniel says that the source of Henry's failure to see this plot clearly was his “unsuspicious magnanimite”; a quality that is part and parcel of the king's own chivalry, leading him to focus concertedly on the opportunity for glorious action abroad to the exclusion of the court intrigue.²¹ By contrast, Shakespeare's Henry may be perfectly equal to the task of dealing with the likes of Cambridge. If he is foiled in doing so, the fault may not be failure to foresee the danger of the earl's enmity (see 11.86-89), but failure—if it can be called such—to foresee his own untimely death.²²

Henry seems to take almost no notice at all of Cambridge in this scene, being bewildered and shocked at the revelation of Scroop's personal treachery. Moreover, the interposition of the scene with Scroop between the two scenes in the play occupied with the death of Falstaff, for which his followers hold the king responsible, indicates that the two events are somehow interconnected. Falstaff's staunchest supporters might allege that Shakespeare explicitly juxtaposes the two parallel betrayals here (since Henry renounced Falstaff's friendship when he became king), and find a kind of justice in the fact that, having proven to be a false friend himself, Henry is shown to suffer the pain of having one (11.93-104).

The evidence of the play itself supports exactly the opposite view, suggesting that Henry is neither the dupe of appearance, nor the false friend to Falstaff, man to man. This scene, a kind of reenactment of incidents at Eastcheap, does after all show the extent of Henry's debt to Falstaff; on whom he practiced exposing liars and from whom he learned how to get out of tight spots. Henry's greatest pleasure as prince seems to have been to expose Falstaff as a boasting thief, and then watch with mock-indignation how Falstaff would try to wriggle out of paying for what he had done.²³ Henry's association with Falstaff is thus a dress rehearsal for the most serious business he has as king. In the extensive speech about Scroop occupying most of the scene, moreover, we can detect an artful silence on a real enemy joined to an artful silence on a real friend.

The bulk of Henry's speech to the “ingrateful, savage, and inhuman” Scroop is an extended enumeration of his putative virtues. Now it is impossible to imagine that Henry could so elaborately rehearse Scroop's false virtues without thinking fondly on Falstaff's true faults. Henry's list is a perfect counter to—the inversion of—a well drawn portrait of Falstaff. Outwardly, Scroop looked eminently to be dutiful, grave, learned, well born, and religious; the very model of discipline and grace, that is, Falstaff's opposite: “Or, are they spare in diet, / Free from gross passion, or mirth or anger, / Constant in spirit, not swerving with the blood, / Garnish'd and deck'd in modest complement, / Not working with the eye, without the ear, / and but in purged judgment trusting neither?” (11.131-36; emphasis added).

In view of the presence of Falstaff's spirit in this act, Henry's deeply moving renunciation of apparent chivalry has a double meaning. The very falseness of Scroop's chivalry vindicates the falseness of Falstaff's—whose name is literally and symbolically false (the real king had no companion named Fals-taff).²⁴ Falstaff perpetually tries to be something he is not. He is the false knight who, consequently, lacks the flaws of the lean and hungry Scroop and who is, therefore, despite his falseness, true. Although Falstaff is laid low by sins from which Scroop is exempt, he was not liable to the sins of the traitors. With one notable exception—when he pretends to be dead—Falstaff is a terrible liar.²⁵ His colossal corporeality tells against him—he is a walking confession of the sins of the flesh—but also for him. He is an open book.

The speech against Scroop serves, and its placement suggests that it is meant to serve, as the king's secret eulogy of the dying Falstaff. There may be no express place for Falstaff in Henry's public world but Henry gives full play to Falstaffian sentiments as king. What Henry appears to forget, he does not forget. In addition to everything else, Falstaff's very material and very mortal presence is important to remember because it deters kings from being deceived by outward appearances—by the forms and ceremonies of their office—and teaches them to recognize their own human vulnerability. Both Richard II and Henry IV forgot the flesh and blood man beneath the dazzling crown—leading the first to commit crimes as king and the second to commit crimes to become king. But it is hard to be beguiled by form next to the living exemplar of substance, matter itself, this “mountain of flesh,” this “tun of man.”

