SOURCE: "Shakespeare: Liberty and Idol Ceremony," in Civil Idolatry: Desacralizing and Monarchy in Spencer, Shakespeare, and Milton, Associated University Presses, 1992, pp. 124-63.

[In the following excerpt, Hardin studies the thematic links between ceremony and proper rulership in the Henriad.]

Apologia

Arguing that in Shakespeare scholarship "the ideas of the time have become a club with which to clobber the character," Richard Levin has offered a worthy refutation of many thematic "readings" of the plays. His case against academic nonsense can make anyone think twice before producing an interpretation of a play that depends on historical and intellectual backgrounds. Such readings, says Levin, "are all based upon the contention that the real meaning of the plays is wholly or largely determined by some component of the extradramatic background and can only be apprehended in relation to it." A good example is the old argument that King Lear commits a grievous sin against the Tudor concept of order in abdicating (once a king always a king). As Levin points out, this concept was by no means universally assumed, Charles V being a notable example of honorable abdication. Moreover, the horror of abdication is nowhere expressed in the play by the many characters who witness and comment upon Lear's giving up the throne.¹

Two tests of thematic criticism are suggested here. One, related to studies of the "world picture," asks whether the idea being treated is truly widely held during the period in question. Another asks if the theme receives significant attention from characters and plot. Many thematic readings fail the first test rather badly. A collection of opinions from clergymen or government time-servers will be produced to make an apparently resounding case that Elizabethans believed, say, that meat was good for the liver; yet a collection just as large can be made for the opposite opinion. Did Elizabethans believe in ghosts—or, more to the point of my inquiry, did they believe in the divine right of kings or in the monarch's absolute power or in the rights of subjects to redress acts of tyranny? A wide range of contemporary opinions exists on these issues.

Theme need not be a play's raison d'etre, but in Julius Caesar and perhaps Richard II politics serve more than the nominal heroes to unify the whole.² When Wilbur Sanders says that "Shakespeare has pondered the unproductive violence of political controversy in his age and has seen through it to the deeper issue it evades,"³ he means that for Shakespeare ideas, both false (the controversy) and true (the deeper issue) had consequences. It follows that the critic's task is in part to uncover that "horizon of already granted meanings and intentions"⁴ lying behind the play—always acknowledging that the discovery of meaning and the act of evaluation are two different critical procedures. This horizon is not propounded, it is already there; but it may seem quite foreign to a later audience. One domain of what is sometimes disparagingly called thematic criticism, then, is simply understanding the concepts in the characters' dianoia, regardless of whether they are imputed to the author. Recent attention to the theatricality of life in Shakespeare, whereby kings are actors, actors are kings (Calderwood, Goldberg, Greenblatt, and others) opens up new ways to think about the plays. But in Shakespeare's political plays the theater is a model for human life, vehicle not tenor. The dianoia of these plays offers not imitations of ideas but true ideas. If thematic criticism sometimes makes Shakespeare sound like a political commentator, it is because he was that, among other things. He comments, through dramatic incarnation, on monarchs pretending to divinity, avaricious noblemen, hypocritical old statesmen, stupid commoners, and on all the theories that each party constructs to justify its claim to exclusivity in the power struggle. These criticisms, for the most part denials, recur so often in Shakespeare's plays, and with less regularity in those of his contemporaries, that they must be attributed to Shakespeare's mind. This mind is often ironic, iconoclastic, as Sanders says, "agnostic" (p. 158). It is a useful thing, no doubt, to analyze Shakespeare's games and plots; but it is at least as worthwhile to sort out the icons and opinions that give rise to his denials.

In fact even the most committed antithematist cannot talk for long about the plays without introducing a theme. An approach that anticipates Levin's in many ways is that of S. C. Sen Gupta in his excellent book on the histories. "If, however, the plays are considered as plays," he writes, "it will appear very doubtful whether Shakespeare was primarily interested in propagating any particular political or moral idea." Yet he performs a number of historically based thematic readings, such as: "by making Richard [II] personally responsible for his disasters, Shakespeare seems to stress his independence of the medieval idea of tragedy, and show in the true Renaissance spirit that man is the architect of his fate and not a victim of the blind goddess of Fortune."⁵

Levin would agree with Sen Gupta that Shakespeare "was not a writer of homilies or of political history" (p. 28), as would any reasonable person. To pursue relentlessly the implications of the homilies against rebellion could end in the view that not only Julius Caesar and Henry IV but Dogberry and Elbow are the unimpeachable heroes of their plays, since all power, even a constable's, is from God. Yet against the wisdom of Ulysses on order and degree there is also that of "a dog's obeyed in office." What is there in the horizon of these two plays at their moment in history that makes the words of Ulysses or Lear exactly right? Or, to return to my own topic, why, on the night before the Battle of Agincourt, does Henry render his memorable soliloquy on kingship and ceremony? Henry V's soliloquy is the climax of the king-and-commoner dialectic of the Henriad—as Norman Rabkin says, "in some respects . . . the thematic climax of the entire tetralogy."⁶ This speech bears directly on this chapter, but adequate interpretation requires searching the horizons of the speech. These contain the whole play Henry V and the history plays leading up to it, especially Richard II, the one that most strikingly sets forth the issues of the soliloquy. Not to be excluded is Julius Caesar, a play written within a few months of Henry V, one that also contends with sovereignty and ceremony. Comparing Henry V with Caesar, John Anson says that the English ruler knows his greatness to be "an essentially social and ritualistic persona behind which there stands another private, corporeal being."⁷ The art of kingship lies in distinguishing between the king's two persons and in achieving, as Anson says, "a position from which he can oversee" both selves, private and public. Henry accomplishes this end, as Caesar does not, by liberating himself and his society from bondage to idol (therefore idle) ceremony.

Richard II

The idea of "the king's two bodies" can become one of those clubs to beat characters with that Levin so rightly complains of. As was said in the introduction, it is not supported by Richard II, and if it implies divine-right sovereignty of the sort that James I supposed, it scarcely conforms to monarchy as practiced in sixteenth-century England. As for that period's own perspective, writes Graham Holderness, Shakespeare "would have known the Middle Ages not as a period dominated by order, legitimacy and the undisputed sovereignty of a monarch sanctioned by Divine Right, but as a turbulent period dominated by a great and fundamental conflict, fought out again and again and rarely suppressed, between the power of the Crown, and the power of the feudal barons."⁸ Writing on this topic, an eminent English jurist has firmly, if unsubtly, called Richard II "a study in misgovernment, due to an over-exalted conception of the royal office by Richard, and an arbitrary disregard for the rights of subjects. The moral of it is as plain in the tragedy as in history. High-handed conduct, based on a conception of royal responsibility to God alone, is alien to the traditions of the English constitution."⁹ Only add that the play is a tragedy, not just a political drama, because the "misgovernment" occurs within the person as well as the realm of Richard. This double focus, inherited from morality-play conventions of the proud soul as world-king, results in a more human king, not a more godlike one. Colet or Erasmus would say, a more human king and therefore a more Godlike one—hence the parallels with Christ's passion that seem so baffling at the end of the play.

The first act of Richard II belies the smooth administration of ideal monarchical justice conducted in Spenser's Mercilla episode. Duessa's trial runs on a clear division of labor, with the knight-heroes and the court in pursuit of a just verdict, and the queen in her mercy-giving capacity somewhat aloof from the proceedings. Richard, however, is hopelessly entangled in the Mowbray-Bolingbroke dispute. Family ties blur the division between peerage and royalty, the accusations reflecting gravely on the honor of both estates. Holderness accurately observes that monarchy has simply failed to balance the power between itself and aristocracy (p. 51). In the speech beginning "Mowbray, impartial are our eyes and ears" (I.1.115), Richard tries to defend himself from suspicion of partiality; but his final sentencing of the combatants satisfies no one, least of all the audience, in its apparent inequity and bias. Richard will later exemplify the defects of divine-right political thought, but the first act indicates the equal perils of mixed monarchy in which the aristocracy shares power with the king. The difference between Richard's throne room and Mercilla's is that between historical and philosophical truth.

The atmosphere of this play breathes mistrust. The formality at Coventry implies not some golden age of well-ordered monarchy, but a guarded, apprehensive condition not unlike the fear that greets Henry V on first entering his throne room (2H4, V.2), fear that he must labor to dispel. At Coventry, in his increasing self-centeredness, Richard violates two principles sacred to the nobility: ceremony and time. The theme of time in the play is broached in the king's very first lines to "Old John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster." By the fifth act, Richard realizes his sins against time: "1 wasted time, and now doth time waste me" (V.5.49). Moving toward this realization, Richard hears York warn of his offense against aristocracy when the old duke says that to deprive Bolingbroke of his inheritance is to "take from Time / His charters and his customaryrights" (II. 1.195). Bolingbroke's refusal to throw down his gage lest he become "crestfallen" (I..1.188) puns on the fear that his name will fall to oblivion if he does not defend the honor of his ancient family. Manipulating time in the sentences and commutations, Richard behaves as if he transcends time like a god.

