SOURCE: "The New Machiavelli: Shakespeare in the Henriad," in Literature East and West: Essays Presented to R. K. DasGupta, edited by G. R. Taneja and Vinod Sena, Allied Publishers Limited, 1995, pp. 122-49.

[In the following essay, Chaudhuri contends that in the character of Henry V Shakespeare reveals "an integrated and purposive development of a new Renaissance ideal of kingship" in which he "appropriates and extends the Machiavellian view of man."]

Shakespeare's Prince Hal, and his later incarnation as Henry V, have always drawn equivocal responses. The New Arden Henry V lists "The Diversity of Critical Opinions"¹; but what might worry us is not this diver sity but the ambiguity of the single response. From Hazlitt through Bradley to Danby, Nuttall, Greenblatt and Kristian Smidt,² readers have been struck by Hal/Henry's image as an ideal prince, guided by his unquestioned duty from the rejection of Falstaff onward, if not earlier; and yet by that very conduct as calculating, hypocritical or inhumane. This conflict of response has been explained in terms of Shakespeare's critique of political man, and specifically the prince or ruler. There appears to be a basic opposition of human ideals and political necessity, ethics and expediency, private and public values.

I wish to propose that the supposed ambiguity lies within Shakespeare's image of the ruler or political man; and that far from being ambiguous, this image is an integrated and purposive development of a new Renaissance ideal of kingship.

This obviously assumes what few will contest, that the conceptual framework of these plays is Tudor not Lancastrian, late-sixteenth and not early-fifteenth century. It also assumes more controversially that Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V make up a single programme—if we like, a "tetralogy." This has been traditionally accepted but often questioned.³ My reasons for adopting such a view will, I hope, emerge from my analysis.

There is another question as well. The very existence of a new Renaissance ideal of monarchy has sometimes been dismissed. As early as 1953, G. R. Elton called it an "outmoded concept."⁴ But the overwhelming consensus, amply borne out by historical and literary evidence, accepts the presence of a new breed of absolute rulers in Renaissance Europe. Their rise may be traced, following Burckhardt,⁵ to the masters of the Italian citystates, a gallery ranging from condottieri and "tyrants" to sophisticated autocrat-statesmen.

The great Tudors—Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth—are among the leading northern examples of the type.⁶ In treating of the two Henries, Tudor (and later) writers allude significantly to their Lancastrian namesakes. The apotheosis of Henry V begins with Polydore Vergil under Henry VII. As late as 1616, Christopher Goodman in The Fall of Man sees the seventh Henry as uniting the virtues of the fourth, fifth and sixth.⁷ The 1513 translator of Tito Livio's Life of Henry V offers his subject as a model for the young Henry VIII.⁸ We may also recall Henry V's insistence on his Welsh connexions in Shakespeare's play, suggesting an association with the Tudors.

The New Monarchs derive their authority not from hereditary claim—at least not a long or secure claim—so much as from virtù, the driving force of assertive personal rule, indeed a projection of their selves onto the fabric of the state: more rather than less so from their sense of the innovative and contingent nature of their rule. They had to work out new strategies of survival and domination, heavily oriented to their own personalities, the circumstances of their rule, and the realities of political life and conduct. They may invoke the principles professed in classical or mediaeval precedent; but these now play their part (not necessarily a mischievous or hypocritical part) in a different context of priorities. The apparent ambiguities of the new political ideal arise from this cause: viewed in a different perspective, they fall into place as elements in a consistent, integrated design.

The most complete and influential exponent of the new politics was Machiavelli. We have been cautioned against seeing Machiavelli as sui generis⁹; but it was through the Machiavellian glass that contemporary political thought and practice was focussed on the consciousness of the age.¹⁰ Yet there has been a curious reluctance to read Shakespeare's political plays in Machiavellian terms. Most writers, even Machiavelli scholars like Felix Raab,¹¹ confine themselves to the vulgarized "stage Machiavel" of Elizabethan drama. The concomitant neglect of Machiavelli's real doctrines in that age has been equally stressed, so that Tillyard can say—amazingly but almost, it seems, with relief—that "his basic doctrines lie outside the main sixteenth century interests" (p. 21). More recently, as in J. G. A. Pocock's formidable The Machiavellian Moment, it has been demonstrated that Machiavelli's influence, though profound, was basically republican; and hence argued, more questionably, that he could not greatly influence English political thought of that age with its doubly sanctified monarchy.¹²

With Shakespeare in particular, some late nineteenth-century critics work their way round to tracing Machiavellism in the History Plays. Georg Brandes comments on Hal's infamous soliloquy "I know you all . . ." (1 H IV I.ii. 190-212):

The son is not so unlike the father as the father believes. Shakespeare has made him, in his way, adopt a scarcely less diplomatic policy.¹³

And Swinburne, in a remarkable evocation of Machiavelli's milieu, writes:

Henry V is the first, as he is certainly the noblest, of those equally daring and calculating statesmanwarriors whose two most terrible, most perfect, and most famous types are Louis XI and Caesar Borgia.¹⁴

But later critics have not followed this lead. Wyndham Lewis's subtle but eccentric study argues for Shakespeare's uncommon understanding of Machiavelli but no special sympathy or assimilation, rather a contrast in temperament.¹⁵ The New Arden 1 Henry IV, and more recently the Oxford Shakespeare edition, make almost casual references to Machiavelli, uneasily coupled in the latter with writers on "courtesy" like Castiglione and Spenser.¹⁶ Wilbur Sanders offers an acute exposition of Machiavellism in Elizabethan drama but sees Shakespeare as essentially anti-Machiavellian, and moreover confines himself to Richard III and Richard II¹⁷ John Danby indeed places Hal as a "Machiavel of goodness,"¹⁸ and A. D. Nuttall as a "White Machiavel"¹⁹but they do not really explore the implications of their phrases.

It is worth investigating whether Shakespeare's English kings evince a more serious and sustained Machiavellism. It is often hard to distinguish between conscious adherence to Machiavelli and a mere course of conduct to which his tenets are applicable. That is the whole point of Machiavelli's empirical approach: he was describing and systematizing timeless patterns of political conduct. But this also means that the distinction is irrelevant: Shakespeare is working within the same context of political awareness. And the parallels are so recurrent and often so close that it does seem to argue for conscious Machiavellism.

In Richard II, the confrontation between Richard and Bolingbroke is most readily interpreted in Machiavellian terms. Richard is a clear example of Machiavelli's warning model, the hereditary prince who fails to see how times are changing, or more generally the ruler who will not adapt to changing fortunes (Discourses III.ix, The Prince xxiv, xxv):

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord; . . .

(III.ii.54-57)

Further,

having never in quiet times considered that things might change . . . when adverse times came, they only thought of fleeing, instead of defending themselves; . . .

