Battenhouse, Roy. “Henry V in the Light of Erasmus.” Shakespeare Studies 17 (1985): 77-85.

[In this essay, Battenhouse evaluates Henry V in terms of the principles set forth by the sixteenth-century Catholic humanist Erasmus in his Praise of Folly and The Education of a Christian Prince, contending that Shakespeare presents Henry as a monarch who repeatedly evades personal responsibility and only counterfeits the role of ideal Christian king.]

In a Cambridge edition of Henry V in 1947, John Dover Wilson described Henry as a king inspired by religion. He even likened this hero's faith to “that of the martyrs.” He judged Henry's bishops to be upright men, and he viewed the play's chorus as an “entreaty from the playwright's own lips.” J. H. Walter, in his Arden edition seven years later, sought to bolster Wilson's interpretation. He provided, therefore, among other things, a tabulation of “parallels” between passages in the play and ideas of kingship he found in a treatise by Erasmus, the Institutio Principis Christiani (1516). But on examining closely Walter's so-called parallels, I find them misleading. Some of them fail to notice that a surface similarity to a precept by Erasmus may actually signal a counterfeiting of it. Others of the listed “parallels” simply bypass a big contrast between what Erasmus enjoins and what Henry does. Let me say, incidentally, that an excellent assignment for seminar students is to ask them to read the whole of Erasmus's The Christian Prince and assess King Henry in the light of it. When I do so, the students notice various disparities; and then I can direct class attention to The Praise of Folly, a work by Erasmus that Walter did not bother to consult. Praise of Folly (1511, expanded 1514) contains passages of satire on pseudo piety that fit remarkably with aspects of behavior the play exhibits in Henry and in his associates. Thus the true parallels are ironic ones. But this means that the view given of Henry by editors such as Wilson and Walter collapses if subjected to the light of Erasmus's comic sense and the Christian norms that underlie it. This essay illustrates this point.

Praise of Folly has a middle section aimed at what Erasmus calls the “theatrical pomp” of playacting bishops and princes who pretend to piety. Here he remarks that whereas charity should prompt bishops to “settle wars, resist wicked princes, and freely give not merely riches but even lifeblood for Christ's flock” (p. 111),¹ this responsibility is often retranslated. What we see instead, he says, are churchmen who fish for lands and defend these with fire and sword (pp. 110, 113). We see bishops for whom the function of “overseer” means keeping a sharp lookout for money. Instead of feeding the flock, they feed themselves. And whereas Chrysostom, Basil, and Jerome confuted pagans by leading good lives and performing miracles, there are nowadays bishops who consider miracles out of date and out of step with the times (pp. 94, 112). “They settle everything with the sword, just as if Christ has perished completely and would no longer protect his own in his own way” (p. 113).

In Shakespeare's play the bishops of Canterbury and Ely fit this portrait. They declare that miracles have ceased.² They are modern and secularized churchmen. Their concern is for temporal lands. Their aim is not to settle wars but to remove all “bars” that might hinder Henry's going to war. When Canterbury urges Henry to “unwind your bloody flag!” he is not thinking of Christ's blood or of giving his own for the flock. He is shrewdly sanctioning Henry's ambition in exchange for his own advantage. He can see clearly enough that if Henry takes one-quarter of England into France the bishops will be left with “thrice such powers” at home. Henry seems unaware that he will thus, in effect, hand over domestic rule to the bishops. Perhaps he has been lulled by Canterbury's smooth proposal: “While that the armed hand doth fight abroad, / Th' advised head defends itself at home.” But these words imply, do they not, that if Henry chooses the role of “hand,” Canterbury will accept the role of “head.”

We are given also by the archbishop a lesson from the honeybees. A picture is elaborated of various classes of functionaries—masons, merchants, magistrates, and so forth, all contributing to “one purpose.” But what is this purpose? Prominent in the picture are soldiers going merrily forth to take booty and bring home pillage. The hive has an emperor, but notice how he is depicted. He is described as “busied with his majesty.” He “surveys” the building of “roofs of gold,”³ and “poor mechanic porters,” and the surly hum of a “sad-eyed Justice,” whose one task is to give death sentences to idlers. Isn't this, indeed, a sad version of justice? In this community, if we examine the imagery, human beings have become “poor” mechanics toiling to the tune of gold and pillage. Such is Shakespeare's irony. He has Canterbury end the fable by boasting an ability to defend his nation's “name of hardiness and policy.” Indeed so; hardiness and policy are this bishop's stock-in-trade, instead of a bishop's proper function of Christian overseer. And Henry, likewise, is only a surveyor, not a shepherd-watchman. When the fable depicts him as “busied with his majesty,” do we recall perhaps Falstaff's early assessment (1H4, I.ii.15) that Prince Hal would have majesty but no grace? Not even enough, said Falstaff, to say grace before bread and butter. Divine grace has no representative in the archbishop's fable.

