SOURCE: Robinson, Marsha S. “Mythoi of Brotherhood: Generic Emplotment in Henry V.” In Shakespeare's English Histories: A Quest for Form and Genre, edited by John W. Velz, pp. 143-70. Binghamton N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996.

[In the following essay, Robinson examines Shakespeare's manipulation of English historiography in Henry V through a thematic evocation of fraternal conflict and reconciliation, and generic blending of tragedy and comedy.]

In the English history plays, Shakespeare's generic choices are often expressed in a symbolic language indigenous to English historiography. The form of Henry V reflects the interplay of several traditions of historiographic practice, each of which appropriates the mythoi of fraternal strife and fraternal reconciliation to articulate the generic shape of the past. Shakespeare's repeated allusions to brotherhood, which are particularly significant in the complementary generic dynamics of Richard II and Henry V, are more than thematic; they are, in fact, a way of articulating form and genre.

This relationship between the figurative representation of historical content in the historian's narrative and the generic form implicit in any account of the past is illuminated by Hayden White's characterization of historical narratives as “verbal fictions” which “mediate” between “past events and processes” and the “story types that we conventionally use to endow the events of our lives with culturally sanctioned meanings.”¹ White thus argues that historical discourse is generically “emplotted” as comedy, tragedy, romance or satire: the chronicle facts, which are “value-neutral” and could serve as the components of several kinds of stories, “are encoded by the use of the figurative language in which they are characterized, in order to permit their identification as elements of the particular story type to which this story belongs.”² The historical narrative, then, can best be described as a “complex of symbols” which “points in two directions simultaneously: toward the events described in the narrative and toward the story type or mythos which the historian has chosen to serve as the icon of the structure of events.”³ White's explanation of the operation of historical discourse invites us to read the figures of brotherhood used to encode the facts of English historiography as signs of the generic story types apart from which the past is incomprehensible. Moreover, White's comment that “history-writing thrives on the discovery of all the possible plot structures that might be invoked to endow sets of events with different meanings”⁴ illuminates the exploratory and provisional character of Shakespeare's quest for historiographic form.

Shakespeare's English history plays, like all histories, “mediate among … the historical field, the unprocessed historical record, other historical accounts and an audience.”⁵ Therefore, it is imperative that we not isolate these dramatic works from their historiographic heritage, but that we consider in some detail the generic strategies for “emplotting” the past which inform the historical accounts on which he drew. Such an approach requires that we entertain historical narratives, “the contents of which are as much invented as found,”⁶ not merely as sources of historical content or fact, but as “literary artifacts,” which as generic emplotments of the past provided Shakespeare with conceptual models against which he undertook his own rewriting of the English past. Thus Shakespeare's use of fraternal conflict as an informing principle in his English history plays reiterates not merely the thematic content, but the shape of both Christian and classical accounts of the past.⁷ In these accounts secular history was often perceived as a fraternal contest for power and glory and expressed in formal patterns that counterposed the tragedy of fraternal strife with the comedy of brotherly reconciliation.⁸

One model for such accounts is St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei, in which the Cain and Abel story is assigned an explanatory and seminal role. Augustine's vision of history not only influenced Christian historiography; his articulation of the tragicomic form of the history of salvation as well as his “political realism” shaped the ideology and the generic structure of the medieval mystery cycles.⁹ Augustine's selective fashioning of biblical history provided a generic model for the formulation of secular history, one which Augustine applied in his analysis of the Roman empire, one which the English writers of the cycle plays invoked in their localization of biblical history and one which Shakespeare tested as he sought to create a dramatic model of English history.

Augustine, following Genesis 4:17-22, designates Cain, a fratricide, as the founder of the earthly city.¹⁰ He thus identifies recurring fraternal conflict as the definitive pattern which informs secular history, a pattern often obscured by the mask of political cooperation. The counterpart of the earthly city is the heavenly city, the citizens of which are the symbolic heirs of Abel and his successor, Seth. The earthly city, driven by egotism and power, “glories in itself”; the heavenly city glories in God.¹¹ Just as Cain's enmity toward his brother represents, Augustine argues, the hatred of the earthly city for the heavenly city, so the fraternal strife between Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome, symbolizes the enmity among members of the earthly city itself.¹² Attributing the conflict between brothers to the unwillingness of one partner to diminish his glory by sharing it with the other, Augustine characterizes the history of the earthly city as an account of “wars, altercations and appetites of short-lived or destructive victories” in which self-interest directs the pursuit of fame and honor.¹³

For St. Augustine history is linear and progressive and has a definite end. As literary fictions, endings as well as beginnings serve to encode Augustine's narrative as a particular genre.¹⁴ The tragic history of the earthly city, destined to suffer its final end—damnation, culminates in the Last Judgment. On the other hand, the citizens of the heavenly city, sharing the communion of the saints and united by their love for God, enjoy eternal life. While the tragedy of fraternal strife is limited to time, the comedy of salvation, begun in time, is fulfilled in an apotheosis in which history is transcended and the members of the heavenly city share in the final triumph of the Church. It is this tragicomic pattern which informs the medieval mystery cycles in which “the role of Cain and Abel remains immensely significant, for it confirms the pattern of the Fall which will resonate through the entire series of plays until finally the ‘two classes’ of people will be separated on the Last Day of history.”¹⁵ In the typological structure of the Corpus Christi cycles, Abel's tragic death as a martyr anticipates Christ's death and the comedic redemption of history.¹⁶

Another widespread influence on English historiography, the representation of internecine conflict in classical histories, provided a distinctive model of the past. Tragic or ironic, the generic shape of these accounts is essentially at odds with the linear and progressive form of Christian history with its tragicomic vision of time.¹⁷ The past is represented as a cyclic alternation of unity and internecine discord in which typical sequences of behavior repeat themselves as part of an irreconcilable duality which is never supplanted. For example, Thucydides presents the Peloponnesian War as a tragic record of recurrent intestine factionalism motivated by a self-aggrandizement and ambition which turned Greek against Greek.¹⁸ In these accounts of the devastating reverses of circumstance to which the city state is subject, Thucydides comments that blood proves a weaker tie than party, which violently divides classes and families. Not only does the father kill the son, but foreigners are invited by partisans to prey upon their fellow citizens. On the other hand, moments of human achievement are described in terms of the communal cooperation of citizens who with oaths of reconciliation unite in the face of immediate difficulty. History is thus represented as a continuous struggle between men and circumstances in which “human reason” is “defeated and crushed by the forces of irrationality.”¹⁹

