SOURCE: Sypher, Wylie. “Political Time: The Vanity of History.” In The Ethic of Time: Structures of Experience in Shakespeare, pp. 23-38. New York: Seabury Press, 1976.

[In the following essay, Sypher reads the second tetralogy in terms of the notion that history is a spurious charade that fades into insignificance when viewed against the measureless backdrop of time.]

Richard III is a “history” play, but hardly in the sense that the tetralogy of Richard II, Henry IV: Parts I and II, and Henry V are “history” plays, for the latter deal with politics as Richard III does not. That is, the tetralogy revolves about the modern issues of power, whereas the malignity of Richard III seems like a grotesque theatrical interlude. Richard III is a caricature of politics; the Henry plays are Realpolitik, dealing with history as we have lately lived it. They have, for us, a disturbing authenticity. The criminal career of Richard III involved no policies; the Henry plays are studies in Lancastrian policy. Shakespeare understands the political games we have been playing since the Renaissance, questioning the relation of power to morality.

However he may overextend his case. Jan Kott shrewdly states that the Henry plays treat power as “something abstract and mythological, almost a pure idea,” a “grand mechanism” to penalize the weak, making them guilty. This exercise of power was in turn a reflex of the new freedom of the will studied in Machiavelli's Prince.

Machiavelli secularized politics, and his premises are phrased at the opening of his book: “The wish to acquire is in truth very natural and common, and men always do so when they can, and for this they will be praised, not blamed.” Such endorsement of power brings into the foreground of history an impulse as old as the epic. But in the epic power was placed in the social context of a code of equity, sharing, and measure. In epic and epical drama, as in the voice of old Queen Margaret in Richard III, power was qualified by the piety of an ancient law of retribution, a postulate of the provincial ordering of the world.

In Machiavelli the piety vanishes. In fact, piety itself is an instrument useful in politics. The Prince is left to make his own way, and Machiavelli asks whether regents “have to use prayers or can they use force?” If they use prayer, “they always succeed badly, and never compass anything; but when they can rely on themselves and use force, then they are rarely endangered.” So the successful Prince will employ “all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict,” and will rely on arms, which must be the foundation of good law. Nor need he dread the reproach of cruelty, since “it is much safer to be feared than loved.” The Prince must learn to be a beast as well as a man, both lion and fox. A policy of power will exempt him from the cycle of Fortune at least to a degree, for “fortune is the arbiter of one half of our actions, but she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.”

There was great malaise about this creed, as there was when Athens long ago used it with entire self-awareness in subjecting the little island of Melos. Thucydides reports, in dramatic form, the brutal honesty of the Athenians, who assured the helpless Melians:

Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can … ; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. Thus, as far as the gods are concerned, we have no fear and no reason to fear that we shall be at a disadvantage.

Euripides' plays are filled with repercussions from this episode; so too Troilus and Cressida is a Shakespearean repercussion from Machiavellian politics. During the debate about keeping Helen, Hector's great speech, derived from Aristotelian ethic, is a rebuttal of the principles of power politics. Hector pleads with the Trojans for a “free determination 'twixt right and wrong,” arguing that if Helen be the wife of Menelaus, the “moral laws of nature and of nations” prescribe that she be returned to the Greeks. Hector's speech is like a footnote to Erasmus or Grotius.

So the Renaissance was hard put to deny the validity of Machiavelli's politics, which by exercise of the Prince's will suspended not only moral codes but, at least partially, the cycle of Fortune. The “moral laws of nature and of nations” having been sadly shaken, the Renaissance needed to counter Machiavellian policy by some alternative principles. Thus it resorted to certain anti-Machiavellian theses, none of which proved very effectual, as Shakespeare's plays indicate. Among these anti-Machiavellian theses were: the already outworn doctrine of the divinity hedging a king, the ideal of honor in the prince, the associated idea that the prince must be a creditable man, and the equivocal notion of redeeming the time.