(Pr. xxiv: p.90)

The Prince, ch. xxiv, on "Why the Princes of Italy Have Lost Their States," is of special relevance: such princes are deficient in military power, and have antagonized both the nobles and the commons. It is so with Richard:

The commons hath he pill'd with grievous taxes,
And quite lost their hearts. The nobles hath he fin'd
For ancient quarrels and quite lost their hearts.

(II.i.246-48)

Richard may be called a classic example of Machiavelli's "contemptible" or "despicable" monarch, who is "thought changeable, frivolous, effeminate, timid, and irresolute" (Pr. xix: p.67):

The skipping King, he ambled up and down,
With shallow jesters, and rash bavin wits,
Soon kindled and soon burnt, carded his state,
Mingled his royalty with cap'ring fools . . .

(1 H IV III.ii..60-63)

More specifically relevant is Discourses III.vi. A prince, Machiavelli says there, can inflict three types of wrong on an individual: to his person, his honour and his possessions; and the last is what most alienates the prince from his subjects (cf. Dis. III.xix, xxiii). Richard taxes his kingdom heavily (R II I.iv.43-52, II.i.246); and further, confiscates the property Bolingbroke was due to inherit from Gaunt, after having wronged both Henry's person and his honour by exiling him.

Henry, on the other hand, has the advantage of his situation:

For a new prince is much more observed in his actions than a hereditary one, and when these are recognized as virtuous, he wins over men more and they are more bound to him than if he were of the ancient blood. For men are much more taken by present than by past things . . .

(Pr. xxiv: p. 89)

He consolidates this advantage by many Machiavellian strategies: for instance, by assiduously courting the commons (as enjoined in Pr. ix, xix: pp. 35-38, 67-69) both before his assumption of power (R II I..iv.23-36) and after (V.ii. 18-21). As Westmoreland recalls in 2 Henry IV:

For all the country, in a general voice,
Cried hate upon him [Richard]; and all their prayers and love
Were set on Hereford, whom they doted on,
And bless'd, and grac'd, indeed more than the King.

(2 H IV IV.i. 136-39)

Henry also wins followers like Aumerle (R II V.iii) and Carlisle (R II V.vi) by the Machiavellian strategy (Pr. ix: p.37) of treating well those who expect ill-treatment: "To win thy after-love I pardon thee" (V.iii.34). Yet his general severity towards rebels (V.vi. 1-18) bears out Machiavelli's precept (Pr. xvii) that "cruelty" is imperative for a new prince, and in time of rebellion.

Discourses III.iv is headed with the precept "A Prince Cannot Live Securely in a State So Long as Those Live Whom He Has Deprived of It." Bolingbroke obviously agrees: he makes known his wish for Richard's liquidation, though later he disowns those who carry out that wish (II.vi.38-40). Cesare Borgia acted in this way with his cruel minister Ramiro d'Oro (Pr. vii). It was a basic Machiavellian precept that the prince should perform gracious and popular deeds himself, but leave the dirty work to others. Bolingbroke uses Northumberland all through in this way.²⁰

Broadly speaking, says Machiavelli, a prince should combine the qualities of the cruel emperor Severus and the benign and philosophical Marcus Aurelius: ".. . he must take from Severus those things that are necessary to found his state, and from Marcus those that are useful and glorious for conserving a state that is already established and secure" (Pr. xix: pp. 76-77). It is easily seen how the successive conduct of Bolingbroke in Richard II and Henry IV in Henry IV conforms to this dual precept.

I shall have more to say later on the benign and philosophical aspect of Henry's later rule. Perhaps his heightened image of benevolence in Henry IV is at some cost to his valourousness. It certainly accompanies a general depression, a fragmentation of the polity in spirit though not in fact, an obsessive concern on the King's own part with his usurped title. His Machiavellian career generates its own profound sense of inadequacy and frustration. In James Winny's memorable phrase, "He dies broken by his achievement."²¹

We may take this as a critique of Machiavellism. There is an element of truth in Lily Campbell's somewhat single-track view of Henry IV as a "mirror" of rebellion.²² Even in his own eyes, Henry remains a rebel to the end, and this self-castigation compromises his status as a "Machiavellian" king, whose role as innovator makes him almost essentially a rebel or usurper.

But the focus of attention has now passed to Henry's son, in whom we see the perfection of the creative Machiavellism initiated by his father in his earlier years. There are many versions of conventional Machiavellism in Henry IV, most clearly in the deception with which Prince John quells the rebel leaders (2 H IV IV. ii). Machiavelli has parallels to offer: Cesare Borgia's extermination of his enemies at Sinigalia (Pr. vii: p.26, and the "Description of the Methods Adopted by the Duke Valentino When Murdering Vitellozzo Vitelli, etc."²³) or Oliverotto da Fermo's trapping of the Fermanese leaders (Pr. viii: pp.32-34). We may contrast Henry V's equally ruthless quelling of Lord Scroop's rebellion (H V II.ii). Henry's rhetoric is just as disingenuous, we may say Machiavellian:

Touching our person seek we no revenge;
But we our kingdom's safety must so tender,
Whose ruin you have sought, that to her laws
We do deliver you.

(H V II.ii. 174-77)

But his manner is completely assured: there is no deception, only an effortless exercise in detection and punishment.

In Henry IV, Hal's own strategy as prince is Machiavellian in spirit—fundamentally in being a strategy, as defined from the outset in his soliloquy "I know you all.. .." His very vow of reform is phrased to sound like a deception:

By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes; . . .
I'll so offend, to make offence a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

(1 H IV I.ii.205-06, 211-12)

This speech is taken to indicate an inhumane, even unethical stance on Hal's part, shattering his apparent embracement of personal freedom and private relations which seems so clearly anti-Machiavellian, a protest against the depressing demands of political conduct. I shall presently argue that this expression of private and popular values constitutes an extended Machiavellism. For now let me note Hal's conscious assumption of a princely role even at this stage, so that his very transgressions contribute to a political strategy and political image. This is confirmed by his words in later life, in a line that has strangely escaped notice: the Dauphin, he says in Henry V, taunts him for his "wilder days," "Not measuring what use we made of them" (H V Lii.267-68).

Hal's goal and strategy are distinctively Machiavellian. As Quentin Skinner points out,²⁴ Machiavelli differs from all earlier theorists in dismissing the importance of training or education in the making of an effective ruler. Hal's Machiavellism in this instance needs no labouring: I shall discuss its implications later. But his plan for a final spectacular reform accords with another of Machiavelli's precepts. Machiavelli does grant that "there is no better indication of a man's character than the company which he keeps"; but an even better way to win renown is "by some extraordinary act," "some . . . novel act that would cause them to be talked about" (Dis. III.xxxiv: p. 510).