Although Shakespeare's formulation of history as fraternal conflict may well draw on the ultimately Augustinian historiography of the mystery plays, English historians themselves, incorporating both classical and Christian strategies of representation, fashioned the past as a story of fraternal discord. The Anglo-Norman chroniclers of the twelfth century, for example, many of whom serve as sources for the Tudor chroniclers, repeatedly represent the past as a story of fraternal discord. Their narratives illustrate the process of historical selection. The factual field is the object not of reduction but “distortion”: the historian “‘displaces’ some facts to the periphery or background and moves others closer to the center, encodes some as causes and others as effects, joins some and disjoins others. …”²⁰ The resulting emplotment takes the form of a cycle in which tragic internecine conflict alternates with periods of comedic reconciliation: brothers prey upon brothers with impunity, periodically uniting to defeat their mutual enemies. Commenting that William of Normandy “did not even spare his own brother,” Henry of Huntingdon, like his fellow historian, William of Malmesbury, invokes this cycle in his emplotment of the reigns of William the Conqueror and his sons and heirs—William II, Henry I, and Robert Duke of Normandy.²¹ Unlike Augustine, who refuses to identify the heavenly city with political entities, Henry of Huntingdon implicitly designates the English as the party of Abel and interprets the internecine fierceness of the Cain-like Normans as evidence of their role as God's scourge, sent to “humble” the English nation.²²

Speaking through the voices of the Norman lords, the historian Ordericus Vitalis even more self-consciously reflects the tragic pattern which he ascribes to Anglo-Norman history, perceiving it as inherent in the past itself. His text clearly demonstrates the way in which the invocation of a motif or figurative symbol—“brothers”—encodes the facts as a component of a particular kind of story. For example his query, “What happened to the Thebans under the two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices?,” summarizes in miniature the course of Anglo-Norman history and informs it with the shape of tragedy. Comparing the nation to a woman continually “suffering the pangs of labor” and “Cruelly harassed by [her] own sons,” he uses a language of internal division to signal the generic shape of the past.²³ Like the other historians, he depicts a cycle of fraternal violence and mutual support: “But as discord makes divisions among them, and fatally arms them against each other, while they are victorious in foreign lands they are conquered by themselves and cut each others throats without mercy. …”²⁴ Drawing on a classical use of fratricide to encode accounts of internecine conflict, Ordericus, like Augustine, presents fraternal conflict as unnatural—the mark of the immorality of secular history. Moreover, his juxtaposition of tragic and comedic emplotments, exemplified in the very language of this passage, demystifies communal cooperation. Because such reconciliations, as Augustine remarks, give rise to the kind of self-interested concord exhibited by a band of pirates,²⁵ Ordericus represents them as ironic inversions of the comedic reconciliation of brothers.

It is Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain, however, who most clearly articulates the pattern, projecting onto a fictitious British past the generic outlines of Anglo-Norman accounts of the past.²⁶ The distinctive feature of his narrative is its formal unity. The unique details of historical discourse which populate the literal surface of historical narratives and which often defy formal coherence are supplanted by the “figurative element.” The generic form of the past, which in most historical narratives recedes to “the interior of the discourse,” is foregrounded.²⁷ In each successive reign the ruling heir is challenged or even deposed by an ambitious brother (sometimes one with whom he jointly shares the throne), cousin or other relative.²⁸ For example, Mempricius and Malim, the great-grandsons of Brute, contest the throne, struggling for possession of the island, and Mempricius murders his brother in a meeting ostensibly planned to forge “concord betwixt them.”²⁹ The threat of internecine destruction is further dramatized in a second scenario—the return of the exiled brother (sometimes accompanied by a foreign army) to reclaim his patrimony. Both of these scenarios anticipate Shakespeare's representation of the English past in which “brothers” are displaced and then return, as do Henry Bolingbroke and the Earl of Richmond, to displace their rivals. Treating his material from an almost secular perspective, Geoffrey does not condemn the brothers in his history as Cains, but with the detachment which also anticipates Shakespeare, he presents their often disastrous choices as representatives of forces of personal desire and individual destiny, forces at odds with the political relationships which determine national unity.³⁰

Geoffrey's tragic scenarios are juxtaposed with interludes of reconciliation in which hierarchy is reaffirmed as the brothers become one in unity or acknowledge differences in lineal rank.³¹ The motif of two becoming one—the effacement of all difference, encoded even in the alliterative names of pairs—figuratively represents the comedic ending which generically identifies these stories. Exiled brothers are restored to their patrimony, and the nation is united. Such reconciliation inspires foreign conquests as reunited brothers, typified by Belinus and Brennius, venture forth to conquer the Franks and finally Rome itself.³² In this formulation fraternal strife is temporarily supplanted by a spirit of unity. History gives way to romance as a tragic or ironic model of the past is displaced by a model of what should be.

Geoffrey presents such moments as “exemplary” history: “the end of fraternal strife restores civil harmony and paves the way for the conquest of foreign lands.”³³ These scenarios, however, do not ultimately provide comedic closure, for Geoffrey's cyclic history has no “ending.”³⁴ His classical and secular vision of history as a contest of irreconcilable forces casts an ironic shadow on these moments of success; the empowering of the nation incites ambition and issues in or is inextricably linked with the resurgence of national crisis in which personal ambition reasserts itself as civil conflict.³⁵ In Geoffrey's formulation of history the unity of brothers anticipates not an ending, but the renewal of a pattern of fraternal hostility and thus ironically defies generic expectations.

The Tudor historian Edward Hall, in contrast, invokes the conflict of brothers to articulate a tragicomic formulation of the past in which English history is a chapter in the history of salvation, the ending of which anticipates Christian apotheosis. In his The Vnion of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, Hall sets forth the conflict between heirs as a manifestation of the tragic “intestine deuision” between “the brother and the brother” as one instance of the factionalism which had shaped the history of European realms.³⁶ Commenting in his introduction that unity cannot be comprehended apart from division, Hall represents the record of warring brothers as both a tragic story of suffering and death and a prelude to the restoration of concord enacted in the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Hall's opening analogy between marriage and Christian redemption, part of an ode to unity, becomes an identification in the conclusion of his account, in which he celebrates this union as a succession of the “ioy” by which “peace was thoughte to discende oute of heauē into England. …”³⁷

Hall's articulation of the Tudor view of the state as a redemptive agency is, however, destabilized by a political realism inherent in any detailed chronicling of fact. The past as an account of warring brothers is represented in a modality which is at odds with and thus ignores providential design.³⁸ Hall's tragicomic emplotment—unity born out of division—is divested of its informing power and disengaged from the text. For although Hall finally describes the Tudor dispensation “as a thynge by God elected and prouided,” he immediately proceeds to record Henry's continuing preoccupation with the suppression of “dyuision” and “dissencion.”³⁹ His generic model of tragic conflict superseded by providential apotheosis gives way to a continuing pattern of conflict.

