[In the following essay, Dean suggests that the structure of Henry V is a combination of two dramatic forms (“chronicle” history and “romance” history), highlights Shakespeare's sophisticated characterization of King Henry V, and explores the dynamic relationship of the drama's main plot and subplots.]

It is customary to divide plays written during the Elizabethan period upon subjects related to English history into two groups: “chronicle” histories, which draw their source-material, in the main, from the work of non-dramatic prose or verse historiographers, and “romance” or “pseudo” histories, which incorporate characters from history within a completely imaginary, usually comic, plot. It is further agreed, by the principal authorities, that only the “chronicle” histories had any important influence on Shakespeare's contribution to the genre.¹ There are grounds for questioning this assumption, which cannot be discussed in detail here;² an interesting case-study of an individual play has, however, been provided by Anne Barton in an important article on Henry V (1599).³ Relating Shakespeare's play to earlier “romance” histories—such as George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (1587-1593), Peele's Edward I (1590-1593), Heywood's 1 Edward IV (1592-1601) and Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter of Manchester (1598-1601)—which, like Henry V, make use of the motif of the disguised king who mingles unrecognized among his subjects, Barton argues that Shakespeare took the opportunity to re-examine the tradition, not without a certain cold detachment. The “nostalgic but false romanticism”⁴ of the earlier plays, with their Utopian dream of a world in which King and commoner could meet on equal terms,⁵ is, in Barton's view, rejected by Shakespeare, for whom “Henry V seems to have marked the end of his personal interest in the tragical history. He had virtually exhausted the form, at least in its English version.”⁶

Mrs. Barton's alignment of Henry V and “romance” histories affords a long-overdue acknowledgment that it was not only in his comedies that Shakespeare explored the conventions of romantic pastoral. Nonetheless, her argument illuminates only parts of the play. If it incorporates “romance” elements, to speak of it as an example of “the tragical history” seems too narrow: as does the alternative category of comic history.⁷ Its tone of disillusionment with an ideal of social democracy, for example, is at odds with the confident, “chronicle” history nationalism apparent (embarrassingly so to our age) elsewhere, in Henry's speeches. Critical disagreements about the play and its eponymous hero have, indeed, centered upon questions of tone and attitude; but such qualities are notoriously elusive, and it is my contention that we shall do better to concentrate on the play's structure, about which it is possible to arrive at more definite conclusions. For, ultimately, we are not dealing with a contrast of tones, but of modes.

I

The main structural components of Henry V are the Choruses, the main plot and the subplot; the relationship between them has caused much discussion. It has been maintained, for example, that the Choruses provide the popular conception of Henry which is contradicted by his actions in the play;⁸ that this contradiction is resolved in Act V;⁹ that the Choruses are to be regarded as no more than a conventional Epic device.¹⁰ Again, it is debated whether the subplot characters act as foils to the King, who appears even greater when compared to them,¹¹ or whether the parallels of incident, character, and language reduce Henry to the clowns' level.¹² Yet again, the play is obviously indebted to a tradition of heroic drama inaugurated by 1 Tamburlaine (1587-1588),¹³ but are we to see Henry as a figure parallel to Tamburlaine,¹⁴ or as an ironic contrast?¹⁵

The most thorough and persuasively-argued structural analysis (although, as I shall argue, it is ultimately unsatisfactory) is that of Richard Levin, and it is convenient to begin from his account of the relationship between the plots, which is designed to justify the conclusion that “Everything in the subplot points unambiguously to its function as a foil to contrast with, and so render still more admirable, the exploits of the ‘mirror of all Christian kings.’”¹⁶ He cites in support a series of striking contrasts: between the English forces, hierarchically organized and embracing the entire British Isles (Gower, Fluellen, Macmorris, Jamy) as well as the ranks of common soldiery (Bates, Court, and Williams) subordinated to the unifying monarch, on the one hand, and, on the other, the autonomous, freelance, “fringe” militia (Nym, Bardolph, Pistol); between Henry's aim of conquest and the clowns' aim of filching; between Henry's unimpeded good fortune, ending in a marriage consummating national and international harmony, and the cumulative decline in the clowns' fortunes, from the loss of Falstaff (II.i, II.iii) to their cowardliness at Harfleur (III.ii) to the deaths of Nym and Bardolph and the final departure for England of the bereaved Pistol (V.i)—all emphasized by the scornful choric comments of the Boy (III.ii.28-57, IV.iv.69-80); between Henry's victories against immense odds and the clowns' verbal menaces which are never put into action; between Henry's resolution of the quarrel with Williams, where the King's honor forbids his personal engagement but matters are settled amicably (IV.viii), and Fluellen's quarrel with Pistol, which the latter neglects to prosecute out of cowardice and in which he is ignominiously beaten (V.i). Levin concludes that “the negative analogies have been consistently deployed to augment the seriousness and elevation of the main action.”¹⁷