Harold C. Goddard, after noting that this fable mentions no churchmen and that it transforms bees communing with flowers into soldiers armed with stings, comments that the archbishop is as deficient in his science as in his symbolism. “What fun,” he remarks, “Shakespeare must have had making such a fool of the Archbishop, knowing all the while that his audience would swallow his utterances as grave political wisdom.”⁴ I surmise, however, that Shakespeare hoped at least a few of his auditors would recognize the foolishness of such wisdom and hence would find amusement in the archbishop's distortion of traditional fable.

Might not learned auditors recall, for instance, that the fable as told by Vergil made no mention of roofs of gold, or of an emperor, or of merchants, or masons, or indeed of any “sad-eyed Justice”? Vergil's bees, it is true, league together “under the majesty of law” to serve the community in various ways—some watching over the gathering of food in the fields, others caring for the young, and others building honeycombs to fill with nectar before winter comes, while to still others “it has fallen by lot to be sentries at the gates,” where they watch the rains of heaven, take the loads of incomers, and “in martial array” drive from the fold the lazy drones. But those details from the Georgics, Book IV, differ significantly from the amplifications provided by the archbishop. Vergil's “sentries” were neither mechanic porters nor soldiers marching abroad for booty.

T. W. Baldwin, when comparing Vergil with Shakespeare, has tried to account for the reshaping by bringing in some commentary by a sixteenth-century editor of Vergil, Willichius; but Baldwin has to admit that the Platonic classifications of office expounded by Willichius provide no more than perhaps a “suggestion” for Shakespeare's phraseology. “Apparently,” says Baldwin, Canterbury's mention of “merchants who trade and soldiers who plunder for the good of their emperor are, like the emperor himself and the magistrates, Shakespeare's own modern application of Vergil's ancient generalization.” Baldwin thinks this “modern application” accords with Shakespeare's “own fundamental concept of the English commonwealth.”⁵ I think we can say, rather, that it is shaped to accord ironically with Canterbury's modern concept, a concept that neither Vergil nor Willichius would have approved. And it is unlikely, I think, that Shakespeare approved of the kind of “empery” Henry resolves to display, namely, a bending of France “to our awe / Or break it all to pieces.” This is a case of “commonwealth” gone askew.

Erasmus in his Education of a Christian Prince referred to the bees, but with an application far different from that of the archbishop. As Andrew Gurr has pointed out, Erasmus begins by saying that a young prince should be told that “the king [bee] never flies away” from the hive and that “it is the part of a good prince always to remain within the limits of his realm.” Furthermore, Erasmus goes on to say, “Plato calls it sedition, not war, when Greeks war with Greeks; and if this should happen, he bids them fight with every restraint. What term should we apply, then, when Christians engage in battle with Christians, since they are united by so many bonds to each other? What shall we say when on account of a mere title … a war is waged?” Gurr, in citing these passages, has noted that Henry's practice reverses the views of Erasmus. Gurr observes also how the “one consent” preached by the archbishop incorporates a wide variety of motives that “work contrariously”; and if we spell out these motives they are a concern by the prelates to keep their lands, a concern by the nobles for personal glory, and Henry's concern to secure his insecure titles; thus the “one purpose” that unites is an obedience to commodity or self-interest as the mainspring of the action.⁶ For Erasmus, however, commodity-serving was not the proper goal of a commonwealth.

