The complex scene on the eve of Agincourt reveals that for Shakespeare politics was a matter for serious debate. And debate is premised on the notion of opposing points of view, each having an element of validity. Shakespeare does not impose his own political views. He leaves a space for the audience to make up their own minds, and that is inherently a way of giving the power of free thought to the people.
The dangers of open debate were all too apparent in an England fractured by religious dissension. Queen Elizabeth, her council and her magistrates were all too aware of the uncertainty of their hold upon power. They could not rely on divine right theory alone. After all, Mary Queen of Scots had been expelled by her Protestant subjects and Elizabeth had (eventually, reluctantly) countenanced her execution. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, the English had taken the side of the people as they rose against their king, Philip II of Spain. Insurrection was always a dangerous matter.
"THE GENERAL OF OUR GRACIOUS EMPRESS"
The 1580s was a decade of war in Flanders, where the English fought with the Dutchmen against the might of Catholic Spain. The 1590s was a decade of war in Ireland, where the Earl of Essex struggled in vain to quell the rebellion of the irrepressible Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone. For the first half of his career, all through the last years of old Queen Elizabeth's reign, Shakespeare was a war poet. He had an obsessive interest in military life. Richard III, Titus Andronicus and all his sons, Othello, Iago and Cassio, Macbeth and the other Thanes, Hamlet's armored father and young Fortinbras, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar, Coriolanus and Aufidius, Alcibiades, Henry IV and Sir John Falstaff, dozens of dukes, earls, and knights in the ranks of the history plays, Benedick and his colleagues in Much Ado About Nothing, Bertram and Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well: all are soldiers; some by profession and others by force of circumstance. All are defined to a greater or lesser degree by the hunger to fill the vacuum left by battle and by war as the defining male action (which is not to say that Shakespeare failed to create a good line in female soldiers--Queen Margaret in the Henry VI plays, Tamora Queen of Goths, Joan of Arc, Cordelia and her sisters, Cleopatra). But the most famous of all his soldiers was King Henry V.
At the beginning of the fifth act of King Harry's play, the Chorus describes his triumphal procession through the streets of London upon his return to England after his astonishing victory on the field of Agincourt. At Blackheath, the audience is told, the king's lords urged him to have "His bruised helmet and his bended sword" borne before him through the city. Harry forbids it,
Being free from vainness and self-glorious pride; Giving full trophy, signal and ostent
Quite from himself to God....
This accords with his attribution of the victory to God on hearing news of the disproportionate numbers of the French and English dead ("And not to us, but to thy arm alone, / Ascribe we all"). And it accords with historical reality: in 1415 Henry V made solemn progress to the shrine in Westminster Abbey that contained the bones of Edward the Confessor. Despite the loudly cheering citizens, triumphal arches, and fountains flowing with wine, not once during the five-hour procession across London did Henry smile. All glory should go to God and Saint George, he said, and no thanks should be given to him.
Shakespeare accordingly declined the opportunity to present a spectacular victory procession onstage. Instead, he devoted the fifth act to the humbler and messier matter of the quarrel between Fluellen and Pistol, then the carving up of the victor's spoils in France. Fluellen and Pistol are effectively surrogates for King Henry and his old companion Sir John Falstaff (Fluellen is a soldier and a Welshman, utterly loyal to the king who was once Prince Harry of Monmouth, while Pistol is a braggart, a coward, and a drinker, bearing the memory of riotous Prince Hal of Eastcheap). The "Welsh correction" of the "English condition" is the final episode in what might be called the battle for the soul of the king between the spirit of Hal and that of Harry, an inner and outer struggle that goes right back to the beginning of Henry IV Part I. Pistol's ignominious exit replays the rejection of Falstaff in a sour minor key, even as the focus on the common soldiers returning from the war remains in keeping with the play's refusal to see only from the point of view of kings and earls and those who have power.
The play ends with an epilogue in which the Chorus reminds the audience that King Harry's life was all too short and that he was succeeded by the child king Henry VI, whose state was mangled and mismanaged by so many rival lords "That they lost France and made his England bleed, / Which oft our stage hath shown." The latter line is a jokey reference to the fact that Shakespeare had made his theatrical name with the Henry VI plays. There is a strong possibility that Shakespeare played the part of the Chorus himself: such lines as "Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, / Our bending author hath pursued the story" would come well and wittily from his lips. Whether or not he spoke the lines, in writing them Shakespeare gives the sense of coming full circle, bringing his long cycle of English history plays to a close. When his fellow actors collected his plays in the First Folio after his death, they arranged the English history plays in sequence not of composition but of the chronology of events. Readers of the Folio would have turned the page from this mention of Henry V's "small time" of life and found Henry VI Part I beginning with his funeral procession. In all probability the wooden coffin in that procession would have been adorned with "His bruised helmet and his bended sword" in order to evoke his military greatness. These would of course have been stage props, but their design could easily have been based on their historical originals.