Attractive though these antitheses may be, there is much, not so unambiguously to Henry's credit, which they pass over in silence. A closer study of the text reveals a number of parallels which seem to draw King and clowns, and also King and Frenchmen, together. Before these can be examined, however, the character of Henry must be set against a “romance” history tradition to which Shakespeare makes definite allusions.

In Act I of the play we see Henry in the role of warlord; in Act V, in that of lover. Elizabethan dramatists, including Shakespeare, had made a commonplace of this conjunction and had explored it metaphorically (by using the language of one of the activities to talk about the other) and in terms of character (by examining the adverse effects upon the monarch's military prowess of the enfeebling sickness of love). Some of the most important “romance” histories in which Mars and Venus are at odds are Lyly's Campaspe (1580-1584),¹⁸ Marlowe's 1 Tamburlaine,¹⁹ Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1590-1594) and James IV (1590-1591) and the anonymous Edward III (1590-1595). By 1599, therefore, a dramatist could assume that the love/war link would be understood, and there is no need to insist on a specific precedent for Henry V. Nonetheless, there are indications that Shakespeare had Edward III particularly in mind (and, it is worth remembering, his connections with that play may have extended to part-authorship).²⁰ Direct references are limited to Canterbury's assertion that the Scottish King was sent to France “to kill King Edward's fame with prisoner kings” (I.ii.162), which derives from the earlier play and not from any extra-dramatic historical account; and to the possibility that Henry V, III.vii.150-54 echoes Edward III, III.iii.159-62.²¹ References to events dramatized in Edward III are, however, more frequent. Canterbury, for instance, encourages Henry:

Go, my dread lord, to your great-grandsire's tomb,
From whom you claim; invoke his war-like spirit,
And your great-uncle's, Edward the Black Prince,
Who on the French ground play'd a tragedy,
Making defeat on the full power of France;
Whiles his most mighty father on a hill
Stood smiling to behold his lion's whelp
Forage in blood of French nobility.

(I.ii.103-10)

The incident of Edward III's refusal to save the Black Prince from danger (Edward III, III.iv; note the theatrical image of “play'd a tragedy” above) is also referred to by the French King (II.iv.53-62), whose admonition to fear one descended from such hardy stock is exactly the advice subsequently given to the French by Exeter (II.iv.91-95). The victory at Crecy is, finally, recalled by Fluellen (“as I have read in the chronicles”) after Agincourt (IV.vii.94-98).

It seems then that Henry is presented as challenging comparison with Edward III. In the earlier play, Edward demonstrates his princely virtue by resisting the temptation to seduce the Countess of Warwick, and his victory in this amorous struggle is echoed in the lists of war by his son's triumph (also unaided) against apparently overwhelming numbers of Frenchmen. What Shakespeare's predecessor had seen as two separate though analogous trials requiring two separate though analogous characters, Shakespeare conflates into the single character of Henry in his dual aspects of warlord and wooer.²²

It is the King's personal equilibrium which is emphasized at the outset of the play. His “two bodies,”²³ his public and private selves, we are assured, are completely at one, and this harmoniousness is conventionally reflected by that of his court and his kingdom, whose various parts “keep in one consent, / Congreeing in a full and natural close, / Like music” (I.ii.181-83). Yet Canterbury is shortly advising him to “Divide your happy England into four” (I.ii.214), and the simile quoted above recurs with ambiguous effect when, in trying to win over the coy Katharine, Henry demands, “Come, your answer in broken music” (V.ii.256-57). The order celebrated at the play's beginning does not necessarily persist to its close, and the references to Edward III may be intended as a discomforting contrast rather than as an admiring parallel. In combining into Henry the roles of Edward III and the Black Prince,²⁴ Shakespeare at least made his King a more complex character, and the nature of that complexity needs further examination.