Richard is often identified with the ceremonies of monarchy, but he reserves ceremony for himself alone. His unthinking self-worship, like Lucifera's mirrorgazing, culminates in his self-identification as God's own child.¹⁰ Later he breaks this illusion of pomp in shattering his mirror. His most serious violations of form, of course, are legal: the farming of the realm and the expropriation of Gaunt's estate. But he shows heedlessness for form in the lists when he shatters the rites of combat. The structure of the scene highlights its ceremoniousness. First comes the marshal's questioning the pair (a "mere formality," as we would say, since audience and characters alike know the points at issue). There is a taboo in the warning that no one may touch the lists, followed by a leave-taking, the herald's challenges, and a trumpet call. At this moment Richard violates the sense of flow and inevitability by throwing down his ceremonial baton. Despite its deadly implications, the ritual until now has conveyed a certain confidence that things will be settled. Richard's gesture unnerves and exasperates everyone. From the participants' viewpoint, royal arrogance has usurped the sacred life-and-death rites of the aristocracy.

If there is no clear delineation of authority in this aristocratic monarchy, there is also no clear answer to the question who brings the king to justice when he commits acts of tyranny like those envisioned in Act II. Clearly the aristocracy cannot. Just before the great deposition scene of Richard II the assembled nobles burst into a series of charges and counter-charges. To Bagot's claim that Aumerle collaborated in Gloucester's murder, the latter convincingly asserts his innocence (IV. 1.20). No sooner has he spoken than Fitzwater throws down his guantlet in equally convincing testimony, saying Aumerle had admitted killing Gloucester, even bragged of it. Percy and another lord step in to take Fitzwater's side, whereupon the Duke of Surrey accuses Fitzwater of lying about Aumerle. Some hope of unscrambling this maze of accusations lies in Mowbray's expected return following the repeal of his exile, until we hear that Mowbray has died. No one can discern the truth. These events thrust us back to the opening scene of the play, when Bolingbroke and Mowbray contended over the same crime. Not only does the play never tell who killed Gloucester, but it leaves unresolved the quarrels over his murder, whether between Bolingbroke and Mowbray or among the assembly in Act IV. When Henry suspends the angry lords' challenges "under gage," he in effect does what Richard might have done to him and Mowbray in Act I, scene 1. For the same reason? Should Richard have done so? We do not know why either king acted as he did; we never know the truth behind the accusations.

When this scene is played—and it is often omitted in productions—the quarreling lords in Act IV must be acted as if each believes unreservedly in his own honesty, for such is the quality of their language in these impassioned denials and countercharges. The same is true of the Bolingbroke-Mowbray dispute: the audience must be utterly perplexed as to who is telling the truth. Their oaths are both sacred and serious. Bolingbroke swears by heaven,

for what I speak
My body shall make good upon this earth
Or my divine soul answer it in heaven.

(I.1.36-38)

as readily as Mowbray, who in the lists against Bolingbroke aims

by the grace of God and this mine arm,
To prove him, in defending of myself,
A traitor to my God, my king, and me;
And as I truly fight, defend me heaven!

(I.3.21-24)

Such is the confusing stuff of Richard II's world, which like that of other political tragedies by Shakespeare lacks any confirming center. This is the opacity of true history: contradictions, deceptions, rumors, without the certainty that any doubts can ever be cleared up. Parents betray children; religion is at best ineffective, more often a pretext for policy; dishonor, injustice, and fear are the real ruling powers. It is as if God had abandoned the body politic to the insatiable appetites of the powerful, as if the play began and ended in the middle of Macbeth.

In Act I, one effect of moving from the challenge to the formal ceremoniousness of the scene at the lists must be to baffle the audience with the question of Gloucester's murder, given further exposition in the intervening scene between Gaunt and the Duchess of Gloucester. Why, if Gaunt believes that "God's substitute," Richard, "Hath caused his death" (I.2.37) does he not follow his namesake in Woodstock and take up his dead brother's cause, vowing revenge? More to the point, why doesn't he use his knowledge to help his son's case against Mowbray? The Duchess could be right: Gaunt counsels patience when he means despair. Alternatively the truth may lie with Gaunt's self-justification, that the quarrel is God's alone: "for I may never lift an angry arm against his minister." If so, York may act from the same motive even in the end, when he races to Henry to tell him of his son's conspiracy. Surely the sycophantic behavior of York in Act V, knowing that his son has abandoned the conspiracy, yet urging Henry not to forgive him after the plot has been defused, makes self-interest a more likely motive than patriotism. The scene anticipates another betrayal of a family member to a usurper in King Lear, when Edmund says that "nature thus give way to loyalty" (III.5.2). Significantly, it is when the family of York has had its bonds of love thoroughly destroyed, and when the dignity of father, mother, and son has been irrevocably compromised by their bickering and groveling before Henry, that Henry's pardon receives the Duchess of York's thanks: "A god on earth thou art" (V.3.136). Rather than take this remark as indicating Henry's newly acquired regal dignity,¹¹ perhaps we ought to see it as the pathetic self-abasement of an old nobility that has capitulated to usurpation, creating an idol-monarch. Does any audience see the scene with York, Aumerle, and the Duchess all cringing before Henry without at least some embarrassed laughter? The scene speaks for itself: it cannot communicate anything except complete loss of face. In the light of this scene, York's early indecision looks suspiciously like a failure of courage.¹² Possibly Gaunt is cast from the same mold, so that his caution, too, is something less than wisdom.

Gaunt may seem a choric figure in the play, the confirming center that will reassure us as to the real meaning of events.¹³ The great speech on "this scept'red isle" in Act II scene I seems incontrovertible evidence of Gaunt's prophetic role. Yet other critics have seen this dying speech as a "vehement wish to dispossess Richard himself of his brithright," its patriotism quite aside.¹⁴ In Act I when Gaunt speaks to Gloucester's widow of Richard's complicity in murdering her husband, scholars used to see Gaunt as enunciating "official Tudor doctrine" on the sacredness of kings:

God's is the quarrel; for God's substitute,
His deputy anointed in his sight,
Hath caused his death; the which if wrongfully,
Let heaven revenge; for I may never lift
An angry arm against his minister.

(I.2.37-41)

If "God's substitute" does mean "king by divine right,"¹⁵ it does so not in the Jacobean sense, but in the general sense that legitimate power is from God. Yet religion serves politic ends admirably here, for Gaunt has done wonders with this little speech. He has guaranteed that people will know about Richard's guilt in Gloucester's murder, since Gloucester's angry widow is unlikely to keep his revelation in confidence. Appealing to heaven is also an eminently convenient way to get rid of an emotional duchess. To her anxious question, "Where then, alas, may I complain myself?" there is no safer, yet less satisfying rejoinder than, "to God, the widow's champion and defense." Gaunt will not be so quick to urge piety in the next scene, speaking to his banished son. This is not to say that Gaunt should have taken the duchess's part, only that his attitude in the scene bespeaks a cold detachment, something less than candor, and possibly an interest in using the widow's grief against the king. As for his coldness, or at least reticence, it may be relevant to add that in the entire scene Gaunt speaks sixteen lines against the duchess's fifty-eight. In summary, Gaunt's deference to "God's substitute" can be interpreted more as pretext than principle.

The world of Richard II resonates with deceiving voices; no one, not the king, not righteous old Gaunt, is above suspicion. Therefore, one cannot take the speeches of either as proof-texts of the play's advocating mystical kingship. As Levin tirelessly reminds us, no thematic statement should be viewed apart from the context of character and action, and context provides only limited help with Richard and Gaunt. At other moment in this play, however, an awareness of context will clarify the ethical direction of a scene. This is especially true of events that cast light on Bolingbroke's motives. What, for example, are we to think of Bolingbroke's assurances to York (II.3.113-36) that he has returned to England only to claim his inheritance, when he shortly lays claim to Richard's too?

An important instance of this kind is the trial of Bushy and Greene. Henry charges the two companions with having "misled a prince," having "Made a divorce betwixt his queen and him," and having "fed upon" Bolingbroke's own fortune by persuading the king to seize his estates (III. 1.7-27). The angry peer devotes by far the greatest part of his speech to injuries against himself, leaving the strong impression that he is acting as judge and jury in his own cause. In the light of his earlier claim that Bushy and Greene are "caterpillars of the commonwealth" (II.3.166), it is surprising that he says nothing here about their supposed corruption in public office. As to the first charge, nowhere does the play support the view that Bushy and Greene have mastery over the king—in this respect the contrast with Woodstock could not be greater. Bolingbroke's factor Northumberland first plants this rumor in the play ("The king is not himself, but basely led / By flatterers" II. 1.241). Richard makes his fatal decisions in Act I all on his own (e.g., the "farming" of the realm, which is wholly his idea, presented to Greene at I.4.42); his independence, indeed, is essential to his tragedy.