At this point, let me add a mention of another commentary on the bees, that of John of Salisbury in Policraticus, VI.21-22. The twelfth-century John, after citing Vergil's saying that the ordering of a commonwealth should be borrowed from the bees, goes on to warn that the happiness of the whole cannot be lasting unless its head gives an undivided attention to the practice of justice. To illustrate a failure in this respect, John then describes the irresponsibility of Dido in too quickly bestowing favor on Aeneas, “an exile and a fugitive, of whose plight and motives she was ignorant.” “With what curiosity,” John exclaims, “did the ears of the chief men drink in the fabulous tales of a man who was striving to clear himself from blame, who was seeking his own glory and reaching out for something wherewith to captivate the minds of his hearers!” And so, with “smooth words” and “seductive flattery” the tales won for him hospitality, followed by the “frivolity of a hunt and other delights”—the eventual fruit of which was the city's destruction.⁷ This story, I suggest, has aspects of analogy to the tactics of Henry in winning public acceptance and then instigating a foreign hunt that would ultimately prove ruinous to England's commonwealth.

But to return to Erasmus. In his Praise of Folly we find him jesting at courtiers who control a foolish crowd with silly tricks of fable. Was it a philosophical oration, he asks, or rather a childish cock-and-bull story, when a certain Roman flattered his audience with a story about the belly and its parts (p. 40)? Erasmus is referring here to a fable used by Menenius and reported by Livy. We may recall how Shakespeare, when dramatizing this fable in Coriolanus, highlighted the absurd primacy it gives to the belly, the “sink” of the body politic; Menenius depicted Belly as the giver of all public benefit.⁸ Surely the honeybee fable, in the version given it by the archbishop, is similarly beguiling and likewise absurd.

Further, let us notice some commentary that may be pertinent to Canterbury's pronouncing on Henry's claim to France. In Praise of Folly Erasmus laughs at orators who indulge in quibbles, “put on display their syllogisms,” ruffle their “theological feathers,” and make “oracular pronouncements” that distort Holy Scripture “as if it were a lump of wax” (pp. 95, 104-05). These features can all be seen, I would say, in the argument Canterbury develops. As a follow-up to Henry's narrowing of the war question to a matter of Salic law, the archbishop evades large issues of justice by plunging instead into a morass of legal quibble and obscure logic. Then, when Henry interrupts to ask for some ground in conscience, the archbishop seizes on a biblical text, “Let the inheritance descend to the daughter,” and from this he triumphantly concludes, “Stand for your own, unwind your bloody flag!” Henry's “own,” however, as Goddard has pointed out, is nothing but a tombstone claim, now being revived eighty years after the fact. Moreover, let me comment on the archbishop's textual scholarship. Any reader who takes the precaution of looking into biblical law regarding female inheritance will make the interesting discovery that Canterbury has cited only half of what Moses said on this point. He has quoted the Book of Numbers 27:8 but has ignored Numbers 36:3, where in regard to the same case, Moses gave the ruling that a daughter who marries outside her tribe loses all right to her father's lands.⁹ Do we wonder why the clarifying addition is not mentioned by the archbishop? Plainly, it would demolish his whole argument, since Henry's French great-grandmother married outside her tribe when she married the Englishman, King Edward. Half texts, of course, were notorious in sham scholarship. The Dr. Faustus of Marlowe's play exploits a half text, as does the wife of Bath in Chaucer's comedy. And Erasmus often lets his Stultitia use snippets of Scripture to concoct a foolish argument (for example, pp. 117-21). All this is part of the sottie tradition.

But let us turn next to folly as practiced by kings. What does Erasmus satirically say of kingly folly? Here is a sample:

They will not listen to anyone except those who have learned the knack of saying such agreeable things as will not disturb their minds with any dutiful anxiety. They think they have fulfilled the whole duty of a prince if they constantly ride to the hunt, [and] if every day brings with it some newly contrived method of reducing their citizens' wealth and diverting it into their coffers—always, of course, finding suitable pretexts so that downright injustice may at least have some appearance of justice.