Shakespeare deals with all these themes, but his distinctive anti-Machiavellian reaction is his new and very sensitive response to the past arising partly from a reinterpretation of the rotation of Fortune's wheel and partly from an intensely dramatic perception that the course of history has been nothing but a masquerade. Shakespeare's sense that this masquerade—this empty pageant of power—has been a blood bath heightens the pathos of the past, giving it existential value. Often in Shakespeare history seems like a triviality or mere tableau where political expediencies are seen against the vast backward and abysm of time. For Shakespeare has the new Renaissance consciousness of the infinite, the opening of illimitable distances like the blue backgrounds in paintings by Leonardo or Patinir or Herri Met de Bles, like a world dissolved, like Prospero's visionary horizon against which we are transient dreamwork. For Shakespeare history can seem to be one more illusion. This is his dramatic reply to Machiavelli, who lacked poetry.

Power and pathos in history, the divinity and honor of the prince, the need to redeem the time—the Henry tetralogy is like an analysis of such themes in Renaissance politics, each ambiguous as if Shakespeare could not find his way to a convincing resolution. Within these plays are the radically inconsistent premises of the Elizabethan mentality of crisis. However they were affected by a medieval tendency to read history as a homily, the plays anticipate the final secularization of politics that causes Nietzsche to proclaim, “The gods are dead; let the superman be born.” The political crisis extends beyond the history plays, for Claudius, Fortinbras, Macbeth, Antony, and Lear's daughters are all involved in the grand strategy of power struggles.

In the Henry plays history is a new kind of chronicle examining codes of political strategy. Shakespeare resisted this merely strategic reading of history, but not with entire success, or at least not without some confusion. He seems never to have found an entirely satisfactory context for the use of power; but he attempted what Machiavelli did not attempt: to find such a context. As Northrop Frye has said, “In Shakespeare there are, in practice, certain moral limits to leadership.” Shakespeare's problem is ours—to provide some moral context for using the ever more terrifying power at our disposal.

The Henry tetralogy is a continuing exploration of alternatives, each bringing its own dilemma. Many have discussed how Shakespeare, unable to regard history as naked power politics, is indebted to the morality play with its emphasis upon the penalties for the king's misconduct, or, on the other hand, for regicide. Shakespeare was much occupied with the nature of the ideal king, always placing Machiavellian policy in an unMachiavellian context, hesitating to endorse a wholly secular meaning to history.

In the background of the tetralogy is the figure of Richard II, a symbol of the divinity hedging the king. Old Carlisle, hearing how Bolingbroke will seize Richard's crown, protests that no subject can sentence his sovereign. With the same choral voice we hear in Queen Margaret, Carlisle predicts that if Bolingbroke is crowned the blood of English will soak the ground and future ages will groan for this foul act. The course of the plays confirms the truth of Carlisle's foreboding, and yet Shakespeare is unable fully to confirm the divine right of kings, for the figure of Glendower is a parody of the royal image of Richard, suggesting the fraudulence of the claim that the king is God's vicegerent, above the jurisdiction of men. Glendower is, in fact, the reductio ad absurdum of the divinity of kings when he claims that at his nativity:

The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes
Of burning cressets, and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shaked like a coward.

(Henry IV: Part I, III, 1)

With sane and secular realism, Hotspur replies, “Why so it would have done at the same season if your mother's cat had but kittened.”

So Shakespeare is thrown back on his other theme regarding royalty, that the good king must be a good man—a theme that, again, is a critique of the Machiavellian image of the Prince as lion and fox. By both criteria Richard II fails entirely; he not only thieves but verifies the Machiavellian truism that the king must be strong enough to use the power that endows him. Richard is a weakling filled with self-pity, and his pathos cannot exempt him from the penalty of failure:

What must the king do now? Must he submit?
The king shall do it. Must he be deposed?
The king shall be contented. Must he lose
The name of king? A God's name, let it go!