In his English histories, Shakespeare more self-consciously enlists the conventional plot scenarios of fraternal conflict and cooperation, testing their iconic power to inform the past and deconstructing familiar patterns. Just as the form of Richard II is, for example, articulated in terms of the biblical paradigm of fraternal conflict, so Henry V dramatizes the comedic or romantic resolution of that cycle—brotherly reconciliation and redemption.⁴⁰ The play's comedic or romantic emplotment is dramatized not only by recurring references to brotherhood but by iconic and exemplary strategies which create the play's “ceremonial” representation.⁴¹ Supporting a vision of unity, these strategies enforce the unity of the text itself.

The play's reenactment of these modes is counterpointed by its denial of the complementary tragic phase of this cycle, expressed in its suppression and isolation of tragedy and its displacement of violence. The comedic voice of the play, a voice of denial, ironically evokes a “tragic emplotment” of events which challenges the very form of the play. As White explains, “The same set of events can serve as components of a story that is tragic or comic, as the case may be, depending on the historian's choice of the plot structure that he considers appropriate for ordering events of that kind so as to make them into a comprehensible story.”⁴² Shakespeare's creation of dual emplotments is a characterizing feature of sophisticated historical texts, which are “always written as part of a contest between contending poetic configurations of what the past might consist of.”⁴³ Mediating between contending emplotments,⁴⁴ Shakespeare qualifies Henry's comedic vision of reconciliation with a tragic model of events.

The form of Henry V is illuminated by the generic dynamics of Richard II, which, in its representation of fraternal conflict, appears to be the tragic counterpart of the comedy of reconciliation. In Richard II Shakespeare juxtaposes the tragic conflict of Cain and Abel and an ironic version of that story in which secular history is distanced from redemptive history. Challenging Mowbray, Bolingbroke covertly identifies Richard as his uncle's murderer, a figurative Cain who

Sluic'd out his innocent soul through streams of blood—
Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries,
Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth,
To me for justice and rough chastisement.

(I.i.103-6)

He assigns himself the role of avenger on behalf of Gloucester, whose identity as sacrificing Abel (104) is reinforced by the Duchess of Gloucester's entreaty addressed to Gaunt—an appeal to “brotherhood” and a protest against the desecration of a sacred heritage symbolized by the Plantagenet blood of her murdered husband (I.ii.9-36). Ostensibly defending the old dispensation, symbolized by the anointed blood of Edward III, against unnatural violation, Bolingbroke assumes the role of Abel's champion. He implicitly aligns himself with England, whose bloodstained “earth” is metaphorically identified as the temporal locus of the heavenly city. Richard, in turn, associates his adversary, whom Shakespeare significantly casts in the role of a brother—“Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom's heir, / As he is but my father's brother's son” (I.i.116-17)—with the heartless and violent power of Cain (III.ii.111).

Exposing the moral posturing, Shakespeare anamorphically conflates his Cains and Abels in their shifting relationship to power and right. Although Cain's exile, the biblical anticipation of the separation of the heavenly city from the earthly city, is repeatedly invoked by the participants as a God-ordained punishment for the apostasy of rebellion, exile in fact dramatizes shifting relations of power in the earthly city (I.iii.198-203), much as it does in Geoffrey's account of the past. Moreover, it foreshadows the recurrence of violence as brothers return to claim their patrimony. Thus Bolingbroke, Mowbray (Richard's surrogate), Richard, and finally Exton (Bolingbroke's surrogate), each forced into “exile” by a “brother,” are condemned by their enemies as apostate violators of the body politic—“With Cain go wander through shades of night” (V.vi.43; I.iii.176-77). Each, on the other hand, identifies himself with Abel. Bolingbroke portrays himself as Abel's defender. Richard, in his martyr-like role as Cain's victim, is implicitly compared to Abel and fashions himself as Abel's typological counterpart, Christ (IV.i.170-72). Even Mowbray and Exton belie their roles as Cains; a crusader, the exiled Mowbray serves Christ in the very capacity which Bolingbroke repeatedly covets for himself and later dies in Venice, yielding up his soul to Christ (IV.i.93-101); in contrast, Bolingbroke's death in the Jerusalem Room at Westminster, not the Holy Land (2 Henry IV IV.v.232-40), ironically signifies his Cain-like exile in the earthly city. Exton, Richard's murderer, believes he serves Henry in his role as the Lord's Anointed.

Although in Richard II the struggle between brothers is fashioned by the contestants as a conflict between Abel and his apostate enemy Cain, Shakespeare, like Augustine, challenges myths of legitimacy which support the power of worldly empires. The identification of England as the heavenly city—the inheritance of Abel—is counterpointed with a vision which undermines the assumptions of a whole tradition of Christian historiography in which the state is a “monument to God's ordering of history,” and the “political or social hero” is informed with the “nature of both Christ and Caesar.”⁴⁵ The tragic demise of Richard as the Lord's Anointed and thus Abel's representative is emplotted as an ironic struggle for power among the descendants of Cain, whose pretensions to moral legitimacy belie the true foundations of the earthly city—power and self-interest. A play in which successive monarchs assume the role of Cain (V.vi.45-46), Richard II enacts the shape of history as recurring fraternal conflict.

Because Henry V is a self-conscious work of historiography, the play itself calls attention to the problematic relationship of genre and history. The selective processes by which the facts of history take on generic form are often transparent; the past is clearly a text subject to the shaping of the historian. In Henry V, generic fashioning becomes evident in what the historian leaves out as much as in what he includes.⁴⁶ One of many such incidents which allude to the recurrence of fraternal violence, the Southampton plot (II.ii) illustrates Shakespeare's use of selective strategies to invoke one generic formulation and suppress an alternative representation.

