SOURCE: Levin, Richard. “Hazlitt on Henry V, and the Appropriation of Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly 35, no. 2 (summer 1984): 134-41.

[In the following essay, Levin argues that contemporary ironic readings of Henry V—those that generally suggest that Shakespeare's dramatic presentation of King Henry is unfavorable—have tended to “appropriate” the work rather than properly interpret it.]

What used to be called the new ironic reading of Shakespeare's Henry V is of course no longer new, since it has been espoused by a growing number of studies of the play over the past three decades, and therefore does not require any extended explanation. Although these studies differ among themselves on matters of detail and emphasis, and sometimes add special qualifications of their own, they generally follow the basic line laid down in Harold Goddard's essay, published in 1951, which is still the most elaborate and probably (as later references to it would indicate) the most influential statement of this position.¹ Its fundamental premise is that Shakespeare designed the play to convey two contradictory meanings—an apparent or surface meaning (usually explained as a sop to the less intelligent members of his audience) which seems to present Henry as a great national hero, the “mirror of all Christian kings,” but which is undercut by a pervasive and subversive irony (aimed at the wiser few) that embodies the real meaning and reveals that Henry is actually a cynical hypocrite, a cold-blooded Machiavellian, a brutal butcher, and so forth.

To judge from a quick survey of recent publications, this is now the dominant view of the play, and is well on its way to becoming the new orthodoxy. As early as 1970, Laurence Michel could say that it was not necessary to spend much time arguing for his ironic interpretation because “most of this exegesis has been done already, and I can merely reiterate,” which he proceeds to do in a brief summary; and eight years later Ralph Berry began his essay by asserting that “the ironic reading of Henry V, which has received some outstandingly able advocacy, seems to me unanswerable. But I shall assume at least a general acquiescence on that score.”² I have presented my answers to this reading elsewhere,³ and have no desire to reiterate them here, since I would like to examine instead a different but closely related new reading that has emerged alongside this one and is now also on its way to achieving orthodox status—namely, the reading of William Hazlitt's essay on Henry V, published in 1817 in his Characters of Shakespear's Plays, as an ironic interpretation and hence as a forerunner of Goddard, Michel, Berry, and the rest. I believe that this is a serious misunderstanding of Hazlitt which should be rectified, but that is not my only motive, because I also believe that an examination of this misunderstanding will vindicate one of my own arguments against the ironic reading of Henry V that has been challenged, and at the same time shed some light on the nature of the reasoning that underlies such readings of this play and of many others as well.

I

The earliest suggestion of this view of Hazlitt known to me appears in 1962 in a study by Roy Battenhouse which he introduces as “a basic extension” of the Goddard position that Henry V is constructed as a “double-edged” play:

It will allow some spectators, blinded by a surface patriotism, to admire as their own ideal its particular heroism. But it will permit others to discern, as various modern critics have, … a suspicious fulsomeness in the rhetoric, and a kind of heroism in Henry more suggestive of “a very amiable monster” (Hazlitt's phrase), or of “some handsome spirited horse” (Yeats's phrase), than of a truly human being.⁴

It is made clearer a few years later in Ronald Berman's assertion that Hazlitt regarded the play “as a satire on the ancien régime, and applauded anything in it which seemed to undercut hierarchy, feudalism, and Christian politics.”⁵ In 1970 Herbert Coursen explicitly equates Hazlitt's interpretation with Goddard's: “Harold Goddard and others … have filled in Hazlitt's outline and have read the play as a condemnation of its principal character”; and in 1978 he calls this “the Hazlitt-Goddard thesis.”⁶ Michael Manheim, writing in 1973, cites two recent ironic readings of the play and explains that they “follow a long tradition of Hal-haters, notably among literary figures: Hazlitt, Swinburne, Masefield, Yeats, and Mark Van Doren.”⁷ And in his 1978 essay Ralph Berry proposes to show that

the mode of Henry V is the dubious or fallacious argument. If the arguments so constantly advanced in Henry V are generally sound [he of course will prove that they are not], then the play is a Meissonier canvas of a Great Patriotic War, Carlyle is right and Hazlitt is wrong, and modern critics have been wasting their time in peering for ironies where none exist.⁸