For nothing so certainly secures to a prince the public esteem as some such remarkable action or saying dictated by his regard for the public good, showing him to be magnanimous, liberal and just, and which action or saying is of a nature to become familiar as a proverb amongst his subjects (Ibid, pp. 511-12),

This is precisely the tactical purpose behind the rejection of Falstaff. It is foreshadowed in the impact that Hal's sober resolution makes on his father before Shrewsbury (1 H IV III.ii. 129-61) and subsequently on the warring camps at large (I H IV V.i.83-103, V.iv.1-73).

The prince who seals his succession by such an act proves to enjoy all the supports that Machiavelli can propose for princely rule: hereditary claim as well as the backing of the clergy, nobles, commons and army (see the early chapters of The Prince). He is careful to appear to have five crucial attributes: of being "merciful, faithful, humane, sincere, religious" (Pr. xviii: p.65). He "endeavour(s) in every action to obtain fame for being great and excellent" (Pr. xxi: p. 82). He placates the nobles, but realizes that the esteem of the people is more important (Pr. xix, Dis. I.xvi, xxxii).

This is best brought out in Henry's relation with his soldiers in Henry V. Indeed, the social basis and recruiting methods of the English army enable him to resolve the Machiavellian opposition of "the people" and "the army." Henry's soldiers are "the people," and he is leading them against a foreign power instead of using them to tyrannize over the commons at home. He alludes specifically to that English institution, the yeomanry supplying the infantry at the time of war:

And you, good yeomen,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; . . .

(H V III.i.25-27)

As J. G. A. Pocock remarks, the status of the yeoman (classically contrasted with that of the French peasant) seems "as if made for" a Machiavellian context²⁵; and the Machiavellian Bacon makes much of it, both in his Essays and in his History of Henry VII.²⁶

Above all, Henry V is Machiavellian in his role as general. As Skinner notes,²⁷ a basic distinction between Renaissance Italian and North European political thought lies in the former's stress on military strategy and the prince's own prowess in war. Machiavelli is specially forceful on this point (see Pr. xiv, xxvi; Dis. I. xxi, II.xvi, indeed Bks. II and III passim; and of course The Art of War), Henry leads his soldiers in person like a good Machiavellian warrior-statesman (Pr. xii, Dis. III.x), and his troops are native subjects, not mercenaries (Pr. xii, Dis. II.x; p. 308). In his French campaign he clearly has to rely on his infantry, which Machiavelli favours over cavalry, citing instances (to which we may add Agincourt) of small armies, chiefly on foot, having routed large mounted forces (Dis. II.xviii, xix). The Dauphin's boasts about his horse (H V III.vii.11-67) take on special point in this light.

Henry's conduct before Agincourt is, in fact, notably like Camillus' when facing the far bigger Tuscan army, as recounted by Machiavelli:

.. . he showed himself to his army, and, going through the camp, he spoke personally to the men here and there; and then, without making any change in the disposition of his forces, he said, "Let every man do what he has learned, and is accustomed to do."

(Dis. III.xxxi: pp. 503-4)

Some chapters earlier (Dis. III..xxii: pp.480-81), Machiavelli had particularly advocated "affability, humanity, and benevolence" in a monarch or prince's treatment of his army: republican armies require stricter and more impersonal handling.

Henry also conforms to Machiavelli's advice (Dis. II..xxvi) of restraint and courtesy towards the enemy (the boasts and taunts of the French again providing a contrast):

.. . we give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language; for when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.

(H V III. vi. 112-18)

Bardolph, it will be recalled, was hanged for pilfering enemy property (H V III.vi.40-57, 103-10). This agrees with the other part of Machiavelli's advice in Discourses III.xxii:

His strict observance of the laws will insure him obedience and the reputation of being virtuous; and his affability, humanity, and benevolence... will make him beloved (p. 481).

The strategic purpose behind such benignity emerges from the contrast with Henry's threat to the people of Harfleur:

.. . in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls;
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confus'd
Do break the clouds . . .

(H V III.iii.33-40)

A subdued nation calls for gentler handling, for as Machiavelli says, "Wise Princes and Republics Should Content Themselves with Victory" (Dis. II.xxvii, title). Henry trains himself to do so, especially as he has followed Machiavelli's Roman example of a quick campaign (Dis. II.vi), following which the enemy would quickly come to terms "to save his country from being devastated" (p. 299).

In Henry V it is not so much devastation by the English as the general decay accompanying the war:

And as our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges,
Defective in their natures, grow to wildness,
Even so our houses and ourselves and children
Have lost, or do not learn for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country,
But grow like savages . . .

(V.ii.54-59)

Whence it happens that the greater kingdom makes terms with the smaller and intrinsically feebler, indicating the latter's political power, as Machiavelli instances (Dis. II.xxx: p. 384). Interestingly, he cites a parallel from his own times, where France had to pay tribute to England because the French king had enfeebled his own subjects by oppression (p. 385), so that

when the English attacked France in the year 1513, the whole country trembled, and the King, as well as everybody else, was of the opinion that the loss of a single battle would deprive him of his state, (p. 387)

This occurred, of course, in Henry VIII's reign. Of the more extensive parallels with Henry VII's, I shall speak later.

We may also recall Machiavelli's mock of the Gauls (i.e., the French, as he explains in Dis. III.xliii: p. 532) as "at the beginning of a combat as more than men, and afterwards as less than women" (Dis. xxxvi: title). There are other stray echoes of Machiavelli in Henry V. The art of war is a major concern not only of Henry himself but of his followers. Fluellen's interest in the "Roman disciplines" and "aunchiant wars" is apparently shared by Captain Jamy (see III.ii, IV.i.). We may even wonder whether Fluellen's comparison of the rivers in Monmouth and Macedon owes something to Machiavelli's remark about the topographical resemblances between various lands, so that "from a knowledge of the country in one province one can easily arrive at a knowledge of others" (Pr. xiv: p. 54).

More centrally, Fluellen and his peers discuss the crucial Machiavellian factor of Fortune in human affairs (HV III.vi.25-39). Interestingly, Fortune is never invoked by the King himself; but in Henry IV there are references to an analogous "Fate" of "Necessity" against which the elder Henry has to profess true Machiavellian virtù:

Are these things then necessities?
Then let us meet them like necessities; . . .

(2 H IV III.i.92-93)

Henry V sees in hostile circumstance both an unbendable frame of action and an opportunity to combat it by one's humanity:

If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.

(H V IV.iii.20-22)

As commonly in such speeches, we cannot distinguish rhetoric from sincerity; but the rhetorical urge itself argues Henry's desire to "covet honour," to carry his men with him and triumph.