The operation of the selective process becomes clear when one examines the chroniclers' attempts to place this event in the larger pattern of historical change. Assuming the retrospective view of the historian, Tudor chroniclers generally represent the Southampton plot as an anticipation of the Wars of the Roses. Recounting Henry's discovery of the conspiracy and his efficient dispatch of the perpetrators, Hall, for example, proceeds to place the event in the broader historical continuum, identifying it as a prologue to the eventual demise of the house of Lancaster:

But if he [Henry] had cast his eye to the fyre that was newly kindled, he should haue surely sene an horrible flame incesed against the walles of his owne house and family, by the which in conclusion his line and stocke was cleane destroyed and consumed to ashes, which fire at that very tyme paradvuenture might haue bene quenched and put out.⁴⁷

In the works of Hall and Holinshed this tragic interlude is juxtaposed in chronicle fashion with heroic accounts of Henry's reign; the poet-historian Samuel Daniel, however, attempts to present a coherent generic model of the past. Emplotting his The Civil Wars as tragedy, he foregrounds the Southampton plot as smoldering evidence of “the lowe depressed fire, / Whose after-issuing flames confounded all” (5.1).⁴⁸ Daniel self-consciously reflects on the tensions arising from his generic emplotment. He must eschew the “intermedled good report” characteristic of chronicle accounts in which inclusiveness supplants generic formulation (5.13). Having committed himself to a tragic account of the past—“‘Nothing but blood-shed, treasons, sinne and shame’” (5.6)—he can “onely tell the worst of euerie Raigne” (5.13).⁴⁹ Given his program of selection, the representation of Henry's reign, as Daniel acknowledges, becomes problematic. He must subordinate “this so happy a meanewhile” (5.33)—an allusion to Henry's enlightened policies of national reconciliation—as a mere parenthesis in a tragic discourse, in which, he laments, the glorious battle of Agincourt has no place (5.13).

The chroniclers and Daniel not only identify the Southampton plot as part of a tragic formulation of the past, they disclose the motives of Cambridge, Grey and Scroop, the king's would-be assassins. Hall, for example, questions the motive of greed confessed by the conspirators, who according to some reports had been bought by the French:

diuerse write that Richard earle of Cambridge did not conspire with the lorde Scrope and Sir Thomas Graye to murther kyng Henry to please the Frenche kyng withal, but onely to thentent to exalte to the croune his brotherinlawe Edmonde earle of Marche as heyre to duke Lyonel.⁵⁰

Revealing that the conspirators were supporters of Lyonel's heir, the descendant of an elder brother, Hall redefines the plot as a recurrence of fraternal conflict and so discloses its tragic configuration: hierarchical differences are effaced as king and subject are identified as rival kinsmen, contenders for the crown and near equals in their rights and claims.

Although the conspiracy in fact challenges the success of the policy of reconciliation and reinstatement by which Henry sought to control and re-assimilate his father's enemies, particularly the Yorkist claimants (II.ii.25-31),⁵¹ in Henry V this plot against the king, discovered on the eve of Henry's embarkation to France, appears strangely transformed. Shakespeare divests the conspiracy of the tragic identity assigned to it by the chroniclers and Daniel. Instead, he uses iconic strategies of representation to divorce the incident from the historical continuum, and thus he contains it.⁵² First of all, this account of the insurrection is detached from the past and future to which it implicitly points, offering no analysis of political cause and effect. It is presented as neither a replay of the Ricardian conspiracies which plagued Henry IV nor a reciprocal reenactment of the familial bloodshed of the past—specifically the murder of Richard II.⁵³ Moreover, it is distanced from the anticipation (in the Epilogue) of the fraternal conflict between the Lancastrian and Yorkist parties which “made his England bleed.”

Ignoring the questions of precedent and outcome essential to historical discourse, Shakespeare not only isolates the event from its temporal context but obscures its motivation.⁵⁴ Henry seizes upon the conspirators' confession that they acted out of greed, appearing to accept this motive at face value (II.ii.88-91) despite Cambridge's ambiguous disclaimer (155-56). In addition, the particular historical details which would disclose factionalism are effaced; Shakespeare is silent about the genealogical facts or political alliances which might reveal the reciprocity of the adversaries and identify the assassination plot as a manifestation of fraternal enmity.⁵⁵

Here, as elsewhere in the play, it is Henry who rewrites events, collaborating with the Chorus, an “official historian.”⁵⁶ In this scene the tragedy of fraternal discord is effaced and finally supplanted in a coherent and self-contained drama which evokes the Last Judgment. Depoliticizing and universalizing the conspiracy, Henry in fact stages a biblical drama of sin and judgment in which he assumes a God-like role as the embodiment of an impartial justice (II.ii.174)—righteous, inclined to mercy, but implacable in the face of sin.⁵⁷ Attributing the conspiracy to unfathomable human depravity, he characterizes the defection of his intimate friend, Scroop, as “Another fall of man” (II.ii.142). He thus magnifies the conspirators' treason as a type of the spiritual apostasy of both Adam and Cain, whose rebellion is structurally represented as a second fall in the medieval cycle plays.⁵⁸ Interestingly, this moral emplotment echoes the medieval account commissioned by Henry, in which the conspirators, condemned as “Judas-like,” are implicitly linked with Cain, Judas' typological counterpart in the cycle plays.⁵⁹ Evoking history's final drama in which justice triumphs over sin, Henry dissociates himself from motives of revenge (174) and identifies himself with both law (143, 176-77) and mercy. He thus denies his reciprocal relationship with his opponents. They in turn, “rejoic[ing]” (159, 161) in the providential discovery of their betrayal, assume the roles of penitents and suppliants, signaling their subordination to the king.

In concert with Henry, the Chorus pursues the theme of betrayal; “English monsters” (II.ii.85) and a “nest of hollow bosoms” (II.pro.21), Cambridge, Scroop and Grey are demonized (II.ii.111-25) as unnatural “children” (II.pro.19). Moreover, their violence and disloyalty are displaced upon the French enemy with whom they are linked (II.ii.88-90, 100). Ironically belying insurrection, this fiction preserves the play's affirmation of “one consent” (I.ii.181, 206; II.ii.20-24). A moralized vision of English unanimity is invoked as a standard for exposing the immorality and unEnglish otherness of the conspirators (II.ii.126-40). The tragic dimensions of the Southampton plot are thus exorcised in a generic metamorphosis by which tragedy, a mere prelude to the reaffirmation of divine order, corroborates the play's insistent declaration of unity. Tragedy is subsumed by and anticipates the romance of brotherly reconciliation.

