Gabriella Infinita Memorias de una

The chorus at the end of Henry  contrasts the happy and success- ful king shown in that play with his son Henry . But is the Henry  we see in the play really to be admired? Countless critics have thought so, and the play has been performed at key moments of English history, as with Laurence Olivier’s film of  that clearly sought to parallel the coming Allied attack upon Fortress Europe with Henry’s European adventure.9_{The Royal Shakespeare}

Company production starring Kenneth Branagh () and Michael Bogdanov’s English Shakespeare Company production (), on the other hand, invoked the context of the  war between Britain and Argentina over the islands called the Falklands or the Malvinas (depending on whose you think they really are) and these produc- tions were considerably less inclined to see Henry as unproblemati- cally heroic than Olivier was.

A useful starting point for considering why readers and theatre practitioners might be sceptical of Henry’s actions is a previously little-noted event in the play that, once attended to, is so shocking that it gave the title to a book called Henry V, War Criminal? (). Arguably this book itself was especially attentive to acts that might constitute war crimes because in the decade preceding its publica- tion, the s, Europe had witnessed in the multiple Balkan con- flicts its first military struggles since the end of World War . The book’s authors John Sutherland and Cedric Watts drew attention to this moment in the battle of Agincourt:

Alarum

But hark, what new alarum is this same?

The French have reinforced their scattered men.

Then every soldier kill his prisoners. [The soldiers kill their prisoners]

Give the word through.

[PISTOL] Coup’ la gorge. Exeunt  

Enter Captains Fluellen and Gower

FLUELLEN Kill the poys and the luggage! ’Tis expressly against the law of arms. ’Tis as arrant a piece of

knavery, mark you now, as can be offert. In your conscience now, is it not?

’Tis certain there’s not a boy left alive. (..– and ..–)

Killing prisoners is, of course, contrary to modern rules of war and it was contrary to the rules that applied in Henry’s time and in Shakespeare’s. But could it be justified in the context of what happens in the play?

Sutherland and Watts point out that the second part of the above extract, which is a separate scene elsewhere on the battlefield, seems like a justification of the prisoner-killing: the French have overrun the rear of the English positions, where the stores of the army are kept and where the servants (boys) wait during the fighting, and are murdered indiscriminately. If this were to happen before Henry’s order to kill prisoners, it might be thought to provide motivation for that act, since killing non-combatant children is itself a violation of the rules of war, as Fluellen rightly says.

We might suppose that although Fluellen’s reaction to the killing of the children is shown to the theatre audience after Henry’s order to kill the French prisoners, the boys were in fact killed first, in which case the French were the first to break the rules. However, as Sutherland and Watts point out, we did not see Henry receiving news of the killing of the boys and reacting to it, rather his order to kill French prisoners is a reaction to the realisation that ‘The French have reinforced their scattered men’, which is an ordinary setback in the battle.

Well after Fluellen’s reaction to the killing of the children, we get what seems to be Henry’s reaction to it:

KING HARRY

I was not angry since I came to France Until this instant. Take a trumpet, herald; Ride thou unto the horsemen on yon hill. If they will fight with us, bid them come down,

Or void the field: they do offend our sight. If they’ll do neither, we will come to them, And make them skirr away as swift as stones Enforced from the old Assyrian slings.

Besides, we’ll cut the throats of those we have, And not a man of them that we shall take Shall taste our mercy. Go and tell them so. (..–)

This is most odd: the king enters with his army – well, a small rep- resentative band of them we should suppose, as even open-air the- atres have limited space on the stage – and accompanied by French prisoners. Why are these prisoners not dead, as Henry ordered and as indeed he orders again here? Coming after Fluellen’s moving reaction to the murder of the children minding the luggage, we have to suppose that Henry’s anger here is his response to the same event. But it must be observed that the play seems curiously evasive about just what happens in this battle.

If we want to construct a reading of the play in which Henry exhibits the characteristics of a twentieth-century war criminal, the play is not short of material. Talking to the governor of the town of Harfleur to persuade him to yield to the English army, Henry threatens to let his soldiers do what soldiers do when military dis- cipline is set aside:

[KING HARRY] Therefore, you men of Harfleur, Take pity of your town and of your people

Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command, Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace O’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds Of heady murder, spoil, and villainy. If not – why, in a moment look to see The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters; Your fathers taken by the silver beards,

And their most reverend heads dashed to the walls; Your naked infants spitted upon pikes.

(..–)  

The modern word for such threats, whether or not they are carried out, is terrorism, for the purpose is to achieve a military and/or polit- ical end by instilling fear into a non-combatant, civilian population. However, to state the matter as baldly as that may be to mistake the nature of drama about war, which is as much concerned with language as it is with action. Noting that, as Andrew Gurr pointed out, the scaling ladders brought on to scale the walls of Harfleur in . are never needed, Janette Dillon observed that

This aspect of the scene may point to the . . . prominent role of rhetoric in achieving victory in this play . . . [It] focuses the audience’s imaginative attention on the wall through language rather than stage action, in a way that requires them to empathize with the effort of will necessary for such action rather than lose themselves in the excitement of action itself . . . .