Now, if Henry is silent about his friend, he may also be silent about his enemy. Henry's concentration on Scroop would be a perfectly effective feint to deflect attention away from Cambridge. And Henry may need to obscure the conspirators' motivations more than they do. To be forced to take note of a rival claimant to the throne is to lend, by the very fact of shedding publicity on it, credibility to that claim. If Henry cannot eliminate his enemies, he must at least prevent them from showing themselves as enemies in public. As with the clergy, Henry must discover new ways of coping with them that do not require him to expose their counterfeits. He confounds his enemies best then by appearing not to see them. As Henry had satisfied without appearing to see the mercenary motives of the church, so in the case of the traitors, he appears to see only mercenary motives.

So much for Henry's potential enemies. To break the cycle of hostilities coming from the traditional quarters—church and nobility—Henry must, in addition, also create new friends; a feat his father could not perform. As Henry diminishes the power of the church by supplanting it as the exemplar of righteousness, so he tempers the political priority of the nobility by raising the common man. He seeks in fact to establish the commonwealth of England on an altogether new foundation; one that will at least fully incorporate the commons into the realm. His aims are visible in Shakespeare's treatment of the war with France.

ACTS III AND IV: FRIENDS AND ENEMIES ABROAD

THE DAUPHIN AND THE FRENCH

It is clear that Shakespeare emphasizes the inferiority of the French to the English in certain fundamental respects—for instance, orderliness and discipline, deference to authority, modesty, gravity, and cohesion. As perfect counterparts of the English, the French are the foil setting off the English more clearly by contrast. The weaknesses in the French army emanate directly from court, where the dauphin, the heir apparent, sets the tone. The contrast between him and Henry reprises the earlier contrast between Richard II, just before his political fall, and Henry Bolingbroke, at the moment of his greatest ascendancy.

The arrogance of the dominant elements in the French court is about to undo them. When the dauphin has his ambassador give Henry a box of tennis balls as a present, to say nothing of the contemptuous greeting he attaches to it (I.ii.249-57); when the French disdain to show up in force to defend the besieged city of Harfleur—being utterly scornful of their adversary (III.iii.43-46); when the nobles shoot dice before Agincourt to decide who will get the ransom on the prisoners they expect to capture—we can see they are readying for a fall.²⁶ While acting through British agents, moreover, the French are behind the attempt to assassinate Henry V. This move is not only shocking and provocative, but also reckless with respect to their own king's security; it makes regicide a thinkable crime.

Along with their boastfulness, an uncritical attachment to feudal aristocratic tradition lures the French to defeat themselves. Indeed, the theme of self-defeat is another carry-over from the earlier plays in this series; a reminder first of Richard's and then of Henry IV's debilities.

While the French forces vastly outnumber the English—the odds are five to one—their numerical superiority is worth less than it seems.²⁷ The haughty aversion of the French aristocrats to the common soldier rends their army in two, canceling out their overwhelming advantage in numbers. A mounted French knight could not brook being beholden to or seconded by a man of low degree (IV.ii.25-28).²⁸ The French nobles, like Richard II before them, refuse to recognize the humanity they share with their commons. In their own minds, far more important than the numbers in their army are the names. The unity that the French fail to achieve for the sake of victory is the punishment inflicted on them in defeat. Ten thousand Frenchmen, lying in jumbled heaps, litter the field at the close of the battle of Agincourt. This final commingling of aristocrats and commoners may be more humiliating to the French than the grim body count itself (IV.vii.74-81).

The class consciousness of the French nobles, their desire to distinguish themselves from their own commons and from the English, is confined to externals or forms. They are imprisoned by what is weighty and palpable to the eye. Preoccupied with gilding the body, they altogether ignore the soul or the inner man. As a consequence, like Richard II's and Henry IV's seduction by outward regal trappings, they are deceived by appearances; this is the characteristic French vice in the play.

