[In the following essay, Richardson claims that Henry V features Shakespeare's depiction of a cynically modern and amoral state.]

By modern political criteria, the medieval world was confused and chaotic. Men's loyalties and duties were divided among the often conflicting claims of the Church, the crown, and their feudal overlords; and it was largely due to these divided loyalties that Malory's Arthur's dream of an England united in the fellowship of the Round Table failed. By the time Malory's Morte D'arthur ends, feudal loyalties, the Grail quest and other claims of the Church, clan loyalties, and the obligations of the Courtly Love tradition have broken the ties of brotherhood so precariously united in the Round Table; and both Arthur and his dream are dead.

However, it is doubtful that the political confusion resulting from the varying claims of these institutions more seriously complicated life for the generality of men than the later emergence of a unified state under a powerful central government. Because Church, crown, and overlord were often in competition with one another, their demands on the individual were ultimately less oppressive than those of the all-powerful state. Moreover, the options available to most men may have been enhanced, giving the individual more freedom to choose his own priorities rather than those assigned him by the state.

Certainly the world of Malory, like that depicted by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, is a broader, more comprehensive world than that which exists at the end of Shakespeare's Henry V trilogy. For by the end of the trilogy, everything—man, the Church, even God—has been reduced to the narrow expediency of the state as embodied in Shakespeare's Hal. To pass from Arthur's dream to Hal's reality is to pass into a shrunken world, a world of diminished possibilities. The transformation of England from a medieval society to a modern state is the larger theme of Shakespeare's trilogy, and much more is at stake than simply Hal's own humanity. Before the end of Henry V Falstaff, the symbol of warm, lusty, unregenerate life for its own sake, is banished and dead. Hotspur, the ostensible personification of the chivalric ideal, has been used and betrayed by the practitioners of the new politics and is finally killed by its most successful practitioner, who desires only the appearance of chivalry. The Church, trying desperately to protect its resources from the crown, has become an accomplice to Hal's morally and legally dubious war against France; and Bardolph and Nym have been sentenced to death for a relatively trivial crime by a man whose hands are red with the blood of thousands—a man who is shortly to order the massacre of large numbers of helpless prisoners.

Even the feudal injunction requiring the loyalty and obedience of the vassal only as long as they are not in conflict with basic Christian values has been abrogated. In his dialogue with the common soldier Williams, this consummate politician manages to place the blame for the wrongs committed in the service of the king or state upon the shoulders of its humblest instruments. They, with God, must share the joint responsibilities for the bloody acts of the state.

The radical dissociation of moral sensibilities so characteristic of the modern state and, indeed, of modern man has already taken place.¹ And, for Hal, the dissociation is convenient. Hal can forgive his would-be assassins for their plot on his person but can order them executed for their conspiracy against him as the state. As the state, he can blackmail the Church into sanctioning his war on France and make it God's war as well as his. As the state, he can threaten the recalcitrant citizens of Harfleur with the rape of their daughters, the slaughter of their elders, and the spitting of their infants upon pikes. And after his exchange with the soldier Williams on the eve of Agincourt, this politic aggressor, this most warlike of kings, can speak with terrible sincerity of the terrible burdens of kingship, of

What watch the King keeps to maintain the peace,
Whose hours the peasant best advantages.

(Henry V, IV, i)²

Nearly all the contents of the Pandora's box of evils that modern man has opened are present in the trilogy—not only the split between the private and public sphere of human action but also the dreadful consequences of a narrow and parochial nationalism. When one considers the context of the foregoing speech and Hal's motives in invading France: to busy “giddy minds with foreign quarrels,” the peace he speaks of can only be the domestic peace of England. For that, another peaceful kingdom must be laid waste, helpless prisoners slaughtered, and men killed in thousands. It is a familiar gambit, an act of short-term expediency. The French, like William Perkins' poor, are expendable in a good cause, “a cursed generation,” who are, in contrast to the English, denied the promise of God's kingdom and belong to “no civill societie,” but are as “rotten legges and arms, that drop from the body.” Thus Christianity, with its larger obligations and its promise of a larger brotherhood, is now confined within national boundaries and, like man, suffers from diminution in Hal's brave new world.