Henry's generic representation of the conspiracy is characteristic of the political fashioning of history in Henry V. Holinshed suggests that the official account of the conspiracy was in fact a fabrication: “their [the conspirator'] purpose was well inough then perceiued, although happilie not much bruted abroad, for considerations thought necessarie to haue it rather husht and kept secret.”⁶⁰ Shakespeare allows us to witness the fashioning of this event, dramatizing the process which began in Henry's court. The suppression of brotherly conflict is of course clearer to the modern reader with access to documents which suggest that the motive of greed was apparently the invention of Walsingham, a Lancastrian apologist, as was the identification of Scroop as the intimate of the king.⁶¹ Both fictions obscured the grievances of the dispossessed Earl of March, whom Henry had forced to pay a huge marriage fine, and of Richard, Earl of Cambridge, who in keeping with Henry's program of reconciliation with his enemies, had been given a title, but had never been awarded any source of income.⁶² These facts, excluded from official accounts, disclose the continuation of brotherly discord. Henry's manipulation of the Lyonel faction through economic strangulation was in fact interpreted by the Earl of March, who feared that the king would “undoe him,” as an act of metaphorical violence.⁶³

Most of these facts were probably not available to the Tudor chroniclers or to Shakespeare. He plays on the ambiguity of the confession as well as the fictitious character of the indictments for treason, confirmed, in this case, by the retrospective acknowledgment (made official by Yorkist claimants) that the “traitors” were never legally convicted (1 Henry VI II.iv.96-97).⁶⁴ Although the conspirators (except Scroop) confessed to a plan to elevate the Earl of March by taking him into Wales and proclaiming him king, those who wrote the indictment, in their effort to win a conviction for treason, charged the conspirators with having plotted to assassinate the king and his brothers. This fiction was designed to substantiate the conventional charge, derived by implication, of “imagining and compassing the king's death.”⁶⁵ Shakespeare's allusion to unvoiced motives activates the dissonance between medieval accounts, which invoke this event to affirm national unity, and the Tudor perspective, in which it figures as a continuation of and motive for the feud between brothers, inspiring the revenge of Richard Plantagenet, Cambridge's son. The Southampton plot ironically anticipates the demise of Lancastrian fortunes and the reinstatement of the Yorkist faction in the person of Edward IV, grandson of Richard, Earl of Cambridge. In a reversal of roles in which Cains and Abels change places, the three Lancastrian kings would in 1460 be declared usurpers, and the perpetrator of this treason, Richard of Cambridge, would later by parliamentary decree lose the name of traitor.⁶⁶

Henry represents his violent repression of fraternal conflict as a type of the Last Judgment and thus disengages this confrontation from the familiar tragic emplotment which encodes acts of internecine conflict. Henry's celebration of the battle of Agincourt is, in contrast, fashioned in terms of the comedy of brotherly reconciliation and Christian redemption. Henry implicitly compares the communal cooperation of his soldiers to the transcendent fellowship of the heavenly city. Like Christ who calls his obedient followers his brothers, Henry promises that “he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother” (IV.iii.61-62) and styles himself as one of a “happy few, we band of brothers” (60). Framed as prognostication, Henry's account of the yearly commemoration of the battle of Agincourt (IV.iii.39-67) anticipates the end to which Christian history points; national history becomes a type of the history of salvation in which tragedy is eclipsed and history redeemed.

Evoking the spiritual and eschatological connotation of brotherhood, Henry, in fact, transforms English history to national hagiography—an account of the suffering and triumphs of the heavenly city as a brotherhood of saints. Just as the hagiographer exhorts the brotherhood of the faithful to endure by reminding them of the Christian's ultimate consolation—the promise of eternal life—⁶⁷so Henry exhorts his men to endure by envisioning for them the consolation promised to national heroes—historiographic fame (51-59). And just as hagiographic literature celebrates death in the company of Christian brothers—one's fellow martyrs—as a privilege and an honor,⁶⁸ so Henry's anticipatory account of English history celebrates the felicity of death in the company of fellow Englishmen—a select brotherhood of national saints. Henry distinguishes this new nobility from that nobility conferred by blood (61-63). Elevating achievement over inheritance, he honors a perseverance and self-sacrifice motivated by a secular faith—patriotism.

Henry completes the spiritualization of English history by transforming the future commemoration of the battle of Agincourt into a secular feast day memorializing those martyrs who gave their lives for the faith.⁶⁹ Unifying the observance of the martyrdom of Sts. Crispinus and Crispianus, whose feast day it is, with the annual remembrance of the heroism of this band of brothers, Henry reinforces the image of a sacred brotherhood. Crispinus and Crispianus, brothers and wealthy heirs to a secular patrimony, succeed to a more transcendent brotherhood as heirs of Christ. They embrace the Christian faith and live as humble shoemakers, sharing the gospel in the face of persecution.⁷⁰ As martyred brothers, not only do they embody Henry's vision of his band of brothers, but their conversion to the Christian faith metaphorically echoes the historic change implicit in Henry's fashioning of events: the subordination of patriarchal and aristocratic notions of allegiance to a new concept—allegiance to country. In creating a new brotherhood of secular saints, Henry forges bonds of communal allegiance, honoring those who are willing to subordinate individual ambition to public goals.

As members of the happy band of brothers, the four Captains—the Welsh Fluellen, the Irish Macmorris, the Scots Jamy and the English Gower—are actors in a comedy of brotherly reconciliation. Foils to the quarrelsome, unsoldierly French, they courteously and generously pay tribute to one another's valor and professionalism and enjoy the comradery of yokefellows committed to a mutual task (III.ii.63-65, 75-81). The ethnic and national divisions dramatically voiced in the distinctive dialects of these officers are discounted by Gower, who rebukes Pistol's xenophobic contempt for Fluellen: “You thought, because he could not speak English in the native garb, he could not therefore handle an English cudgel” (V.i.73-75).

The play's comedic vision of the English past—its denial of ethnic differences—is, of course, at odds with the audience's awareness of a continuing history of ethnic rebellion. For as the play elsewhere indicates, in 1599 the English audience awaits news of the subjection of Ireland (V.pro.29-34). Thus, ethnic animosities surface even in the midst of a supportive communal dialogue. For example, the outraged “What ish my nation?” (III.ii.121) with which Captain Macmorris responds to Fluellen's innocent allusion to “many of your nation” (120) fiercely contests the dehumanization of the Irish by their English oppressors. Stigmatized as “a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal” (121-22), the Irishman was of course excluded from both the contest of brothers, a story of near equals, and the comedy of fraternal reconciliation. Hardly candidates for brotherhood, the Irish, like the French before them, were “the other”—the victims of the imperialism which brotherhood inspires. Intimations of tragedy, the deep and irreconcilable divisions articulated by this Irish voice, like the voices at Southampton, must, of course, be muted and transfigured as they are in this scene: “Gentlemen both, you will mistake each other,” cautions Gower (133).

Because England's politically sensitive relationships with a rebellious Ireland and an independent Scotland do not support an English story of fraternal reconciliation, Shakespeare selectively foregrounds Fluellen, a shadow of the Welsh-born Henry, as a symbol of the spirit of patriotic unity—a corporate nationalism which in the world of the play transcends these ethnic differences.⁷¹ Playing the stranger, Henry, the first among Englishmen, disguises himself as Henry Le Roy, “a Welshman” and proclaims to a hostile Pistol that he is Fluellen's countryman, friend “And his kinsman too” (IV.i.51-59). Henry not only acknowledges the power of bonds based on ethnic and national identity, he at once enacts the effacement of the differences he celebrates. Henry—king and commoner, Welshman and Englishman—becomes all things to all people to win them to his cause, forging fraternal bonds which permeate social, ethnic and national boundaries.