Whenever Shakespeare or a member of his acting company or his audience went into Westminster Abbey (as many of them, Shakespeare included, may well have done early in 1599 for the funeral of the national poet, Edmund Spenser), they would have seen Henry V's saddle, helm, and shield. These objects, his so-called "funeral achievements," were displayed on the wooden beam above the chantry where he was laid. Katherine of Valois, his queen, the real-life original of the charming Kate who is wooed in the final scene of the play, lay nearby in an open coffin of loose boards beside him (a generation after Shakespeare, the diarist Samuel Pepys saw her mummified remains and was allowed to kiss her lips).
The prominence of the relics in the Abbey is a reminder that the story of Henry V was very much alive and significant in 1599. Shakespeare boldly stressed the contemporaneity of the figure of conquering Harry in some other lines in the chorus at the beginning of the final act, lines that allude both back to ancient Rome and forward to the moment when the play was first performed. By so doing, they constitute the most explicit and striking topical allusion anywhere in his works:
... But now behold,
In the quick forge and working-house of thought, How London doth pour out her citizens.
The mayor and all his brethren in best sort,
Like to the senators of th'antique Rome,
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conqu'ring Caesar in:
As by a lower but by loving likelihood,
Were now the general of our gracious empress,
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit,
To welcome him? Much more, and much more cause,
Did they this Harry....
Few audience members could have had any doubt what the Chorus was talking about. The "gracious empress" is Queen Elizabeth and "the general" is the Earl of Essex--the queen's sometime favorite, embodiment of the martial code of chivalry and honor, leader of the war party in the long-standing debate at court over how to proceed in relation to Spain. The reference to Essex's Irish campaign against the "rebellion" of Tyrone is unmistakable.
Shakespeare does not let go of his habitual political caution. It is a "likelihood," not a certainty, that Essex will return from Ireland bringing rebellion broached on his sword (
in fact, he returned in ignominious failure a few months after the premiere of the play). In the mind's eye of Shakespeare's Chorus it is an open question how many people will turn out to cheer Essex. In Elizabethan punctuation a question mark served the function of both exclamation and interrogation: Shakespeare's political slipperiness becomes visible if we think about the difference in tone between the equally legitimate modernizations of punctuation, "How many ... To welcome him!" and "How many ... To welcome him?"
But, for all the hedging, there is still a boldness in the comparison. When "conquering Caesar" crossed the Rubicon and returned to Rome, there was talk of his seizing an imperial crown and Brutus and his friends had to take drastic action to save the republic. Shakespeare dramatized that story in the other historical drama he brought to the London stage in 1599, Julius Caesar. Conversely, there were moments in late Elizabethan court politics when exasperation with the old, childless queen's refusal to name an heir led some to wonder whether there might not be a future for England in some form of Roman-style republican government, with the Privy Council serving as its Senate and a strong man such as Essex in the role of Consul.
Essex was widely perceived as a heroic figure, a no-nonsense military man. He was greeted with acclaim whenever he rode through the streets of London, as he did before heading off on his French campaign in 1591. Intriguingly, Shakespeare had previously created an image of Henry V's father, Henry IV, formerly Henry Bullingbrook, that was highly evocative of this aspect of Essex. At the climax of Richard II, he describes Bullingbrook in London:
... the duke, great Bullingbrook,
Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed
Which his aspiring rider seemed to know,
With slow but stately pace kept on his course,
While all tongues cried 'God save thee, Bullingbrook!'
There was no precedent in Shakespeare's chronicle source for this striking image of Bullingbrook's popularity. It has been invented in order to establish a contrast with the deposed Richard II, who follows in after with no man crying "God save him" as dust and rubbish are thrown out of the windows on his head.
In the Henry IV plays, however, Shakespeare conspicuously dropped the image of Bullingbrook, now king, as a popular figure. Far from showing himself among his people and exemplifying strong government, Henry IV skulks in his palace as his kingdom disintegrates around him, the penalty for his usurpation of his throne. The horseman and populist is his son Hal, who goes on to become Henry V, leading his men to triumph in battle. The language of the fifth act Chorus's description of his return to London after the victory at Agincourt echoes that of the speech about his father at the corresponding moment in Richard II. As so often in Shakespeare, the wheel of history comes full circle. But, unusually for Shakespeare, it also comes directly into the present. Regardless of Shakespeare's semiconcealed political intentions in making the allusion--one gets the sense that he is only somewhere a little over halfway to being, as his sometime patron the Earl of Southampton certainly was, a supporter of the Earl of Essex--it is easy to see how the two remarkably similar passages in Richard II and Henry V could have been perceived as pro-Essex and therefore why the Essex faction turned to the Chamberlain's Men and asked them to stage a Shakespeare play on the day in February 1601 that turned out to be the eve of the abortive rebellion against Queen Elizabeth that cost Essex his life on the scaffold.