Bolingbroke's second accusation regarding the "divorce" carries a veiled reference to the homosexual reputation of Richard II as developed in Woodstock and the chronicles; but these implications are not in Shakespeare's play. If anything, Shakespeare's king resembles not the clothes-horse of Woodstock but the Richard of Drayton's Heroical Epistles, where his love for Isabel raises him to heroic stature. In fact the entirety of Act II, scene 2, in which Greene, Bagot, and Bushy console the queen, suggests amiable relations between the favorites and her.¹⁶ Clearly Bolingbroke has exploited Rumor, "the common liar," who will ever be in attendance once he has taken the throne.

A seemingly straightforward scene is that in which Richard utters his famous "doctrine" of divine right; but the irony here (III .2) is indicated in the immediate entry of Salisbury with news of the Welsh defection. Thus dispirited, Richard acts out a passage from the Vindiciae contra tyrannos: "Let the people forsake their king, he presently falls to the ground, although before, his hearing and sight seemed most excellent, and that he was strong and in the best disposition that might be; yea, that he seemed to triumph in all magnificence, yet in an instante he will become most vile and contempible" (p. 126). Here Shakeapeare probably meant Richard to sink down, for a few moments later when he says, "For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings" (lines 155-56), Richard is almost certainly sitting. This emblematic use of gesture occurs frequently in the play, as in the king's descent from the battlements to meet Bolingbroke. It was very likely a gesture inherited from the mystery plays centuries earlier, when Herod held his stage tantrum on hearing the Magi had escaped, or when he was taken by death. The same enacting of a king's "fall" occurs in The Spanish Tragedy when the Viceroy of Portugal hears of his overthrow (I.3.10), and of course at the end of Richard III

Richard II resembles Hamlet in its world of seeming and deception. Yet the protagonist is less equipped than Hamlet to discriminate false from true, especially as regards the "flatterers" that people his own mind. This world, where words and symbols cannot be taken at face value, has with good reason prompted interpretation of Richard II as a play about language and symbol.¹⁷ Richard's tragedy is that he allows himself to be deluded, hence ultimately usurped, by his confidence in the lifeless symbol. What gives life to the symbol of the crown, what gives it sacredness, is the king's living up to his role. Failing that, it does no good for king or critic to invoke "the sacred, animistic bond between king and land—the corpus mysticum which includes and transcends both political kingdom and physical earth."¹⁸ In Coursen's words, Richard fails as keeper of the holy metaphor. The bond, rendered lifeless, becomes an empty "idol," as Henry V will say in the very act of bringing the symbol of the crown back to life.

There remains the argument that Richard, for all his failures and crimes, represented the order that in Shakespeare's time "was in fact humanity's only right condition."¹⁹ Yet it is crucial to see that order was not an end in itself. One effect of king-worship is to take both freedom and responsibility from the subject. In Eramus and Spenser the order of monarchy is an instrument of peace, and peace in turn of the personal liberty that would give each soul the fullest possible scope for working out its salvation. The tragedies of disorder in Shakespeare similarly move us not because they violate some aesthetic or mystical status quo, but because the liberties of good, happy people have been cut off by malice or misfortune. Hamlet forced into the path of violence; Ophelia, Brutus's Portia, and Lucrece²⁰ driven to suicide; Othello constrained by a different but no less devastating injustice—all exemplify the pathos of the subverted will. Cosmic or social disorder may be the setting of tragedy, but the tragic event is personal. Audiences feel pity for Lear in the storm, not on account of the storm itself. M. M. Reese writes that "divine right is only a slightly elaborate way of stating the general conviction that the gods do act through man, and that the consequences are tragic when we try to resist their will" (p. 113). Rather, it would seem, the tragic consequences are set in motion when human lives are invaded by Satanic malevolence, or fortune, or perhaps even Providence (Macduff s children must die so that James VI may ascend the throne). Moreover, does God act through men, and how do we know when he is doing so? Divine intervention enters the plays not as assumed but as the subject of a question.

What distinguishes the history plays from the tragedies, says Nevo, is that in the former "the protagonists are exhibited as struggling for freedom to initiate events" (p. 60). Richard is a tragic hero in that he is sufficiently human to make the wrong choices; but in the early acts of the play he also makes the choice of wrong. At least for a time he takes on the role of Spenser's Grantorto. His haughtiness toward the dying Gaunt is offensive, but much more destructive of Richard's "reputation" in the play is his unreflecting, casual seizure of other people's land and wealth to make war in Ireland. What stands unforgivable to Elizabethan frugality is that the seizure is necessitated by "riot," courtly extravagance. Yet, damning as it is, Richard's venality at least remains open for all to see. Bolingbroke, the inscrutable usurper who so manipulates his public image, opens the floodgates of civil war while pretending to save his country. His pious claims of loyalty on returning from exile do not fool Richard and serve only to confirm his hypocrisy. Only after Richard has lost his kingship and liberty does he become the hero of a history play, "struggling for the freedom to initiate events." The weariness with patience that overtakes him in the last act leads to his one freely willed moment during the entire play, in the sense that it emerges from the wisdom of self-knowledge. Even in the deposition his vacillating blunts the impact of a potentially grand exit.

"Ceremony" is both the veil that conceals Richard from himself and the cloak that Henry IV will use to hide his guilt. Although Shakespeare may not have known the theological terms, he depicts the effects of confusing dulia (the honor due to authority) and latria (divine worship, which Richard thinks he shares). Nevo writes that in the first scenes of the tetralogy, "Feudal rituals mask the ulterior potential realities of collusion and guilt" (p. 62). Maynard Mack, Jr., detects impatience with the "cloying ceremony" of court in the early scenes of the play.²¹ Whereas E. M. W. Tillyard had found in "the ritual or ceremonial element" of Richard II evidence that Shakespeare was consciously depicting the golden age of the old medieval order, most of the more recent critics of the play seem to agree that, far from glorifying Richard, the ceremonies of anointed kingship keep him fettered in illusion, not yet a free man.²² At the center of the play is what Norman Rabkin calls "Richard's tragic confusion of ceremony with reality."²³ During the great speech when Richard at last recognizes his humanity, he finally sees "Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty" (III.2.173) as worthless if unreciprocated. In the same passage, "pomp" becomes an object of amusement for antic death; and later Richard will think of his wife, once "set forth in pomp" from France, now cast into widowhood and obscurity (V.1.78).

Ceremony is not redeemed until the last play of the cycle that Richard begins, when the monarch's humanity, his dependence on his fellow men as on God, is firmly established on the field at Agincourt. This does not imply a flawless unity in the entire tetralogy: the characters, especially Prince Hal, seem to shift a good deal over time.²⁴ Yet the four plays have a continuous vision of history, sustained by a mature, creative intelligence. Like the proud soul of the morality plays, monarchy must be purged of idolatry, an evil spirit haunting European courts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. W. Gordon Zeeveld has said of Richard II that "the enormity of his offense to Shakespeare's audience lies in his presumption to sanctity, the character no English king had been allowed."²⁵ Richard pays for these pretensions, of course; Henry IV cannot even think of making them. Henry V, remarkably, manages to expiate both his father's sin of regicide and the blasphemy of Richard's presuming to a divine role.

Henry V and the Critics

"Without humanism, in short, there could have been no Elizabethan literature: without Erasmus, no Shakespeare."²⁶ Thus Emrys Jones, in a book that faults earlier literary historians, particularly C.S. Lewis, for their neglect of Erasmus in assessing the intellectual backgrounds of English Renaissance literature. The criticism is accurate, though Shakespeare studies have been paying more attention to the subject. Shakespeare's first-hand knowledge of Erasmus is certain, and unquestionably both authors shared a similar vision of human folly and a scorn for the doctrinaire.²⁷ A source in The Praise of Folly for one of Falstaff s speechs²⁸ shows Erasmus contributing to the formation of the character. The Fallstaff-Hal relationship also echoes the warning against parasites in The Education of a Christian Prince. ("The prince will therefore always be on the lookout to keep the proportion of idlers down to a minimum among his courtiers, and either to force them to be busy or else banish them from the country.")²⁹ The "player king" motif in Shakespeare may well originate in one of the Adagia?³⁰ Erasmus's hatred of war, his ideas on the humanity of kings and their responsibility to their subjects also lie nearer the histories than does the once-assumed "Tudor doctrine" of God-like kingship. This correspondence has led several scholars to examine the Erasmian influence in Henry V, particularly J. H. Walter, whose Arden edition lists impressive parallel passages in Shakespeare's play and the Education.³¹ Andrew Gurr has recently explored the similarities between Erasmus's and Shakespeare's emblem of the bees' commonwealth in these two works.³² This is not to make Shakespeare Erasmus's mouthpiece, but the humanist's influence, often unnoticed in older scholarship, may provide an opening in the critical morass surrounding the play and its hero, since the tacit assumption in some "divine monarch" readings of the plays is that it never would have occurred to anyone in Shakespeare's century to say that kings were not absolute vicars of God.