I have cited enough parallels of varying importance between Machiavelli and the History Plays. Many of the resemblances are not conclusive; but, as I said earlier, they affirm Shakespeare's general familiarity with the new politics, whose most influential founder and spokesman was Machiavelli. Bolingbroke and Henry V could have been conceived only by a dramatist participating in such assumptions of political conduct and political success.

Awareness of the new politics and new image of the prince is also borne out by at least one treatise written shortly after Shakespeare. Bacon's History of Henry VII (1621), anticipated or echoed in his Essays, is closely based on Machiavelli and often repeats the latter's very phrases. Bacon's realistic picture differs at many points from Shakespeare's ideal monarch: Henry VII is said to have evoked much reverence, a "good measure" of fear, but very little love.²⁸ Yet the affinities between the two figures are striking, usually relating to Machiavellian points of strategy or policy.

In a general way, says Bacon, the King

was grown to such a height of reputation for cunning and policy, that every accident and event that went well was laid and imputed to his foresight, as if he had set it before (p. 156).

This appears from his success in quelling rebellions with singularly little bloodshed (p.239): "His pardons went ever both before and after his sword." His method, first with the rebellion of Lovell and the Staffords and later in the Perkin Warbeck affair, was to issue a general pardon and then, having thus isolated the leaders, to crush them ruthlessly—just as Prince John does in 2 Henry IV IV.ii. Henry VII's "secret spials" to discover "practices and conspiracies" (pp. 241-42) recall Henry V's handling of the Scroop plot. And Henry VII too usually led his troops in person, being "first or second in all his warlike exploits." (p. 89).

Above all, though Henry VII fought no major war, "he knew the way to peace was not to seem to be desirous to avoid wars"; and further, "his arms, either in foreign or civil wars, were never infortunate" (p. 238). The target of his foreign wars and missions was of course France. In a speech to Parliament²⁹ in 1491, he delivered a harangue against France alluding to Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt (pp. 118ff.).

Needless to say, hostilities with France continued in Henry VIII's reign, frequently to English advantage. (Machiavelli notes this, as we have seen.) The persistence of anti-French sentiments, especially after the loss of Calais in Mary's reign, is a fact of English social history. Its vehemence in Elizabethan times appears from the widespread resistance to Elizabeth's proposed marriage with the Duke of Alençon. Shakespeare exploits a basic premise of Tudor sentiment to uphold his presentation of the New Monarch.

In this presentation, the purely Machiavellian elements are combined with others from the varied political traditions of the time. As Skinner points out, North European political thought operated on a more idealized plane than the Italian, with more emphasis on the ethics of political conduct, at times in direct reaction to Machiavelli; but gradually, raisons d'état came to prevail. This is precisely the adjustment that we find in the Henriad. The theme of "honour" prominent in the plays echoes the treatment in, say, Erasmus' The Education of a Christian Prince: "True honour is that which follows on virtue and right action of its own will."³⁰ This can be matched from the more idealistic of Italian political discourses. Here, for instance, is Castiglione:

So upon the earth a much more liker image of God are those good Princes that love and worship him, and show unto the people the clear light of his justice, accompanied with a shadow of the heavenly reason and understanding.³¹

Significantly, Castiglione's philosophic basis is Plato's metaphysical idealism rather than the customary Aristotelian materialism as reflected in the Politics and Ethics. Castiglione's rhetoric can be matched from Henry V:

Consideration like an angel came,
And whipp'd th' offending Adam out of him,
Leaving his body as a Paradise,
T'envelop and contain celestial spirits.

(I.i.28-31)

But the speech is framed in irony: two churchmen, alarmed at Henry's designs on the wealth of the Church, wish to divert his energies towards a war with France.

Erasmus makes much of the Christ-like nature of the ideal prince. This is in line with a new clemency and ethical concern that not only form part of the professions of the mature Henry IV but correspond to something genuine in his final sober and self-questioning phase. He adopts a policy of pardon in handling rebellions (1 H IV V.i, 2 H IV IV i.142 ff.): the older rebel leaders have to conceal his clemency from Hotspur to serve their own politic ends (1 H IV V.ii.). An exchange between a rebel and a loyal lord in 2 Henry IV significantly inverts the Machiavellian tenets of "love" and "fear," seen as the ruler's possible response to his subjects:

Mowbray: But he hath forc'd us to compel this offer,
And it proceeds from policy, not love.
Westmoreland: Mowbray, you overween to take it so.
This offer comes from mercy, not from
fear; . . .

(IV.i.147-50)

We cannot tell who is right.

In Henry V, any reversal of the Machiavellian balance is clearly strategic, as in Henry's preference for "lenity" over "cruelty," cited above (III.vi. 116-18), or the Earl of Cambridge's praise:

Never was monarch better fear'd and lov'd
Than is your majesty: . . .

(II.ii.25-26)

Cambridge is plotting against the King even as he says these words. But in Henry IV it is hard to be sure. The King's offer to the rebels in Part I sounds like common political rhetoric:

We love our people well, even those we love
That are misled upon your cousin's part...
... But if he will not yield,
Rebuke and dread correction wait on us,
And they shall do their office.

(I H IV V.i 104-5, 110-12)

But his earlier words to Worcester betray the sincere regret of a troubled old man weary for peace:

You have deceiv'd our trust,
And made us doff our easy robes of peace
To crush our old limbs in ungentle steel:
This is not well, my lord, this is not well.
What say you to it? Will you again unknit
This churlish knot of all-abhorred war,
And move in that obedient orb again
Where you did give a fair and natural light.. .

(V.i.11-18)

As we saw before, Henry IV offers both a study and an insidious critique of Machiavellism.

Both Henry IV and Henry V show a new concern and responsibility of office. It is present even in the latter's Prince Hal days:

O majesty!
When thou dost pinch thy bearer, thou dost sit
Like a rich armour worn in heat of day,
That scald'st with safety.

(2 H IV IV.v.27-30)

The most striking evidence of this concern lies in Henry IV s sense of the burdens of kingship, the unease afflicting the head that wears a crown (2 H IV III.i.4-31). Here, interestingly, Shakespeare for once reflects the idealized vein of Erasmus and echoes his words and images: the good prince "is ever on the watch so that everyone else may sleep deeply."³² Prince Hal too echoes the sentiment in the speech just quoted:

O polish'd perturbation! golden care!
That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide
To many a watchful night!

(2 H IV IV.v.22-24)

Such passages convey an entirely un-Machiavellian sense of the sacrifice involved in high office. The idea is extended in Henry V's reflections on his responsibility for his soldiers' fate:

We must bear all. O hard condition!
Twin-born with greatness . . .
What infinite heart's ease
Must kings neglect that private men enjoy!