I shall now take up again the question of the relationships between the plots.

II

It is generally agreed that Pistol is in certain respects a parody of Henry. His “On, on, on, on, on! to the breach, to the breach!” (III.ii.1) blatantly echoes “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more” (III.i.1), although Pistol, as usual, does nothing to follow up his encouragement, and the phrase is also used by Fluellen (III.ii.21) and echoed by Macmorris (III.ii.111 ff.). More substantially, the references to throat-cutting first made by Nym (II.i.22-24, 69 ff.) and Bardolph (II.i.91 ff.) are taken up by Pistol in his catch-phrase “Couple a gorge!” (II.i.71, IV.iv.37). According to the Quarto of the play (1600), he also speaks these words at the end of IV.vi, just after Henry's order to his troops to kill the French prisoners (IV.vi.37), which is repeated, with the specification of throat-cutting, at IV.vii.65. The Quarto is an unauthorized text, and the Folio omits Pistol's parting shot; but, as William Empson argues, the other occurrences of the phrase allow us to take it seriously as associating Henry's action with the coarse vindictiveness of Pistol.²⁵ Again, critics have commonly found difficulty in accepting what seems to be gratuitous ranting on Henry's part at Harfleur (III.iii.1-14); the New Arden editor's assurances that the King is “precisely and unswervingly following the rules of warfare as laid down by Vegetius, Aegidius Romanus and others”²⁶ do not seem an adequate explanation. When we connect Henry's behavior here with the throat-cutting incident, and with his exposure, through an elaborate trick, of the traitors Cambridge, Scoop, and Grey (II.ii)²⁷—a trick which deliberately mocks them despite Henry's verbal professions of sympathy—we cannot but feel uneasy.

Henry is also associated with the subplot characters through his supporters, who are by no means so united as Richard Levin claims. We may not feel inclined to attach much weight to the charges of Nym and the Hostess, that the King has virtually murdered Falstaff (II.i.88, 121-26), but Williams' retorts to him in IV.viii (considered below) are more serious criticisms (as are the soldiers' arguments in IV.i). Again, the quarrel between Macmorris and Fluellen in III.ii parallels that between Nym and Pistol in II.i; whilst the encounter between Fluellen and Pistol in V.i has been anticipated by Fluellen and Williams in IV.viii, and by Henry and Williams in IV.i. I am suggesting, in short, that Henry V may not be a straightforward double-plot play with a clown subplot acting as foil, but what Levin calls an “equivalence plot” play;²⁸ and, at the risk of appearing unduly schematic, I further propose that the parallels of character, implied by the parallels of incident given above, may be transcribed, using Levin's own system, into a series of proportional relations, thus:

Henry:Williams::Fluellen:Williams::Fluellen:Pistol.

If we eliminate the common factors in this equation, we have

Henry:Williams:Pistol,

which brings the King into comparison with both a member of the acceptable common people, and a wholly unacceptable rogue. This sequence may not be mathematically exact, but it is dramatically suggestive and excludes the possibility of placing Henry on a level of his own in which every bad action committed by other characters somehow makes him seem more admirable.