As Nicholas Hytner suggests in his interview about his 2003 National Theatre production of the play, Shakespeare's allusion to Essex implicitly licenses producers and directors of Henry V to establish resonances with the wars of their own time. Though there is a long history of patriotic productions, a close examination of the text provides ample justification for readings and performances that are skeptical and anxious about the values of war.
"WHAT ISH MY NATION?"
Where Henry IV began with rebellion coming from Scotland (the Douglas) and Wales (Owen Glendower), Henry V brings the whole of the British Isles together in the fight against France. Included in King Henry's army is a quartet representing England (Gower), Wales (Fluellen), Scotland (Jamy), and Ireland (MacMorris). But we cannot say for sure that the play is celebrating the unification of the four nations into one, for during the campaign against France, King Harry's army is not without its tensions. The Irish MacMorris, in particular, is an odd man out, not even at peace with the affable Fluellen:
FLUELLEN Captain MacMorris, I think, look you, under your correction, there is not many of your nation--
MACMORRIS Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain and a bastard and a knave and a rascal? What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?
In the chorus to the fifth act, the Earl of Essex is seemingly celebrated because as the audience is watching the play in London in 1599 he is broaching the Irish on his sword. Yet here in the body of the third act, Shakespeare gives a voice to Ireland. Or rather, he questions England's--for the Welsh Fluellen in his loyalty to Harry of Monmouth, once Prince of Wales and now king of England, speaks for England--he questions England's right to speak for Ireland. What Englishman or anglicized Welshman dare talk of MacMorris's nation? What kind of a nation can Ireland be when the Irish are construed by the English as villains and bastards and knaves and rascals? And that is how the dominant voice of Elizabethan England's national poet, Edmund Spenser, did construe them in his dialogue of the mid-1590s, A View of the Present State of Ireland. But even Spenser had his countervoices. A View is written in the form of a dialogue and it is more sharply critical of the "Old English" settlers in Ireland than the Irish themselves, while in The Faerie Queene there is a Savage Nation resembling Ireland, but also a Savage Man who is the noblest man.
As for Shakespeare, he is all countervoice. When MacMorris says "What ish my nation?" Ireland in its anguish is allowed to speak, just as in The Tempest Shakespeare's most beautiful poetry is put into the mouth of a "savage and deformed slave" whose name evokes Caribbean and Cannibal. Because Shakespeare's own allegiances are so elusive, because every one of his voices has its countervoice--Fluellen his MacMorris, King Harry his Michael Williams, Prospero his Caliban--he has become the voice of many positions, whether political, ethnic, or ethical.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the amount of space that is given to the king's stirring speeches and the archbishop's convoluted history lesson, Henry V has almost as high a proportion of prose as the two parts of Henry IV. And it is the prose scenes that are the most emotionally engaging: Hostess Quickly's simultaneously comic and moving account of Falstaff's death, the moment of tenderness as the women say farewell to their men going off to war, the figure of Fluellen (portrayed with great affection for his loyalty and professionalism, yet simultaneously teased for his pedantry in the history and theory of warfare), the utterly authentic combination of fear, common sense, and bloody-mindedness shown by the common soldiers in their debate with the disguised king on the night before the battle.
Falstaff is dead, but his spirit is reanimated in his friends who follow the wars to France. Throughout the Henry IV/V trilogy, there is an under-commentary cutting away at Prince Hal's growth into the role of warrior-king and patriot: a confused but vibrant prose voice is counterpointed against the polished verse of law, order, and military glory. It is a voice summed up most concisely in the words of Falstaff's sometime page. In response to the king's cry that battle is the opportunity to achieve immortal fame, the boy says "Would I were in an ale-house in London. I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety." This is not just the sentiment of a pint-sized Falstaff out from under Arthur's bosom: it is the voice of the foot soldier in every age. After Agincourt, the king thanks God for the miracle whereby fewer than thirty English have been killed in the battle. In his listing of the dead, he does not mention Falstaff's proxies, yet they are the ones whom the audience mourns most: Bardolph and Nym, hanged; the boy, killed with the luggage; Quickly or Doll,* dead in the spital of a malady of France. They have died not for Harry's but for Falstaff's England;
they have fought not for a palace or parliament in Westminster but for an ale-house in Eastcheap.
* Pistol is married to Nell Quickly, but says in Act 5 that "my Doll is dead i'th'spital/Of a malady of France": this is one of the numerous cruxes where Shakespeare or the printer may have muddled a name or where there may be purposeful dramatic play. The sense of loss suggests that he is talking about his wife, but death by way of sexually transmitted disease (the French malady) is much likelier for the whore Doll Tearsheet than the hostess Quickly, and has already been prepared for by Pistol's lines in Act 2 Scene 1 about Doll in "the powd'ring tub of infamy." Either way, the point is to make Pistol into the last survivor of the Eastcheap cronies.
ABOUT THE TEXT
Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date--modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare's classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can't).
But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original "Complete Works" prepared for the press by Shakespeare's fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of "Quarto" editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of a few plays there are hundreds of differences between the Quarto and Folio editions, some of them far from trivial.