(H V IV.i.239-43)

This should be read in the light of a Tudor law whereby a subject assisting the King with men or arms was absolved of all responsibility for the justness of the cause, as he was merely obeying his King. As Bacon remarks,³³ it was a law more admirable in ethics than in jurisprudence; but its immediate end, of course, was a practical one, to induce a readier offer of men and arms. Henry's burden of responsibility is indeed "twin-born" with warlike ambition.

A similar ambiguity invests Henry IV s repeated desire to lead a crusade. By Henry's own deathbed admission, this is a politic ploy:³⁴ Machiavelli would have approved, for he has much to say about the use of religious faith to political ends. (Discourses I.xii, II.ii, III.i are most important in this regard.) To prevent betrayal by his new supporters, says Henry:

I cut them off, and had a purpose now
To lead out many to the Holy Land,
Lest rest and lying still might make them look
Too near unto my state. Therefore, my Harry,
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels . . .

(2 H IV IV.v.209-14)

Thus, Ferdinand of Aragon, according to Machiavelli:

. . . to be able to undertake greater enterprises, and always under the pretext of religion, . . . had recourse to a pious cruelty, driving out the Moors from his kingdom and despoiling them.

(Pr. xxi: p. 82)

Yet as Alexander Leggati observes,³⁵ Henry's cynical professions do not quite meet the case. His vow to go on a Crusade is first made at the end of Richard II:

I'll make a voyage to the Holy Land,
To wash this blood off from my guilty hand.

(R II V.vi.49-50)

This is indeed part of his suspect rhetoric to disown the murder he has instigated; but the context generates a more sincere sense of guilt. So too at the end, as invoked at the moment of death (2 H IV IV.v.230-40), the desire acquires a sincerity and poignancy it did not possess even twenty lines earlier in the account to Hal quoted above.

The lasting impact of Henry IV's resolution was, of course, politic. Bacon reports how Charles VII of France, announcing his intention to go on a Crusade, cited Henry's precedent.³⁶ In Shakespeare too, the "higher" ideals of both Henry IV and Henry V are asserted in a context of practical strategy and sordid political realities. This might make for ethical ambiguity, but emphatically not for divided purpose or intent: even Henry IV's world-weariness does not stand in the way of his political ends.

Indeed, by a basic paradox of contemporary political thought, a spiritual—hierarchic frame of values provided the best rationale for absolute rule. As J. G. A. Pocock explains:

In what may be termed the imperialist vision of history, political society was envisaged as the existence among men of the hierarchical order existing in heaven and in nature; its legitimation and its organizing categories were alike timeless, and change could exist in it only as degeneration or recovery. Affiliation with the empire, then, like affiliation with monarchy generally, was affiliation with the timeless.³⁷

The republican ideal, on the other hand, was set in time; it "accepted the fact of the republic's mortality," and its hero was the unsuccessful rebel Brutus. A hero-king, general and absolutist like Henry V also admits the mortality of his own life and rule:

O, be sick, great greatness,
And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!
Think'st thou the fiery fever will go out
With titles blown from adulation?

(H V IV.i.257-60)

But this admission is, as it were, proof of his spiritual Tightness and conformity with the universal order. It is quite opposite in purport to Richard II's rhetoric on the "antic" Death (R II III.ii. 144-77), whose defeatist self-indulgence reveals Richard's unfitness to rule.

Henry V is sober enough in his sense of his own feebleness and mortality. He lives with these realities, and (as James Winny argues persuasively in The Player King) the History Plays are at one level a sustained pageant of "men grappling with an identity bigger than their own,"³⁸ the role of "king" imposed on the capacities of the "man." But whereas Richard II falls abject victim to the anomaly, and Henry IV succumbs privately to frustration and melancholy, in Henry V it remains a general and, as it were, philosophic premiss that, far from curbing his ambition, seems to lend it an extra cachet of sober self-awareness.

As for Henry V's explicit religiosity, we may agree with Kristian Smidt that it is "a political, not a personal, phenomenon."³⁹ In his most agonized stirrings, he betrays a strange redaction of piety and penitence in a singular bargain with God:

Not to-day, O Lord!
O not to-day, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown!
I Richard's body have interred new . . .
Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay,
Who twice a day their wither'd hands hold up
Toward heaven, to pardon blood; and I have built
Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests
Sing still for Richard's soul.

(H V IV.i.298-308)

The spiritual nullity of such expiation is obvious even to himself:

.. . all I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.

(IV.i.309-11)

The "ideal" and spiritual dimension of his rule is supremely a political concern and political strategy, confirming his power by the strongest divine and hierarchic criteria. It makes good his weakness of hereditary title, providing a new Machiavellian basis for personal power and popular support.

Now, the ultimate orientation of Machiavellian thought is republican, however it might incorporate the concept of the New Monarch. Such a monarch may exploit the concepts of tradition and hierarchy to his own ends, but he has to justify his rule in a nontraditional and non-hierarchical context. Barring such simple throw-backs (in both conceptual and chronological terms) as Marlowe's Tamburlaine, the New Monarch of Renaissance history and drama is asserting a model of individual power, and exceptional ability to justify that power, in a world which has admitted new ideas of a contrary bent. Even a figure like Tamburlaine illustrates the paradox by virtue of his shepherd origin.

Quentin Skinner describes how the figure of the vir virtutis passes from a republican embodiment in the fifteenth century to an authoritarian one in the sixteenth.⁴⁰ By this time too, a new philosophy of sovereignty and the divine right of kings was evolving in France and would pass to England. James I's explicit insistence on his divine right was perhaps a reactionary and counterproductive stance; but Elizabeth invested herself with a singular self-generated mystique, an utterly novel and expertly manipulated image of power.⁴¹

Such absolutism is not a survival from mediaeval models. It exceeds them in its totality and intensity; and whatever philosophical trappings it may assume, it is conceptually much more precarious, relying on the ruler's charisma—deepening into myth in extreme cases—and his control of events. The cultivation of this image of monarchy provides a special version of the Renaissance process of "self-fashioning" that has captured our attention since Greenblatt's influential work.⁴² In Hal/Henry V, however, right from the soliloquy "I know you all . . . ," the aim seems less a discovery of the intrinsic self than the projection of a public image, in a Machiavellian world where to seem is more crucial than to be.

At a different level, of course, the best way to seem something is to be it. Public triumph is possible only through the assertion of a compelling self, a true triumph of personality—achieved most dramatically, if most crudely, by Marlowe's Tamburlaine. Where Tamburlaine succeeds, Coriolanus fails. English political drama traverses an immense distance in these twenty years.

Henry V has to succeed in a Coriolanian context. He manipulates society by the power of his personality, whereas Coriolanus merely alienates himself. A major support lies in Henry's self-created mythic image of the dissolute prince reformed. Beyond this, his autocracy is tempered but also protected by the rule of law, tradition and general consensus:

This is the English, not the Turkish court;
Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds,
But Harry Harry.