(III, 3)

England needs Bolingbroke, who by Machiavellian principles justly sends Richard to his obscure little grave.

Woven in with Richard's failure is the old resignation to the cycle of Fortune's wheel. Deposed Richard, extending his crown to Henry IV, brings in the theme (which is repeated when Bolingbroke himself faces Hal in the Jerusalem chamber):

Now is this golden crown like a deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another,
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen, and full of water.
That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs whilst you mount up on high.

(IV, 1)

Associated too with this Chaucerian alternation is the lyrical melancholy pervading the entire tetralogy, suggesting that the king is but a man after all. Machiavelli had introduced into politics the schizoid notion that a bad man could be a good prince, or conversely, a good man could be a bad prince. Consequently there appears the disrelationship between public and private character, leading to the depersonalizing of politics, making it a form of role-playing. For in such politics the mask is more real than the face; the Prince must drop his face to exhibit his mask. The act is more real than the actor. Or is it? As a dramatist, Shakespeare continually raised doubts about the validity of role-playing. He was ever inclined to distrust the very theatrical medium in which he worked, and his plays are filled with references to the deceptive nature of dramatic representation. In the Henry tetralogy he is almost obsessively concerned with the relation between the nature of the king as man and the role he played as king. In this way Shakespeare's reading of history is radically dramatic.

The relation between the man and the king—here is an aspect of Renaissance humanism. As Richard sits upon the ground speaking of graves and epitaphs, he recognizes that the king is as vulnerable to calamity and death as his meanest subjects. Like them he feeds on bread, tastes grief, and meets the disasters from which his royal role cannot protect him. In such passages—and in the great scene between Hal and his father in the Jerusalem chamber—Shakespeare has a perception Machiavelli never attained, namely, that the play of political power is only another imposture enacted in time. As Richard says, “nothing can we call our own but death,”

And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

(III, 2)

The antic death, sitting within the hollow crown, keeps court among kings, mocking at pomp and allowing the Prince to monarchize with “self and vain conceit” until at a prick the whole empty pageant ceases. Machiavelli lacked this pathos of time, this longer and more human perspective on politics.

Having acknowledged the defenceless humanity of kings, Shakespeare is led to that other anti-Machiavellian thesis at the heart of the history plays, the theme of honor, through which Machiavelli finessed his way with specious ease. Though Shakespeare is fully aware of the validity or the necessity of honor, this value in history is frequently uncertain and often deceptive, the mere scutcheon Falstaff finds it. Noble and appealing as the ideal of honor may be, Shakespeare does not rely upon it as an assured moral principle operative in history. Behind, or within, the ideal of the king's honor always lurks the implication that, as Lenin put it, in politics there is no morality, only expediency. There is enough cynicism in the Henry plays to indicate how deeply Shakespeare was affected by the wound Machiavelli gave modern politics.

In Hal, the most attractive of the Lancastrians, honor could be said to replace the ideal of the divinity of kings. And yet Hal himself tarnished the ideal of honor by stroke after stroke of effective strategy, especially in the outrageous imperialism of his incursion into France. The Lancastrian line never allowed honor to inhibit the realism of their policy. Falstaff has the privilege of deflating this hypertrophied value: if he that died Wednesday for some airy notion has honor, then honor is only a word. Besides, it is not Hal, but Hotspur, who embodies the unqualified principle of honor—Hotspur, with his romantic wrong-headedness and passion, voices the ideal of honor and the foolish honesty that the Prince may have. But the leap to pluck bright honor from the moon is not so easy as Hotspur supposed, and it is an insane venture anyhow, as Hamlet knew when he mediated on that other sweet prince, Fortinbras, who embarked on an enterprise as headlong as Hotspur's, finding quarrel in a straw, fighting for a plot that could not hold the slain. Honor as an ultimate value seems to be a variety of neurosis, a compulsion that is politically rash, a perversion of the use of power.