(p. 108)

Can we not parallel this with Henry's foreign hunt and its pretexts? Shakespeare shows us a Henry who does not listen to anything in the archbishop's speech except what is agreeable to his own exploit already predetermined. Having traded behind the scenes for the archbishop's favor, Henry uses the public hearing only for some appearance of justice. Take care, he admonishes, “how you awake our sleeping sword.” What he wishes to avoid is not the war but any personal responsibility for it. Indeed, throughout the play, Henry has a kind of genius for dodging responsibility by transferring it to others—for instance, when he says that the dauphin will be the cause of all the widows the war will make, or when he tells the citizens of Harfleur that they will be blamable for whatever massacre Henry's soldiers may perpetrate, or when at Agincourt he evades a question from Williams by twisting it so as to reduce a king's responsibility to that of a merchant. Such talk would not have satisfied Erasmus. His Praise of Folly warns that a king is “responsible for the integrity of all officials” and for watching carefully against deception, keeping in mind “the judgment of that king [that is, God] who before long will call him to account.” If a king deviates from what a scepter properly signifies—namely, justice and an uncorrupted heart—should he not fear, asks Erasmus, lest “some clever wit” make a laughing stock of his deficiencies (pp. 107-08)? I find that remark interesting because it reminds me of how Falstaff made laughable the kingship of Henry IV by wittily depicting him with a dagger in place of a scepter. We can only surmise what Falstaff might have said of Henry V's order at Agincourt to kill all the prisoners. I can imagine Falstaff saying, “Tut, tut! Food for daggers!” That would have been a suitably Erasmian jest at such bloody business.

But since Falstaff has long ago been banished by the “new” Henry, Shakespeare provides as evaluators of the massacre of prisoners the king's now favored companions, a beef-witted Gower and a pseudo-learned Fluellen. Their praising of the king's heroism is comic, although unwittingly so on their part. It illustrates the kind of folly Erasmus attributes to the camp of falsely Christian war leaders who reduce all laws and religion to chaos. Such leaders, he says, never lack “learned flatterers who call this patent madness by the names of zeal, piety, and fortitude,” having devised a way to allow someone to thrust cold steel into a brother's guts without any awareness of offense against Christ's precept of charity (p. 114). The irony of that observation, I think, helps us see Shakespeare's irony when he depicts Gower praising Henry as “gallant” and shows us Fluellen devising a way not merely to allow Henry's deed but also to flatter it with a “learned” comparison to the “magnanimity” of Alexander the Pig.¹⁰ Fluellen's lisp of “Pig” for “Big” is unwittingly on target. So also is his notion that Henry's greatness is akin to that of the pagan Alexander. Fluellen is oblivious of any norm such as Christian charity, and in that respect his comic learning is analogous to that of the archbishop in Act I. The two bishops of Act I, and here in Act IV the two yokels English and Welsh, seem to me parallel dramatizations of social types, high and low, who supported Henry with their flattery. Erasmus would have appreciated the irony of Shakespeare's drama.

In The Christian Prince Erasmus devotes a chapter to warning against flattery, and elsewhere in this treatise he twice says that pagan princes such as Alexander are no proper model for Christian kingship. “What could be more senseless,” he asks, “than for a man who has received the sacraments of the church to set up as an example for himself Alexander, Julius Caesar, or Xerxes?” (p. 203). And again, there is that admonition: “You have allied yourself with Christ—and yet will you slide back into the ways of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great?” (p. 153). A prince with Christ in his heart, Erasmus goes on to say, will rather bear with losing something of his empire than avenge an injury at great loss to the state (p. 154). A Christian prince should put aside “feigned excuses” and should try wholeheartedly for means to avoid war (pp. 249, 256). Erasmus urges the prince to question first his own right; and then, even if this is established without a doubt, he should nevertheless ask himself, “Shall I be charged with such an outpouring of human blood; with causing so many widows; with filling so many homes with lamentation and mourning; with robbing so many old men of their sons? … Must I account for all these things before Christ?” (pp. 253-54).

Shakespeare's Henry, if we apply these norms of Erasmus', is clearly a backslider from Christian duty. At Harfleur he urges his men to behave “like so many Alexanders”; and instead of asking himself the questions Erasmus mentions, he licenses a “conscience wide as hell.” To the town's women and children he threatens a massacre like that of “Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.” Shakespeare thus associates Henry with the archetypal tyrant of Bible story. And at Agincourt we see Henry neglecting to heed an Erasmus-like admonition by the plain soldier Williams. The king, says Williams, will have “a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in battle shall join at the latter day.” Disregarding this admonition, the disguised Henry ends his nighttime visit by giving jolly assurance as follows: “It is no English treason to cut French crowns, and tomorrow the king himself will be a clipper.” Here “clipping”—in the triple sense of cutting off heads, purses, and coins—serves as a kind of counterfeit creed by which Henry cheers up his troops.

