[In the following essay, Brownell affirms the unified design of Henry V by presenting a scene-by-scene analysis of the drama in relation to its theme of “private cause” versus “public good.”]

That Henry V provokes radically different responses from its modern interpreters is well known. For every critic willing to accept the play at face value as heroic drama, there is another determined to find it an ironic satire of Machiavellian militarism. But controversy fails to daunt Shakespeareans who are newly attracted to the play, each intent upon developing an interpretation that reasonably accounts for the largest measure of evidence. No exception, I here offer my own view that Henry V is a coherent dramatic work, an imaginative unity with a form totally integral with its meaning.

This is not to obscure the fact that the play is also one segment of a four-play historical sequence. Yet that particular fact should not be given more than its just due—as too often, I believe, it is. Extra-textual evidence, usually from the other plays of the Lancastrian tetralogy, may corroborate details in Henry V, but it cannot be relied upon to uphold a full reading. As Edgar Allan Poe neatly phrased the axiom, “Every work of art should contain within itself all that is requisite for its own comprehension.” We are, then, the more likely to gain practical understanding by scrutinizing the play itself for evidence of its formally controlling purpose. Above all, one looks for clues to an underlying idea, some organizing principle that governs all the characters and the configuration of all the parts.

I

To date, the clearest insight into the overall structure of Henry V is that provided by Richard Levin.¹ Approaching the work as one type of Renaissance double-plot play, Professor Levin shows that Pistol and his cronies afford a near-perfect illustration of the “clown subplot” that serves as a foil to (as distinguished from a parody of) the main-plot actions. He finds the foil relationship to be most fully developed through a number of negative analogies. For example, Henry's impassioned urging of his army at the siege of Harfleur (III.i) is formally opposed to the succeeding scene in which Fluellen must drive the unwilling clown-foils into battle. “… Everything in the subplot,” argues Levin, “points unambiguously to its function as a foil employed to contrast with, and so render still more admirable, the exploits of the ‘mirror of all Christian kings’” (p. 116). Because plot-subplot analysis of this kind embraces a play's central elements, it offers a persuasive structural account of Henry V.

But an even more comprehensive explicative method is available to the student of Renaissance dramaturgy: analyzing the principles of design by which individual scenes are aggregated into the play as a whole. That approach is only now coming into its own, and will surely find wider use in future studies of Renaissance drama. A few years ago, Alfred Harbage noted that “It is one of the curiosities of Shakespearean criticism that it has offered so little analysis of scenic structure as compared with analysis of characters in the last century, and of images in the present one. Perhaps the reason is that the subject has lain fog-bound in the exhalation of the phantom ‘acts’ which have diverted or baffled inquiry.”² In his fine recent study of Shakespeare's dramaturgy, Mark Rose agrees, declaring the matter of disputed act divisions “a scholarly red herring” that “discourage[s] us from seeing the plays as they really are.”³ As Professor Rose demonstrates, the basic structural unit of Shakespearean drama in particular and late Tudor drama generally is the cleared-stage scene.

One may account for this fact by the uniquely pictorial, visual sensibility of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The Renaissance tendency to fuse the sister arts of poetry and painting in the spirit of the Horatian dictum, ut pictura poesis (“poetry is like painting”) is illustrated in many genres, but nowhere more clearly than in the remarkable popularity of the emblem book—a collection of spatially discrete “speaking pictures.” But if Renaissance aesthetic notions of spatial form and multiple unity are influences upon the emblem book, they also figure importantly in the symmetry and schematic organization of long poems like Spenser's Faerie Queene and Epithalamion, and Marlowe's Hero and Leander. So, likewise, do the aggregate scenes of a Shakespearean play comprise, in effect, an integral series of speaking pictures. Shakespeare tailors his scenic design to his drama of ideas; he makes conscious use of patterning for thematic purposes. To relate the independent scenes to their controlling idea, Shakespearean dramaturgy characteristically employs such formal means as frame scenes, diptych scenes (for example, the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet as divisible “hate” and “love” segments), ironic juxtapositions, and parallels and liaisons between scenes.

It is in light of these known Shakespearean methods that I offer the following scene-by-scene analysis, endeavoring to show that Henry V's individual scenes are organically interconnected, unified by a single conceptual framework. That framework consists in two rival ethical attitudes, whose prevalence oscillates in successive scenes or groups of scenes throughout the play until at last the favored attitude overrules. Specifically, the idea of the play's structure is embodied in two thematic contraries: private cause versus public good.

