Henry V's charisma in the tetralogy—whether that charisma is construed as positive or negative—is closely connected with his aura of uniqueness. This aura emanates less from his personality or his accomplishments than from his ability to occupy a particular symbolic position in the historical narrative more securely than anyone else on the stage: he is the supremely oriented historical actor ("herein will I imitate the sun"). Unlike Hotspur, he need not worry about losing the map, because he carries the map within himself. His sense of direction is privileged, in every sense, and he is the only character in Shakespeare's historical universe who maintains this privilege from first to last. As such, he has the rather opaque quality that accompanies any figure of nostalgia; a being neither wholly anticipated nor subsequently duplicated in history, he seems not quite human.

The moral distance between Henry V and Henry VI was brutally obvious—we might say too obvious—to both Shakespeare and his audience; but Shakespeare was also interested in limning the distance between Henry V and his father. Henry IV, too, is deeply concerned with orienting himself properly within the world and within history, but his capacity to do so is more like Hotspur's than like Hal's. This is not so much because Henry and Hotspur both fall under a long shadow of usurpation and rebellion, but rather because they are both placed outside the world they wish to inhabit in ways that the political action of the plays never makes fully explicit. Henry IV, for one thing, has never entirely overcome the onus of exile laid upon him by his unfortunate predecessor. After Richard banishes the two contestants in King Richard II, Henry (i.e., Bullingbrook) demands of Mowbray that he confess his treason, for "had the King permitted us, / One of our souls had wand'red in the air" (I.3.194-95); the death of one of the parties to the duel would have forestalled either confession or pardon. But exile—even in its mitigated version—reduces Bullingbrook to a similar state of wandering, as he himself confesses to Gaunt a few moments later: "Must I not serve a long apprenticehood / To foreign passages, and in the end, / Having my freedom, boast of nothing else / But that I was a journeyman to grief?" (lines 271-74). Bullingbrook's use of metaphor here is telling: exile is a form of servitude which does not culminate in a firmer sense of identity or purpose.

The uncertainty of exile overshadows even Bullingbrook's moments of triumph in King Richard II His reentry in act 2, scene 3 begins with a query about local geography:

Bull. How far is it, my lord, to Berkeley now?
North. Believe me, noble lord,
  I am a stranger here in Gloucestershire.

(2.3.1-3)

Interestingly enough, Hotspur also has trouble "locating" Berkeley Castle in Henry IV, Part 1, when he attempts to explain his hatred of Bullingbrook to Northumberland:

In Richard's time—what do you call the place?—
A plague upon it, it is in Gloucestershire—
'Twas where the madcap duke his uncle kept—
His uncle York—where I first bow'd my knee
Unto this king of smiles, this Bullingbrook—'Sblood!
When you and he came back from Ravenspurgh—
North. At Berkeley castle.
Hot. You say true.

(I.3.242-50)

To Bullingbrook and Northumberland, as to Hotspur, the region surrounding Berkeley Castle presents itself as alien, but Bullingbrook is "a stranger here" in a sense that transcends the merely parochial. When, later in the scene, he boldly attempts to reclaim his inheritance—"As I was banish'd, I was banish'd Herford, / But as I come, I come for Lancaster" (lines 113-14)—we remain aware of something chimerical in Bullingbrook's character, a fundamental doubt concerning the title which should properly belong to him. The rhetorical questions he directs to York seem to remain suspended, not entirely answerable: "Will you permit that I shall stand condemn'd / A wandering vagabond, my rights and royalties / Pluck'd from my arms perforce—and given away / To upstart unthrifts? Wherefore was I born?" (lines 119-22).

This problem of establishing location—of things, names, purposes—culminates in Exton's murder of Richard, an act inspired, ironically enough, by the same sort of question:

Exton. Didst thou not mark the King, what words he spake?
"Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?"
Was it not so?
  [1.] Man. These were his very words.
Exton. "Have I no friend?" quoth he. He spake it twice, and urg'd it twice together, did he not?
  [1.] Man. He did.

(5.4.1-6)

At the close of the play, Exton tries unsuccessfully to provide Henry with a locus, an unambiguous center from which the question "Where is the King?" could receive a clear answer: "Great King, within this coffin I present / Thy buried fear. Herein all breathless lies / The mightiest of thy greatest enemies, / Richard of Burdeaux, by me hither brought" (5.6.30-33). Henry, though, is unwilling to "come home" in such a way; appropriately, he punishes Exton by passing on to him the burden of exile: "With Cain go wander thorough shades of night / And never show thy head by day or night" (lines 43-44). At the same time, Henry plans to provide a more legitimate locus for himself by undertaking the most solemn and sacred of all homeward journeys in the western world: "I'll make a voyage to the Holy Land, / To wash this blood off from my guilty hand" (lines 49-50).

At the beginning of King Henry IV, Part 1, however, Henry is forced to admit that "this our purpose now is twelve month old" (I.1.28). It is also clear in his initial speech that Henry thinks of the Holy Land not only as the general site of a crusade but as a physical place, to be experienced concretely as such:

Forthwith a power of English shall we levy . . .
To chase those pagans in those holy fields,
Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail'd
For our advantage to the bitter cross.

(Lines 22, 24-27)

This is less the language of the crusader than of the penitent pilgrim, tracing the footsteps of Christ along the Via Dolorosa, aspiring to tread the same ground that Christ had trod.¹⁴ In Henry's case, however, the act of pilgrimage is never entirely separable from the ethic of the crusade; like so many other Christian monarchs, Henry wishes to transform Jerusalem from a city on the periphery of the European world to a city at the center of the oikumenê as well as at the center of the believer's consciousness. By restoring Jerusalem in this way, Henry will, he hopes, achieve the sort of historical fulfillment that seems perpetually to elude him in England.