The critics' attack on Henry V as hero begins with Hazlitt's politically charged essay in Characters of Shakespeare 's Plays?³³ Through the years a number of anti-Henricians have similarly acted from their politics or moral convictions. "Purely subjective notions paralyze their judgments," complains one scholar, "and they write as pacifists, republicans, anti-clericals, little Englanders, moralists, even arbiters of etiquette, until one is astounded at the prejudice Henry has managed to arouse."³⁴ Those who make reasoned attempts to deal with the play fall into several groups. Traditionalists take the playwright as endorsing both Henry and the politics of power (e.g., E. E. Stoll, John Dover Wilson); another group sees the play as a disguised satire on the politics of war, with Henry as an archhypocrite (Gerald Gould, Harold Goddard). The latter school typifies what Richard Levin calls the "two-play" or "two-audience" approach with one Henry V for the thick-brained jingoist, another for the sophisticated.³⁵ Shaw and Mark Van Doren speak for a small party that reduces the play to an artless propaganda piece. Many recent critics (and they have my vote) see Henry as in the Kenneth Branagh film: an admirable character in a deplorable political situation (Stribrny, Reese, Jorgensen, Calderwood, Thayer).³⁶

A special case is the dialectical interpretation. The title of Norman Rabkin's "Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V" reflects the author's view that Shakespeare had an "intransigently multivalent perception of reality," and really wants us to buy neither a duck nor a rabbit. This interpretation raises the artist above the issues, agreeing with the ambient preference for negative capability, the sense of paradox, tension, or ambivalence. Yet Rabkin's summary of both pro- and anti-Henrician viewpoints, merely confirms the likelihood of the first. Is it really possible, for instance, that Pistol's sullen exit in Act V is supposed to evoke pathos "for the reality of the postwar world" of jobless soldiers turning to crime, of disappointed dreams of glory?³⁷ Related to this is Eric LaGuardia's subtle argument that, although the tetralogy traces the decline of symbolic order as language turns from poetry to policy, "we are not asked to judge whether that decline is pure gain or pure loss. It would seem wiser to think of them [the plays] as dramatizing man's continuous participation in both the mythical and historical."³⁸ Yet audiences are constantly being "asked to judge" in the political plays, this being one of their characteristics as a literary kind. "We may claim," LaGuardia writes, "that the plays dramatize the emergence of a culture purged of the nonhistorical formalism of Christian chivalry into a brighter world where the autonomous reality of nature is recognized," which means, I think, that Richard's and Hotspur's destructive egoism gives way to a recognition that time and community are real. This is unquestioned. Yet can we face the other way too? "Or, we may claim that they dramatize the tragic death of the sacramental view of nature, together with its kindred poetic sensibility, and the rise of a new order of anarchy, libertinism, and political opportunism" (pp. 70-71). The "sacramental view," by definition entailing a whole community, lies in the renewal of society that will occur in Henry V. As for libertinism and opportunism, these faults seem more chargeable to Richard than to Henry.

In any attempt to understand play and protagonist, the reading of Act IV, scene 1, especially the king's one soliloquy in the play, must be crucial. Yet Henry's speech on kingship and ceremony is often neglected or brushed aside. A 1979 article declares, "With the exception of his brief and relatively uninformative soliloquy the night before Agincourt, we have no access to the private man, and his public rhetoric is inevitably ambituous."³⁹ Reese (p. 331) scarcely notices the speech in discussing the play, even though it could be used to bolster his case that majesty depends on a partnership between king and subject. Two studies have interpreted the speech as central to the play, but with opposite conclusions as to its meaning. These two arguments both demonstrate, incidentally, two of the pitfalls that Levin mentions in historical interpretation. Gordon Ross Smith has bolstered the Gould-Goddard view with a wide array of Elizabethan writings that condemn ceremony as the last refuge of scoundrels.⁴⁰ Yet anyone who has read much on this subject knows that there are impressive authorities to uphold almost any point of view. Moreover, it seems fairly clear that Henry is himself questioning ceremony in his speech, not using it as pretext, and that the action of the whole play moves toward abandoning it as well. On the other hand, W. Gordon Zeeveld's lengthy and informed chapter on ceremony in Shakespeare uses Elizabethan writings to support the pro-Henrician view. Zeeveld is more interested in sources than plot and character development, claiming that Henry moves toward an "acceptance of the burden of ceremony."⁴¹ Far from it, in fact; the last two acts of the tetralogy completely reverse Richard's confidence in the trappings of anointed kingship, as Henry V rectifies the earlier king's confusion of ceremony with reality.⁴²

Agincourt: Kingship without Fear

Henry's motive in going among his men before the battle is not "to survey and view the warders," as was reported in Holinshed, nor is it to lift his men's spirits, as the Chorus says, for he is in disguise. His words to the troops are scarcely encouraging:

WILLIAMS. Under what captain serve you?
KING. Under Sir Thomas Erpingham.
WILLIAMS. A good old commander and a most kind gentleman.
I pray you, what thinks he of our estate?
KING. Even as men wrecked upon a sand, that look to be washed off the next tide.

(IV.I.90-95)

The most likely reason for this incognito excursion and the bleak comments is that Henry is testing his men's conviction to determine whether panic might undermine his generalship in the morning's action. He discovers fear, and at the root of his men's fear, their sense of powerlessness under the king. They have no voice in a war that may cost them their lives. As Williams says, a commoner's distrust of his king's actions is "a perilous shot out of an elder-gun. . . . You may as well go about to turn the sun to ice with fanning in his face with a peacock's feather." Williams sums up the principal arguments against war in the age, often echoing Erasmus's ideas in the Education and elsewhere.⁴³ The dialogue opens a profound examination of the nature of kingship, of the condition of men under kings.

Agincourt was an excellent proving ground for theories of monarchy because monarchy exists in its purest form in war. Sir Thomas Smith described the battlefield as the one place where the prince has truly absolute power: "This absolute power is called marciali lawe, and ever was and necessarilie must be used in all campes and hostes of men . . . that with more awe the souldier might be kept in more straight obedience, without which never captarne can doe anie thing vaileable in the warres."⁴⁴ Smith's nearest disciple in the play is Fluellen, spokesman for "the ceremonies of the wars, and the cares of it, and the forms of it, and the sobriety of it, and the modesty of it" (IV.1.70-74). But Smith's "awe," like Fluellen's ceremoniousness, if imposed too rigidly upon the army, could backfire, bringing about a spirit of craven servility rather than confidence in martial order. Henry himself believes in the "straight obedience" of his soldiers as poor Bardolph discovers and as the dialogue with Williams shows: a king is to his soldiers as a master to his servant. And yet he admits, in his soliloquy following this exchange, that such a strict bond creates a "hard condition" for king and people alike. The ardent monarchist Hobbes would later insist that if men are to lead tranquil, productive (therefore happy?) lives they must have one great power to keep them all in awe. The debate with Williams has made Henry discover the unsettling consequence of this opinion:

O Ceremony, show me but thy worth!
What is thy soul of adoration?
Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form,
Creating awe and fear in other men?
Wherein thou art less happy being fear'd
Than they in fearing.

(IV.1.230-35)

The metrical shortening of the last line places a heavy emphasis upon "fearing." Under a tyrannical rule men can fulfill themselves only through fearing or "awe." Ultimately the typical subject under such a ruler is the "wretched slave" envisioned in the last third of the soliloquy, who has traded his liberty for the security of fear.

The ironic note in Henry's portrayal of the wretched slave subverts arguments that this is firm "political doctrine." Oxymorons suggest both Henry's own divided mind and the individual's impossible straits in these circumstances. The hypothetical slave has "body fill'd and vacant mind"; in his peaceful sleep he is "cramm'd with distressful bread"; though he "sleeps in Elysium," he "sweats in the eye of Phoebus" (recalling Williams's image of fanning the sun with a peacock's feather); at the end of his life he goes "with profitable labor to his grave." This last phrase implies a contrast between the ongoing motive of honor in the Henriad and its base alternative, "profit" or private gain as a result of mere "labour," which leads only to oblivion.

At this moment, his meditation at its most intense, Henry is interrupted by Erpingham's summons. His dilemma—between his need for fearless soldiers and the apparent necessity that in a monarchy all men be subservient—is not yet explicitly solved. He can only pray for a resolution:

O God of battles! steel my soldiers' hearts.
Possess them not with fear. Take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if th' opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them.

(IV.i.276-79)

Henry's despondency is complicated by his sense of unworthiness before God. He has tried to make expiation for his father's crime, but recognizes that good works are vitiated by the condition of the worker:

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

(IV.1.289-92)

Resemblances to Claudius's prayer in Hamlet come to mind; but like all Adam's children, Henry has inherited the consequences, not the guilt, of his father's crime.

Any interpretation of Henry V must take into account that the prayer is in fact answered—or least that events turn out in accordance with the prayer.⁴⁵ In his next scene Henry has solved his dilemma. If servile men cannot act with courage, then the slaves must be freed:

proclaim it Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse.
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.