In . the same principle is continued: Henry talks his way into Harfleur rather than fighting his way in. Perhaps that is a better outcome overall. Whether or not we condemn Henry for his threats, we should observe two points here. The first is that, having seen in Chapter  how Shakespeare portrays the off-duty lives of soldiers and their being condemned for falling from heroic action to mere love, we can now see that his representation of that heroic action itself may contain elements of extraordinary brutality. The second is that this is not the first time Shakespeare presented his audience with a chance to favour persuasion-by-language (which is what the term ‘rhetoric’ essentially means) over conquering by force: one can read The Taming of the Shrew as the story of a relatively enlightened husband who uses language and mind-games (in modern terms perhaps even brainwashing) to make his wife conform to his will, instead of simply beating her as some written authorities of Shakespeare’s time advocated.

Thinking about Henry’s military actions in terms of rhetoric can change the way we think about his wooing of Princess Catherine of France. Henry begins his wooing with the standard disclaimer of rhetoricians that they are not terribly good with words (‘Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . .’):

KING HARRY Fair Catherine, and most fair, Will you vouchsafe to teach a soldier terms Such as will enter at a lady’s ear

And plead his love-suit to her gentle heart? (..–)

This is standard stuff and not to be believed, and hence not to be played as truthful by actors. Read with a sceptical eye, or performed with a sense of what Henry’s rhetoric has already achieved in this play, the wooing of Princess Catherine can seem as full of subtlety and guile as Richard ’s wooing of Lady Anne (Richard , .). Like Richard, Henry has to twist logic to overcome the fact that the object of his desire comes from the party that his side has just defeated in bloody conflict:

CATHERINE Is it possible dat I sould love de ennemi of France?

KING HARRY 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 France is mine, and I am yours, then yours is France, and you are mine.

(Henry , ..–)

Similarly, in response to Lady Anne’s ‘It is a quarrel just and rea- sonable, | To be revenged on him that killed my husband’ – Richard indeed killed her husband and his father too, whose bleeding body is horribly present in this scene of wooing – Richard offers the brilliant reversal, just like Henry, that ‘He that bereft thee, lady, of thy husband, | Did it to help thee to a better husband’ (Richard , ..–).

Where did Henry get his rhetorical power? In one of the most influential essays on the character of Prince Hal/King Harry, indeed one of the most influential Shakespearian essays ever, Stephen Greenblatt brilliantly reinterpreted the transformation of the wastrel adolescent into the heroic man to argue that the former state was necessary to the latter.That is, Hal had to spend time  

slumming with the low-life of Eastcheap in order to learn the true ways of the world and so equip himself to better command his people once he became king. Greenblatt began by considering con- temporary accounts circulating in England about the native Americans that explorers were coming into contact with in the New World. Walter Raleigh sent the mathematician Thomas Harriot to record and describe the Virginian colony, and Harriot learnt the North Carolina Algonkian dialect and studied the Indians, whose religion was, according to Harriot, a manipulation of beliefs by the priests in order to achieve social cohesion.

The Indians began doubting their own religion when con- fronted with the (seemingly magical) objects brought by the Europeans, and this appeared to confirm Machiavelli’s assertion that religion is just a device for princes to keep their populations in awe and so promote civil obedience. From this perspective, the New World offered a unique anthropological opportunity to test Machiavelli’s hypothesis (in his Discourses, –) that the civilised world could set up a state among the uncivilised using its technological power to mystify them into adoration of the invader. There is something of a paradox here, for it would seem that con- firming that religion is just an ideological tool used for political ends would seem to threaten the very European culture itself, since that culture is built on these ideological uses of religion. Greenblatt argued, however, that just this paradox is the key to the contain- ment of the political subversion that Machiavelli’s ideas might otherwise promote, for the power that the radical hypothesis threatens to expose (European culture) uses the radical hypothesis to increase its power by colonising Virginia using the same ideo- logical means.

Colonial power is not monolithic because it needs be vigilant and monitor threats to itself, and hence it needs to evaluate what may constitute a threat. The same monitoring goes on in the Henry  and Henry  plays, according to Greenblatt. Shakespeare astutely represented the operation of containment of subversion in Henry, in which Prince Hal is both thief and heir to the throne and is leader of an army of misfits who are pressed into defending the state. Hal is not simply redeemed at the end, rather he is constantly redeemed throughout the play by our liking for him and his mischievousness.