That Shakespeare provides a classic portrait of the modern state and its rulers in the trilogy is undeniable. That Hal has generally been considered Shakespeare's ideal king is perhaps due to the acquiescence of modern man in his own diminution and the corresponding shrinkage of his moral perspective. That Shakespeare encourages us to see Hal's limits, his moral obliquity, is, I think, obvious. In Henry IV, Part I, he places Hal in the shadow of Hotspur and Falstaff; in Part II, he shows him cruelly rejecting Falstaff and eagerly seizing his father's crown. Further, he gives us little evidence that Hal is either a good or responsible king, or that he considers England any more than an extension of himself.

Many critics have been taken in by Hal's wit and rhetorical skills, but the soldiers who, with the French civilians, are the initial victims of his policies are under no illusions about him. Pistol knows that the English are going to France “like horse leeches … to suck, to suck, the very blood to suck.” Hal evades rather than answers the charges of the loyal Williams, and the comparison of Hal and “Alexander the Pig” by Gower and Fluellen after hearing of the order to kill the French prisoners is devastating in its irony:

GOW.
.. the King, most worthily, hath caused every soldier to cut his prisoner's throat. O, 'tis a gallant King!
FLU.
Aye, he was porn at Monmouth, Captain Gower. What call you the town's name where Alexander the pig was born?
GOW.
Alexander the Great.
FLU.
Why, I pray you, is not pig great? The pig, or the great, or the mighty, or the huge, or the magnanimous, are all one reckonings, save the phrase is a little variations.

This rather pointed exchange, which also involves parallels drawn between Alexander's Cleitus and Hal's Falstaff, ends with Fluellen exclaiming “I'll tell you there is good men porn at Monmouth” (Henry V, IV, vii).

Those who believe that the larger theme of the trilogy shows a tragic Hal reluctantly surrendering his humanity to the importunities of kingship overlook the fact that Hal is the only unchanging factor in the trilogy. Only his outward circumstances change. Hal is, in the end, as he was in the beginning, the shrewd, unscrupulous, politician using people as tools for his own ends, whether they be to astound the world with his reformation, as factors “to engross up glorious deeds” in his behalf, or to fill up breaches in the walls of Harfleur. Most damaging is Hal's brutal rebuttal of the troubled Williams' assertion that if Hal's soldiers “do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it, whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.” Hal answers:

The King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers … for they purpose not their death when they purpose their services. Besides, there is no king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to the arbitrement of swords, can try it out with all unspotted soldiers. Some peradventure have on them the guilt of premeditated and contrived murder; some, of beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury; some, making the wars their bulwark, that have before gored the gentle bosom of peace with pillage and robbery. Now if these men have defeated the law and outrun native punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to fly from God. War is His beadle, war is His vengeance, so that here men are punished for before-breach of the King's laws in now the King's quarrel. … Then if they die unprovided, no more is the King guilty of their damnation than he was before guilty of those impieties for the which they are now visited. Every subject's duty is the King's, but every subject's soul is his own.

(Henry V, IV, i).

The speciousness of Hal's logic here is stunning.

Samuel Johnson said of Homer that neither nations nor time has been “able to do more than transpose his incidents, newname his characters, and paraphrase his sentiments.” Most certainly this is true of nations in the twentieth century with regard to Shakespeare. Hal's sentencing of Bardolph and Nym and his specious reply to Williams have, in our day, been echoed at Nuremberg and the Lieutenant Calley trial. The cry of “Once more unto the breach” has echoed continually since Hal's time, and uncounted millions have rushed forth in their youth to fill one breach or another. Still the breaches become larger and the cries shriller and more urgent.