(IV.3.34-39)

The free soldiers are offered a choice: a secure life of "profitable labour" or fame, honor, remembrance—all the qualities that Falstaff and his tavern crowd have denied. In the flush of victory (IV.7) Fluellen will report that he has forgotten Falstaff s name. Henry's speech on fame is no reversion to the values of Hotspur, the chivalric anachronism so obsessed with honor and self-glorification. The difference is that Henry offers to distribute honor to the English at large, diffusing his kingly person throughout the body politic. In the first act the bishops, themselves acting selfishly, had urged Henry to act for the sake of personal and family honor ("Stand for your own! Unwind your bloody flag"; "Awake remembrance of these valiant dead / . . . You are their heir; you sit upon their throne" (1.2.101, 115). Henry now urges his army to act for collective honor: we shall be remembered on St. Crispían's Day:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.

(lines 60-62)

By casting off "idol ceremony" Henry has freed his men from the previous night's fear. His pun in this phrase may have been commonplace in the controversial rhetoric of Shakespeare's age, for a speech in the pre-Civil War debates attacked "idol, idle or scandlous ministers" in the Church.⁴⁶ But the pun has rich implications for the tetralogy. Richard's idleness and selfidolizing brought on England's troubles, and the "idle companions" of Prince Hal's youth seem to threaten the commonwealth. Applying the idol-idle epithet specifically to the ceremonies of coronation, Henry reflects the established thinking on these rites, for when the heir to the throne was anointed and given the scepter nothing sacramental occurred. Cranmer said that royal anointing was "but a ceremony," having "its ends and utility yet neither direct force nor necessity."⁴⁷ Edward Coke wrote that "coronation was but a royal ornament and outward solemnization of descent."⁴⁸ Even during the Civil War, both sides agreed that the king was king before his coronation.⁴⁹ Yet Shakespeare has in mind something beyond this technicality, for in existential terms even birth does not "make" a king. As Erasmus said, "for a person to be a prince it is not enought to be born, to have ancestral statutes, the sceptre and the crown. What makes a prince is a mind distinguished for its wisdom, a mind always occupied with the safety of the state, and looking to nothing but the common good."⁵⁰ Henry's soliloquy repudiates in this respect the idol-kingship of Richard, which depended on symbols to the exclusion of princely wisdom.

Fluellen gives an amusing, because distorted, reflection of such wisdom—faintly pompous and self-important, missing the sprezzatura of the real thing. He shows that formality has its uses: his attacks on the forlorn Pistol comically parody Henry's judgment of the traitors. But in the main Fluellen's eccentricity marks the limitations of ceremoniousness. When he complains that the killing of the English servant-boys is "expressly against the law of arms," he betrays a confusion of form and reality akin to Richard's. One wonders whether the very notion of "laws of war" did not appear contradictory if not quixotic to veterans of Europe's religious wars in Shakespeare's audience; it certainly would have to Erasmus. A similarly comic gravity undercuts Fluellen's strained analogy between Henry and Alexander the Great,⁵¹ as misguided as his comparison of Pistol and Mark Antony in Act III, scene 6. Formality and sobriety, the qualities that Henry says separate the king from his followers, are the very attributes that determine Fluellen's comic role. His presence thus has a therapeutic purpose, to rectify these qualities through laughter.

The new fearlessness of the English allows Henry to pun on "fear" in the exchange with Mountjoy. The word-play may go unnoticed unless one recalls that in Elizabethan English the vowel in the word was still close to the sound in Middle English fer:

MOUNTJOY. And so fare the well;
Thou never shalt hear herald any more.
KING. I fear thou wilt once more come again for ransom.

(IV.3.126)

Spenser puns on the same word when Una approaches the disguised Archimago "with faire fearefull humblesse" (1.3.26). Shakespeare continues this word-play in the two following scenes, first when Pistol captures the French soldier Monsieur le Fer, "Master Fer" (or "master Fear" as Elizabethan audiences would have heard it). When the distraught Frenchman calls upon God, Pistol thinks the name "Signieur Dew" is meant for himself. The episode (often omitted in eighteenth-century performances, when the play seems to have been regarded as mere patriotic spectacle)⁵² joins the issue of freedom and servility in fear. The comic reversal of the gentlemen serving a clown is enhanced by the Frenchman's religious awe ("je vous supplie," "Sur mes genoux"). The next scene also evokes the theme of servility, when Bourbon tries to rally his fleeing soldiers with a contempt that sharply differs from the tone of Henry's speech to his men:

And he that will not follow Bourbon now,
Let him go hence, and with his cap in hand
Like a base pandar hold the chamber door
Whilst by a slave, no gentler than my dog,
His fairest daughter is contaminated.

(IV.5.13-17)

The Chorus had promised to show Henry "thawing cold fear" among his troops (IV. Chor. 45). By the time the battle begins, the English soldiers no longer stand as "condemned sacrifices" but free men, while the French are in the service of servile men like Pistol.

Through purging himself of the poison in kingship, the quality that sustains flattery and fear, Henry solves a problem that his father could not. Henry IV's ironic apostrophe in the soliloquy, "O, be sick great greatness, / And bid thy Ceremony give the cure!" (Part Two, IV. 1.237-38), is only a breath away from the discovery of another Shakespearean king, who in the act of baring his soul finds himself. But the anagnorisis that comes with Lear's "Take Physic, pomp!" is elemental, metaphysical. Henry's aim, to reconcile the two private and public "bodies" he must wear, typifies the social action of the political plays:

What infinite heart's-ease
Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!

And what have kings, that privates have not too
Save ceremony, save general ceremony?

(IV.1.223-25)

Unlike his son, who in 3 Henry VI asks virtually the same question and elects to behave simply as if he were a private man, Henry manages to save the appearances of royalty. Abjuring ceremony, he ushers in a new sense of responsibility in king and subjects alike.⁵³ Before this night, Henry wants to unload responsibility for his actions: on the bishops for determining the justice of the war, on the conspirators for their own death sentences, on the citizens of Harfleur for the devastation should they not capitulate. Certainly by this time if not earlier, the king understands that authority must exist independently of its symbols.

Yet the final lines of the soliloquy state a problem seemingly irrelevant to the state of things at the time:

The slave, a member of the country's peace,
Enjoys it: but in gross brain little wots
What watch the king keeps to maintain the peace,
Whose hours the peasant best advantages.

(lines 267-70)

First, the peace has not been maintained, second, the "slaves," or common soldiers, stay up and worry as much as the king. These lines, so much at variance with their context, appear to support an ironic reading of the speech. To be sure, "the slave" is not the common Englishman but the extreme case, the "wretched slave" envisioned in his earlier lines. Yet how can one explain Henry's claim to be maintaining the peace in the midst of an apparently unnecessary, even unjust war?

Since irony always depends on authorial intention, a prior question is whether Shakespeare believed, "No king of England if not king of France." The answer, as far as it can be given, seems to be yes—in 1415, that is. Henry V is not extending his empire but preventing the French king from doing so at England's expense. The first and second tetralogies are largely about the loss of French territories that, according to then-received history, especially in Hall,⁵⁴ had rightfully been England's. Elizabethans probably knew better than we the close blood ties of English and French ruling families in the early fifteenth century, the historical Constable of France, for instance, being half-brother to Henry V. The first tetralogy methodically plotted the decline of England's fortunes as parallel to the erosion of her French territories. Looking back over these early plays, Shakespeare can write in the epilogue to Henry V:

Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing
That they lost France and made his England bleed.

The last line has almost the force of cause and effect: to lose France is to bring disaster to England. This is in part because the loss of territory means the deprivation of the king's own honor, a connection implicit in the Daphin's insult of the tennis balls. Even Falstaff acknowledges the uses of honor when he tries to claim credit for killing Hotspur. In Henry's uncertain political circumstances, as Shakespeare would have read in the chronicles, losing France and royal honor could leave the way open to a resumption of the late civil wars. This must explain the reasoning behind the soliloquy: Henry watches on the battlefield to keep the peace at home. The condition is not unlike that in 1599, as Gary Taylor reminds us, when the monarch "had, for a generation, maintained the peace largely by fighting wars abroad" (p. 9).

Nothing in the character of Hal or Henry V supports the picture of Erasmus's land-grabbing warmonger kings. In fact, Shakespeare appears to have constructed the play so as to exonerate Henry from this charge, showing the Dauphin maneuvering him into mounting an offensive. No sack follows the seige of Harfleur, as in Holinshed and in Drayton's version of the story.⁵⁵ Moreover, Shakespeare shows the king leaving England with the memory of political conspiracy still fresh. The world of Acts I and II is not far from the deceit-charged atmosphere of Richard IL Yet it is too harsh to attribute Henry's motives to the politic wisdom of his father—"busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels" (2H4, IV.5.213). Rather, Henry finds himself confronted with a characteristically Shakespearean paradox. Peace can be attained only through war, or in the words of his own remark a little before the soliloquy: "There is some soul of goodness in this evil, / Would men observingly distill it out" (IV.1.4). That the English must fight abroad to keep from destroying each other at home is a pathetic fact of history. Like other important ideas in the main plot, this one is mirrored in the tavern scenes, as when Bardolph quells the fight between Nym and Pistol: "Come, shall I make you two friends? We must to France together; why the devil shall we keep knives to cut one another's throats?" (II. 1.86). The "soul of goodness" that Henry seeks is a spirit of discordia Concors governing the action of the play—first in the unification of the strife-torn English society, then in the concord of warring countries achieved in marriage.