Ironically, Henry's afterthought is to envy the repose enjoyed by wretches of “vacant mind.” But in whom have we seen a vacant mind? Not in Williams, surely, but rather in Henry's version of watchfulness, which has vacated all Christian sense of responsibility. His prayer before battle does likewise. After asking God to steel his soldiers' hearts and take from them a sense of reckoning, he asks pardon for his father's fault of crown-snatching but takes no look into his own similar purpose. In effect, Henry thus parodies the Bible's meaning of “watch and pray.” He has substituted what he earlier referred to as “idol ceremony,” whose only reward, he admitted, was “titles blown from adulation.” Such a concept of kingship flies in the face of the norms of Erasmus.

Erasmus in The Christian Prince makes the point that what distinguishes “a real king from the actor” is a king's duty to be “like a father” to the state (p. 152) and like a physician who studies to heal it (p. 205). Moreover, he says, a king should be like a farmer who loves the land over which he rules, and therefore he should consider no work more magnificent than a beautifying of his country with good habits, just laws, and magistrates of integrity (pp. 205, 248). He should strive to preclude, says Erasmus, any need for the science of war, since in military service there is a “busy sort of time-wasting,” destructive of values (p. 226). A prince's aim should be the welfare of his people. And this means, further, that he should marry someone from his own kingdom. Marriage to a foreigner for the sake of political alliance, Erasmus warns, can harbor future trouble. “It sometimes happens,” he remarks, “that after long violent wars, after countless disasters, a marriage is finally arranged and the matter settled, but only after both parties are worn out from misfortunes” (p. 242).

In Shakespeare's play Henry's marriage to Katherine comes when the armies of France and England are both exhausted and does not ensure future peace. The epilogue tells us that what followed was misfortune for England. In the negotiations for the marriage we see the emphasis Henry puts on obtaining it, but we see also that he has failed to obtain the crown of France and must disguise this fact with a paper title. In such a situation the two kings are adroit “actors,” but neither is the kind of “real king” Erasmus defined in terms of father, physician, and good farmer. Their warfare has dis-beautified the world's best garden, Burgundy tells us, by turning it into a tangle of weeds. And when he describes this disaster as a symbol of the unnatural savagery to which “ourselves and children” have been reduced, can we suppose that the pronoun “our” means the French only? In Henry's camp, more conspicuously than among the French, we have seen the “swearing and stern looks and meditating on nothing but blood” that Burgundy lists as evidence of moral decline. Erasmus would call this the result of a neglect of other sciences for the sake of frivolous war, a wasteful business. And Shakespeare has shown it to be the result of Henry's taking his father's advice to “waste the memory of former days” by busying giddy minds in foreign quarrels. But what a cost there is in such a policy! By setting English youth afire to “sell the pasture to buy the horse,” Henry has proved himself a poor farmer and no lover of England. He has dazzled eyes by his playacting, but he has healed nothing. Erasmus perceived the folly of that kind of kingship, as does Shakespeare.

The chorus of Shakespeare's play, however, lacks a sense of irony. It represents simpleminded English opinion—or, may we say, it echoes the view preached by Stultitia in Praise of Folly when she declares war to be the fountainhead of all praiseworthy deeds (p. 35). Human opinion, Stultitia goes on to say, is the basis of happiness, since “the human mind is so constituted that it is far more taken with appearances than with reality” (p. 71). Therefore, we enjoy life, she explains, as a sort of play in which various people wear the costumes for their assigned parts; and this whole play would be spoiled if some petulant wiseman were to strip away the makeup to examine the wretched man underneath. Would we not rightly banish, she asks, anyone who interfered with the disguises and poetry of illusion that are necessary to performing the play of life? The only true prudence, she concludes, is to adapt to prevailing circumstances, “do as the Romans do,” and run with the herd (pp. 43-44).

This Roman sense of values, which Erasmus has jestingly set forth, seems to me to be the operative faith of Shakespeare's chorus. Metaphors of history as a playhouse (and no accompanying sense of history as a time for pilgrimage) define the outlook of the chorus. Henry in the role of Mars, using his kingdom for a stage on which to create a “swelling scene,” is the story the chorus invites us to aid with our imaginations. A London swarming to fetch in its Caesar, as in “antique Rome,” sums up the narrator's vision of welfare achieved. He laments only that Shakespeare's stage is too limited to display the full story. To overcome this obstacle, he confesses at Agincourt his fear that the battle's name will be much disgraced by our seeing four or five ragged foils disposed in brawl ridiculous, unless we as audience bring to mind “true things by what their mockeries be.” We must see beyond the visible scene!