Overall, the French are victims at Agincourt of a self-imposed double deception. Judging by externals, they misperceive both English strengths and French weaknesses. They assume that the English are not men to be reckoned with essentially because they do not look the part. And they assume that their own mere presence in glistening battle regalia will suffice to defeat the English. “Do but behold yond poor and starved band, / And your fair show shall suck away their souls, / Leaving them but the [shells] and husks of men” (IV.ii.16-18). Against such hollow, counterfeit men only a counterfeit valor—valor's “vapor”—is needed (11.18-24). As it is, until it is too late, the French bring only apparent valor, a “fair show,” and nothing more, to bear.

HENRY AND THE ENGLISH

When the two armies meet, the French are at the peak of their form while the English are at the lowest ebb of theirs. To this point the English have not seriously tested themselves against the French; they are engaged by the French when Henry's sick and famished army is retreating to Calais for the winter (III.vi).

The play suggests that in the absence of Henry's leadership of the English at Agincourt, French self-confidence would have been very well founded. The resplendent and formidable outward appearance of the French, on which they themselves rely, is the one thing that can defeat the English. Despite their own weaknesses therefore, the French army possesses the power to unnerve and paralyze the English, in effect defeating them in advance, before a single arm is lifted. The English, too, are in danger of becoming their own worst enemy. To avoid what is essentially their own self-defeat, then, the English must be made proof against appearances. Henry can insure that they do not make the French mistake only by making them literally blind to what they see (IV.i.290-91). For Henry and his friends, this is the real battle at Agincourt.

To confound or over rule their senses, Henry must steel their hearts. Since the body is merely the outside or skin of a man, the mere shell or “husk,” we may say that nature cooperates with Henry's effort. Henry muses, “when the mind is quick'ned, out of doubt, / The organs, though defunct and dead before, / Break up their drowsy grave, and newly move / With casted slough and fresh legerity” (IV.i.18-23).²⁹ The soul can rally, even resurrect, the body.

Historical accounts of the war with France often stress the unique resources of the English. By and large, however, they emphasize English weaponry and the mode of warfare, in particular, the prominence in the English army of the long bow and, hence, of the archers, who were commoners, over the mounted knights or nobles.³⁰ In Henry V, Shakespeare is silent on all such matters.³¹ Indeed, the greatest peculiarity of this play organized around war is that there is no actual warfare in it.

Shakespeare may want to show that the cause of the English victory is not discernible in weapons or combat tactics at all, but is, on the contrary, entirely a matter of hearts and minds. As Henry himself insists: “All things are ready, if our minds be so” (IV.iii.71). On the English side, the cause of victory is manifest therefore in Henry's speeches to his men before battle. From these speeches we can conclude that Agincourt does indeed represent a departure from tradition; not because of the new preponderance of the common man's weapons, but because of the new preponderance of the common man's heart. This is not to say that King Henry is a democrat in disguise. From Henry's actions we can, however, infer his recognition of the common humanity underlying all social and political distinctions.

As Shakespeare presents it, the war provides the opportunity not only to cover up or postpone the old quarrels, but also to begin to eradicate their cause. The secure allegiance of the commons establishes a bulwark for the crown missing in previous reigns. Henry's actions imply, therefore, a more far-reaching and revolutionary design than anything conceived by his father. As he also sets about to reconstruct England's past, Henry sets about to construct the English nation, to make a whole out of the disparate parts.³² To achieve genuinely national goals, Henry must put amity where there might otherwise be distrust and mutual respect where there could be contempt.³³