So over against the outworn faith in the divinity of kings, the secular ideal of honor is hardly tenable as a strategic principle. To this degree Shakespeare subscribes to Machiavelli. Yet the need for honor rings like a refrain through Shakespeare's plays, heard in Antony's dealings with Caesar and in Pompey's refusal to cut the throats of his competitors when they feast as his guests. It is symptomatic, however, that honor is cherished most by the losers in history. Shakespeare seems forced back to a qualified Machiavellian policy that should be used by a king who is also a responsible man. Here we are on the most ambiguous ground of all, for this ideal requires a Prince who is able to temporize by adapting the ethic of honor to pragmatic or utilitarian policy.

Henry IV, having liquidated Richard for the good of England as well as in his own interest, rejects the very poison he found it prudent to use, saying that his soul is full of woe because of the blood he thought it expedient to shed. The murderer puts on the mask of the moralist. Then Hal, descending into Eastcheap, plays the same equivocal game at the bohemian plane:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.

(I, 2)

Hal's father confesses that he himself used much the same tactic while Richard ambled with shallow jesters; Henry seemed the nobler when he found the moment to ascend. The Lancastrians are able to exploit the time, establishing themselves by an opportunism that is Machiavellian. They are salutary Machiavellians. One of the most comprehending appraisals of political power is Henry's comment, “Are these things then necessities? Then let us meet them like necessities.”

The Lancastrians are creatures of time who can manipulate the occasion. By contrast, Falstaff is a creature who is timeless. Born late in the day, he is an archetypal figure exempt from the casualties of history until Hal rejects him. At the start of Henry IV, when Falstaff asks, “What time of day is it, lad?,” Hal replies almost symbolically, “What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day?”—a “superfluous” query on Falstaff's part. If the Lancastrians are strategic, Falstaff is instinctual. Falstaff is able to respond biologically, so that when he is caught lying about the robbery at Gadshill, he claims that he was “a coward on instinct,” for “instinct is a great matter.”

Falstaff brings into history an animal faculty for survival by an adaptability that was not scientifically defined until the 19th century. He is a natural being like Nietzsche's satyr creatures existing behind the facade of history, and he dies at the ebbing of the tide. In his greatest biological speech after the battle of Shrewsbury, Falstaff identifies his timeless instinctual existence by affirming that he is no counterfeit figure in history but, like Christ himself, an embodiment of the perpetual vitality not to be quenched:

To die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed.

(V, 4)

Falstaff's role-playing is unlike the role-playing of the Lancastrians since it springs from a primal élan vital, organically, not from preconceived policy. He is able to transform the Darwinian to the Dionysiac values. Falstaff responds tropistically; his mutations have an ad hoc rapidity, like the changing colors of the chameleon. His adaptability is not an act calculated in advance but an ecological reaction.

Only when he begins to play the Lancastrian game with Shallow does Falstaff fall victim to history and time. Until then he maintains himself as an image of Whitman's urge, procreant urge, the organic principle of life itself enduring beyond and behind political history to which he at last succumbs. By his descent into Eastcheap Hal participates in Falstaff's celebration of vitality.

Yet Hal belongs to political history, and the Lancastrians move through these plays with a double time sense: the sense, first, that they have a vocation, by using their political strategy, to redeem the time by a secular, half-Machiavellian policy; and secondly, by their sense that the very political history they create is only an insubstantial pageant in which they are transient actors. They sense that they can, and must, make history, but that history is a triviality when seen against the illimitable horizon of time.

Hal has this double, ironic vision even while he is in Eastcheap. “Well, thus we play the fools with the time,” he says, “and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.” Hotspur, too, at the moment of his death, has the same sardonic sense of the vanity of history:

But thoughts, the slaves of life, and life time's fool,
And time that takes survey of all the world
Must have a stop.

(V, 4)

Richard II likewise has this sense that the life of a king is an absurd charade; deposed by Bolingbroke, he is suddenly time's fool:

… I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing. But whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.