The comedy of reconciliation is enacted on the field of Agincourt itself where the king's identification of himself as a Welshman and Fluellen as his “good countryman” (IV.vii.104) is reciprocally acknowledged by Fluellen: “I am your Majesty's countryman” (110). However, shared nativity, Fluellen realizes, is but a material bond, and thus his kinship with Henry, like the brotherhood of the four Captains in the play, is a spiritual one, a shared integrity. For Fluellen will confess their relatedness “so long as your Majesty is an honest man” (IV.vii.118-19). Just as Henry fashions the battle of Agincourt, so Fluellen proceeds to rewrite Welsh history as a comedy of fraternal cooperation. Shakespeare's allusion to Holinshed's tragic record of atrocities done in 1399 by the monstrous Welsh women on the bodies of dead Englishmen in 1 Henry IV is succeeded in Henry V by Fluellen's record of “good service” in a French garden of leeks, where the Welsh reappear as brothers-in-arms to the English (97-98).⁷² Conflating a Welsh St. David's day victory, sometimes identified as a Celtic defeat of the Saxons, with the Black Prince's victory at Crécy, Fluellen creates an account of “St. Davy's day” which both validates Welsh nationalistic pride and is ironically refashioned to serve “English purposes” (II.pro.15). Connecting the past with the present, this narrative places the battle of Agincourt in the broader context of English history as a continuing comedy of fraternal reconciliation intrinsically connected to the staging of a foreign war. Incorporated into the fabric of English history, St. David's day—a memorial to Welsh valor—anticipates and is subsumed by St. Crispin's day. A celebration of brotherly cooperation, it commemorates the reconciliation of ethnic differences which like “many arrows, loosed several ways, / Come to one mark” (I.ii.207-8). The generic impulse of comedy—incorporation—is thus enacted again and again in the representation of ethnic brothers. The embodiment of this incorporation, Fluellen, the king's kin, countryman and double, collaborates with Henry to create an incorporative history of English fraternity, which honors difference while invoking an inclusive English brotherhood as the earthly model of the fellowship that epitomizes the heavenly city.

Henry's fashioning of the past and future as a comedy of reconciliation conflates the history of redemption with the triumphs of the earthly city. Shakespeare, in contrast, distances the earthly city from its heavenly counterpart by destabilizing Henry's emplotment, in which tragedy is averted and transformed. The comedic unity of the play is, in fact, constantly under siege as inverse accounts of fraternal discord surface. For example, the tragic outlines of the Southampton plot and the intimations of ethnic hostility emerge displaced onto another fraternal triumvirate, the fictional conspirators, Bardolph, Nym and Pistol, “three sworn brothers” (II.i.12). The Southampton plot is, in fact, the centerpiece in a dramatic triptych, the flanking panels of which reenact the classical emplotment of history as a tragic or ironic cycle of fraternal violence and reconciliation. A parodic version of Henry's comedic representation of the conspiracy, Act II, scene i burlesques the quarrel of brothers. Nym and Pistol draw swords; their mutual threats of murder reenact the discord among brothers disguised by the official account of the Southampton plot (II.i.35-73). Vying for the hand of Mistress Quickly, who is married to Pistol but was contracted to Nym, they openly contest a reductive version of the competing claims which remain unspoken in Henry's encounter with his co-claimant. Suspending this quarrel, the announcement of Falstaff's death with the explanation “the King has kill'd his heart” (II.i.88) not only restages Henry's own betrayal by his intimate friend, Scroop, but also implicates Henry himself in the reciprocal economy of fraternal hostility.

A reenactment of the historiographic comedy of affiliation, the third scene (II.iii) in this triptych counterpoints the first. Echoing Henry's assurance that “every rub is smoothed” (II.ii.188), Pistol's promise to Nym that “friendship shall combine, and brotherhood” (II.i.109) anticipates an alternate story, one which will supplant the conflict of brothers played out in this scene. The reconciliation is, however, an ironic and starkly realistic version of the idealized national unity Henry constructs for the audience in scene ii. Brotherly unity is achieved by the repression of differences which still fester (Nym cannot kiss the hostess goodbye); confederacy is merely a redirection of predatory self-interest: “Yoke-fellows in arms, / Let us to France, like horse-leeches, my boys, / To suck, to suck, the very blood to suck!” (II.iii.53-55). The thievish ambitions of Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph, “sworn brothers in filching” (III.ii.43-44), expose both the ambitions of another triumvirate—the would-be usurpers of the crown—and the imperial ambitions of Henry himself. Enclosing Henry's comedic and self-contained staging of history, this parodic reenactment of the historiographic fictions of fraternal violence and brotherly reconciliation reformulates the past in both a tragic and ironic mode. Generically transformed, Henry's story is subsumed as part of a continuing pattern of internecine violence which informs Anglo-Norman accounts of the English past. Just as the Anglo-Normans, driven by self-interest, destroy their brothers and then turn their mutual hostility against their enemies, so the English unite to prey upon the French.

Shakespeare, in fact, interrogates Henry's model of national brotherhood—a fellowship of saints bound together by mutual love—invoking an alternative model of community, a sworn brotherhood of thieves. Shakespeare's critique of the pragmatic bonds which support national unity echoes Augustine's depiction of the earthly city as a confederation of thieves:

Set justice aside then, and what are kingdoms but fair thievish purchases? For what are thieves' purchases but little kingdoms, for in theft the hands of the underlings are directed by the commander, the confederacy of them is sworn together, and the pillage is shared by law amongst them? And if those ragamuffins grow up to be able to keep forts, build habitations, possess cities, and conquer adjoining nations, then their government is no more called thievish, but graced with the eminent name of a kingdom, given and gotten, not because they have left their practice, but now because they may use them without danger of law.⁷³

Just as Augustine, citing Alexander the Great, effaces the distinction between the emperor and the thief, so Shakespeare counterpoints Henry's band of brothers with a band of thieves, exposing the basis of communal cooperation rooted in egotism and material ambition.

Henry's vision of brothers reconciled and redeemed from obscurity by the power of the historiographic record “From this day to the ending of the world” (IV.iii.58) informs time with a comedic closure and implicitly anticipates the redemption of history. Analogy becomes identity as English history, rewritten in the form of redemptive history, becomes one with Christian history. Shakespeare, however, questions the relationship between the record of history and the record of eternity, creating alternative “endings” which reformulate the story of Henry's reign. Henry's identification of secular history with the history of the heavenly city and his depiction of the state as a redemptive agency is countered by Williams' anticipation of “the latter day”:

But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp'd off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, “We died at such a place”—some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument?