The Growth of King Hal

Henry's uneasiness in the ceremonial role begins much earlier, even before the action of Henry V. At the instant of assuming power, the new king establishes himself as a plain man, eager to defuse the apprehensiveness, the "fear," attendant on royal solemnities.

This new and gorgeous garment, majesty,
Sits not so easy on me as you think.
Brothers, you mix your sadness with some fear:
This is the English, not the Turkish court,
Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds,
But Harry Harry.

(2H4, V.2.44-49)

The clothes metaphor, majesty as a covering for the essential humanity shared by all people, continues into Henry V. Henry tells the French ambassador, "I have laid by my majesty / And plodded like a man for working days" (1.2.227), but he will soon "dazzle all the eyes of France" with his "glory." The image returns in Exeter's message to the French king: "divest yourself, and lay apart / The borrowed glories" of Henry's rightful title (II.4.78). Going into war, Henry must "put on" majesty, even though he believes that, "His ceremonies laid by," the king is but a man (IV. 1.101). On his deathbed, Hal's father had promised, "a time is come to mock at form" (2H4, IV.4.118), but the prince will find it not so easy to rid himself of his costume.

An obstacle at first is the fearfulness of the court as noted above, a fear deriving partly from the Lord Chief Justice's earlier firmness with the wayward Hal. The new king will not retaliate because, recognizing that majesty is a "garment," he can understand the Justice's desire to protect the "royal image" (1.89). He sounds sincere when he claims that his wild affections have been buried with his father (1.123); but what remains behind—a person or only an image?

The tide of blood in me
Hath proudly flow'd in vanity till now.
Now doth it turn and ebb back to the sea,
Where it shall mingle with the state of floods
And flow henceforth in formal majesty.

(V.2.129-33)

Here surely the playwright looks toward themes and events of the next play in the series. The image suggests a tidal river like the Thames used in the familiar conceit of the microcosm. Until now Henry's blood has flowed inland. In the outgoing current the king will lose his self-centeredness entirely in the "state of floods," the open main of the nation. He makes good on this promise in the brotherhood of Agincourt and in his self-effacement after the victory. At the same time these lines hint at the cold formality of the king beset by enemies whom we see in the opening of Henry V, a play that moves us from the low ebb of Falstaff s death to the charm and warmth of the wooing scenes.

Before his triumph in France, Henry shows his cold majesty in his two encounters with the magnates of his realm—the avaricious bishops in Act 1, scene 2 and the treasonous lords in Act 2, scene 2. Both scenes are redolent with that same sense of hypocritical formality felt in the lists at Coventry in Richard II,

Opening the play with the bishops accomplishes two things. It clarifies their role in fomenting the war,⁵⁶ and appeals mightily to the audience's prejudice against the hierarchy of the old (and maybe new) church, especially when followed by the bishops' strident appeals for war. In the first tetralogy, at Henry V's funeral, Gloucester says that "had not churchmen prayed" against him, the heroic king might still be alive (1H6, 1.1.33). Later the scheming Bishop of Winchester becomes a means of Gloucester's and the kingdom's downfall (2H6, III.1). Among the antecedents of this first scene is the mystery-play tradition that portrayed as bishops the Jewish priests scheming against Christ. So they appear in the stage directions of the N-Town or Ludus Coventriae play on the council of the Jews, where mitered bishops in red (much more obviously bishops than the two in the Branagh film) are attended by clerks and doctors in furred hoods. Erasmus's Education of a Christian Prince attacks bishops and priests for being "the very firebrands of war" in his day, a frequent accusation in his and like-minded humanists' writings.⁵⁷ Tyndale laments that nowadays "bishops can only minister the temporal sword," calling for their expulsion from councils of government.⁵⁸ Drayton blames an earlier civil war in England partly on the church, while the chronicler Hall dwells on Canterbury's selfish motives in urging Henry to war.⁵⁹ Dressed, probably, in the splendid robes of a medieval archbishop, Canterbury images those "devils" that Henry later describes, who

Do botch and bungle up damnation
With patches, colors, and with forms being fetch'd
From glist'ring semblances of piety.

(H.2.115)

Some have read the archbishop's speech on the bees' commonwealth as the consensus political philosophy in Shakespeare's time; but if there were devotees of Elizabeth as the queen bee, there were also many who had encountered the republican skepticism of Cicero's De Officiis (a text much read in Elizabethan grammar schools):

Just as swarms of bees do not congregate in order to construct honeycombs, but devise honeycombs because they are by instinct swarming creatures, in the same way men apply their industry to actions and thought after they have formed communities according to an instinct much more powerful than that of bees. It is therefore clear that factual knowledge will be solitary and barren of results unless it is accompanied by the virtue that consists of protecting mankind, or, in other words, of promoting the social unity of the human race. The same condition holds true for courage. If courage does not function in a context of mutual benefit and human intercourse, it is hardly better than brutality and savagery. (1:57)

Oblivious to this higher sense of community, the beeminded hierarchy do not return to the later scenes of Henry's victory and negotiations for peace. They seem put in the play to represent a dimension of self-interested hypocrisy behind the war. Henry's barely suppressed anger at this deception is apparent in his repeatedly reminding them of their sacred trust, using formal phrases invoking the deity.

Henry's coldness returns in his sentencing of the traitors, when he adopts the tone of the heavenly judge presiding over "Another fall of man" (II.2.142). It is this kind of primness that has led people to call him an "unlikeable" hero.⁶⁰ Many resent the king's deceiving the traitors in this scene (tricking them into self-condemnation by asking their advice on leniency for a drunk who reviled the king). In effect, Henry acts in conformity with Erasmus's Christian kingliness; for if the king must rule over free subjects, then ideally even the greatest criminals would freely condemn themselves. This takes a little contriving, perhaps at the expense of verisimilitude: although in 1 Henry VI Shakespeare indicates that the Cambridge plot is grounded in legitimate grievance, here the conspirators are merely seduced by French promises.⁶¹ An uneasy ceremoniousness also creates a rather hollow feeling during the last fifty lines. Exeter arrests each traitor using the formulaic language of the law: "I arrest thee of high treason, by the name of...." Each man in turn utters his last words and awaits the inevitable sentence. To enhance the sense of awe in these fifty lines, Shakespeare has Henry use the name of God no less than seven times—probably more reminding than necessary of the sacrilege implicit in overthrowing one's government.

These first two acts disclose a court atmosphere devoid of trust and love, an extension of the "enforced ceremony" of Brutus's famous lines on friendship (JC, IV.2.21). A sign of the deceit and treachery in the first half of the play, the language of ceremony remains part of Henry's mask (as in the rather bombastic speech to the people of Harfleur) until the self-examination of Act IV. It signifies less his own than his kingdom's insecurity that an open heart and free expression are impossible for him until then.⁶²

This point can address two of the most frequent complaints about the king's character, even from some of his partisans—his coldness and, what perhaps is the same thing, his self-righteous piety. Almost everyone agrees that these qualities have disappeared by the last act, though Shakespeare may not make the change wholly convincing. The coldness in Acts I and II chiefly comes from seeing Henry in the company of enemies and those who would use him—the bishops, the traitors, and the French ambassador. To some extent, it is also owing to Henry's isolating himself in his "new garment." Except for Exeter, a councilor rather than a friend, the king is without companions or confidants; one feels this lack all the more severely because of Hal's fellowship in the earlier plays. Yet the histories, not unlike the tragedies, assert the dependence of even the greatest members of the commonwealth upon others.⁶³ Henry shows he has learned this dependency only hours before his victory, when he makes the offer to his soldiers.

Piety actually comes to Henry in this play, and it may well be that it completes a Renaissance "education of the prince." Hal learns temperance and fortitude in Part One, justice and wisdom in Part Two. In Henry V, his placing the outcome of the battle in God's hands endows him with "religion as well as the cardinal four [virtues], rounding out the five royal virtues listed by Elizabeth" in her first address to parliament.⁶⁴ This is not the uncritical piety of Henry VI, so removed from the world that he cannot discern fraudulent piety; nor is it "superstititous"⁶⁵ simply because it leads him to pray for his soldiers in battle. Yet a subtle difference exists between Henry's formal declarations early in the play—those associating himself with God⁶⁶—and his insistence after the battle that God deserves all the credit for the victory. This humility, this acknowledgment of his humanity, accounts for his self-conscious plainness wooing Katherine in the last act. What some see as the unadorned brutality of warfare could equally be the abandonment of the formalities of majesty. Now ceremony belongs to God. Henry celebrates the victory at Agincourt with almost obsessive selfeffacement:

O God, thy arm was here!
And not to us, but to thy arm alone,
Ascribe we all! . . .
. . . Take it, God,
For it is none but thine!