II

Crystallized in that antinomy is an essential tenet of sixteenth-century political morality: namely, that the needs of the commonwealth take precedence over the welfare of private citizens. So often did that sentiment find expression in Tudor literature that it attained proverbial status. From Morris Tilley's compilation of Elizabethan proverbs only two of many examples contemporaneous with Shakespeare's play need be cited: “private welfare is not to be preferred before common-weale,” from Nicholas Ling's Politeuphuia. Wits Common Wealth (London, 1597); and “private cause must yield to public good,” from George Chapman's (George Peele's?) Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, I.ii.26 (London, 1594).⁴ In Shakespeare's own work, the private/public antinomy has major ethical and thematic relevance in the tragic poem, The Rape of Lucrece (1594). There, as in Henry V, “private” is equated with negative, solipsistic values, and “public” with the positive, societal values imperiled by Tarquin's crime:

‘Thy secret pleasure turns to open shame,
Thy private feasting to a public fast,
.....‘Why should the private pleasure of some one
Become the public plague of many moe?
.....For one's offence why should so many fall,
To plague a private sin in general?

(Luc., ll. 891-92, 1478-79, 1483-84)⁵

In Henry V, to be sure, the private/public polarity is somewhat less obvious, taking the form, by and large, of a unifying structural concept rather than a verbalized motif. Yet it is an ideational conflict that remains constant and pervasive in the play. The mode of opposition among particular scenes may variously be expressed as solipsism vs. altruism, self-love vs. public spiritedness, special pleading vs. the communal welfare, selfhood vs. the polity, parasitism vs. social benefaction, egoism vs. fellow feeling, partiality vs. mutuality, the subjective code vs. the objective ethos, opportunism vs. patriotism, and so forth.

In the analysis that follows, every scene will be considered except for the brief Prologue and Epilogue. These are excluded from the analysis because they function as mood-setting, presentational frame scenes that lead the audience into and out of the drama proper, which is thus formally set apart.

III

The opening scene (I.i) is flatly concerned with advancement of a private cause. From the first line on, we hear that the main problem for the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely is to defend the Church's lands against an impending parliamentary bill of expropriation: “If it pass … We lose … half of our possession” (ll. 7-8). Of course, the bishops assert only the highest charitable motives for wanting to hold on to the property that parliament would “strip from us” (l. 11). But there is little doubt that narrow group interests take precedence over those of the commonwealth when we learn that Canterbury has cynically moved to incline King Henry to their cause by offering a great sum of money (ll. 75-81) in support of the tentative French invasion.

With the ceremonial entry of the King and his attendants (I.ii) we are instantly shifted to the arena of public interest. Once the question of England's just claim to France has been legally and morally resolved by Canterbury's discourse on the Salic Law, and ratified by the English lords, that policy is then extolled in the most glowing terms. The French expedition is thus unmistakably affirmed as a collective, national endeavor, not a strategy for the monarch's personal glory. Exeter invokes a traditional analogy to express their common solidarity: “For government, though high, and low, and lower, / Put into parts, doth keep in one consent, / Congreeing in a full and natural close, / Like music” (I.ii.180-83). With an equally traditional metaphor, Canterbury descants for 39 lines on the correspondence between England's national unity-in-diversity and that of the beehive (ll. 183-221). Though at the same time the King's courage and honor are enlarged upon (“I will dazzle all the eyes of France”), his virtues are never isolatedly his own, but rather meld with the nation's destiny: “I am coming on … to put forth / My rightful hand in a well-hallowed cause” (ll. 293-94). Henry's is a collaborative enterprise that allies the entire cosmic hierarchy: God, himself, and his subjects (“by God's help / And yours, …” ll. 223-24). His half-dozen allusions to God in this scene are no mere index of personal piety, therefore, but thematic affirmations of the lofty, communal sanction of the venture. As though in direct response to Henry's call to action in the tag line of this scene, the Chorus enters to announce that the royal imperative has been translated forthwith into a single-minded, national effort: “Now all the youth of England are on fire, / … / Following the mirror of all Christian kings / With winged heels” (II. Chor. 1, 6-7).

Displacing the show of public unanimity just witnessed, the scene following (II.i) presents a speaking picture of utterly different behavior: the petty contentiousness of Nym and Ancient Pistol. The cause of their grudge is a third party, Nell Quickly, who has faithlessly revoked her trothplight to the one in order to marry the other. That fact only makes the blustering exchanges of oaths and threats between the two former friends seem the more perverse and solipsistic. Even their comic diction negatively accents the trivial, personal (“solus”) nature of their quarreling, which keeps them (ll. 86-88) from responding to their public duty in France:

NYM
                                                            I would have you solus.
PISTOL
“Solus,” egregious dog? O viper vile!
The “solus” in thy most mervailous face!
The “solus” in thy teeth, and in thy throat, …

(II.i.43-46)

Another iterative word in this scene, and in the play thereafter, is Nym's catchword, “humour.” In contemporary usage the word was, of course, a synonym for any personal whim, crotchet, quirk, or idiosyncrasy—as in Nym's phrase beginning at line 52, “I have an humour to knock you.” Both “solus” and “humour” are thematic words, connoting verbally what Nym and Pistol's repeated drawing and sheathing of their swords symbolize visually throughout the scene. They are the gestes of private indulgence that derogate from the public interest.