Hal is a theatrical prince – he plays roles – and power is, by impli- cation, a matter of performance. The pleasing subversions of  Henry  become in  Henry  and Henry  open duplicities and ruthless exercises of power and trickery, forcing reinterpretation of the earlier work as not so much the humanising of the excesses of power (the reading in which the very human Prince Hal grows up and takes responsibility as a man) as a desperate yoking together of the forces (held together by conjuring tricks) which are now shown to be violently destabilising.

In this reading, Hal’s learning of tavern language, which had earlier seemed like a bridging of class divisions, now is shown to be his cynical learning of the ways of the poor in order that they may better be controlled. As Warwick prophetically puts it:

WARWICK

My gracious lord [Henry ], you look beyond him [Prince Hal] quite.

The Prince but studies his companions,

Like a strange tongue, wherein, to gain the language, ’Tis needful that the most immodest word

Be looked upon and learnt, which once attained, Your highness knows, comes to no further use But to be known and hated; so, like gross terms, The Prince 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 other, Turning past evils to advantages.

( Henry , ..–)

As we see, Hal does indeed cast off his former companions, and many readers and theatregoers have understood this as a necessary, albeit regrettable, stage in his maturing into king Henry . If we take Warwick seriously, on the other hand, Hal was always prepar- ing for this moment and the ‘good’ King Harry is cast in a trou- blingly cynical light from the start. In other words, the horrors that he threatens and orders in Henry  can be traced back to before his ascension of the throne.

Perhaps we do not need to decide whether Henry  is a good or a bad king because there are aspects of Henry  that would seem to confirm that the play is about the combination of (or, the conflict between) opposites. This is most apparent in the relationship between the play’s choruses, which are unrelentingly positive and upbeat, and the dialogue and actions that come between them. A reading of the play based on this contrast was made by Anthony Hammond. Of Shakespeare’s plays, Hammond observed, only Henry  and Pericles have the elaborate structure of an introductory prologue, choruses before each act, and a concluding epilogue. Critics have tended to see Henry as a great warrior-king because the chorus says he is, but in fact we do not see him being a warrior in the play.

Hammond suggested that Shakespeare included so much Renaissance ideological idealism of the warrior-king deliberately so that the Henry he creates falls short of it. That is to say, Shakespeare is covertly attacking the ideal. The chorus’s prologue has two tones of voice, the heroic and the apologetic, and asks the audience to exercise its imagination to make up for the perform - ance’s inadequacy. Such imaginative gap-filling is referred to by Theseus watching the mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst no worse if imagination amend them’ (..–). As discussed in Chapter , the audience of Pyramus and Thisbe do not exercise the willing use of their imagination to make up for the play’s deficien- cies, nor do the audience of the pageant of the Nine Worthies in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but these plays need audience indulgence whereas Henry  does not.

Gary Taylor has argued for the prologue and the chorus before . of Henry  being a deliberate arousal of an expectation only to temporarily frustrate it, but Hammond thought this wrong because there is never an attempt to represent mass confrontation of armies and so the prologue has nothing to apologise for. The prologue promises military exploits and the play then begins with a long debate by the churchmen about the new king’s taxation plans. The chorus to Act  promises that ‘all the youth of England are on fire’, that the war is universally popular, and that everyone is behaving honourably, but the next thing the reader reads, or the audience

sees, is tired old Nym, Bardolph, and Pistol, and it hears their endless complaining about the war, and then a conspiracy against Henry. Similarly the chorus to Act  stresses the military daring of the army, and is followed by Henry’s solo speech which is not fol- lowed by mass arousal but again by the trudging of tired old Nym, Bardolph, and Pistol.

Thus, the choruses are out of keeping with the rest of the drama. Before the battle of Agincourt, the chorus refers to Harry cheering his troops up as he passes among them, but we see Harry going around his army in disguise, somewhat as Richard  does when eavesdropping on his troops (Richard , ..–). Thus there are two problems with the play. The first is the discrepancy between the chorus’s description of events and the drama’s depiction of them, and the second is Henry’s morality and the question of whether or not we are to admire him. For Hammond the good/bad duality of Henry is built into the play: ‘Henry is a great hero, and a cold, con- niving bastard’.Thus the chorus gives the ideological norm, and the play incorporates this norm and also challenges it.

According to Hammond, Shakespeare has the chorus apologise for the limitations of the stage not because he is really embarrassed but just the opposite: the apology is ironic and works to celebrate the parameters within which drama functions. The play ‘attempts to end in closure, but the Chorus’s epilogue denies the finality of that closure’ and ends instead by ‘stressing the transitory nature of Henry’s achievement’. We earlier considered as an awkward fact the detail of the tetralogies’ order of composition, their being written in a sequence that makes it hard to sustain Tillyard’s reading in which Providence is working through English history. In Hammond’s account this becomes the central irony that structures Shakespeare’s engagement with the genre of history plays: Shakespeare, it seems, wants to undermine this patriotic, chauvin- istic tradition.

There is one version of the play Henry  for which this sophisti-