(IV.i.133-42)

In this vision of the Last Judgment, Shakespeare recreates the alternative ending of Christian history; the comedic apotheosis of the saints is rewritten as the tragedy of damnation. If the play's presentation of the body politic in a language of unanimity exemplified by “one consent” (I.ii.181, 206; II.ii.22-23), “all,” (II.pro.1), “one” (I.ii.208-9, 212; V.ii.357-58) and in images of harmony—the beehive (I.ii.187-204) and the happy band of brothers—insistently encodes its story as a comedy, the shocking image of dismembered body parts, brutally dissevered, signals a contending version of Henry's seamless story of “one consent.” In this apocalyptic anticipation of the “heavy reckoning” due to men engaged in amoral conquest, the earthly city is envisioned as a dissevered body and the material basis of its unity is disclosed. Contrasting the “argument” or sign which identifies men who live and die by violence—blood—with the mark of the heavenly city—charity—Williams calls into doubt the sanctification of a band of brothers united not by justice, but by blood. Williams's severing of the history of conquest from the history of the heavenly city echoes Augustine's division between the party of Cain and the party of Abel: “that boasts of ambitious conquerors led by the lust of sovereignty: in this all serve each other in charity. …”⁷⁴ Ironically, Williams's anticipation of time's ending subverts the transcendent implications of Henry's anticipation of a temporal apotheosis. It also subjects Henry himself to the “heavy reckoning” which he invokes in condemning his fraternal enemies in his own drama of sin and judgment.

The demythologized accounts of the band of brothers as a confederacy of thieves and an assembly of severed body parts figure forth an alternative story, reiterating the generic tensions which give shape to Henry V. Shakespeare discloses the artifices—both political and aesthetic—which fabricate a vision of unanimity. He thus reveals the fictive character of the comedic closure created by Henry's rewriting of the Southampton plot as a triumphant Last Judgment and his fashioning of the story of Agincourt as its redemptive counterpart. The comedic mode is sustained by a conjuring effort expressed in pleas, promises and acts of imagination. These voices deny, rebuke or transcend the reverse story—history as an account of fraternal enmity. Ironically, these voices at once demystify the English historiographic assumption that foreign conquest reflects or enhances national unity.⁷⁵ For example, Bardolph's plea for reconciliation between Pistol and Nym, “Come, shall I make you two friends? We must to France together” (II.i.90-93), juxtaposed with the tragic alternative—“knives to cut one another's throats”—is echoed by Bates's plea, “Be friends, you English fools, be friends” (IV.i.219). Henry's promise of eternal brotherhood is adumbrated by the material vision of Pistol's promise to Nym. Just as his assurance that “friendship shall combine, and brotherhood” (II.i.109) anticipates the literal profits of that union, so Henry's promises serve his imperial ambitions. Not only do the characters persuade one another, but the Chorus in a language of unanimity (“all,” “every,” “solely” [II.pro.1-4]) also directs us in the romantic project of imagining the unity of “English purposes” (II.pro.15). Although the Chorus enjoins the audience to accept its poetic figuration as history, “submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind,”⁷⁶ the conjuring mode discloses that we are witnessing not history itself but the ceremonial fashioning of an historical text.

While the interior play, Henry's play, imitates the comedic form of redemptive history, all but overpowering dissenting voices which, like that of Williams, invoke the tragedy of damnation, a third “ending” is proposed in the play's epilogue. Recalling the historical continuum, signaled by references to the succession and the future, Shakespeare reframes the past. The Chorus supplants the ending of Henry's story with the record of recurring civil violence. One becomes “many” (Epi.11, 12) as Henry's brothers vie for control of the realm and its young heir.⁷⁷ Shakespeare counters a comedic myth of transcendence with a secular vision of history similar to Geoffrey of Monmouth's ironic or realistic emplotment of British history, in which fraternal enmity and reconciliation are part of a continuous and inescapable cycle. Distancing history's amoral conflicts and its temporary and pragmatic reconciliations from the history of the heavenly city, Shakespeare represents this cyclical interplay of tragic and comedic scenarios as a parodic counterfeit of the tragicomic form of redemptive history.

Shakespeare, then, explores the generic configurations of the past by reenacting in alternative emplotments the interplay of fraternal strife and brotherly reconciliation, a familiar model for medieval drama and English historiography. The discourse of Henry V is, in fact, marked by “a dialectical tension” between generic models. Such a tension, as Hayden White argues, is the mark of “the element of critical self-consciousness present in any historian of recognizably classical stature.”⁷⁸ Shakespeare dramatizes Henry's own effort to rewrite history, exorcising the tragic aspects of the mythic configuration of English historiography and institutionalizing the divine comedy of brotherly reconciliation. The play itself presents an ironic view of history's comedies and tragedies. Like an anamorphic image, brotherhood figures forth the “alternative emplotments” which endow a set of historical events, which in themselves have no story, with “all the possible meanings” accessible to Shakespeare's audience.⁷⁹ The comedy or romance of brotherly reconciliation is sustained by the non-mimetic strategies of the Chorus and of Henry's moral emplotment, designed to evoke what should or might have been. Nevertheless, neither moral exhortation nor appeals to the imagination succeed in exorcising the tragedy of fraternal enmity which reappears in mimetic representation of violated brotherhood. Shakespeare, thus, invokes generic patterns common to English historiography to recreate history's shifting perspectives and to test those formulations against the witness of the record.

Notes

1. Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 82, 88.

2. White, “Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination” in his Tropics, 109; White defines “emplotment,” a term which I borrow (along with its cognates, “emplot” and “emplotted”), as “the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures, in precisely the way that Frye has suggested is the case with ‘fictions’ in general” (“Historical Text,” 83).

3. White, “Historical Text,” 88.

4. White, “Historical Text,” 92.

5. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973), 3.

6. White, “Historical Text,” 82.

7. See Clyde Kluckhohn, “Recurrent Themes in Myth and Mythmaking,” in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray (New York: G. Braziller, 1960), 52. For a discussion of tragedy as fraternal violence see René Girard, Violence and The Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972).

8. For a discussion of the representation of power in medieval drama see John D. Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989), 23-25.

9. Cox xi; V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1966), 57-67.

10. St. Augustine, The City Of God, trans. John Healey, 2 vols. (1945; repr. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 2:64.

11. Augustine, 2:59. See Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985). Paster identifies the archetype of opposed cities as an ancient one, which appears in classical as well as scriptural sources, and is “always deeply involved with the notion of historical time” (2-13). She discusses the “bipolar image” of the city as it appears in Renaissance tragedy, masque and city comedy.