Act II, scene ii again presents the contrary side of the equation. Bedford and Exeter's opening dialogue reveals that the conspiracy of Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey is known to the King, and that the traitors “shall be apprehended by and by” (l. 2). Since the first eleven lines foretell how this scene must end, its purpose is obviously not to build suspense as to the conspirators' identities. It is, rather, to dramatize the ascendancy of the public welfare over that most despicable of all private crimes against the social order, treason. By way of reinforcing the dramatic irony, Henry reminds the dissembling conspirators where true allegiance ought to lie, with the martial task that has the nation's wholehearted support: “we are well persuaded / We carry not a heart with us from hence / That grows not in a fair consent with ours” (ll. 20-22). As the traitors are handed their orders of arrest, Henry berates them as “English monsters” who “Join'd with an enemy proclaimed, and from his coffers / Receiv'd the golden earnest of our death” (ll. 85, 168-69). The rigor of the law must be imposed, he says, not because it revenges the attempt against his person (l. 174), but because of the public chaos their capital crime would have produced. They would have sold the King's “princes and his peers to servitude, / His subjects to oppression and contempt, / And his whole kingdom into desolation” (ll. 171-73).

With the shift of locale to the Boar's Head Tavern (II.iii), we again revert to the world of selfish opportunism. For a few moments, the grieving of Pistol, the Hostess, and their friends at the news of Falstaff's death is allowed to evoke our sympathy and amusement (at the Hostess' malapropisms and Pistol's alliterations). But not for long, because the scene closes with Pistol reaffirming his self-serving, parasitic motives: “Let us to France, like horse-leeches, my boys, / To suck, to suck, the very blood to suck!” (II.iii.50-51). Ironically, his words recall the earlier-mentioned depredations of a proclaimed national enemy, “the weasel Scot” who “sucks her princely eggs” (I.ii.170-71). At the French court in the next scene (II.iv) self-centeredness also prevails, but in a different modality. While the French King and the Constable recommend caution and national preparedness against the English invasion, the Dauphin speaks slightingly of Henry, and would put private enmity and spite above public policy: “Say, if my father render fair return, / It is against my will; for I desire / Nothing but odds with England” (II.iv.127-29). As his advice to his father shows, the Dauphin virtually incarnates self-regarding hauteur: “Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin / As self-neglecting” (ll. 74-75).

Stirringly, the Chorus at the beginning of Act III recalls us to the arena of public-spirited action. We the audience become vicarious participants in the sailing of Henry's “brave fleet” toward the great national mission at Harfleur: “who is he … that will not follow / These culled and choice-drawn cavaliers to France?” (III.Chor.22-24). The imperative mood is employed all-pervasively in this speech (“Suppose … Play … behold … think … follow, follow! / Grapple”), as though to compel our allegiance to the common cause. This is the same rhetorical mode that Henry will use with his troops in the famous speech in the following scene: “imitate the action of the tiger: / Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, … On, on, …” (III.i.6 ff.). Henry's inspiring presence before Harfleur is the apotheosis of communal values in action: “Cry ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’” (III.i.34).

Act III, scene ii divides into two episodes, before and after line 23, the two segments of the diptych representing contrary ethical priorities. Nym, Pistol, Bardolph, and the Boy have heard the King's order to the breach, but choose rather to evade the call to heroic warfare: “The knocks are too hot. … The humour of it is too hot” (ll. 2-4). Nym's “humour” is again the verbal high sign of solipsism, of the elevation of private cause over public welfare.

But immediately afterward, the anti-social motivations of his cohorts are pointedly censured in the Boy's soliloquy. Pistol is a coward, and Nym and Bardolph are shirkers and downright thieves: “They will steal anything, and call it purchase” (III.ii.38). The Boy repudiates such practices (“Their villainy goes against my weak stomach,” l. 48) and expresses his intention to leave their service. The entire speech is choric in tone, stressing that its condemnation of parasitism is the play's ethical position directly confided to the audience. And to emphasize that Pistol and his friends are untypical of English soldiery, there follows an episode showing that bravery, dependability, and loyalty to the common welfare are in fact the dominant social values (ll. 50-130). Symbolizing the national unity-in-diversity are captains Gower, Fluellen, Macmorris, and Jamy, who set aside their respective regional loyalties (English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish) to embrace a public duty that could well involve the ultimate self-sacrifice. Jamy's sentiments speak for all: “ay'll de gud service, or ay'll lig i' th' grund for it! ay, or go to death!” (ll. 106-7). An honorable band whose efforts are socially productive, they are in stark contrast to the ignoble fraternity of Nym and Bardolph, “sworn brothers in filching” (ll. 40-41).

In Act III, scene iii Henry addresses the besieged Governor of Harfleur and brings about the French town's immediate surrender. Using a rhetorical strategy designed to provoke fear of his soldiers' reprisals, Henry gains his objective without additional bloodshed. The victory, however, is shown to belong to the English forces collectively rather than to the King alone; he is but the self-effaced embodiment of the national will. Henry's sole concerns are for the vanquished (“Use mercy to them all”) and for his soldiers' health and well-being (ll. 54-56).