(2 H IV V.ii.47-49)

Both Henry IV and Henry V—especially the former in handling his wild son—embody the classic English model of a controlled, constitutional monarchy of which the Chief Justice is a symbolic embodiment⁴³:

Happy am I, that have a man so bold
That dares do justice on my proper son;
And not less happy, having such a son
That would deliver up his greatness so
Into the hands of justice.

(2 H IV V.ii.108-12)

This, incidentally, agrees not only with orthodox "idealistic" continental thought but also with Machiavelli. At several points in the Discourses (I.xvi, xxxiv, 1 viii) Machiavelli emphasizes how a beneficent monarchy approaches republicanism by creating laws that restrain its own power.⁴⁴

This leads on to a profounder populism consolidating the image of the King in the Henriad. Here we find a remarkable contribution on Shakespeare's part, an extension and reworking of the classic Machiavellian model. This makes the Henriad, to the best of my knowledge, unique as a proposal for political innovation in dramatic form.

Machiavelli's fundamental strength is his realism, his acceptance of political life as it truly is:

.. . it appears to me more proper to go to the real truth of the matter than to its imagination; and many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live...

(Pr. xv: p. 56)

This leads him to recognize the importance, and also the ease, of pleasing the people:

.. . he who has but a few enemies can easily make sure of them without great scandal, but he who has the masses hostile to him can never make sure of them, and the more cruelty he employs the feebler will his authority become; so that his best remedy is to try and secure the goodwill of the people.

(Dis. I.xvi: p. 162. Cf. Pr. xix)

This is particularly true of the new political context created by the ever-changing reality of events, the uniqueness of each contingency, which is an obvious assumption of the Machiavellian approach:

in Roman times it was necessary to satisfy the soldiers rather than the people, . . . because the soldiers could do more than the people; now, it is more necessary for all princes, except the Turk and the Sultan, to satisfy the people than the soldiers, for the people can do more than the soldiers.

(Pr. xix: pp. 75-76)

Time and again, Machiavelli emphasizes the contingent nature of monarchy itself, however beneficial or even essential it may be at times: he even suggests that monarchic rule might be introduced in the interests of a greater republican programme (Dis. I.ix, x, xxxiv; II.ii). His younger contemporary Francesco Guicciardini reiterates this with a still greater republican bias, though concluding that princely rule tempered by law and popular control provides the best form of government.⁴⁵

In such a context, it will not be enough for a monarch to "satisfy" the people. He must understand and interact with them, enter into enlightening and strengthening contact with the humble, unmentionable elements of national life. The orthodox, restrictive, merely "majestic" ideal of kingship, confined to courtly and military routine, has limitations amply brought out by Henry IV's last melancholy phase. Prince Hal's different programme provides him with an inclusive experience of mankind.

As we have seen, traditional manuals on the education of princes had advocated an orthodox, bookish mode of social ethics, "how we ought to live," rather than "how we live." This is coupled with vehement injunctions to the prince to avoid what Erasmus calls "the sullied opinions and desires of the common folk":

. . . whence, I ask you, does the prince get the leisure time to remain secluded for whole days, to waste the greatest part of his life in playing at dice, in dancing, in hunting, in associating with utter fools, and in idle nonsense, even more frivolous than these?⁴⁶

J. H. Walter cites Erasmus' advice to justify the rejection of Falstaff.⁴⁷ But as we have seen, the Machiavellian approach dismisses such orthodox political education. Instead, Hal trains himself through engagement with the total inchoate social order that he will one day rule and be ruled by: a mobile order, which he must guide to his ends by the adaptive power of his own virtù: "He is happy whose mode of procedure accords with the needs of the times" (Pr. xxv: p. 92).

This new sense of the power of undefined social forces, more compelling than royal authority, may be called the socio-political equivalent of the philosophic recognition of a pluralité des mondes. Such recognition is not merely disintegrating: it authenticates the royal identity on a much firmer and more complexly tempered basis. The awareness of this greater, openended, immeasurable reality as the shaping factor in politics, the basing of royal and political heroism on a fundamentally unheroic sense of man—these are the crucial legacies of Machiavelli. The Henriad gives them dramatic embodiment in a new creative reworking.

Many critics have talked of the expansive quality imparted to Henry TV by the Eastcheap and Gloucester-shire scenes—in Tillyard's phrase, "the idea of picturing all England."⁴⁸ But there is more to the matter than picturesque or sentimental patriotism. The demotic scenes in Henry IV do nothing less than introduce a new popular level of social apprehension, outside the pale of formal political theory in that age, essentially subversive, yet needed to provide the ultimate justification of any system of rule.

The carnivalesque implications of Henry IV have been noted in academic criticism since C. L. Barber's study.⁴⁹ But Barber lays great emphasis on the formal order subsuming the carnival. For an awareness of the full potential of carnival, we must look to Mikhail Bakhtin:

The carnivalesque crowd in the marketplace or in the streets is not merely a crowd. It is the people as a whole, but organized in their own way, the way of the people. It is outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socio-economic and political organization, which is suspended for the time of the festivity.⁵⁰

With Falstaff as with Gargantua and Pantagruel, we can see the people's spirit expressed in carnival through the "language of the marketplace," the "grotesque image of the body," and references to the "material bodily lower stratum" (Bakhtin's chapter-headings). Bakhtin sees in the entire Renaissance a unique "concept of frankness":

The culture of folk humour that had been shaped during many centuries and that had defended the people's creativity in non-official forms, in verbal expression or spectacle, could now rise to the high level of literature and ideology and fertilize it.⁵¹

In the last chapter of Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin cites specific instances of Rabelais's carnivalesque commentary on the politics of the time. Rabelais, claims Bakhtin, embraced "the new principle to which the immediate historic future belonged, the principle of the national state"; but

although he spoke seriously of such things, he knew the limits of this seriousness. Rabelais's own last word is the gay, free, absolutely sober word of the people, which cannot be bribed with the help of the limited progressiveness accessible to the men of his time.⁵²

I would like to place Shakespeare within the same design, challenging orthodox class-based political thought—to which even Machiavelli is clearly confined—with wider populist criteria of judgment. But he expands Machiavellism to meet the challenge: in place of the sceptical, anarchic utopia with which Bakhtin credits Rabelais,⁵³ we have a reaffirmation of monarchy in terms of a broader, utterly unassailable reality.