(IV.8.101-7)

The Chorus reports that on his return to England Henry refused to parade the symbols of victory, a last abjuring of ceremony, "giving full trophy, signal, and ostent / Quite from himself to God" (V. Chor. 21). To celebrate his victory, Henry orders not only the traditional hymn of thanksgiving, "Te Deum," but also the "Non nobis," Psalm 115 ("Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy Name give glory."). The Geneva Bible describes this psalm as "A praier of the faithful oppressed by idolatrous tyrants." A marginal gloss adds, "Seeing that nether the matter nor the forme can commend the idoles, it followeth that there is nothing why they shulde be esteemed." As in the concluding battle of Spenser's Legend of Justice, the same action resolves possibilities for both tyranny and idolatry.

Liberation

In several respects the liberation in the second tetralogy resembles that in Spenser's Book V. Both undertake first to deliver the body politic from the effects of private concupiscence, and in both a rehabilitation of honor joins with the public shaming of false knighthood. Then follows the need to deliver the state from the threat of civil discord, Duessa symbolizing the principle that is fleshed out in the rebellious Northumberland, Cambridge, Scrope, and Grey. Only in the final movement are the emphases different. Spenser shows the Christian commonwealth saved from external idolatries, Shakespeare, the self-denial that differentiates Christian king from world-king. The end of the sixteenth century brought apprehensiveness over absolutism in the state, a development that may explain Shakespeare's shift from the confident celebration of monarchy in Henry V to the troubled picture of the rise of tyranny in Julius Caesar.⁶¹ If the Roman history play was written later, it may originate in a desire to show a purer form of autocracy, one independent of Christian virtues.

Henry several times mentions the antithesis of ideal kingship: the Turkish tyranny, the nightmare of total autocracy envisioned by Spenser, Erasmus, More, and, in their peculiar handling of Herod, the mystery playwrights. "Not Amurath an Amurath suceeds, But Harry Harry" (2H4, V.2.48). Henry even anticipates a son, "half French, half English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard" (H5, V.2.202). The Turkish government proverbially stood for the difference between mixed and absolute monarchy: "Wherefore .. . if the prince of the Turkes (as it is written of him) doe repute all other his bondmen and slaves (him selfe and his sonnes onely freemen) a man may doubt whether his administration be to be accompted a common wealth or a kingdome, or rather to be reputed onely as one that hath under him an infinite number of slaves or bondmen among whom there is no right, law, nor common wealth compact, but oney the will of the Lorde and segnior."⁶⁸ Even in the conditions that most justify imposing his will on others—sedition in Act II and war in Act IV—Henry manages to keep alive the "compact" between king and subject.

Closer to events of the play, as noted in the early discussion of the French monarchomacy, the French government represented to many in Shakespeare's audience a "byword for tyranny."⁶⁹ Sir Roger Twysden observed that the French monarch "hath beene ever esteemed more absolute then the English," and Sir Thomas Smith traced the "absolute and tyrannical power and government" there to the reign of Louis XI, whose warmaking Erasmus had deplored in the Adagia.⁷⁰ Whether this was an accurate assessment or not, the French monarchy was thought a virtual tyranny, and to this belief was imputed the "base and servile behavior"⁷¹ of the French commoners. Especially in the scene in which Le Fer submits to Pistol, the play shows the playwright as susceptible to this myth as anyone else. The French nobility are every bit as devoted to honor as the English: "self-live, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting," says the Dauphin to his father (II.4.75). But obsession with honor, like its neglect, brings failure. The French nobles' self-love causes them to underestimate the enemy and, in the scene of their rout (IV.5), leads them to blame their own troops for their failure. Their arrogance has in it something of Coriolanus, with his unreflecting identification of plebians as slaves. They prove unable to lead their men back into order, even though they still have superior numbers (lines 20-22). The epic qualities of Henry V require portrayal of a worthy adversary, a requirement that Shakespeare satisfies in the French scenes. But the great flaw of the Dauphin and his nobles is their constitutional inability (in every sense of the phrase) to grant the liberties that Henry allows his own troops.

The "soul of goodness in this evil" of war emerges in the concord of the final scene. The harmony of peace—as in the mystery plays of Pharaoh and Herod, Henry's "Peace" is the first word in this scene—comes to the body politic with the successful treaty, and to the private life of the king by his successful wooing of Katherine. The cold formality of the opening acts is exchanged for the warm rituals of peacemaking and matrimony. The French queen voices hope for the harmony of opposites, "that this day / Shall change all griefs and quarrels into love" (line 20). Burgundy's long speech on "mangled peace, / Dear nurse of all the arts, plenties, and joyful births" (line 34) looks back to traditional humanist ideas on peace, especially those found in Erasmus's Complaint of Peace and the Panegyric to Philip. This play shares yet another feature with Spenser's Book V in the eschatological undertones of the ending. The imagery of Burgundy's speech serves this purpose, partly borrowed from Isaiah's vision of a returned golden age.⁷² So does the projected marriage and the French king's prayer for "Christian-like accord" between the two nations. The golden age is just momentarily glimpsed, in a "Small time," as the Chorus says; but we see enough to realize the advantages of brotherhood over war in helping it return....

Notes

¹New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 159, 146-66, 150. Much of what I am saying is also related to pp. 11-77.

² Hugh M. Richmond, Shakespeare's Political Plays (New York: Random House, 1967), 203, makes this point about both plays.

³ Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 149.

⁴ Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics, 24. Note also his comment that "teachers of literature need to become experts in 'translation' more than 'analysis'; their task is to bring what is strange, unfamiliar, and obscure in its meaning into something meaningful that 'speaks our language.' This does not mean 'souping up' the classics and dressing Chaucer in twentieth-century English; it means recognizing the problem of a conflict of horizons and taking steps to deal with it, rather than sweeping it under the rug and concentrating on analytical games" (p. 29).

⁵Shakespeare's Historical Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 18, 19.

⁶ "Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V," SQ 28 (1977): 279-96 (p. 287); revised in Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 33-62 (p. 47).

⁷ "Julius Caesar: The Politics of the Hardened Heart," ShakS 2 (1966): 11-33.

⁸ Graham Holderness, Shakespeare 's History (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1985), 42. The discussion that follows has benefitted from this book as well as Calvin G. Thayer, Shakespearean Politics: Government and Misgovernment in the Great Histories (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983).

⁹ George W. Keeton, Shakespeare's Legal and Political Background (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1967), 278-79.

¹⁰ In this respect Sanders (p. 188) notes the speech on God's angels, II.2.60.

¹¹ See the long note on this line in the Arden ed. by Peter Ure (London: Methuen, 1961), p. 166, which typifies the editor's assumption of the Lily B. Campbell approach to kingship in this play (the line is said to be "normal Tudor doctrine").

¹² The favorable treatment of York is one of the few blind spots in Wilbur Sanders' reading of this play. Sanders is forced to dismiss the York of the second half as "like an unfinished sketch" (p. 185).

¹³ E.g., Keeton, Background, 265; Ure, ed. Richard II, lxvi.

¹⁴ Richmond, Shakespeare's Political Plays, 128.

¹⁵ Matthew Black, Pelican ed., note at 1.2.37.

¹⁶ For this reason one may question the staging, in the BBC's televised RSC production, of 1.4 with a toweldraped Richard and his favorites in a sort of massage parlor. It simply reinforces Bolingbroke's version of Richard, which is not warranted by the text. The director also conveniently eliminates the scene in which the favorites console the queen. By contrast, in the 1986 RSC Stratford production Bolingbroke was a "brutal philistine" in a "single-minded reading" of the play: see Nicholas Shrimpton, "Shakespeare Performances," Shakespeare Survey 40 (1988): 180-81.

¹⁷ LaGuardia, "Ceremony and History"; James L. Calderwood, Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad: Richard II to Henry V (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979). Calderwood and I would seem to disagree with LaGuardia's view that "the simplest statement of the basic conflict in the play is that there is a continual counterpoint in the equation of word and object, and the separation of word and object" (p. 78). I believe the play works relentlessly toward "the separation of word [or symbol] and object"—ultimately the separation of crown from king.

¹⁸ Nevo, Tragic Form, 75.

¹⁹ M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty: A Study of Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Edward Arnold, 1971), 112.

²⁰ See Michael Platt, "The Rape of Lucrece and the Republic for Which It Stands," Centennial Review, 19 (1975): 59-79, for an excellent study of personal and political violation in Shakespeare's poem.

²¹Killing the King, Yale Studies in English 180 (New Haven, 1973): 27.

²² Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1944), 251. For a balanced critical appraisal of the anti-Tillyard school, see Robert P. Merrix, "Shakespeare's Histories and the New Bardolaters," SEL 19 (1979): 179-96.

²³ "Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V," 287.

²⁴ Arguing against the consistency of Hal is William Babula, "Whatever Happened to Prince Hal? An Essay on 'Henry V,' SS 30 (1977): 47-59; arguing for it, Carol Marks Sicherman, "King Hal: The Integrity of Shakespeare's Portrait," TSLL 21 (1979): 503-21, largely on the evidence of Hal's canniness throughout his plays.

²⁵The Temper of Shakespeare's Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 53.

²⁶ Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 13.