With his speeches, Henry aims to kindle a zeal for the common cause within which the differences between nobles and commons can merge and, for a time, dissolve themselves. He seeks both to ameliorate the traditional aristocratic impulses toward an aloof and segregated existence, and to encourage the common soldiers to catch some of the fire that more easily inflames the nobles; or, if not rendering them ardent, at least making them obedient. In the first place, to achieve these two purposes Henry does not so much denounce the thirst for distinction that underlies the hereditary aristocracy as to nurture that pride on a new basis. As much as the French nobility, but in a novel way, Henry ostentatiously flaunts good breeding. England herself and not a few old, established families is now hailed as the progenetrix of the best men. “And you, good yeomen, / Whose limbs were made in England, show us here / The mettle of your pasture; let us swear / That you are worth your breeding, which I doubt not; / For there is not one of you so mean and base / That hath not noble lustre in your eyes” (III.i.25-30). Further, the new upper class, the rarefied fraternity to which Henry invites his little “band of brothers,” is all-inclusive with respect to those who participate in the engagements in France and who partake of the common danger, but is reserved for them alone; an exclusive club in which membership is earned by valiant service. “For he today that shed his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition” (IV.iii. 38-39; 59-61).

At the deepest level, however, and contrary to what one might expect, the task Henry has to weld English hearts together in a single whole demands that he stay alive to the real heterogeneity and indeed the inequality of his men. If the concentration on the body democratizes men by reducing them to the lowest common denominator, which is the tendency—against their will—of the French, the focus on souls expresses a genuinely aristocratic impulse. To make Englishmen out of all his men does not require that Henry seek to obliterate the natural distinctions between them, but that he bring them by different routes, “contrariously,” to a common goal (I.ii.205-6).

Henry speaks to his soldiers as if he spoke to two natural classes of men.³⁴ The natural nobles seek honor and can even be made to prefer it to life, and the natural commoners would trade all of the martial fame in the world, since it belongs to dead men, for the page boy's pipe dream: “a pot of ale and safety” (II.i.12-13). To speak well to each of these types of men, Henry must meet their real concerns, while being free of their self-deceptions or delusions. Henry cannot shore up the nobles' flagging spirits by appearing to be anything less than the foremost exemplar of chivalric virtue; as if he embraces entirely Harry Percy's intrepid, even reckless zeal for outward glory (Harry Percy is called “Hot-spur”) and does not share at all in Falstaff's immunity to it.³⁵ “But if it be a sin to covet honor, / I am the most offending soul alive” (IV.iii.28-29). He cannot shore up the commoners' hearts by being king at all, and so he disguises himself as a common man. As in his jests with Falstaff that had no apparent purpose beyond themselves, to achieve his deadly serious purposes as king, Henry bestows himself so that he may serve as the touchstone to the souls of the other men while hiding his own. As Chorus tells us, the famous “little touch of Harry in the night,” enables “mean and gentle all” to derive support from the king's example “as may unworthiness define,” that is, each according to his own limits (1V.i.45-47). There is, moreover, a central trick or paradox in each of the two main speeches Henry delivers on the eve of the battle at Agincourt that reveals how well he knows his men.

To treat the second of Henry's audiences first: Henry's prebattle speech to the nobles is apparently very traditional. To overcome their fear of death, Henry appeals to their thirst for honor. The stark imbalance in the sizes of the two armies is thus no disadvantage: “The fewer men, the greater share of honor” (IV.iii.22).³⁶ What the soldier sees so clearly with his mind's eye—the honor that will be his—can make him ignore the things he apprehends with his senses. Death itself can be made to disappear from view.

Thus, Henry anticipates for the nobles the accolades that will be heaped upon them after the battle. In the most vivid, intoxicating way, Henry commemorates the victory attained at Agincourt before it is won.³⁷ There is no reverential invocation of the ancestors in Henry's speech as there had been earlier in England and at Harfleur. The knights who face the French at Agincourt are no mere latecomers or epigoni. On the contrary, the achievements of those who have come to France before slip into oblivion. “This day is call'd the feast of Crispian … / And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, / From this day to the ending of the world / But we in it shall be remembered” (11.40,57-59; emphasis added).