Surely the larger tragedy and theme of the Henry V trilogy is not Hal's alone but humanity's as well. To be sure, that medieval order, of which Hotspur and Falstaff are in their own differing ways representative, was decadent. It was an order whose decadence was reflected in the venality of the churchmen in Henry V as well as in the excesses of both Hotspur and Falstaff. Clearly, a change was needed, and Shakespeare was not engaged in whitewashing the past at the expense of the present. But a world lacking the qualities embodied in a Falstaff or Hotspur, however much they need tempering, is surely a poorer world. A world in which religion and the chivalric ideal have value only as instruments of policy is a poorer world. As Hal reduces all to his narrow exigencies, the range of human choice becomes more and more limited until, in the end, there is only the state. Arthur's dream would have united the conflicting loyalties and institutions of his world into a partnership and directed them toward a common and loftier secular end. Hal's reality subordinates or destroys them in pursuit of its own questionable ends. One feels that Arthur would have rejoiced in a Hotspur and a Falstaff even as he sought to curb their excesses, but Hal destroys them.

The larger promises implicit in Hal's soliloquy in Henry IV, Part I, beginning

I know you all, and will a while uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness,

are made quite explicit by the end of Henry V; and Falstaff's cry “Banish plump Jack and banish all the world” has been prophetic because only the state blindly pursuing its own purposeless destiny remains. Despite his wit and his moments of insight, Hal remains, beneath his stolen mantle of chivalry, a sort of political Flem Snopes. He has pursued power as blindly as and to no more discernible purpose than Flem pursued wealth, and therein lies the tragedy for both Hal and humanity. If Flem is Faulkner's equivalent of Max Weber's capitalist man—one who rationally exploits other human beings for profit pursued as an end in itself—then Hal is his political equivalent: one who rationally exploits people for power pursued as an end in itself. And the emergence of both Hal and Flem in the modern age has given an added touch of horror to a world already horrible enough in its reality. Both exploit and manipulate men for ends that are incomprehensible in terms of normal human motivation, ends that are, in fact, ahuman. We can comprehend the motivations of Flem's predecessors, the Compsons, Sutpens, and Sartorises even as we deplore them, just as we can comprehend those of a Falstaff and Hotspur and his fellow conspirators even as we deplore them. With both Hal and Flem man's sublunary predicament has come to mirror his predicament in the larger universe he inhabits. Man's own world which had, with the traditional consolations of religion, provided him with some relief from the hell of life in an indifferent and incomprehensible universe has become as indifferent to his needs and as incomprehensible to him as that larger universe. Therein lies, I think, the peculiar horror of Hal and the modern state of which he is Shakespeare's exemplar.

There are critics who are fond of speaking of Shakespeare's dark period, but I submit that the Henry V trilogy is the blackest work Shakespeare ever did. The implications of Hal's brave new world are too sad, too horrible for satire, cynicism, or railing; and the sympathy of Shakespeare must finally embrace Hal, even as that of Faulkner embraces Flem. It is for these reasons that so much critical confusion exists about Shakespeare's intention with regard to Hal and what he represents. The dreary truth of the emergence of the modern state and its consequences for man can only be treated in the tones of restraint that sorrow and utter hopelessness engender. Shakespeare's apprehensions concerning the new political order which Hal represents have become a frightening reality today; and virtually the only voices one hears in our literature are those of frightened, impotent little men vainly protesting that they want to live. But our Hals in their madness do not hear and still ready themselves and their peoples to prevail or die to no purpose on some field of Agincourt. Their world, like Hal's,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

After writing his trilogy, it would have been redundant, I feel, for Shakespeare to have exclaimed like Conrad's Kurtz over the horror of it all.

Notes

1. Nor is this radical separation of the private sphere from the public with regard to morality restricted to politicians like Hal. One is almost inescapably reminded of R. W. H. Tawney's comment on the Puritan tendency to regard “religion as a thing privately vital but publicly indifferent.” Historically, it was the middle class, puritanical in nature before Calvin, who joined with the monarchy to found modern England; and if one can give credence to his critics, the Puritan was as pathologically concerned as Hal to conceal this schism.

2. All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from G. B. Harrison's Shakespeare: The Complete Works. (New York, 1952).