The deepest insight into this process seems to come from outside the political and academic pale of western Europe. "In Henry IV," writes Jan Kott:

two notions of England are continuously set in contrast to each other. . . . The young prince [becomes] a wise and brave king. [But] it appears that the company of Falstaff and cutpurses is a far better school for royalty than the feudal slaughter.⁵⁴

In other words, we are witnessing the paradox of a monarchy validated in proletarian terms, a conflation of two contrasting levels of being. The isolating, elitizing tendency implicit in a monarchy is thus countered by assimilating it with a popular carnivalesque (alternatively, mythopoeic) level of apprehension—as it was in many ways in Tudor myths and spectacles.⁵⁵

Yet of course this is the ultimate Machiavellian ploy, the New Monarch's most skilful extraction of popular assent to his rule: "I'll so offend, to make offence a skill." Hence, although the validation is chiefly effected through Hal's association with Falstaff, it is sealed by an astute and well-timed overthrow: the rejection of Falstaff adds a new dimension to the myth of Hal as King. When all is said and done, the popular element is assimilated not in the anachronistic terms of Marxist dialectic but in those of the new politics of the "Machiavellian moment."

In Henry IV, says Greenblatt:

the founding of the modern state, like the selffashioning of the modern prince, is shown to be based upon acts of calculation, intimidation, and deceit. And these acts are performed in an entertainment for which audiences, the subjects of this very state, pay money and applaud.⁵⁶

We need not resort to metadrama to study the process. Hal has confirmed his right to rule by proletarian contact; now he can and must break off such contact—to satisfy public expectation and complete the pattern of a popular royal myth.

Falstaff's equivocal class identity marks him out for his role. He is a knight, but a markedly déclassé knight: more than sufficiently so to lead the prince down the uncharted paths of low life, yet far enough removed from the proletariat for the multitude to watch his fall with unvexed gratification. His rejection is approved of by people of all orders, Fluellen (H V IV.vii.48-55) as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury (I.i.26-69), but much more sincerely by the former. Even Falstaff s associates, who ascribe his death to a broken heart, see it as the concomitant of a perfectly admissible exercise of power:

The king is a good king: but it must be as it may; he passes some humours and careers.

(H V II.i. 125-26)

On Henry's side, his experience of Eastcheap gives him the confidence to move incognito among his soldiers on the night before Agincourt and even seal a challenge with one of them. As Gary Taylor notes,⁵⁷ he does not indeed seek them out, and always maintains his distance, even when he later makes good the challenge in his proper identity (IV. viii.24-63). But he can speak to the soldiers in their own language; and, what is more important, he can confront his subjects' image of himself. Enlightened Renaissance princes were enjoined to look into such a "mirror."

I have more to say about the rejection scene; but this calls for another approach. The king's popularity in Henry V is accompanied by resentment and doubt in the soldiers' minds:

Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it . . .

(IV.i.146-48)

They also mistrust his word that he will not be ransomed:

Ay, he said so, to make us fight cheerfully; but when our throats are cut, he may be ransomed, and we ne'er the wiser.

(IV.i. 199-201)

With this goes a revelation that can spell the death of royal authority:

I think the king is but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me; the element shows to him as it doth to me; all his senses have but human conditions: his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man; . . .

(IV.i.101-6)

The crucial point is that the last admission is made by the king himself. It is the climax of a motif running through the Henriad. In a passage from Henry IV (II.ii.1-18) which Auerbach chose as his point of entry into Shakespearean drama,⁵⁸ Hal had confessed to an unprincely love of small beer. This wry modesty is later turned to good use in setting up a new line of rapport with his subjects: the king's mere humanity provides an extra mandate for his rule. J. G. A. Pocock again explains the rationale:

The way is now open to say that because the king shares imperfection of intellect with his subjects, he should take counsel of their laws and customs and of themselves in occasional and regular assemblies; but that because authority is, under God, his alone, he can never be obliged to take counsel of law or parliament and does so only because prudence enjoins it.⁵⁹

The populism of both Bolingbroke and Hal/Henry V now appears in a clearer light. Their new sobriety and responsibility is not born simply of conventional royal duty, but from a new republican consciousness. Falstaff s great role in Henry IV—his "educative" role vis-à-vis Hal—had been to provide an alternative order of values and experiences: anti-rule, anti-virtù, but expressing certain crucial energies of the human state. The play is structured around the dialectic of Falstaff and the king, the tavern and the court; and our divided response is owing to the opposite human realities they represent, reflected in the conflict of "man" and "king" in Hal's progress to kingship. But in terms of political strategy there is no opposition: rather a convergence of two lines of engagement, popular and magisterial sentiment interfused to uphold the prevailing political system, here a monarchy. This is essentially the compound of Machiavelli's Prince.

The puzzle of the rejection scene reflects the same predicament. Initially, it appears as a disquieting ethical choice, and has been so presented by critics from Bradley down to Danby, Nuttall and Greenblatt.⁶⁰ Was Hal right or wrong to reject Falstaff? Was the price in human terms balanced by the political advantage? Which party has a better call on our sympathy? But finally, the insolubility of the puzzle brings us round to a sense of its irrelevance, and this provokes a deeper dissatisfaction. The situation is replete with ethical implications, yet it bypasses the question of ethics. The rejection is politically imperative; viewed functionally rather than morally, it is right. Yet our sense of its Tightness is nagged by values that should logically find no entry here. We are caught between two categories of judgment which should be kept apart but cannot. At a simpler level, Tamburlaine poses the same challenge.

In his path-breaking article on "The Originality of Machiavelli," Isaiah Berlin suggests that what has challenged and infuriated Machiavelli's readers down the centuries is his sense of the irrelevance of moral or ethical social life:

. . . an insoluble dilemma . . . his de facto recognition that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other, that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration, and that not merely in exceptional circumstances, . . . but (this was surely new) as part of the normal human situation.⁶¹

But this binary view emerges, at it were, between Machiavelli's lines. His tone is amoral, detached, clinical, though impregnated with a hint of conscious paradox and iconoclasm, a quizzical awareness of the "shocking" ethical impact of his observations.⁶²

In Shakespeare's Henriad we find a truly full and balanced presentation of the paradox, without foregrounding either component: a triumphant new princely ideal, integral and consistent within itself, tempered by the full complex reality of life, yet curiously vulnerable to assault from external or irrelevant factors and partial realities considered in their own terms. Figures like Bolingbroke or Henry V acquire a kind of elevation by virtue of their political achievement, an immunity from common human judgment; yet clearly they cannot be immune. Shakespeare appropriates and extends the Machiavellian view of man; but the Henriad is perhaps the most stringently self-defining, self-assessing testament of the "Machiavellian moment."

Notes

All Shakespeare references are to the New Arden editions of the plays. All references to Machiavelli's Prince and Discourses are to the translations by L. Ricci (Rev. E. R. P. Vincent) and C. E. Detmold, respectively, in the 1-Vol. Modern Library edition (New York, 1950).