(V, 5)

One of the touching moments in these plays comes when Henry IV, who has mastered history by dethroning Richard, lies awake saddened by the disorders in his kingdom, and meditates on the unfathomable reaches of time against which the course of history seems negligible. It may be the longest vision of time in Shakespeare, longer even than Macbeth's despairing vision of interminable yesterdays and tomorrows. The full and astonishing range of Henry's vision backward over time can be suggested by a model one of our scientists has devised to scale the age of the earth against man's history.¹ If we contract terrestrial time into the scale of a single calendar year, and the world began on January 1st, then life would not appear until early August. By October there would be the oldest fossils, by December reptilian life would have developed; mammals would evolve about Christmas, and on New Year's Eve, by five minutes to midnight, man would present himself. Recorded human history would occur in the interval while midnight strikes.

This reductive backward view is phrased in Henry's meditation, which is filled with the pathos of a time sense that only modern man could have, and which makes Machiavellian tactics seem like a jest:

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! And other times to see
The beachy girdle of the ocean
Too wide for Neptune's hips …
          … O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.

(III, 1)

The passage has none of the cynicism of Macbeth's bitter speech, but springs from an awareness of fatality brought by the Renaissance time scale, the blue distance that was like an elegiac background to the intrigues of the Machiavellian Prince who makes himself master of fortune and his hour. Henry's nocturnal soliloquy gives the largest possible meaning to the Renaissance landscape-with-figures—that marvelously new art form, a feat of the Renaissance imagination where the image of man is seen against a cosmic, timeless projection, into which he is absorbed with a nearly Oriental intuition of totality. The only kind of surrender known to the Lancastrians comes in the guise of this new temporal consciousness, this receding horizon that obliterates history.

For Falstaff, too, history is only an interlude that confers the delusory value known as honor. At a remarkable moment in the Jerusalem chamber while Henry IV lies at point of death, he is able to take, at last, a Falstaffian view of political history. Henry admits to Hal that his whole career in historical time has been like an ephemeral role, and with a sadness that is like a counterpoint to Falstaff's cynical appraisal of honor, the dying Henry confesses to his son that God alone knows by what devious paths he got the crown:

For all my reign hath been but as a scene
Acting that argument.

(IV, 5)

History is not only guilt; it is a mumming. At this moment Henry has a dramatic vision lacking in Machiavelli when he recommends the politics of success. Only the lengthened perspective of seeing history against the abyss of time could give this modern feeling of the vanity and pathos of politics, a pathos and comedy Machiavelli would not understand.

But this is only an episode in the Henry plays, and Hal, like his father, like his brother John, must play the game of politics to redeem the time. In his attempt to console Henry for the dereliction of Hal, Warwick predicts that Hal will

… in the perfectness of time
Cast off his followers, and their memory
Shall as a pattern or a measure live,
By which his grace must mete the lives of others,
Turning past evils to advantages.

(IV, 4)

For Hal as an agent in political history will manipulate morality itself and continue to play the game that his father played as opportunist. Hal must redeem the time by living in a time quite different from Falstaff's time; he must reject the ahistoric time of revelry, the changeless time of the saturnalia, and take his place in the foreground of Machiavellian strategic time. So also Prince John proves at Gaultree that he is the legitimate son of his father by the strategy of redressing the grievances of the rebellious nobles while he condemns them to death.

After his father has gone wild into his grave, Hal continues to play the historical game even more effectively than the elder Henry. Hal puts on the mask of responsibility and justice to legitimize his policy. Before invading France, he is at pains to certify by Salic law that he can with right and conscience claim the French crown. The appearance of legality gives this imperialist enterprise a color of righteousness. Falstaff is dead, but there was perhaps more integrity in his cynicism about honor than in Hal's barbaric threat to the citizens of Harfleur: if he attacks again, he will bury the city in ashes, and his soldiers with the license of bloody hands will mow down virgins and infants.