The “language lesson” scene (III.iv) featuring Princess Katherine and her gentlewoman might seem to signal an alternation to merely personal values, but this is not the case. Though the scene serves several dramatic functions at once, the key phrase relating to the private/public antithesis is Katherine's assertion that she must learn the English language: “il faut que j'apprends à parler” (ll. 4-5). That English is felt necessary (“il faut”) for a French princess is, in effect, an acknowledgment of France and England's cultural parity. More important, it foreshadows England's later political and cultural transcendence. Even the Princess' blushing allusions to the obscene words that are the French sound-alikes of the English words foot and gown are more than instances of local humor. They are dramatic expressions of the Princess' sexual awareness, and by extension her nubility, which will have important social implications in the play's final scene. The present scene takes place in France and deals with personal matters; but paradoxically, its main reason for being is as a reverberation of Henry's victory for English communal values in the preceding scene.

With Act III, scene v comes a regression to egotistic motives. It is noteworthy that the French forces, who have met to plan their defense against the English, are represented by only the narrowest upper stratum of aristocrats. Unlike the English, whose cause energizes social cohesiveness (“Now all the youth of England are on fire”), the French response is actuated only incidentally by the threat to the nation as a whole. What preoccupies the French nobles is the confined interest of their class. They wish to avenge the loss of self-esteem occasioned by the English invasion. What lip service they give to patriotism is couched in terms of wounded personal honor: “shall our quick blood, spirited with wine, / Seem frosty? O, for honor of our land, / Let us not hang like roping icicles …” (ll. 21-23). The notion of honor echoes throughout the scene, but always in the sense of a private punctilio which must be vindicated rather than an internalized public ethic: “with spirit of honor edged … hie to the field … now quit you of great shames” (ll. 38-39, 47; cf. l. 27). Most stinging of all to the French is the affront to their pride and manhood: “Our madams mock at us and plainly say / Our mettle is bred out” (ll. 28-29).

In the scene following (III.vi), the play's ethical alternatives confront one another, to the esteem of public values. Pistol attempts to persuade Fluellen to intercede with the Duke of Exeter in behalf of Bardolph, who is to be hanged for stealing that “pax of little price” (l. 44). Fluellen refuses Pistol's special pleading, saying that he would want his own brother executed if he were guilty, “for discipline ought to be used” (l. 55). Minutes later, King Henry informs Fluellen that maintaining orderly conduct is not just a military necessity but, because they are on enemy soil, a socio-political one as well (ll. 103-9). In his attempt to raise private expediency above obligation to the community, which Fluellen and the King exemplify, Pistol is once more shown up as the very embodiment of egoism: “a rogue, that now and then goes to the wars to grace himself” (ll. 66-67). The King, on the other hand, takes the occasion humbly to reaffirm the dependence of his army upon a suprapersonal reality, God (ll. 145, 151, 164).

The next scene (III.vii) is a vignette wholly concerned with the French nobles' vanity and frivolousness on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. As they banter about the relative merits of their armor and horses, not the slightest heed is given to the battle's wider implications. The narcissistic Dauphin's boastfulness is only slightly more conspicuous than the others', but it makes him the easy target of the Constable's taunts. Without exception, every speaking character in this scene is given to vaunting French superiority. But the primary focus here is not upon real versus apparent valor, but rather upon the utter self-absorption of these aristocrats, which points up the flaccid social bond underlying their cause. French defeat is a foregone conclusion.

The impression of social divisiveness in the previous scene, expressed through the belittling, sarcastic exchanges among the French leaders, is contrasted in the Chorus to Act IV by an impression of unity and fellow feeling on the English side. The rapport between Henry and his soldiers is not the product of their mutual danger, but of Henry's ability to instill a sense of personal co-identification, of shared participation in their national mission: “with a modest smile / … [he] calls them brothers, friends, and countrymen” (IV. Chor. 33-34). Unlike the inwardly preoccupied French nobles, the outer-directed Henry upholds a demotic, communal goal. By his visits among his men (“A little touch of Harry in the night,” l. 47), he makes co-partnership of every rank the object of personal concern: “A largess universal, like the sun, / His liberal eye doth give to every one” (ll. 43-44).

Act IV, scene i involves the subtlest expression of the private/public dialectic in the play. This is the scene of Henry's incognito conversation with his soldiers, Bates and Williams, on the eve of the battle. For the first time there is a hint of possible contradiction between Henry's avowed public intention not to allow himself to be ransomed if he were captured by the French, and what action he might actually take. By refusing ransom, the King has magnanimously set aside a royal prerogative which would serve his private advantage, choosing instead to tie his own fate to that of his army. Henry's third-person self-deprecations in this scene (“the king is but a man … his senses have but human conditions,” ll. 98, 100) both humanize him and enhance his credibility. Clearly, the King's private thoughts and public enactments are identical. Nevertheless, Williams is entitled to his skepticism. Henry's display of valor could be but a false mask for cowardice: “He may show what outward courage he will” (l. 109; italics mine). Unlike the common soldier, moreover, the King might revert with impunity to self-regard: “when our throats are cut, he may be ransomed, and we ne'er the wiser” (ll. 183-84). Henry's certain knowledge that he would keep his public promise never to be ransomed is unprovable, for the special privilege he enjoys as a king exempts him from being held to such a pledge: the validity of his oath as a private person is mooted by the royal prerogative. The frustration this causes Henry is not self-created, but inheres in the medieval and Renaissance legal sanction of his office, which distinguished between the king's two bodies, the private and the public: “O hard condition, / Twin-born with greatness” (ll. 219-20).⁶ Williams' incredulousness piques Henry, then, because it calls his private as well as his public oath into question. By way of postponing their altercation to a more fitting time, Henry gets Williams to agree to exchange gloves, with both to wear them in their respective headgear for later identification (ll. 197-202).