His behavior toward Williams, in particular, casts interesting light on the claims made for him in I.i as the complete man and the complete King. In disguise he declares that “The King is but a man, as I am … His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man” (IV.i.100 ff., 105 ff.). Anne Barton sees ironic scrutiny of the “romance” history motif here; her point can be developed by observing that, in “romance” history, the King's disguise and the equality it provides are possible only because the King is the King; his condescension is in itself an aspect of his royal magnanimity, so that ultimately there is no Utopia at all. Henry illustrates this point too: he appears to be denying that he is any different from his subjects, but the phrase “as I am” is an escape clause: to be a man as Henry is is not to be a man in the normal sense. Subsequently Henry pulls rank in telling Williams, “It was ourself thou didst abuse” (IV.viii.50; note the change from “I” to “we”). But Williams is not to be cowed:

Your majesty came not like yourself: you appeared to me but as a common man; witness the night, your garments, your lowliness; and what your highness suffered under that shape, I beseech you, take it for your fault and not mine: for had you been as I took you for, I made no offence; therefore, I beseech your highness, pardon me.

(IV.viii.51-58)

It is true that he asks forgiveness, but his attitude is quite unlike the abject terror of, for example, Hobs in 1 Edward IV when he discovers the real identity of his erstwhile boon companion. Williams' common-sense defense of his actions, his readiness to suggest that the King is at fault, discomfort Henry by reducing him to the level of “a common man” at a time, and in a place, where it does not suit his convenience. He evades a direct reply (as he did in IV.i.150-92, when Williams asked about the King's personal guilt for the deaths of his soldiers in battle) by the obligatory distribution of largesse: “Here, uncle Exeter, fill this glove with crowns …” (IV.viii.59), and by reducing Williams to the status of “this fellow” (IV.viii.60). But when Fluellen tries to imitate the King by offering Williams a shilling, the latter's irritation explodes: “I will none of your money” (IV.viii.70). Fluellen's gesture reflects back upon Henry's, cruder though it is; we have witnessed a gap between Henry as King and as man which has involved him in, to say the least, inconsistent behavior.

The Williams episode affects its subsequent analogues. Fluellen's offer of money to Williams is repeated to Pistol (V.i.60 ff.), who, appropriately to his lower status, gets a groat rather than a shilling but, like Williams, refuses it. Additionally, the glove given by Henry to Williams as a gage has its comic counterpart in the leek sported by Fluellen and eaten by Pistol.²⁹ Even though we may be reluctant to accept R. W. Battenhouse's view that the leek episode is a parody of Henry's marriage to Katharine,³⁰ still the symbols link Henry to Pistol, and Fluellen's anger toward Pistol, which even Gower condemns as excessive (“Enough, captain: you have astonished him,” V.i.40), recalls Henry's overbearing treatment of Williams. Fluellen, has, moreover, already been established as a substitute-Henry by his observation that the King, like him, wears the leek on St. David's day, and by Henry's explanation that “I wear it for a memorable honour; / For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman” (IV.vii.108-9).

Fluellen is also the means of furnishing another comparison for Henry's rule. Following Henry's claim that the English are descended from a race of Alexanders (III.i.19), he is himself compared to “Alexander the Pig” by Fluellen (IV.vii.14-55), who has earlier proved himself a master of inapt analogy in equating the valor of Pistol with that of Mark Antony (III.vi.12-16). As a commentator on this episode remarks, the references to Antony and Alexander “precede questionable ethical actions by the two men [i.e., Pistol and Henry] which belie the classical designations or, ironically, reflect them, and through contrast undercut the apparently heroic images.”³¹ It is tempting to think, in the “romance” history context, that memories of Lyly's Alexander in Campaspe are surfacing in Shakespeare's mind here, and that the character joins Edward III as a pattern of the integrated self in comparison with whom Henry fares badly.³²

I have so far been trying to establish comparisons between the mainplot and subplot worlds which imply an equivalence, and not a contrast, between them, and accumulate to qualify radically our approval of the King. I now turn to the resemblances between Henry and the French, which are less explicit but nonetheless significant.

The opening of the play establishes a pattern of religious references in which England and France are placed at opposite ends of the ethical scale. As a “true lover of the holy Church” (I.i.23), one whose reform of his life was so sudden as to be almost miraculous, Henry is living testimony to the power of God, “in whose name,” he charges the French ambassadors, “tell you the Dauphin I am coming on” (I.ii.291). In opposing Henry the French are, in effect, siding with the Devil, as are their undercover agents at the English court. The actions of these traitors seem to Henry to constitute “another fall of man” (II.ii.142); he denounces Scroop as an “inhuman creature” (II.ii.95), the seduction of whom—to thoughts of treason and murder, those “two yoke-devils sworn to either's purpose” (II.ii.106)—represents a triumph for the forces of darkness:

                    … whatsoever cunning fiend it was
That wrought upon thee so preposterously
Hath got the voice in hell for excellence:
.....If that same demon that hath gull'd thee thus
Should with his lion gait walk the whole world,
He might return to vasty Tartar back,
And tell the legions: “I can never win
A soul so easy as that Englishman's.”