But are we not here being nudged by Shakespeare to ask what the “true things” are? The chorus thinks they are the public legend of Agincourt, more glorious than Shakespeare's crude players can convey. Shakespeare, surely, views the matter differently. His underside meaning is that the ragged foils are a true imitation of the moral raggedness of Agincourt, whose participants were engaged indeed in a ridiculous brawl. Yet, as we sit and see the disgraceful business, can we not bring to mind “true things”—namely, the Christian norms that Agincourt disgraced and merely counterfeited? This double-sided art of statement is in the tradition of Chaucer and Erasmus. Shakespeare has simply allowed his play's naive narrator, the chorus, to say some things truer than the speaker knows. The truth about Henry's conquest is that it was more Roman than Christian, and more a popular imagination of benefit than a genuine achieving of benefit.

That Shakespeare's play invites an ironic view of Henry was perceived by William Butler Yeats in 1903 but has been elaborated chiefly since Goddard's seminal essay of 1951. Progressively this view has helped establish the critical objectivity of Shakespeare as an artist able to portray both the popular basis of Henry's fame and the tawdry virtues that made it possible in an age concerned more with Roman spectacle than with Christian responsibility. Ralph Berry discovered in the play's rhetoric thirty-eight instances where a speaker's therefore or its semantic equivalent is used to cover a “dubious or fallacious argument.”¹¹ That kind of evidence, of course, coheres with the Erasmian sense of humor I have outlined. It coheres also with the English “giddy minds” to which Shakespeare's Henry IV referred, and with the kind of prince Shakespeare lets Falstaff preview comically as a “shallow” fellow, intent on “new silk and old sack” (2H4, II.iv.235 and I.ii.196). Shakespeare was apparently well aware that the Christianity of Henry was as hollow as the pseudo piety at which Erasmus aimed his praise of folly. To writers such as Erasmus, therefore, the dramatist probably turned for insights into the comedy of pagan values masquerading as Christian. The result was a play shaped to stimulate reappraisal of Henry through its canny combination of heroic myth and shady dealings.¹²

Notes

1. In citing from the Praise of Folly, my page references (given in parentheses) are to Clarence H. Miller's translation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979); and my page references to The Education of a Christian Prince are to Lester K. Born's translation (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1936), the one used by J. H. Walter.

2. Such a view is characteristic of a faithless and shallow learning, as Shakespeare makes clear in All's Well That Ends Well, II.i.115 ff and II.iii.1-5. In Henry's case, however, there is the further irony that the archbishop is correct in ascribing Henry's change of manners to natural causes rather than miracle; for, in fact, Henry has experienced no inward conversion or new faith, no miracle of the Holy Spirit such as John's gospel (chap. 3) stipulates for a genuine Christian conversion. J. H. Walter, floundering on this point, is forced to argue (p. xxi) that miracle is not “doctrinally admissable,” thus ignoring biblical doctrine. When Walter then tries to associate the “consideration” that caused Henry's change with a meaning given this word in Saint Bernard's writings, the argument is empty, since Bernard had in mind a spiritual consideration, something quite different from Henry's politic planning to attract more eyes. Realistically, the Frenchmen in the play attribute to Henry a “discretion” like that of the Roman Brutus (II.iv.37), in other words, a worldly reasoning of pagan calculation.

3. Recall here Sidney's well-known phrase regarding the weak foundation of roofs of gold; see his An Apology for Poetry, in G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, I (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press), 177.

4. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 224.

5. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, II (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1944), 472-78. Baldwin seems not to see the significance of the changes he reports. For instance, regarding the bees at the gate, he remarks that they become “Shakespeare's ‘executors pale,’ not acting on their own initiative as in Virgil, but in good English tradition carrying out the decree of a sad-eyed justice, who had thus to be inserted.” How good is this alteration? Baldwin also ignores the fact that one of the classes Willichius lists as proper to a republic, the sacerdotes, is absent from the archbishop's fable. Might we surmise that perhaps, ironically, the “sad-eyed Justice” represents the reduced function the archbishop takes to be his?