Our every observation of the play to this point argues against interpreting this episode as mere psychological realism, as a scene intended to depreciate Henry's maturity as a king.⁷ The scene is preeminently of emblematic significance. For, notwithstanding its unfriendly tone, the act of exchanging “gages” (l. 197), or pledges, symbolizes the reciprocity and mutuality existing between Henry and his men. Their shared public allegiance creates a genuine brotherhood, a human parity that transcends the disparity in rank. As Henry later puts it, “he to-day that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother” (IV.iii.61-62; cf. IV. Chor. 34). Viewed in anthropological terms, the exchange of gloves is a social-bonding ritual. It is a “rite of incorporation” exactly as the inter-tribal marriage, the exchange of visits or gifts, the communal feast, or the peace-pipe ceremony are for primitive peoples.⁸ Such a rite puts one or both of its participants under a constraint. By giving over his glove to one of his ordinary soldiers, then, all the while continuing to hide his elevated status, Henry symbolically reaffirms his earlier vow that self-interest shall defer to the body politic.

The Dauphin and three other French peers then blusteringly take the stage, at once displaying their narcissism. As in III.vii, they are absorbed by externals, the “fair show” (IV.ii.17) of their horses and dress:

ORLEANS
The sun doth gild our armor. Up, my lords!
DAUPHIN
Monte, cheval! My horse, varlet lacquais! Ha!
ORLEANS
O brave spirit!
DAUPHIN
Via les eaux et terre!

The four men are then joined by a fifth, the Constable. Though staging calls for the group to stand before the audience in a line, the impression conveyed is one of mutual isolation and detachment—the very opposite of group solidarity. The fragmentary nature of the opening lines also confirms an aura of divisiveness, of obliviousness to everything but private concerns (“our honors,” l. 32). To observe how well Shakespeare has used structural means to contrast public-spirited with egocentric values here, consider the way Henry's final line in the previous scene creates a liaison with this one. Henry's words, “The day, my friends, and all things wait for me” (IV.i.296), had emphasized his commitment to obligations outside himself. Juxtaposition of those words with the light-minded bravado of the Frenchmen heightens the play's central ethical opposition.

King Henry's “Crispin's day” speech is the rhetorical high point of IV.iii and of the play. But more important, the speech makes explicit the King's almost sacramental identification of himself and his men with their unanimous, high purpose: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; / For he to-day that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother” (ll. 60-62). The sense of community among Henry's officers had already been depicted at the beginning of the scene in their exchange of affectionate epithets—“noble,” “good,” “kind,” “full of valor,” “princely” (ll. 8-16). This camaraderie and devotion to public responsibility, in spite of the “fearful odds” (l. 5), may be contrasted with the endless self-congratulations of the Frenchmen in the preceding scene.

Pistol's capture of Monsieur le Fer in IV.iv is an episode that is humorous only on the surface. Though we may smile at Pistol's punningly tortured French, the chilling purpose of the scene is to remind us that Pistol and his “yoke-fellows in arms” became soldiers for predatory, not patriotic, reasons: “like horse-leeches … to suck!” As Pistol leads off his captive, whose life has been spared by the promise to pay 200 crowns in ransom, the Boy soliloquizes on Pistol's self-serving hypocrisy and cowardice: “I did never know so full a voice issue from so empty a heart … ‘The empty vessel makes the greatest sound’” (IV.iv.66-68). As Derek Traversi rightly observes, “The chief quality of Pistol is emptiness, a bombastic show that wordily covers vacancy.”⁹ Pistol, his lately-hanged confederates Nym and Bardolph, and the boastful French nobles are all types of the “hollow men” envisioned by T. S. Eliot in the poem of that name. And significantly, all of these self-centered, spiritually vacuous characters are later defeated or humiliated by characters who represent the good of the commonweal.

The next scene (IV.v) finds the French army in disarray and facing imminent defeat. In their concern with private stigma (“O perdurable shame! Let's stab ourselves. … Shame, and eternal shame! nothing but shame! / Let us die in honor,” IV.v.8, 11-12), the Dauphin and his colleagues are oblivious to the national danger. The operative word in this brief, 24-line scene is shame; it occurs no less than six times. As in the preceding scene, personal interests transcend public ones, though for the last time in the play. From IV.vi through to the end, every scene magnifies the ideal of community.