(II.ii.111-13, 121-25)

This way of viewing rebellion is a wholly conventional one, but it is given special prominence by the insistence on Henry's personal piety: moreover, it reappears more explicitly in the clown scene which separates I.ii from II.ii. There we hear Nym boasting that “I am not Barbason; you cannot conjure me” (II.i.53), Barbason being, as the editor notes, the name of a devil. The association becomes more marked when the Boy refers to Pistol as “this roaring devil i' the old play” (IV.iv.73-74). In their desire for self-interest, their indifference to moral standards, and their isolation from the order of Henry's court, the subplot characters are inimical to the King's religious conception of his own person and mission, and so are to be allied mentally with the French as agents of disruption and wickedness.

This conjunction of the French and the clowns, and their joint association with the Devil, apparently forms a group of characters, and a body of values, to which Henry can figure as a splendid contrast. But the play's moral values are not so straightforward. Perhaps the King's old tutor had something to teach him yet; Falstaff on his deathbed, we are told, stigmatized women as “devils incarnate” (II.iii.32), and in his courtship of Katharine, Henry himself is drawn into the magic circle. Henry's first words after kissing her are “You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate” (V.ii.292); he later admits to Burgundy, “I cannot so conjure the spirit of love in her, that he will appear in his true likeness” (V.ii.306-8), to which Burgundy replies, “If you would conjure in her, you must make a circle” (V.ii.310-11). Various extenuating explanations of this language can be offered—that it is a light-hearted conventional metaphor for falling in love, or that it is part of Shakespeare's purpose to show Henry as an adept courtier. Katharine is not a “witch” in the same way as Joan of Arc or Margaret in Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy. Yet the equation of the power of beauty with the power of black magic had been established in “romance” history since Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.³³ and, taken together with the other references to devils given above, these uses of the metaphor cannot be dismissed as mere badinage. They seem to reflect the parallelisms of character discussed earlier in this essay, casting doubt on Henry's judgment and actions. Furthermore, his courtship is conducted partly in bawdy terms which we have previously heard from Katharine (in the language-lesson in II.iv) and the Dauphin. Lamenting his amorous ineptitude in the approved soldierly fashion, he claims that

If I could win a lady at leap-frog, or by vaulting into my saddle with my armour on my back, under the correction of bragging be it spoken, I should quickly leap into a wife. Or if I might buffet for my love, or bound my horse for her favours, I could lay on like a butcher and sit like a jack-an-apes, never off.

(V.ii.138-45)

Compare with this the obsession with horses characteristic of the Dauphin in III.vii, in particular this exchange on the subject of his own horse:

DAU.
… I once writ a sonnet in his praise and began thus: “Wonder of nature,”—
ORL.
I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress.
DAU.
Then did they imitate that which I composed to my courser; for my horse is my mistress.
ORL.
Your mistress bears well.
DAU.
Me well; which is the prescript praise and perfection of a good and particular mistress.

(III.vii.41-48)

Henry in the wooing scene allies himself, through the use of a specific sexual image as well as of a bawdy tone (the references to “conjuring in” Katharine carry the same suggestiveness), with the French and, implicitly, with the subplot characters—the enemies of England and of God.³⁴