Several other statements of this sort were evoked by my assertion, in New Readings vs. Old Plays, that the earliest ironic reading of Henry V I could find was Gerald Gould's article of 1919,⁹ and that before then there was a general consensus of opinion that the play was not ironic. In their reviews of the book, Roy Battenhouse objects: “Is there really a consensus of response? Hazlitt, we may recall, considered Henry V an ‘amiable monster’”; while E. A. J. Honigmann claims that Gould's reading “has an honourable ancestry before 1919 in the work of Hazlitt, Watkiss Lloyd, Yeats, and others. There are really two traditions where Henry V is concerned.”¹⁰ And Coursen criticizes me for “overlook[ing] Hazlitt's violent exception to ‘consensus’ in 1845, a predictable republican reaction to be reiterated by the Quaker, Harold Goddard, a century later.”¹¹

II

To see that this view of Hazlitt's position is clearly wrong, we need go no further than the first two sentences of his essay. He begins:

Henry V. is a very favourite monarch with the English nation, and he appears to have been also a favourite with Shakespear, who labours hard to apologise for the actions of the king, by shewing us the character of the man, as “the king of good fellows.” He scarcely deserves this honour.¹²

And the essay itself faithfully follows the logic of this double thesis. The first section draws up an indictment of Henry (which appears to be directed more at the historical personage than at the dramatic character) in order to show that he does not deserve the honor Shakespeare has bestowed on him, so it is obviously presented as Hazlitt's own indictment and not the play's. Then comes the transition: “So much for the politics of this play; now for the poetry” (p. 286). The remainder of the essay is devoted to a series of “splendid quotations,” almost all of which contribute directly to the favorable portrayal of Henry and his cause. Hazlitt often expresses his admiration for the “strength and grace” or “beautiful rhetorical delineation” or “heroic beauty” of these passages, although he also occasionally indicates his disapproval of the values they embody¹³—a disapproval which presumably accounts for his resistance to that favorable portrait, and for his judgment that this “is but one of Shakespear's second-rate plays” (p. 289).

Thus, while it is perfectly clear that Hazlitt condemns Henry, there is no suggestion that he thinks the play does so. In fact, in the first section he admits that

We like him in the play. There he is a very amiable monster, a very splendid pageant. As we like to gaze at a panther or a young lion in their cages, … so we take a very romantic, heroic, patriotic, and poetical delight in the boasts and feats of our younger Harry, as they appear on the stage.

(p. 286)

And in the second section he says that

The behaviour of the king, in the difficult and doubtful circumstances in which he is placed, is as patient and modest as it is spirited and lofty in his prosperous fortune.

(p. 291)

Nor is there any suggestion that Hazlitt finds anything that might be called satire or irony in Shakespeare's treatment of Henry. I think we must conclude, therefore, that far from being an ancestor (much less an “outline”) of Goddard's reading of Henry V, Hazlitt's is exactly the opposite: he interprets the play as a straightforward and very positive presentation of Henry that fails, whereas Goddard interprets it as an ironic and very negative presentation of him that succeeds (that is, for the wiser few, a group to which Hazlitt obviously does not belong).

III

We would also have to conclude, as a logical consequence, that Hazlitt's reading is not an exception to the consensus of opinion I spoke of, but is in fact part of it. For I was referring to a consensus in the interpretation of the play, not in the evaluation of it or its protagonist. We all know, of course, that the prevailing estimates of Renaissance characters and plays (and even of Renaissance drama as a whole) fluctuated widely over the years, because of changes in taste and in the theatre itself, and also in political and social attitudes, as Hazlitt demonstrates. What I maintained, however, was that the basic interpretation of most of these plays—that is, the perception of their intended effect, broadly defined—has remained quite constant from the earliest recorded responses, which often go back to the seventeenth century,¹⁴ down to the advent of the new ironic readings in our own day. In this sense, then, the consensus on Henry V includes both Hazlitt and Carlyle, since they agree in their interpretation of Shakespeare's intention (to present Henry as an object of admiration), although they disagree sharply in their judgments of Henry (on whether he “deserves this honour”) and hence of the play (on whether it realizes that intention). One could even argue that; in proving the existence of this consensus, Hazlitt's position is more significant than that of Carlyle and the many other admirers of Shakespeare's protagonist, for his disapproval of Henry should have made him especially sensitive to any indications of a similar attitude in the play itself. Therefore, the fact that he sees no such indications—that, despite his own feelings, he still believes that Henry was “a favourite with Shakespear, who labours hard to apologise” for him—must be considered a very impressive confirmation of the consensus, like the corroborative testimony of a hostile witness in court.