In scene vi of Act IV, a mirror inversion of the previous scene, King Harry hears Exeter describe the noble battlefield deaths of Suffolk and York. Although both scenes are virtually equal in length (24 lines in IV.v, 36 in IV.vi) and deal with the fortunes of war, their emphases are antithetical. Whereas in IV.v the French were engrossed with private honor, York's dying words in IV.vi refer selflessly to his public commitment: “‘Commend my service to my sovereign’” (l. 23). There follows yet another exemplary resolution of the private/public antinomy. Upon Exeter's admission that he was moved to tears by York's death, Henry too gets “mistful eyes” (l. 34). At that precise moment the French sound an alarum (l. 34 s.d.) signifying their intention to rally. Henry is compelled instantly to respond to that tactical disadvantage by ordering the French prisoners executed. Predictably, critics who opt for an ironic reading of the play interpret this action as heinous or unnecessarily cruel.¹⁰ But the manifest function of the incident is to make a razor-sharp juxtaposition: Henry as capable of feeling the deepest private compassion, yet able to stanch that emotion utterly when public danger threatens. For this episode Shakespeare even adapts his sources—in both Hall and Holinshed—in a way calculated to enhance our impression of Henry as a model of social responsibility, not the private avenger of the murdered luggage boys.¹¹

After the English victory, Montjoy the herald seeks King Henry's permission to allow the French to bury their dead. The herald makes a special point of the need “To sort our nobles from our common men” for “… our vulgar drench their peasant limbs / In blood of princes” (IV.vii.69, 72-73). The class partiality of the living is now to be reimposed upon the dead. By contrast, among Fluellen and his other comrades of high and low estate, King Henry reaffirms the mutuality that continues to unify all levels of the English social hierarchy (ll. 89-173). His mock-serious teasing of Williams in the next scene—his pretended indignation at the “bitter terms” he endured while incognito in IV.i, and his desire for “satisfaction”—ends good-naturedly with the presentation of the glove filled with crowns (IV.viii.53-54). Henry's gift-giving assuages Williams' honor, and, like their earlier exchange of gloves, functions as a rite of incorporation, re-establishing parity in their interdependent social relationship. Like the glove-exchange, the gesture has little psychological interest, being above all emblematic social symbolism.¹²

From the Chorus we learn of Henry's triumphal return to England. For reasons of modesty, the King refuses to display tokens of his personal heroism, “Being free from vainness and self-glorious pride; / Giving full trophy, signal, and ostent / Quite from himself to God” (V. Chor. 20-22). Henry's piety remains a conspicuous thematic idea throughout the play, and this emergence of it echoes his own words in the previous scene: “O God, … to thy arm alone, / Ascribe we all!” (IV.viii.101-3). And yet its very obviousness arouses suspicion in several modern commentators, who refuse to take Henry's virtue at face value.¹³ To be sure, Henry refers to God oftener than any other Shakespearean character, even more frequently than the Henry whose deeds Holinshed records. But never, in any of its dramatic contexts, does the trait smack in the least of personal righteousness. Instead, it functions as a socio-ethical motif, connoting the alliance with Providence that rewards champions of the general welfare.

The critics who insist upon reading the two scenes of Act V as the concluding segment of a traditional five-act structure are almost always disappointed. Samuel Johnson, for example, held that “the poet's matter failed him in the fifth act, and he was glad to fill it up with whatever he could get.”¹⁴ That the historical actions of the last act take place five years after the heroic battle of Agincourt inevitably strikes Shakespeare's detractors as the worst kind of anticlimax. But if the two scenes comprising Act V are analyzed scenically, in terms of their significant bearing upon the private/public thematic paradigm, the organic purpose of the last act becomes manifest. While every scene after IV.v vindicates communal values, the two scenes of Act V together form a diptych that provides the public ethos with its final, closural affirmation. With these two scenes, the conceptual opposition that informs the entire play is climactically resolved. Scene i, in the satiric mode, presents the exemplary defeat or nullification of private expediency; scene ii, on the other hand, is in the mode of festive comedy, and celebrates personal and socio-political harmony on an international scale.

Each scene is dominated by an emblematic, ritual action which has the reverse implications of that in the other scene. In scene i, that action is Fluellen's belaboring Pistol with a leek until he falls stunned to his knees (V.i.32-34). On the literal level, as farce, the gesture signifies revenge for Pistol's having insulted the Welshman for wearing the leek on St. Davy's day. But as dramatic symbolism, Pistol's humiliation betokens the play's wider repudiation of the kind of self-love that undermines responsibility to the community at large. By reason of his cowardice and opportunism, Pistol has been an exemplar of anti-social behavior; he is thus the play's comic villain. His punishment figures forth society's retributive action: the ritual expulsion of the scapegoat who personifies hated taboo values. With both Fluellen and Gower “officiating,” Pistol's rites take the form of abusive name-calling (“scurvy, lousy … counterfeit cowardly knave,” etc.), physical degradation (being pummeled with and forcefed the leek), and finally explicit banishment (“God bye you. … Go, go. … Fare ye well”). Shakespeare is careful to emphasize that Pistol is no mere victim of personal vengeance, but the object of collective derision. For the leek is unequivocally a social symbol, a totem of British patriotic virtue which even King Henry himself wears as an “honorable padge” (IV.vii.96-100). It is thus an index of Pistol's self-absorption that he grows “qualmish at the smell of leek” (V.i.19), being given only to “mock at an ancient tradition, begun upon an honorable respect and worn as a memorable trophy of predeceased valor” (ll. 63-65). His ignominy lacks even a shred of pathos. But though now a declared pariah, the unrepentant Pistol will yet maintain his leech-like relation to society: “To England will I steal, and there I'll steal” (l. 79). That he also intends to become a bawd (l. 78) expands his associations with social outlawry and sterility—a fact that establishes a significant liaison with the next scene, as will be apparent shortly.