It may be argued against this that, again, bawdy may be innocent or merely to be expected in wooing. But Henry's behavior with Katharine cannot be seen apart from the accumulation of details to which I have related it, and, taken together with them, it becomes profoundly disquieting. The kinds of unity achieved by the marriage—the national and international peace which it cements—are ambiguous. As in Campaspe and Edward III, the activities of war and love are imaged in terms of each other as if to emphasize a final harmony. Henry admits that, although he is the conqueror, he “cannot see many a fair French city for one fair French maid that stands in my way” (III.ii.335-37), and the French King comments, “Yes, my lord, you see them perspectively, the cities turned into a maid; for they are all girdled with maiden walls that war hath never entered” (V.ii.338-41). From this point of view Henry's union with Katharine is one between equals who are complete in themselves yet complementary. Yet the key word is “perspectively”—point of view is important, and mutable.³⁵ There is a disjunction between Henry as man and as King; Katharine's high social position does not shield her from suspicions of black magic. From such a union we can hardly expect permanence, and, as the final Chrous reminds us, Henry's successors “lost France and made his England bleed” (l. 12). The peace purchased by Agincourt was, after all, dearly bought.

III

I have sought to indicate Shakespeare's debt, in Henry V, to other aspects of the “romance” tradition than those noted by Anne Barton, and in doing so to mediate between the critical disagreements outlined at the beginning of section II. If the play is viewed “perspectively,” it becomes more complex than is generally allowed. It shows us both the Henry of popular esteem, the undaunted, unsophisticated, all-conquering patriot, expecting that he and Katharine will beget another such conqueror (V.ii.215-20), and an imperfect man, sometimes hasty, sometimes brutal; both an Epic Prince and a private person; both a triumph of unification and a failure to perpetuate it. The subplot acts as both foil to, and critique of, the main plot; the Choruses make just claims for the King's achievement and also caution us against a blind endorsement of his success.

Henry V demonstrates an equilibrium of a kind which makes irrelevant the academic distinction between “chronicle” and “romance” history with which this essay began: indeed, it contains both kinds within itself. The materials of the story derive from Hall, Holinshed, and other chronicles,³⁶ but the story is not the same thing as the plot; and the plot turns upon conventions of romance such as the King disguised and the King in love. Shakespeare's handling of these conventions, however, is such as to hint at his dissatisfaction with their representations of reality. The world of Henry V is not a place where the contest between good and evil is straightforward, or where the values of the English establishment are wholeheartedly endorsed: nor is it one where there is not virtue extant—the positives for which Henry stands really are positive It is, rather, a world of profound ambiguities, as I have tried to show: a world where the juxtaposition of “chronicle” and “romance” visions of political action (the one encouraging a sober realization of the responsibilities of power, the other a light-hearted appreciation of its privileges) stretches the history-play genre to its limits. It is worth remembering that Shakespeare's next history-play, of any kind, was to be what the Folio firmly called the tragedy of Julius Caesar.

Notes

1. See, e.g., E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1944); Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, Cal.: The Huntington Library, 1947); Hardin Craig, “Shakespeare and the History Play,” Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. Brander Matthews and Ashley H. Thorndike (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), pp. 55-64; F. P. Wilson, Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 105-8; Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press 1957; rev. ed., London: Methuen, 1965); Kenneth Muir, “Source Problems in the Histories,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 96 (1960), 49; F. P. Wilson, “The English History Play,” in Shakespearian and Other Studies, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 1-53.

2. I am preparing a full discussion in another article.

3. “The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History,” in The Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance, ed. J. G. Price (University Park: Penn. State Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 92-117.

   Terminal dates for plays follow S. Schoenbaum's revision of Alfred Harbage's Annals of English Drama 975-1700 (London: Methuen, 1964).

4. Barton, p. 99.

5. Not exactly equal, as I point out below.

6. Barton, p. 117.

7. Even A. P. Rossiter, who brilliantly explored this sub-genre, failed to notice the connections between the plots: “There are fine things in Henry V; but much of the comedy has lost touch with the serious matter” (Angel with Horns, [London: Longmans, 1961], p. 58).

8. H. C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 218.

9. W. Babula, “Whatever Happened to Prince Hal?: An Essay on Henry V,” Shakespeare Survey, 30 (1977), 47-59.

10. J. H. Walter, ed. New Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1954), pp. xiv-xvii and note on I.i.1. All subsequent references to Henry V are cited to this edition.

11. Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 116.

12. R. W. Battenhouse, “Henry V as Heroic Comedy,” Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1962), pp. 169-80.

