Henry V
Indeed, Henry does behave in King Henry V as though the known world belongs to England and England belongs to him. His actions in the play have their impetus in his lengthy discussion with the bishops about "Salique land" in act 1, scene 2—a scene which, while it may be unduly tedious for modern audiences, must surely have had a significant degree of topical interest for its initial viewers.
The wooing scene at the end of the play is perhaps more dubious than tedious, but Henry's relationship with the land (a land which now incorporates France) remains close to the surface:
Kath. Is it possible dat I should love de ennemie of France?
K. Hen. No, it is not possible you should love> the enemy of France, Kate; but in loving me, you should love the friend of France; for I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it: I will have it all mine. And, Kate, when Fance is mine and I am yours, then yours is France and you are mine.
Kath. I cannot tell wat is dat.
K. Hen. No, Kate? I will tell thee in French . . .
(5.2.169-77)
Henry's French may be no better than Katherine's English, but it is nonetheless a kind of French—the kind an English king would speak. However awkwardly the French and English languages approach one another in King Henry V, their meeting betokens a larger assimilation: "thy speaking of my tongue, and I thine, most truly falsely, must needs be granted to be much at one" (lines 190-92).
The most obvious sort of assimilation here is represented by the impending betrothal of Henry and Katherine, yet even Henry's love-talk reveals his more general and more crucial affiliations:
take me by the hand, and say, "Harry of England, I am thine"; which word thou shalt no sooner bless mine ear withal, but I will tell thee aloud, "England is thine, Ireland is thine, France is thine, and Henry Plantagenet is thine" . . . (Lines 236-40)
The structure of this speech becomes suggestive when the phrase "of England" is treated as carrying a definite possessive meaning: England possesses the king, who in turn possesses Katherine "of France." Once France becomes part "of England," then Henry can assign to Katherine a nominal ownership which begins with England and ends with Henry himself. But this last is like a series of concentric circles within a primum mobile: England moves the cosmos, with Henry pervading that cosmos from center to periphery.
The entire scene may seem overdrawn, yet it does bring a subtle sort of closure to the narrative of placement and displacement which runs through the tetralogy. Just before the betrothal, Henry muses to the French king over the transformative power of love:
. . . you may, some of you, thank love for my blindness, who cannot see many a fair French city for one fair French maid that stands in my way.
Fr. King. Yes, my lord, you see them perspectively: the cities turn'd into a maid; for they are all girdled with maiden walls that war hath [never] ent'red. (Lines 316-23)
The word "perspectively" has usually been associated with some form of the optical tricks or the trompe l'oeil techniques that became so popular in the sixteenth century: a painting of a woman that resolves, on closer examination, into an urban landscape. The word may also suggest simply a shift in perspective, the transformation of an object from one set of dimensions into another, as in a map. Katherine becomes a visual...
(This entire section contains 1304 words.)
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representation of the territory which Henry now controls—a distinctly ominous development, as feminist readings of the history plays suggest,11 but also a final confirmation of Henry's ability to make sense of and to use the "map" of the land placed before him.12
Shakespeare's presentation of Henry V does, often enough, suggest a deep-seated ambivalence about his character; one has only to consider the always open question of the banishment of Falstaff at the end of King Henry IV, Part 2. But this question hinges in large part on the sense, shared by both audiences and critics, that Falstaff is "close to the land," an authentic vestige of the English countryside and its folkways. While Falstaff s language and peculiar energeia may suggest this, his overall role in the plays does not. He may claim in act 2, scene 4 of King Henry IV, Part 1, that banishing "plump Jack" would be like banishing "all the world" (lines 479-80), but audiences and readers already know about his weakness for hyperbole; moreover, such a claim fails to localize Falstaff in any way. For while he may be a knight, Falstaff appears not to be "landed"; he is a transient being, with no specific habitation other than the Boar's Head Tavern. Falstaff does "come down to earth" with his false death at Shrewsbury, where, as the stage directions indicate, Hal "spieth Falstaff on the ground." But Falstaff cannot stay put; he "riseth up," refusing to be "Embowell'd" (5.4.111), and (significantly) he takes Hotspur's corpse with him. After deciding to pretend that he has himself killed Hotspur, he says, "Nothing confutes me but eyes, and nobody sees me" (lines 126-27). The words are patently ironic—the audience, of course, sees Falstaff the entire time—but beyond the reflexive theatricality of the remark there lies a sense that Falstaff, for all his great size, is (like a fairy in the daylit world) an invisible being—invisible, at least, within the world of fact. Falstaff cannot lose his place because he has no place to begin with. Thus Hal can treat Falstaff at the end of King Henry IV, Part 2, as if Falstaff lived only within Hal's nighttime dreams but not within any actual "ten mile" radius of the king, wherever the king should happen to reside on English soil (5.5.49-51, 65).
In the quality of his "residence," then, Henry is delivered to the Elizabethan audience as a central moral and historical referent: he is the king who comprehends the land, in both of the important senses of comprehension, and thus represents an idealized feudal relationship between ruler and nation—"nation" understood not so much as polity or people but as a macrocosm of the manor, with Henry as lord and the people as tenants of an extensive but thoroughly domesticated property. Shakespeare's Henry may perch on the cusp of modernity, but he also offers the Elizabethan audience a nostalgic dream-vision of the medieval king, at home in the world because he is the world.
We can note as well in Shakespeare's presentation of Henry an interesting variation on the familiar idea of the king's two bodies, the transient, physical "body natural" and the eternal, immutable "body politic."13 In King Henry V, the identification between the body of the king and the "body" of the nation is so close that the loss of the one is in effect the loss of the other, as is suggested by the brief summary of Henry VI's reign at the close of the play, in which the Chorus equates the gradual dissolution of monarchical authority with the physical disintegration of England and its borders: "Henry the Sixt . . . did this king succeed; / Whose state so many had the managing, / That they lost France, and made his England bleed" (act 5, epilogue, lines 9-12). The sense of the possessive pronoun in line 12 is ambiguous; "his" appears to refer to "Henry the Sixt," but it forms part of the rhyme with line 10 ("this king succeed" / "his England bleed"). "This king" is carefully aligned with "his England," so that the nation remains identified with Henry V even after his death. The troubles of Henry VI's reign are metaphorical wounds in the corpse of the late king, whose demise signals a hiatus in the ability of the English monarch to act effectively in history.