Whether primitive or advanced, every society employs special ceremonies to mark its members' crucial changes of life. Rites of banishment, expulsion, or excommunication are one type of what Arnold van Gennep has called rites of passage, and initiatory rites of incorporation are seen as their counterpart (van Gennep, pp. 113-15). And whereas an expulsion ritual was found to be the underlying form of V.i of Henry V, Act V, scene ii involves the converse symbolic action, a rite of incorporation. Anticipatory rites of incorporation had occurred earlier in Act IV, scenes i and viii, when the King gesturally affirmed a bond of mutuality with his soldiers. But the betrothal of Henry and Princess Katherine solemnizes a full-scale personal and national incorporation. In the opening moments there are semiological expressions of divisiveness: the French and English parties make ceremonial entries from opposite doors, and take up positions on either side of a wooden bar (V.ii.27) that divides the stage.¹⁵ The scene concludes, however, with a summary enactment of the new “incorporate league” (l. 350) of France and England. A ceremonial trumpet flourish accompanies Henry's kiss of the Princess (l. 342 s.d.), magnifying that gesture into a national rite of unification.

Even the numerous sexual references and innuendoes in this scene relate to the ascendancy of public over private values in the play. For unlike the brutal sexuality associated with Pistol in the last scene, the sexual nuances attending Henry's betrothal to the French princess have socially beneficial connotations. As the royal pair embodies political unity (“Combine your hearts in one, your realms in one!” l. 344), so their sexuality is directed toward communal, national-evangelical goals (“Shall not thou and I … compound a boy, half French, half English, that shall … take the Turk by the beard?” ll. 200-203). Such sexual allusions as this and the remarks of the quibbling Duke of Burgundy (“If you would conjure in her, you must make a circle,” ll. 282-83; cf. ll. 136-41, 200) have both thematic and anthropological relevance. They are metonyms for the life-force necessary to rejuvenate the French nation, once a “garden of the world, / Our fertile France” (ll. 36-37), but now made moribund and infertile by war (“nothing teems / But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs,” ll. 51-52). And just as indecency worked as vestigial fertility symbolism in Greek Old Comedy, surviving as a saturnalian element in Shakespearean festive comedies like Love's Labor's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing,¹⁶ so it functions with like effect in Henry V. Surely it was for this purpose that the Princess' sexual sophistication was established in III.iv, when she acknowledged to her gentlewoman her awareness of the obscene puns. That incident not only revealed Katherine's humanity but suggested her latent sexuality, foreshadowing the role that her procreativeness would eventually play in the dynastic and socio-political union of France and England. The play ends with the marriage in immediate prospect, and the wedding party departs in a festal procession—an analogue of the kommos of Attic comedy, and the canonical ending of all comedy. When one considers the important question of genre, then, necessarily a side issue in the present essay, the cumulative structural and stylistic evidence makes it clear that Henry V is as much a festive comedy or a heroic romance as a history play.¹⁷

IV

The foregoing scene-by-scene analysis confirms what many recent studies of Shakespearean structure have demonstrated: that act division plays no part at all in the design of the plays; that their basic dramatic unit is the scene; that there is a conscious design in the internal organization of the scenes, as in the schematicism of A Midsummer Night's Dream or the symmetry of The Winter's Tale; and that the scenes are individually molded compositions which are part of an organically unified pattern.¹⁸ This is true of Henry V, whose individual scenes or integral groups of scenes severally depict two contrary sets of values, values which alternate in prominence throughout the play.

There is, however, a wide disparity in the structural emphasis given the two sets of contraries. If we let the total number of lines in support of each ethical alternative stand as a rough index of relative importance, then communitas is preferred to egoism by nearly three to one, 2541 lines (73.6٪) as compared with 880 (26.4٪).¹⁹ But more important is the fact that the climactic last half-dozen scenes of the play present a sustained triumph of the public ethos. In other words, the overall pattern of scenes organizes the positive and negative values not merely as oscillating, paradigmatic categories, but as an emerging temporal sequence wherein social mores progressively transcend anti-social ones.²⁰ It is emphatically a moral structure.