13. See David Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: “Henry VI” and its Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972).

14. R. Egan, “A Muse of Fire: Henry V in the Light of Tamburlaine,” Modern Language Quarterly, 29 (1968), 275-82.

15. R. W. Battenhouse, “The Relation of Henry V to Tamburlaine,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 27 (1974), 71-79.

16. Levin, Multiple Plot, p. 116.

17. Ibid., p. 119.

18. Campaspe is not an English history play, but its inclusion in the list is justified since it provided the basic “romance” history structure, it is referred to in 1 Henry IV (see A. Davenport, “Notes on Lyly's Campaspe and Shakespeare,” Notes and Queries, 199 [1954], 18-20, and A. R. Humphreys' New Arden ed. [London: Methuen, 1960], note on II.iv.402-9), and, as I suggest below, we may be meant to recall it in Henry V also.

19. Also not an English history play, but central to the tradition (cf. above, note 13).

20. The debate is summarized by Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare as Collaborator (London: Methuen, 1960), pp. 31-55. See further 1. Koskenniemi, “Themes and Imagery in Edward III,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 65 (1964), 446-80.

21. See New Arden Henry V ad loc.

22. The extent to which a “romance” conception colors Edward III is indicated by the fact that the historical Edward raped the Countess of Salisbury. (I am grateful to John W. Velz of the SQ Editorial Board for pointing this out.)

23. Cf. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957).

24. There are striking similarities between the portrayal of the Black Prince and both the Hal and Hotspur of 1 Henry IV.

25. “Falstaff and Mr. Dover Wilson,” Kenyon Review, 15 (1953), 241-43 (but the whole article repays close study).

26. New Arden ed., p. xxv. For criticisms of Henry, see the comments by G. Gould and D. A. Traversi reprinted in Henry V: A Casebook, ed. Michael Quinn (London: Macmillan, 1968).

27. Compare the machinations of Richard II in II. ii of the anonymous play now generally called Woodstock (1591-1595; ed. A. P. Rossiter [London: Chatto and Windus, 1946]). He manipulates the accepted Court custom of petitioning the King as a sardonic method of ending Woodstock's protectorship and claiming the crown. (Once again it is interesting to note possible connections between Woodstock and 1 Henry IV: see R. Helgerson, “1 Henry IV and Woodstock,” Notes and Queries, 221 [1976], 153 ff.).

28. See Multiple Plot, chapter 5.

29. Noted by Levin, pp. 118 ff. Anne Barton, “The King Disguised,” p. 117, compares the treatment of Kendal's emissary in George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, and that of the Summoner in 1 Sir John Oldcastle (1599), which may be indebted to Henry V.

30. Article cited above, note 12.

31. R. P. Merrix, “The Alexandrian Allusion in Shakespeare's Henry V,” English Literary Renaissance, 2 (1972), 333.

32. Merrix provides detailed discussion of Elizabethan attitudes to Alexander. Interestingly, in 1 Henry IV, III. ii, Shakespeare may well have drawn some details for Henry's advice to Hal from a recent translation of a pseudo-Aristotelian work in which Alexander is similarly counseled: See T. P. Harrison, “The Folger Secret of Secrets, 1572,” in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, pp. 609 ff. (Once again, I owe this reference to John W. Velz.)

33. See William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935; 2nd ed. 1966), p. 33, and W. Towne, “‘White Magic’ in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay?”, Modern Language Notes, 67 (1952), 9-13.

34. Paul A. Jorgensen, “The Courtship Scene in Henry V,” Modern Language Quarterly, 11 (1950), 183ff., inaptly compares the scene to King William's wooing of Mariana in Fair Em, but sees no derogation of Henry here.

35. On perspectives as a symbol for relativist perception see Richard II, II. ii. 19-20. The whole subject is illuminatingly surveyed by A. Shickman, “The ‘Perspective Glass’ in Shakespeare's Richard II,” Studies in English Literature, 18 (1978), 217-28.

36. See New Arden ed., pp. xxxi-xxxiii, and the relevant chapter in Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (London: Methuen, 1977).