The same can be said, moreover, of several of the other “Hal-haters” named by the critics quoted earlier. Swinburne, Masefield, and Van Doren may question the merits of Henry (and of the play), but they never suggest that Shakespeare's portrayal of him is meant to be ironic or negative.¹⁵ Their readings, in other words, belong to the same general class as Hazlitt's rather than Goddard's, which places them within this basic interpretive consensus. Watkiss Lloyd is different, since he argues that there are deliberate ironies in the play's presentation of Henry; however, he regards them as “reservations” which are designed to qualify but not to cancel out the overall impression favorable to him and his enterprise, and so stops far short of claiming that the play as a whole is ironic.¹⁶

Yeats is the only one of those named who makes such a claim; he concludes that Shakespeare could not have admired Henry, and “watched [him] not indeed as he watched the greater souls in the visionary procession, but cheerfully, as one watches some handsome spirited horse, and he spoke his tale, as he spoke all tales, with tragic irony.”¹⁷ Although that is scarcely the kind of irony that Gould and Goddard and their followers find in the play, which is supposed to produce an emphatic condemnation of Henry, I probably should have cited this essay, rather than Gould's, as the earliest ironic reading and hence the first real break in the consensus on Henry V.

I may of course have overlooked other nineteenth-century ironic readings, but I do not see how there could be many of them, or how they could constitute a “tradition” of ironic interpretation, as Manheim and Honigmann suggest. If such a tradition existed, Gould was certainly not aware of it, since he titles his article “A New Reading of Henry V,” and begins it with the assertion that “None of Shakespeare's plays is so persistently and thoroughly misunderstood as Henry V,” after which he announces, in italics, that “The play is ironic,” as if he had made a major discovery. Indeed, Gould is even careful to distinguish his reading from Hazlitt's: “He detested Henry, and said so: but he made the mistake of supposing that that detestable character was a ‘favourite’ character of Shakespeare's” (p. 42).¹⁸ Moreover, Gould seems to have had no discernible effect on the non-ironic consensus, which prevailed for at least thirty more years, even among those “Hal-haters,” as we found in the case of Van Doren.¹⁹ So far as I can ascertain, the ironic tradition did not really get under way (if that is what traditions do) until the studies of Goddard and Gilbert in the 1950s.

IV

It is not enough, however, to correct this erroneous conception of Hazlitt's essay (and of its relationship to the consensus), because we still have to ask why it has become so widespread. Since the critics quoted earlier could not have been deliberately misrepresenting Hazlitt, they must have been misreading him. And the nature of their misreading is quite clear: they failed to distinguish his view of Henry from his view of Shakespeare's view of Henry. They seem to have assumed, in other words, that his attitude toward the protagonist would also be the attitude he attributed to the play. And this assumption is by no means limited to them; it reappears, for instance, in several recent discussions of Henry V which divide the critics into those who admire Henry and those who dislike him, as if that were the crucial distinction which would necessarily determine their interpretations of the play.²⁰ But we have just seen that this is not true—that it is possible (or, at least, used to be possible) for critics to dislike Henry and yet believe that Shakespeare admired him and intended to present him non-ironically as an object of admiration. Such critics, we might say, disagree with the play.

Should we then ask if there are any examples of the reverse disagreements of critics who admire Henry but think that Shakespeare disliked him and meant to portray him ironically as an object of detestation? The question itself seems absurd, since it is obvious that all of the critics who read the play as an ironic condemnation of Henry also condemn him themselves. They never disagree with the play, because the attitude they find in it turns out to be identical with their own. This may help to explain why they have assumed that the same would be true of Hazlitt. And it may also raise the suspicion that they, unlike Hazlitt, are projecting their attitude into Henry V, that with their ironic reading they are appropriating the play—to adopt Alan Sinfield's phrase²¹—so that it will mean what they want it to mean.

If we go on to consider why they should do this, it is not difficult to find explanations (I am not of course implying any conscious intention to distort the play). Projection is, after all, a natural tendency to which we are all subject in our responses to art as well as to life. It is also natural enough to take pleasure in discovering that, in the attitudes involved here, we are on the same side as our greatest cultural hero (which means proving that he is on our side). But the primary motive for these ironic readings would seem to be the desire to vindicate the play and its author. Critics like Hazlitt and Van Doren, who disliked Henry but thought that Shakespeare did not, tended to downgrade the play; their disagreement with it became, in effect, an adverse judgment of its values. But such a judgment is apparently inconceivable to the modern ironic critic. He sees it as his task to prove that the play's values are right (that is, that they coincide with his own), so if they seem to be wrong he must show, by means of an ironic reading, that they are only the “apparent” values and that the “real” ones are above reproach. (As Sinfield put it, he “attempt[s] to juggle the text into acceptability.”) Goddard, for instance, is quite open about this; he begins his chapter on Henry V by stating that he will clear Shakespeare of the “charge” of jingoism (p. 216). And the fact that Gould's essay appeared in 1919 would suggest that he wanted to absolve Shakespeare of the sentiments associated with militarism, which now seemed so abhorrent.