Expressed diagrammatically, the fortunes of characters who variously represent self-interest, such as Pistol and the French chivalry, begin a diagonal descent to repudiation and defeat almost from the beginning of the play. Intersecting that downward vector is the upward diagonal that represents the justification and growing success of King Henry and like-minded supporters of communal goals. A comprehensive analysis of scenic structure not only reveals the unifying conceptual design of Henry V, but also verifies the majority understanding of the play as one whose nature is exemplary rather than ironic or satiric.

Notes

1. Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 116-19.

2. Alfred Harbage, gen. ed., The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 32.

3. Mark Rose, Shakespearean Design (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of the Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), p. 21 et passim; the remarks immediately following are indebted to this book. On the “speaking-picture” aspect of Renaissance visual epistemology, mentioned next, see also Forrest G. Robinson, The Shape of Things Known: Sidney's Apology in Its Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), chaps. 2 and 3.

4. Morris Palmer Tilley, Elizabethan Proverb Lore in Lyly's Euphues and in Pettie's Petite Palace with Parallels from Shakespeare, Univ. of Michigan Publications, Language and Literature, 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1926), item 505. Unaccountably, the proverb and its many examples are omitted from Tilley's expanded version of this work, published posthumously in 1950.

5. Citations are to The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, op. cit.

6. See E. F. J. Tucker, “Legal Fiction and Human Reality: Hal's Role in Henry V,” Educational Theatre Journal, 26 (1974), 308-14; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 8 et passim.

7. See Marilyn L. Williamson, “The Episode with Williams in Henry V,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 9 (1969), 280-81; cf. Anne Barton's view, that the quarrel and Henry's allegedly patronizing generosity contradict the romantic, ballad tradition (“The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History,” in The Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance, ed. Joseph G. Price [University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1975], pp. 100-101).

8. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle Caffee (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 131-33.

9. Derek Traversi, Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1957), p. 193. Note, too, that Pistol's trumpery in this scene is stylistically isolated by his use of stilted blank verse, while the Boy and the Frenchman converse ingenuously in prose.

10. E.g., Norman Rabkin condemns the act as an illegitimate “response to the fair battlefield killing of some English nobles by the French” (“Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 28 [1977], 292), but fails to mention the French alarum that prompted it; H. M. Richmond considers the English as “guilty of barbarities” as the French (Shakespeare's Political Plays [New York: Random House, 1967], p. 198).

11. Holinshed, “The Third Volume of Chronicles: Henry V,” Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, IV (1962; rpt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 397.

12. See van Gennep, pp. 131-33.

13. For a debunking of this refutative critical technique, which has been used specifically to question Henry V's piety, see Richard Levin, “Refuting Shakespeare's Endings. Part II,” Modern Philology, 75 (1977), 139-40. See also Traversi, cited above.

14. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Vols. VII and VIII, Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), VIII, 565. J. M. Maguin observes that Act V is structurally coextensive whether the act division of the First Folio or of modern editions is used, making V.i-ii by either scheme a depressing “continuation of a deliberately descending curve” (“Shakespeare's Structural Craft and Dramatic Technique in Henry V,” Cahiers Elisabethains, 7 [1975], 59). For an affirmative approach to Act V, differing from my own, see George Walton Williams' argument that its scenes “are thematically united in presenting peace and order, at home and abroad. They are also thematically unified by references to language and to the garden” (“The Unity of Act V in Henry V,” South Atlantic Bulletin, 40 [1975], 5).

15. The semantic value of gesture, movement (including stage grouping), and decor is discussed in my essay, “Visual and Aural Signs in the Performed English Renaissance Play,” Renaissance Drama, NS 5 (1972), 154-57.

16. See C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 7-8, citing Francis MacDonald Cornford, The Origins of Attic Comedy (1914; rpt. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1961), see esp. pp. 38-39.

17. Barber's classic study approaches two other history plays, 1 and 2 Henry IV, in terms of festive comedy, but not Henry V. Significantly, in its bawdiness the latter more typifies Shakespearean comedy; it was designated “the obscenest of the Histories” by the authority on such matters, Eric Partridge (Shakespeare's Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary [1947; rev. rpt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968], p. 45).

18. See Rose, esp. pp. 1-26; Hereward T. Price, “Mirror-Scenes in Shakespeare,” in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. James G. McManaway, et al. (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), pp. 101-13; and Wildred T. Jewkes, Act Division in Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays 1583-1616 (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1958). See also Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). A precursor of the extended scenic-structural reading is Hereward T. Price's analysis of 1 Henry VI in Construction in Shakespeare, Univ. of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology, 17 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1951), pp. 24-37.

19. Lineation used is that of Charlton Hinman's facsimile edition of the First Folio (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968). For the reason given earlier, the fifty lines of the combined Prologue and Epilogue are excluded from the count.

20. For other uses of oscillation analysis in Shakespeare studies, see Elemér Hankiss' report on the Investigative Committee on New Research Methods in Shakespeare 1971: Proceedings of the World Shakespeare Congress, Vancouver, August 1971, ed. Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1972), p. 274.