²⁷ See, e.g., Kenneth Muir, "Shakespeare among the Commonplaces," RES 10 (1959): 283-89 (on Adagia in R2); Thelma N. Greenfield, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Praise of Folly," CL 20 (1968): 236-44; G. R. Hibbard, "Erasmus and More in the Age of Shakespeare," Erasmus in English 12 (1983): 2-10; L. T. Woodbridge, "Shakespeare's Use of Two Erasmian Colloquies," N&Q 30 (1983): 122-23. Attention to Erasmus and Shakespeare's fools begins with Enid Welsford, The Fool (London: Faber and Faber, 1935).

²⁸ Jurgen Schafer, "Falstaff s Voice," N&Q 214 (1969): 135-36.

²⁹ Born trans. Education, 225.

³⁰ Jones, Origins of Shakespeare, 278-82, citing "Tragicus Rex" (LB 2:574).

³¹King Henry V, Arden ed. (London: Methuen, 1954), xvi-xviii. See also Roy Battenhouse, "Henry V in the Light of Erasmus," ShakS 17 (1985): 77-88.

³² "'Henry V and the Bees' Commonwealth," Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977): 61-72. On the tradition of the bee-kingdom see below, p. 148.

³³ E.g., "Such is the history of kingly power, from the beginning to the end of the world;—with this difference, that the object of war formerly, when the people adhered to their allegiance, was to depose kings; the object latterly, since the people swerved from their allegiances, has been to restore kings, and to make common cause against mankind." Everyman's Library ed. (London, 1906), 157. Hazlitt's continuing malign influence on productions of the play is noted by Gary Taylor, ed., Henry V (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 58. Taylor's introduction, probably the most valuable criticism on the play yet written, differs from my interpretation in emphasizing the king's responsibility for the deaths in the play.

³⁴ Reese, Cease of Majesty, 317.

³⁵ Levin, New Readings, 138, though some form of "two audience" approach is inevitable, e.g., to allow for theatrical irony. In his Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 116-19, Levin uses the evidence of plot structure to defend a pro-Henry reading of the play. Levin's argument is augmented in Brownell Salomon, "Thematic Contraries and the Dramaturgy of Henry V," SQ 31 (1980): 343-56.

³⁶ Stoll, "Henry V," in Poets and Playwrights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1930); Wilson, ed., Henry V, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1947); Gould, "A New Reading of Henry V," English Review 29 (1919): 42-55; Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); Edwin Wilson, ed., Shaw on Shakespeare (New York: Dutton, 1961); Van Doren, Shakespeare (1939; rpt. Garden City: Doubleday, n.d.), 143-52; Zdenek Stribrny, "Henry V and History," in Shakespeare in a Changing World, ed. Arnold Kettle (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 84-101; Reese, Cease of Majesty; Jorgensen, "A Formative Shakespearean Legacy"; Calderwood, Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad; Thayer, Shakespearean Politics.

³⁷ Rabkin, "Rabbits." For a related view of 1H4, that it "confirms the Machiavellian hypothesis of the fraud even as it draws its audience irresistibly toward the celebration of that power," see Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion," Glyph 8 (1981): 40-61 (p. 57). In the various incarnations of this essay Henry V gets short shrift, though the latest version improves slightly: see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 12-65.

³⁸ LaGuardia, "Ceremony," 71; see above, n. 17. Gunter Walch, "'Henry V as a Working-House of Ideology," Shakespeare Survey 40 (1988): 63-68, finds the play ambiguous in the disparity between what the Chorus says and what happens. He is right about the resulting complexity, but the truth about history is more accessible in this than in most of the other history plays.

³⁹ Edward I. Berry, "'True Things and Mock'ries': Epic and History in Henry V," JEGP 78 (1979): 1-16 (p. 8). The ceremony speech is also virtually unnoticed in Moody E. Prior, The Drama of Power (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), and in Greenblatt and Battenhouse.

⁴⁰ "Shakespeare's Henry V: Another Part of the Critical Forest," JHI 37 (1976): 3-26.

⁴¹The Temper of Shakespeare's Thought, 41.

⁴² Richard C. McCoy, "'Thou Idol Ceremony': Elizabeth I, The Henriad, and the Rites of English Monarchy," in Urban Life in the Renaissance, eds. Susan Zimmerman and Ronald Weissman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), pp. 240-66, shows that Elizabeth herself contributed to the desacralizing of kingship reflected in Henry V.

⁴³ See above, p. 63.

⁴⁴De Republica Anglorum: A Discourse on the Commonwealth of England (1853), ed. L. Alston (Cambridge University Press, 1906), pp. 59-60.

⁴⁵ Contrast Calderwood, Metadrama: "Harry's speech on Ceremony and his prayer to the God of battles have no effect upon the English, who of course remain united as before" (p. 153).

⁴⁶A Speech of John White (1641), fol. 413, quoted in J. Sears McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 87. Also cf. Spenser's use of "idol pomp," above, p. 106.

⁴⁷ J. Strype, Cranmer (1848), I, 2, p. 206, quoted in Janet L. Nelson, "Inauguration Rituals," in Early Medieval Kingship, eds. P. H. Sawyer and I. N. Wood (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1977), 50.

⁴⁸Reports, Pt. VII (IV, 10a), quoted in Kantorowicz, p. 317.

⁴⁹ Cf. Edward Symons, Essex royalist minister, addressing a neighboring Puritan minister: "First (Sir,) let me minde you: of what you yielded, namely, that the King is King before his Coronation; indeed his Crowne is but a note or ensigne of his Kingly dignity." A Loyall Subjects Beliefe (Oxford, 1643), 41.

⁵⁰Adagia, "Aut fatuum aut regem nasci oportere," p. 41.

⁵¹ Robert P. Merrix, "The Alexandrian Allusion in Shakespeare's Henry F," ELR 2 (1972): 321-33, uses this passage to support an anti-Henrician reading, though it seems to me more germane to the opposite interpretation.

⁵² Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Modernizing Shakespeare's Spelling, with Three Studies in the Text of Henry V (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 92.

⁵³ Cf. Reese, Cease of Majesty, 111.

⁵⁴ See Walter, Arden ed., xxxiv.

⁵⁵ See Drayton, The Battaile of Agincourt, lines 785-808, for a realistic account of civilian suffering during the artillery bombardment in the siege; Holinshed, ed. cit., 3:73-74, reports the pillaging after Henry enters Harfleur.

⁵⁶ A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1955), 257, was perhaps the first to note that, although Henry does not acknowledge it, he must know the bishops' true intentions.

⁵⁷Education trans. Born, 255. Cf. Complaint of Peace in Essential Erasmus, trans. Dolan: "Yet priests dedicated to God as well as monks, who should be even more holy, now inflame men to murder. . . . Bishops leave their dioceses to perform the business of war" (pp. 190-91). In 2H4, IV.2.5-30, the Archbishop of York also receives his share of such criticism.

⁵⁸Obedience of a Christian Man, 185, 206-7.

⁵⁹ Drayton, Barons Wars, 1.6; Holinshed also follows Hall here: see Walters, Arden ed., p. 160.

⁶⁰ Reese, Cease of Majesty, 332.

⁶¹ Kelly, Divine Providence, 235.

⁶² Contrast Gurr: "Henry's intense fury at the rebels' disloyalty shows that he has more than a touch of his father's insecurity" (p. 67).

⁶³ Harold S. Wilson, On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 96, 210-12.

⁶⁴ Sherman Hawkins, "Virtue and Kingship in Shakespeare's Henry IV," ELR 5 (1975): 314-42 (p. 342).

⁶⁵ S. C. Sen Gupta, Shakespeare's Historical Plays, 146.

⁶⁶ E.g., 1.2.23, 263, 291; II.2.140-42.

⁶⁷ Robert P. Adams, "Transformations in the Late Elizabethan Tragic Sense of Life: New Critical Approaches," MLQ 35 (1974): 353-63. Boris proposes that the appearance of James Γ s The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598) may have moved Shakespeare "to specify the importance of law, parliament, and council to a king in the proper government of England" (p. 229).

⁶⁸ Smith, De Republica Anglorum, p. 21.

⁶⁹ Boris, Shakespeare's English Kings, 35. On the "mystery" of monarchy in France, see Roland Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry IV, trans. Joan Spencer (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 240-50.

⁷⁰ Twysden, Certaine Considerations upon the Government of England, ed. John Mitchell Kemble. Camden Soc, vol. 45 (London, 1849), 18; Smith, De Republica Anglorum, 16 (Smith's reference to Louis XII may originate in Hotman, suggests the editor, p. xlii); Erasmus, "Spartam nactus es hanc orna," Adagia, 103.

⁷¹ Thomas Gainsford, The Glory of England (1618), 307; in France, "as for the Country-man, hee is called a Pesant, disparaged in his drudgery and servile toylsomnesse, liveth poore and beastly, is treacherous at advantage, and yet afraid of his owne shadow" (p. 241). Hall (fol. 110v) thought that during Henry VI's times the French towns went over to the French king because of their "abhoring theenglish libertie, and aspiring to the French bondage and native servitude."

⁷² Isaiah 32:10-20, noted by Walter, Arden ed., 143.