The celebration Henry lovingly depicts for his men weaves perfectly together an acknowledgment and a forgetting of their mortality. Given the inevitability of death at some time, the deliberate choice of a noble death is more compelling: “He that outlives this day, and comes safely home, / Will stand a' tiptoe when this day is named,” and, “he that shall see this day, and live old age, / Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors” (11.41-45; emphasis added). Nevertheless, the overriding impression conveyed by Henry's speech is one of high-spirited vitality, camaraderie, and warm good cheer. The portrait of the celebrants of Agincourt is so lifelike, its hearers can place themselves in the imagined scene, subtly obscuring the fact that in Henry's foreshadowing, they are not actually there. Henry has made clear that all names of note must be earned by valiant service. Barely perceptible in his picture, however, is the fact that all that remains of the men to whom he is speaking is their names. The seductive, imaginary commemoration takes the place of the real ones, which they are not to enjoy. Inconspicuously but definitely embedded in the promise of undying honor, so to speak, as its escort, is the promise of death. Henry's immortal speech to his nobles is their funeral oration.³⁸ …

Notes

1. All citations are to The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). I wish to thank Lauren Weiner, Diana Schaub, and Fred Baumann for their assistance, and Mary Nichols, Ernest Fortin, and Lee and Joseph Knippenberg for enabling me to present earlier versions of this essay. I also thank the Earhart Foundation for fellowship aid.

2. See Herschel Baker's “Introduction” in the Riverside Shakespeare for a summary of critical positions, 930-34. See also Ken Adelman, “The Blast of War,” in Policy Review no. 52 (spring 1990), 80-83; Lily Campbell, Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1947); Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Seinfeld, “History and ideology: the instance of Henry V,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 206-27; Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 19-47; Harry M. Geduld, Filmguide to Henry V (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1973), 55-69; Lawrence Olivier, “The Making of Henry V,” Classic Film Scripts (London: Lorrimer Publishing, 1984), 1; Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972); Norman Rabkin, “Rabbits, Ducks and Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly vol. 28 no. 3 (summer 1977); 279-96; E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: Macmillan Press, 1946); Derek Traversi, Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1957); and Gunter Walch, “‘Henry V’ as Working-House of Ideology,” in Shakespeare Survey 40, (1987): 63-68. On the general approach I am employing, see Allan Bloom with Harry Jaffa, Shakespeare's Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1964); and Catherine Zuckert, Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form (Savage, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990).

3. All references to Shakespeare's sources are to Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare's Plays, vol. 4 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 299-434. See also Graham Holderness, “Henry V,” in Shakespeare: The Play of History, ed. Graham Holderness, Nick Potter, and John Turner, (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 62-82.

4. See Paul Cantor, Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976), 7-18; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1996), section 224 (pp. 151-3).

5. See Richard II, I.i.104; III.iii.108; V.vi.43; and Pamela K. Jensen, “Beggars and Kings: Cowardice and Courage in Shakespeare's Richard II,” Interpretation, vol. 18, no. 1, (fall 1990): 111-44.

6. See Holinshed, in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 280-88; Famous Victories, in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources 1.480, 313; 11.550-51,570-72, 315; Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 354 ff; 1 Henry IV (I.ii.195-217); and 2 Henry IV (V.ii.122-29). Narrative and Dramatic Sources is hereafter referred to as N- and D-S-.

7. See Bullough, N- and D-S-, 216-17; Famous Victories, 1.480, 313; 11. 550-51,750-52, 315; 1 Henry IV, V.iv.49-52.

8. 2 Henry IV, IV.v. 202-20; 1 Henry IV, I.i.18-28.

9. Holinshed speaks of the “sharpe invention” of the church to support the war in order to set aside the commons' bill. Shakespeare preserves from Holinshed the fact that this wealth was “devoutlie given,” but refrains from repeating Holinshed's phrase that it was also “disordinately spent” (Bullough, N- and D-S-, 377-78; see also 356).