Hal at least partially redeems himself from the amorality of history the night before Agincourt when, being catechized by Williams the common foot soldier, he is compelled to examine the justice of his cause and to decide whether it is honorable. Hal's conviction that honor must be grounded in an accountable use of royal power—meaning, in effect, that the king must answer for the ills befalling his people—is a response to Richard II, to Hotspur, to Falstaff (and to Fortinbras). Thus morality is linked with history. Honor does not accrue from victory, but from the character of the regent who leads his people to victory, or to defeat. So the king must be one with his subjects, among the happy few who share the making of history.

Hal resolves his “identity crisis” as Hamlet could not—in the course of history itself. If Hamlet's “identity crisis” is resolved at all, it is resolved for Hamlet alone. Hal's case is otherwise; he finds himself in his commitment to his followers, in what Buber would term an I-Thou relation. Hal's freedom is not found in Eastcheap, for while he was in bohemia he had only freedom from his father's empty respectability. Hal's freedom is found at Agincourt, where there is not freedom from but freedom to.

Freedom means freedom to act. The Hamlet paralysis is gone, for Hamlet's quest for freedom from was partly responsible for his frustrations. Hamlet could not redeem the time, although at last he was able to redeem himself. Throughout the Henry plays and throughout Hamlet there is a counterpoint of the private and the public. Hamlet never moves outside the dilemmas of the private; thus he is not a sweet prince except by promise—never by political action. This is what links Hamlet with Richard II, who as a public figure is disastrous. Richard as a private figure, with his Hamlet-like self-indulgent sensibility, has a certain pathos, a large degree of humanity. Yet Richard's very consciousness of his frailty is self-regarding, much like Hamlet's consciousness of his sullied flesh, his nameless offenses. Hal is never self-indulgent to this extent, for Hal was able to command his roles as Hamlet and Richard are not. Hamlet and Richard are seduced by the roles they allow themselves to play. But from the first Hal—who has his own dramatic imagination—knows them all and is able to calculate the instant when one mask is to be dropped, and another put on.

Richard and Hamlet exist in the realm of the Eigenwelt. Hal realizes himself in the time of the Mitwelt and Umwelt. Hamlet and Richard could not play the game of history. Hal plays this game to the hilt, existing as a public figure. Further, insofar as time is subjective for Richard and Hamlet, it is a form of melancholia in Richard and a form of compulsion in Hamlet. For Hamlet the times are out of joint; he should act, and does not act. Not being able to act, he lacks honor. The sense of failed honor is a symptom of Hamlet's neurosis, which appears in his agonized contemplation of Fortinbras' Polish venture. Hamlet knows that this rash Norwegian, making mouths at the event, is afflicted by a disease of ambition in fighting for an eggshell. But Hamlet knows, too, that Fortinbras has an honor wanting in himself.

The Henry plays are a catharsis for this neurosis attaching to the name of honor. The catharsis is reached in several ways. There is, first of all, the ridicule of the divinity of kings, the frailty of Richard, and the inflated claims of Glendower. Then there is the pitiless inquisition by Falstaff, along with Hal's own scorn for the impulsive Hotspur. Above all there is old Henry's confession, baring his royal masquerade. Finally, out of all this mutual reduction emerges the figure of Hal attaining a public honor won through private examination of a cause to which he commits his subjects. It is an honor set upon a choice of policy which must be realized in historical and public time. Yet, however Hal redeems the time by finding his identity in political history, the fact remains that politics may not be enough, for politics and ethics are still at odds, especially when seen against the theatricality of the Grand Mechanism—a mechanism that looks like idiocy when projected against ahistorical time.

Notes

1. The following “scale reduction” of history is drawn from Hans Kalmus, “Organic Evolution and Time,” in: J. T. Fraser, The Voices of Time, p. 332. Kalmus is quoting B. Hocking.