12. Augustine 2:64.

13. Augustine 2:63.

14. White, “Historical Text,” 98.

15. Clifford Davidson, From Creation to Doom (New York: AMS Press, 1984), 46.

16. Davidson, 46-47; Kolve, 66-67.

17. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1957), 471.

18. Cochrane, 473; Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley, Modern Library College Editions (Modern Library: New York, 1951), 3.80-86.

19. Cochrane, 473.

20. White, “Historicism,” 111-12.

21. The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon, trans. Thomas Forester (1853; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1968), 217; William Malmesbury's Chronicle of the Kings of England (London, 1889), 331-33.

22. Huntingdon, 216.

23. Ordericus Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy, trans. Thomas Forester, 4 vols. (1854; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1968), 2:433; 4:156-57.

24. Ordericus, 4:156-57.

25. Augustine, 1:115; Cochrane, 489.

26. Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), 139.

27. White, “Historicism,” 115.

28. Hanning, 142-43.

29. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, Sebastian Evans translation revised by Charles W. Dunn (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 32-33.

30. Hanning, 125-26, 142, 159-60. Geoffrey is the source for Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc (1562). A forerunner of the Marlovian and Shakespearean history play (Irby B. Cauthen, Jr., ed., Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970], xiv), this drama didactically portrays fraternal strife as the tragic sequel to any deviation from “single rule.” The play's polarized iteration of this historiographic pattern provided the Elizabethan auditor with a model for interpreting the present and future, a model which foregrounds issues of unity, authority and succession.

31. Geoffrey, 61-63.

32. Geoffrey, 51-56.

33. Hanning, 125-26, 145.

34. Hanning, 140.

35. Hanning, 148-49.

36. Edward Hall, Hall's Chronicle (London, 1809), 1.

37. Hall, 1-2, 425.

38. Henry Ansgar Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), 122-23.

39. Hall, 425.

40. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (Glenview, Ill.: Scott Foresman, 1980). All quotations follow this edition.

41. Herbert Lindenberger, Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature to Reality (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), 78-82.

42. White, “Historical Text,” 84.

43. White, “Historical Text,” 98.

44. Hayden White, “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” in Tropics, 129.

45. Hanning, 31-43; Cox, 12-15. Augustine's skepticism of the political order sets him at odds not only with classical idealism but with the assumptions of Christian historians for whom the history of the Christian state is synonymous with the history of the heavenly city.

46. White (“Historical Text,” 90-1), discusses Levi-Strauss's theory that “the coherence” of the historian's “story” is achieved by the exclusion of “one or more of the domains of facts.”

47. Hall, 61.

48. Samuel Daniel, The Civil Wars, ed. Laurence Michel (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958).

49. White (“Historicism,” 111-2) describes generic formulation as a selective process which is not a reduction but a “distortion of the factual field.”

50. Hall, 61.

51. See G. L. Harriss, “The King and His Magnates,” in Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. G. L. Harriss (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 31-51. Harriss discusses the Southampton plot as a renewal of the rebellion against Henry IV (36-37).

52. James R. Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1985), 103-4. Siemon argues that, despite Henry's allegorical shaping of this scene as a symbol of his magnanimity, it “pushes into the realm of history, where at each moment disorder and discrepancy force one to take up the burden of interpretation, to consider before and after, origin and end, purpose and conclusion without any promise of satisfying certainty to come.” I would suggest that the scene itself successfully represses such inquiry except at one point—the concession of motive—although, as I argue below, other parts of the play contest the generic representation of this scene, reidentifying it as a story of re-emergent civil conflict.

53. Karl P. Wentersdorf, “The Conspiracy of Silence in Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 27 (Summer 1976): 272-74.

54. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), 220.

55. Wentersdorf, 271, 274.

56. Emmon Grennan, “‘This Story Shall the Good Man Teach His Son’: Henry V and the Art of History,” Papers on Language and Literature 15 (Fall 1979): 371.

57. See John H. Walter, ed. King Henry V, the Arden Shakespeare (1954; repr. London: Methuen, 1979). Interpreting Henry as an emblematic figure—the ideal Christian prince—he reads this scene as an exemplum of kingly justice, clemency (xviiii) and magnanimity (xvi) and argues that Henry is, like “pius Aeneas,” an agent of God's plan (xxv). Dollimore and Sinfield, in contrast, comment on the universalizing of this defection (220) as a political strategy. The dual emplotment allows us to entertain Henry as both an emblem of justice and an astute politician adept at rewriting events and staging his own Doomsday pageant.

58. Gesta Henrici Quinti: The Deeds of Henry V, trans. and ed. Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 19; Kolve, 85.

59. Dollimore and Sinfield, 217.

60. Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols. (London, 1807), 3:72.

61. T. B. Pugh, Henry V and the Southampton Plot of 1415 (London: Alan Sutton, 1988), 156, 109.

62. Pugh, 97-102.

63. Harriss, 46.

64. Pugh, 129.

65. Pugh, 129-30. See also John G. Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason: An Introduction (Buffalo: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1979), 9-11.

66. Pugh, 133-35, 129.

67. Helen C. White, Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 8-9. White identifies the address “of consolation and encouragement to the faithful in time of persecution” as one of the most significant “hagiographic genres.”

68. Helen C. White, 9-10.

69. Helen C. White, 14. The “afterlife” of the martyr is historical as well as transhistorical. In conflating the celebration of Agincourt with the yearly commemoration of a saint's day, Henry invests historical deeds with the kind of transcendence reserved for the sacrifices of Christian martyrs.

70. Butler's Lives of the Saints, ed. Herbert Thurston and Don Atwater (New York: P. J. Kenedy, 1956), 4:197-98.

71. Joan Rees, “Shakespeare's Welshmen,” in Literature and Nationalism, ed. Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Savage, Md.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1991), 29.

72. Rees, 22; 33-34. Weighing the documentary support for Fluellen's account, Rees discusses the conflicting accounts of this Welsh victory and the origins of the Welsh celebration of St. David's day.

73. Augustine, 1:115.

74. Augustine, 2:59.

75. Dollimore and Sinfield, who argue that the play is not “‘about’ unity” but about insurrection (216), contend that the notion that foreign wars distract from internal conflict and enforce unity is demystified (215-18). If so, Shakespeare is implicitly challenging an assumption which is reiterated (and sometimes questioned) in English historiography.

76. Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1842), 1:192. The play's comedic or romantic enactment of an idealized version of brotherly reconciliation and its ceremonial exorcising of the tragic witness of fact recalls Bacon's distinction between poetry and history, in which poetry idealizes by “submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind,” while history, like reason, “doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things.”

77. Dollimore and Sinfield, 220.

78. White, “Historical Text,” 94.

79. White, “Historical Text,” 84, 92.