10. By contrast to Holinshed's Chronicles and Famous Victories, in the play it is Henry rather than the clergy who introduces the possible objections of the Salic Law and Henry rather than either the clergy or the nobles who introduces and presses home the objections that could be made about Scotland. Both of Shakespeare's sources present an actual debate on, especially, the latter question. Canterbury in Famous Victories and Westmoreland in the Chronicles raise questions about Scotland, which are duly answered in the former case by Oxford (1. 770-75, 779;. 331-32), and in the latter by Exeter, whose “earnest and pithie persuasions” entirely carry the day, “according as the archbishop had mooved” (379-80). See also Holinshed, in Bullough, N-and D-S-, 377-81, 407; Winston Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples (New York and London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1956), Volume I, 292-94; 1 Henry VI, I.i.35-36; see also III.i.

11. See Holinshed, in Bullough, N- and D-S-, 407.

12. I.ii.21-22; 281-88; II.ii. 79-82; 184-87; III.iii.39-40; IV.i.155-56; V.ii.68-71.

13. 2 Henry IV, II.ii, 79-82.

14. Richard II, II.1.15-16, 28-29,70; Jensen, 113, 120.

15. The attack that the English make on what they call “the borrowed glories” of France (II.iv.78-79) is matched in Shakespeare's play King John, where the French ambassador tells the English king to lay down the “borrowed majesty” he holds in the English crown (I.i.4). The battles at Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356) (II.iv.50-55) took place during the lifetime of the sitting French king, making the war seem like a renewal of a quarrel, which Henry's predecessors had to forgo (Famous Victories, 1.768). Richard II had, however, married a French queen, inaugurating a kind of truce that lasted into Henry's reign.

16. Given the clergy's unanimity on the war question, the editorial attributions of the speech at I.ii.166 to Ely and that at 1.174 to Exeter, might be misattributions, and perhaps transposed.

17. Holinshed, in Bullough, N- and D-S-, 407.

18. Calling Henry “a severe justicer” who was both loved and obeyed, Holinshed says he left “no offense unpunished, nor freendship unrewarded” (Bullough, N- and D-S-, 406).

19. Holinshed reports that Cambridge “rather confessed … monie” as his motive than reveal his true purposes because he desired “rather to save his succession than himself,” a situation that, had Henry “either doubted or foreseene,” would not have come to pass (Bullough, N- and D-S-, 385-6). Famous Victories does not treat the conspiracy.

20. Nominally, Cambridge acts on behalf of Mortimer, earl of March, Richard II's designated heir, who is not mentioned in the play. Because Mortimer had no son, however, Cambridge harbored the not unfounded hope that the crown would devolve on his own heirs. After Henry's death, Cambridge's son, Richard Plantagenet, does initiate the claims against Henry VI that start the dynastic wars. See 1 Henry VI, II.vi.91-95; II.v. 23-33, 55, 63-97.

21. Daniel's Henry “for being good, hates to be ill.” See stanzas 34-35, in Bullough, N- and D-S-, 428-29.

22. See Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. with intro. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), chap. 14, 60. See also Chaps. 3, 12; 14, 60; 18, 25, esp. at 100.

23. 1 Henry IV, I.ii.186-90; II.iv; III.iii.163; 2 Henry IV, II.ii.169-70.

24. In 1 Henry VI, I.i.131, Shakespeare uses the name “Sir John Falstaff” for the cowardly knight Sir John Fastolfe; he originally gave the name Oldcastle to the prince's companion. (2 Henry IV, Epilogue, 1.32; and Riverside, 843).

25. 2 Henry IV, IV.iii.18-23.

26. Holinshed reports that before the battle at Agincourt, the French built a chariot at the site, to be used to parade Henry through French streets, “little weening (God wot) how soone their brags should be blowne awaie” (Bullough, N- and D-S-, 394).