Whether consciously or not, Henry is also participating in the medieval tradition that literally placed Jerusalem at the center of the map, and that figured significantly in what might be called the geographical imagination of Europe. The pictorial beginnings of this tradition are in the so-called T-0 maps, which date from at least the time of the sixth-century bishop Isidore of Seville, who included one in his Etymologiae. These maps present an archetypally—and, one might add, typologically—well-ordered world, a circle divided into three parts (Europe, Africa, and Asia) by a "T" laid on its right side and composed of the Nile, the Don, and the Mediterranean, the last forming the leg of the T. In Isidore's map the three parts reflect not only the conventional continental divisions but Noah's disposition of the world among his sons Shem, Ham, and Japhet in the tenth chapter of Genesis.¹⁵ By roughly A.D. 1100, Jerusalem has come to occupy the point at which the lines of the T join to form a cross.¹⁶

There are, of course, no T-0 maps on display in the Henriad; but this ancient picture of a bounded world, organized simply and providentially around an immutable center, is eminently serviceable in suggesting the "mental map" that Henry carries with him.¹⁷ The vision of a holy city at the heart of a static world offers at least the hope of a serene antithesis to the dynamic but uncentered realm over which he struggles to rule.

That Henry is thinking in such terms is clear both at the close of the scene, when he repeats to Warwick, Surrey, and Blunt his long-standing wish—"And were these inward wars once out of hand / We would, dear lords, unto the Holy Land" (lines 107-8)—and earlier as well, when Henry prays for a map of sorts to guide him: "O God, that one might read the book of fate, / And see the revolution of the times / Make mountains level, and the continent, / Weary of solid firmness, melt itself / Into the sea . . ." (lines 45-49). Henry desires a book that will render graphically both the past and future of the world he now inhabits. Unlike the Holy Land of the T-0 map, the land in the book of fate is a disordered one, expanding, contracting, and finally dissolving; the closer analogy would be to Hotspur's "revolutionary" map, with its shifting boundaries and altered river course. Henry differs from Hotspur, though, in drawing a moral lesson—albeit an entirely disheartening one—from his study of the "terrain" of human action: "The happiest youth, viewing his progress through, / What perils past, what crosses to ensue, / Would shut the book, and sit him down and die" (lines 54-56). Clearly, Henry is preparing for the hour when he will shut the book on a land with which he has never managed to identify himself.

That hour arrives in act 4, scene 5, during which Henry's chronic sense of dislocation finds its ironic denouement. Shakespeare provides a potent visual emblem within the scene, when Henry wakes from his fitful sleep to ask, "Where is the crown? who took it from my pillow?" (line 57). The question may strike us as slightly comical, suggesting as it does that Henry's notion of himself as king is dependent on an entirely portable "prop"—a prop which is now in another room, resting for the moment on his son's head. His suspicions about Hal's motives give rise to the fear that under Hal England will lose all its familiar boundaries, reverting to a prehistoric feral state: "O thou wilt be a wilderness again, / Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants!" (lines 136-37).¹⁸ Yet Henry's assessment of his own reign, which he delivers to Hal in a speech that effectively functions as a deathbed confession, is suffused with the king's understanding of his own refusal to honor the proper boundaries: "God knows, my son, / By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways /I met this crown . . ." (lines 183-85). His concluding advice to Hal is extraordinary in its cynicism, suggesting a continuing consciousness that, all along, the "wilderness" and the "wolves" have merely been concealed from view by a thin veneer of civility:

. . . all [my] friends, which thou must make thy friends,
  Have but their stings and teeth newly ta'en out;
By whose fell working I was first advanc'd,
And by whose power I well might lodge a fear
To be again displac'd; which to avoid,
  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.

(Lines 204-12)

Here, at last, Henry acknowledges the threat of displacement in the most pragmatic terms; it is a threat he not only fears but has exploited for his own purposes.

In this account the most penetrating irony is that Henry's journey to the center of the world would actually have been an attempt to de-center the consciousness of his own subjects, to blur and confuse the bounds of Henry's reign over England. In order to preserve his rule, Henry has paradoxically sacrificed the possibility of finding the center of his "state" in England itself. And he advises Hal to follow a similar course, without acknowledging—for when did Henry ever seem aware of it?—the close identification that already exists between Hal and the land, and Hal's gift not only for finding but for enlarging his own "center."

Shakespeare adapts Henry's dying words from Holinshed, but those words are nonetheless symbolically charged, as Henry discovers that the only Jerusalem he will ever reach is one altogether close to home:

King. Doth any name particular belong
Unto the lodging where I first did swound?
War. Tis called Jerusalem, my noble lord.
King. Laud be to God! Even there my life must end.
It hath been prophesied to me many years,
I should not die but in Jerusalem,
  Which vainly I suppos'd the Holy Land.
But bear me to that chamber, there I'll lie,
In that Jerusalem shall Harry die.

(Lines 232-40)¹⁹

At this moment Henry could say, as Edmund does at the end of King Lear, "The wheel is come full circle, I am here" (5.3.175). Henry has indeed arrived at a specific place—just as Hotspur finds his "two paces of the vilest earth"—but it is not the place he thought to occupy. His final dislocation takes two distinct forms: not only does Jerusalem come uncentered on Henry's mental map of the world, but the locus of the monarchy, Westminster itself, suddenly shows itself as foreign terrain—for Henry has never known the name of the presumably familiar chamber in which his reign will conclude.