Nor has this rescue operation been limited to Henry V. It is the underlying cause, I believe, of our many new ironic readings of The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice (probably the two plays of the canon whose “apparent” values are most unacceptable today), which set out to demonstrate that we are really meant to condemn Petruchio's taming of Kate (or else to conclude that she was never really tamed after all), and that Portia and Antonio are really shown to be at least as bad as Shylock, if not much worse. Indeed, this conception of interpretation as exoneration is now so widely accepted that I have even heard the suspicion voiced (though I have not yet seen it in print)²² that those who do not read these plays ironically may themselves be guilty of male chauvinism and antisemitism. From the perspective of the ironic critics this seems quite logical, because they always try to prove that a play embodies values which they believe in, and therefore expect that others will do so too. This is the same kind of reasoning, I suggested, which led them to assume that, if Hazlitt disliked Henry, he would read the play ironically in order to find it echoing his own attitude. That is what they would have done in his place.

V

It is also easy to understand why they would want to claim that Hazlitt's reading is ironic. For most of the critics quoted at the outset are themselves committed to the ironic interpretation of Henry V, and are therefore faced with the embarrassing fact that the “real” meaning they have discovered in the play does not seem to have been noticed for three hundred years by spectators or readers, including some of the most insightful commentators on Shakespeare, who have all interpreted the play in the opposite way (which is what the nonironic consensus means). This would indicate that there must be something radically wrong with the play, since it had obviously failed to communicate its meaning. But these critics cannot accept such a judgment, for we saw that their purpose was to vindicate the play—in fact they usually insist that it is brilliantly successful.²³ And that is why they feel the need to deny the consensus, and to recruit “an honourable ancestry” in Hazlitt and others. In order to protect their ironic reading of Shakespeare, they must go on to produce ironic readings of earlier readings of Shakespeare. Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.

Now it may not matter very much if we misinterpret Hazlitt's little essay, which can scarcely be considered one of the treasures of our literary heritage. But I hope it is not necessary to argue that it matters a great deal if we misinterpret Shakespeare. And that will happen, inevitably, whenever we set out to prove that our own attitudes and values are mirrored in his plays. I may be entirely wrong, of course, in suggesting that this is what the new readings of the ironic critics amount to. But if I am, there is a very simple test that they can take to acquit themselves and refute me. All they have to do is tell us some significant respects in which their view of Henry's victory, or Kate's taming, or Shylock's trial differs from the view they attribute to Shakespeare. They certainly should be able to do this, because it is hardly possible that an author writing almost four centuries ago, in a culture which was in so many ways quite unlike ours, would have exactly the same attitudes on war and women and Jews (not to mention the more general social and moral values involved) as a critic living today. It seems perfectly fair, therefore, to ask them to state some of these differences in attitude. If they cannot, it seems fair to conclude that they are not really interpreting Shakespeare but appropriating him.

Notes

1. The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951), chap. 17.

2. The Thing Contained: Theory of the Tragic (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), p. 65; The Shakespearean Metaphor: Studies in Language and Form (Totowa, N. J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978), p. 48.

3. The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 116-19; New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), chap. 3 passim.

4. “Henry V as Heroic Comedy,” Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1962), pp. 165, 168.

5. Introduction, Twentieth Century Interpretations of Henry V (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 14.

6. “Henry V and the Nature of Kingship,” Discourse, 13 (1970), 283; Review of The Triple Bond (ed. Joseph Price), Shakespeare Quarterly, 29 (1978), 302. See also The Leasing Out of England: Shakespeare's Second Henriad (Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1982), p. 155.

7. The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespearean History Play (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1973), p. 194. The two recent ironic readings cited are John Bromley, The Shakespearean Kings (Boulder: Colorado Associated Univ. Press, 1971), chap. 6, and C. H. Hobday, “Imagery and Irony in Henry V,” Shakespeare Survey, 21 (1968), 107-13.

8. Shakespearean Metaphor, p. 50.

9. “A New Reading of Henry V,” English Review, 29 (1919), 42-55.

10. Comparative Drama, 14 (1980), 237; Yearbook of English Studies, 12 (1982), 246.

11. Exchange, 5 (1979), 54 (he is responding to an earlier article where I made the same point). Hazlitt died in 1830, and Goddard was not a Quaker.