27. Holinshed reports odds of six to one, in Bullough, N-and D-S-, 392.

28. It may have been to justify their fighting alongside lesser men rather than to call forth more gallant service from them, that the French court created five hundred new knights just before the battle at Agincourt (IV.vii.85-86).

29. See 2 Henry IV, I.ii.193-201.

30. Dupuy and Dupuy, The Encyclopedia of Military History (New York: Harper and Row, 1870), 330-35, 414-15; Winston Churchill, 294-296; Michael Howard, War in European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 1-19; Theodore Ropp, War in the Modern World (London: Collier Macmillan, 1959), 19-25.

31. To enhance the effectiveness of the archers, Henry employed a device that is nearly as famous as the battle itself, one made into a picturesque part of the battle scenes in both the Olivier and Branagh film versions of the play. To protect the archers compromising the vanguard, Henry planted tall sharpened stakes in the ground in front of them; in order to gore the horses of any assaulting Frenchmen who survived the initial shower of arrows. The importance of this arrangement is attested to by Holinshed. Famous Victories essentially incorporates his description as part of the order of battle (11.1160-80), in Bullough, N- and D-S-, 39 and 332-33. In 1 Henry VI, the inability to employ this particular device is adduced as a factor in England's defeat when the war with France is renewed (I.i.115-19). It is all the more curious then to note that no reference to it, or to the order of battle or tactics at Agincourt, or even archers, occurs in Henry V.

32. Moving the aristocracy away from French, the historical Henry was the first king of England to write his field dispatches in English. See Churchill, 299.

33. The night before Agincourt, the French nobles dissipate their own considerable eloquence and facility with language, which might have been used to muster courage in the army, in sophisticated and lascivious wordplay having to do with horses and mistresses and taking the one for the other. The ridiculous lengths to which the dauphin goes to celebrate his horse (“his neigh is like the bidding of a monarch”) is also telling because, judging from the way he—the heir apparent—is treated by his closest associates, “the prince of palfreys,” receives more deference than the prince himself (III.vii.10-40). The dauphin inspires a senseless, frivolous competition in the nobility, which prevents the men from helping one another or from wanting to help him (III.vii.72-123). As the model for the realm as a whole, the order that is missing in his own life infects the army. At the most crucial moment, the horrified nobles recoil at the disorder that has defeated them by a veritable panegyric on disorder. In deference to chivalry, the best they can do is to attempt to escape disgrace by embracing death (IV.iv.6-22).

34. Harvey Mansfield, “Machiavelli's Political Science,” American Political Science Review 75, no. 2 (June 1981): 293-306.

35. The contrast between Falstaff and Percy is made in 1 Henry IV, V.iv.

36. Holinshed merely reports at this point “a right grave oration,” culminating in “manie words of courage.” The point of the speech as he describes it, moreover, is: the fewer men, the less damage to England. An additional advantage to having so few men is that the soldiers will not ascribe the victory to themselves, but to God. His Henry also makes a disdainful reference to the French (Bullough, N- and D-S-, 393-4; Churchill, 295).

37. Strictly speaking, as is true of the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, the commemoration of valor at Agincourt is independent of the attainment of victory.

38. The peculiarity of Henry's speech as a pre- rather than a postbattle oration, as well as something of the universality of the sentiments it expresses about tales soldiers tell “in their flowing cups” is captured in General Norman Schwarzkopf's address to the departing troops after the success of Desert Storm in Bahrain on 8 March, 1991. “I can hear the war stories now. Over Lone Star beer, over Colorado Kool-aid, over some great German beer, a firewater or two, and what you drink the most, that Diet Pepsi and Coca-Cola. I know what glorious war stories they are going to be”: (Richard Pyle, Schwarzkopf: The Man, the Mission, the Triumph (New York: Signet, 1991), 255-56.