¹Henry V, ed. J. H. Walter (London, 1954, rpt., 1970), pp. xii-xiv.

² William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817; rpt., Oxford, 1952), pp. 166-77; A. C. Bradley, "The Rejection of Falstaff," Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909; rpt., London, 1965); John Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (London, 1948, rpt., 1975), pp. 81-101; A.D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis (London, 1983), pp. 153-61; Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford, 1988), pp. 40-65; Kristian Smidt, Unconformities in Shakespeare's History Plays (London, 1982), pp. 134-44.

³ For an efficient account of the controversy, see Dennis H. Burden, "Shakespeare's History Plays: 1952-1983," Shakespeare Survey 38 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 14-15.

⁴ G. R. Elton, "Renaissance Monarchy?," Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1974), p. 40. The article first appeared in 1953.

⁵ Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860 et seq.), trans. S. G. C. Middlemore: see Part I ("The State as a Work of Art") and Part II ("The Development of the Individual"), chs. 1-3.

⁶ See E. W. Ives, "Shakespeare and History," Shakespeare Survey 38, pp. 19-25.

⁷ See E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London, 1944, rpt., 1956), p. 237.

⁸ See Tillyard pp. 56-57; Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's "Histories" (3rd edn., 1947, rpt., 1977), p. 256.

⁹ See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978, rpt., 1979), Vol. 1, pp. 128 ff., 180 ff. cf. J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1928, rpt, 1964), pp. 493-95.

¹⁰ The Elizabethan response to Machiavelli has been treated at length by Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London, 1964); but balanced summaries can be found in Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge, 1968, rpt., 1980), pp. 61-63, and Anne Barton, "Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare's Coriolanus," Shakespeare Survey 38, p. 122.

¹¹ See note 10.

¹² J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), ch. x.

¹³ Georg Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study (1895-96; Eng. trans. 1898): quoted in the New Variorum 1 Henry IV, ed. S. B. Hemingway (Philadelphia, 1936), p. 49.

¹⁴ A.C. Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (1880): quoted ibid., p. 461.

¹⁵ Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox (London, 1927, rpt., 1955), pp. 161 ff., 177 ff.

¹⁶1 Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London, 1960, rpt., 1968), p. lii; ed. David Bevington (Oxford, 1987), p. 45.

¹⁷ Sanders, chs. 4-6, 8-9.

¹⁸ Danby, pp. 89-90.

¹⁹ Nuttall, p. 147.

²⁰ See Sanders, pp. 170-71.

²¹ James Winny, The Player King (London, 1968), p. 104.

²² Campbell, ch. XIV.

²³ See W. K. Marriott's translation appended to the Everyman's Library edition of The Prince (London, 1908, rpt, 1931).

²⁴ Skinner, Vol. 1, p. 122.

²⁵ Pocock, p. 357.

²⁶ Bacon, "Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates," Essays, ed. E. A. Abbott (London, 1882), Vol. 1, pp. 105-6, 11.114-40; History of Henry VII in Bacon's Works, eds. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath (London, 1857-59), Vol. VI, p. 95.

²⁷ Skinner, Vol. 1, pp. 130, 172 ff, 244 ff.

²⁸ Bacon, Works, Vol. 6; p. 243. All later page refs. to this edition and volume.

²⁹ Actually, it was probably to a "Great Council": see Spedding's note, Works, Vol. VI, p. 117.

³⁰ Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. L.K. Born (New York, 1936, rpt, 1964), p. 148.

³¹ Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir T. Hoby (1561: Everyman's Library, London, 1928, rpt., 1974), pp. 276-77. Spelling modernized.

³² Erasmus, p. 162; cf. p. 184.

³³History of Henry VII: Works, Vol. VI, pp. 159-60.

³⁴ Contrast Mowbray's genuine old-world crusading zeal as recalled by Carlisle in R II, IV.i.92-100.

³⁵ Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Political Drama (London, 1988), p. 83.

³⁶History of Henry VII: Works, Vol. VI, p. 107.

³⁷ Pocock, p. 53.

³⁸ Winny, pp. 46-47.

³⁹ See Smidt, pp. 137-40; New Arden, 1 Henry IV, p. li.

⁴⁰ Skinner, Vol. 1, ch. 5.

⁴¹ The best account of this is still to be found in Frances A. Yates, Astraea (1975, rpt., Harmondsworth, 1977), Part II: "The Tudor Imperial Reform."

⁴²Renaissance Self Fashioning (Chicago, 1980) practically ignores the History Plays. The omission has been made good in Shakespearean Negotiations.

⁴³ See Norman Sanders, "The True Prince and the False Thief," Shakespeare Survey 30 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 31-32; Leggatt, p. 107.

⁴⁴ I may refer here to Anne Barton's fine account of Machiavellian republicanism as reflected in Coriolanus: see note 10 above.

⁴⁵ See Guicciardini's Considerations on Machiavelli's "Discourses," I.ii, ix, lviii: trans. in Guicciardini's Selected Writings, ed. & trans. C. & M. Grayson (London, 1965).

⁴⁶ Erasmus, pp. 150, 184. Cf. also p. 52.

⁴⁷ New Arden Henry V, p. xxv. Tillyard (pp. 277 ff.) more curiously cites manuals on courtesy and princely education to justify Hal's association with Falstaff.

⁴⁸ Tillyard, p. 299. Cf. Tillyard, p. 304; 1 Henry IV, Oxford Shakespeare edn., pp. 59-64.

⁴⁹ C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959).

⁵⁰ Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (1968, rpt, Bloomington, 1984), p. 255.

⁵¹Ibid, p. 72.

⁵²Ibid, pp. 452, 453-54.

⁵³ See, e.g., ibid., pp. 448, 454.

⁵⁴ Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. B. Taborski (2nd edn., London, 1967, rpt., 1978), p. 42.

⁵⁵ See Yates, Astraea (as in note 41 above); E. C. Wilson, England's Eliza (1939; rpt., London, 1966); Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Medieval into Renaissance (Ipswich, 1977), ch. vi; Jean Wilson (ed.), Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Woodbridge, 1980).

⁵⁶ Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 52-53.

⁵⁷Henry V, Oxford Shakespeare edn. (1984), pp. 42-46.

⁵⁸ Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton, 1953, rpt., 1973), ch. 13.

⁵⁹ Pocock, p. 353.

⁶⁰ Bradley, Oxford Lectures, p. 255; Danby, pp. 91, 99-100; Nuttall, p. 155; Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 56-64.

⁶¹ Isaiah Berlin, "The Originality of Machiavelli," Against the Current (1979, rpt., Oxford 1981), pp. 74-75.

⁶² Sanders (p. 64) sees this feature as indicating "Machiavelli's own final failure to exclude the moral order." To me it suggests a deliberate teasing undercurrent of allusion to that order.