12. I quote from The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent, 1930-34), IV, 285-91.

13. See especially p. 288: “It is worth observing that in all these plays, which give an admirable picture of the spirit of the good old times, the moral inference does not at all depend upon the nature of the actions, but on the dignity or meanness of the persons committing them. … Might was right, without equivocation or disguise, in that heroic and chivalrous age.”

14. The earliest comments known to me which could indicate an interpretation of Henry V are in Thomas Heywood's An Apology for Actors (1612), sig. B4^r, and Margaret Cavendish's CCXI Sociable Letters (1664), pp. 245-46 (Letter 123), and they both would belong to the consensus I am referring to.

15. Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (London: Chatto & Windus, 1880), pp. 112-15; John Masefield, William Shakespeare, Home University Library of Modern Knowledge (London: Williams and Norgate, 1911), pp. 120-23; Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (New York: Henry Holt, 1939), pp. 170-79.

16. William Watkiss Lloyd, Critical Essays on the Plays of Shakespeare (1856; rpt. London: George Bell, 1875), pp. 251-67: “Thus much in reservation, or thus much in vindication of the poet, who must not be lightly misconstrued as exhibiting a dazzling display of military heroism to take and astonish the world by its dash and brilliancy, while he overlooks or forgets to hint at the basenesses that are compatible with glories of this class. … Apart, however, from the question of the cause that calls them forth, the qualities that achieve military success are in themselves truly honourable and admirable. … While, therefore, the poet does not conceal the qualifications they are subject to, he addresses the national military spirit distinctly enough, and excites our esteem” (pp. 255-56). He concludes with a warning against “giv[ing] applause unmingled with any reservation to the successful bravery and ambition of Henry” (p. 267). Schlegel also finds some ironic elements in the play which qualify its presentation of “Shakespeare's favourite hero in English history”—see A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1809-11), trans. John Black (London: Bohn, 1846), pp. 428-32.

17. William Butler Yeats, “At Stratford-on-Avon,” Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903), pp. 154-64.

18. See also Alan Gilbert, whose ironic reading is more tentative than Gould's: “Are we, going further even than Hazlitt, to interpret the work as a satire on a hypocrite whose ambition disregards the misery he causes?” (“Patriotism and Satire in Henry V,” Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Matthews and Clark Emery [Coral Gables, Fla.: Univ. of Miami Press, 1953], p. 62).

19. Further evidence can be found in the surveys of criticism in John Dover Wilson's introduction to the New Cambridge edition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1947), and Paul Jorgensen's “Accidental Judgments, Casual Slaughters, and Purposes Mistook: Critical Reactions to Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth,” Shakespeare Association Bulletin, 22 (1947), 51-61. Neither of them mentions Gould, or seems to be aware of an ironic interpretation of the play.

20. Manheim's list of “Hal-haters,” quoted above, is part of such a division based on the critics' own feelings. See also the division in Larry Champion, Perspective in Shakespeare's English Histories (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 211, which lumps together on the anti-Henry side ironic readings like Bromley's and non-ironic ones (including Hazlitt's). Ronald Berman runs into a greater problem in A Reader's Guide to Shakespeare's Plays (rev. ed., Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1973), pp. 73-74, with his classification of “three groups of critics: those who hate the play and its hero; those who admire both; those who attempt to remain neutral.” The first group includes Hazlitt, Swinburne, Van Doren, and Battenhouse, among others. But Battenhouse—to adopt this terminology—hates Henry and admires the play, since he thinks the play hates Henry too. And this would also apply to Hazlitt, if what Berman said about him in the passage quoted earlier (that he regarded the play “as a satire on the ancien régime”) were true.

21. “Against Appropriation,” Essays in Criticism, 31 (1981), 181-95; see also the briefer comments by Maynard Mack, Rescuing Shakespeare (Oxford: International Shakespeare Association, 1979), pp. 4-5; and Joanne Altieri, “Romance in Henry V,” Studies in English Literature, 21 (1981), 238-40.

22. René Girard comes quite close in “‘To Entrap the Wisest’: A Reading of The Merchant of Venice,” Literature and Society (Selected Papers of the English Institute, 1978), ed. Edward Said (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), p. 109. See also Edna Krane, “Literary Criticism and Theological Anti-Semitism,” Midstream, 30 (1984), 47-50.

23. Berry, for instance, says that Shakespeare's ironic strategy “calls for sleight-of-hand of the highest order, for the disparity between the two versions [i.e., the apparent and real meanings] has to be indicated discreetly yet unmistakably” (p. 48), which leads one to wonder why it was in fact mistaken for all those years.