6. Andrew Gurr, “Henry V and the Bees Commonwealth,” Shakespeare Survey, 30 (1977), 61-72; the quotations are from Gurr, pp. 61 and 64.

7. The Statesman's Book of John of Salisbury, trans. John Dickinson (New York: Knopf, 1927), pp. 245-48.

8. Regarding Shakespeare's irony when dramatizing the Roman fable of Menenius, see my discussion in Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 341-50.

9. Goddard, p. 221. Holinshed had recorded in his chronicle that Edward III relinquished his claim to France in the treaty of Bretigny (1360). C. H. Hobday, in “Imagery and Irony in Henry V,” Shakespeare Survey, 21 (1968), 107-13, remarks, “To assume that Shakespeare regarded Henry's claim to the French throne as justified is to assume he was incapable of reasoning” (p. 111).

10. I comment on this comparison, along with other comic aspects of the play, in “Henry V as Heroic Comedy,” in Richard Hosley, ed., Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1962), pp. 163-82. See also Goddard, pp. 248-51, and Robert P. Merrix, “The Alexandrian Allusion in Shakespeare's Henry V,” English Literary Renaissance, 2 (1972), 321-33.

    Like Erasmus, Shakespeare had inherited the Christian estimate of Alexander given by Saint Augustine in The City of God, IV.iv., which likens “kingdoms without justice” to piracies. After commenting that “in thefts the hands of underlings are directed by the commander,” Augustine tells us of the excellent answer a pirate gave to the Macedonian Alexander who asked him how he dared molest the seas. The pirate replied, “How darest thou molest the whole world? But because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief: thou, doing it with a great navy, art called an emperor.” On the other hand, Augustine's example of a good ruler is the Christian emperor Theodosius, who rescued the child Valentinian from a usurping tyrant and succored the church with wholesome laws (City of God, V.xxvi). Augustine's norms in chap. xxiv for ruling well include “reign justly”; “be slack to revenge, quick to forgive”; “use correction for the public good”; “do all things not for glory but for charity.” These norms were probably those by which Shakespeare evaluated the morals of the kings he dramatized.

11. Berry, The Shakespearean Metaphor (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 48-60.

12. I think misleading the contention of Norman Rabkin in his Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 33-62, that the play, like a gestaltist's trick drawing of a rabbit or a duck, “leaves us at a loss” by oscillating between two “alternative” and “irreconcilable” portraits of Henry. “The terrible fact about Henry,” Rabkin thinks, “is that Shakespeare seems equally tempted by both its rival gestalts” because he is undergoing a “crisis of understanding and belief,” a spiritual struggle that he would spend the rest of his career working through (pp. 61-62). This biographical hypothesis seems to me unwarranted, and I would say that artistically the copresence of popular illusion and disgraceful facts about Henry is evidence not of “irreconcilable” portraits but of correlative aspects of his delusory success. That is, unless Henry had had in his own day many auditors willing to revere a Mars-like hero of “famine, sword, and fire,” his hunting expedition would have had no supporters and his massacre-acquired victory no public acclaim; and likewise, an Elizabethan appetite for such things, a readiness by many auditors to overlook or approve Henry's tactics, is correlative with this hero's “theatre” success. The symbiotic relationship between blind appetite in the public and pretenses by wretched heroes who thereby win veneration is one of the points Erasmus makes in his satire. Augustine, I may add, had made this same point in his City of God (II.xx), where his criticism of Roman culture was that a love of wealth and riot as constituting human happiness led people to honor as gods whoever procured this kind of happiness, even though a reasonable creature would be offended if he surveyed the “impurities” and “waste” of the kings who achieved this happiness. It is likely that Shakespeare was familiar with The City of God; and if so, he must have been reminded of Rome's cultural flaw when he found in Holinshed and Hall a similar phenomenon—a lauding of Henry in the summary evaluations of these chroniclers, even though the episodes reported in their chronicle material contained unsavory details at which a reasonable reader might balk if not predisposed to approve Henry. Shakespeare thereupon decided, I suggest, to challenge a return to ethical reason through a strategy of both inflating the adulation of Henry and amplifying his evasive makeshifts, thus squeezing the reader's mind between the portrait's two layers of illusion and shoddy reality. This had been the technique of Erasmus for exposing worldly folly.