Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
by Stephen Greenblatt
A Review by Alastair Fowler (TLS, February, 2005)
Will
in the World is a readable book about Shakespeare's life. What sort of
book remains unclear -- fact or fiction, criticism or history? Of
course, the boundary between biography and novel has blurred. All
biographies must in part be imaginary constructs, especially when the
subject is historical and the evidence incomplete. Nevertheless, some
build on researches so thorough that they contribute to history.
(Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys comes to mind.) With Shakespeare, the
documentary evidence is fragmentary and enigmatic: his biographers have
been tempted to spin more or less well grounded speculations. We have
had Katherine Duncan-Jones's well- informed "ungentle" Shakespeare and
Jonathan Bate's lover of Southampton. Why not, then, Stephen
Greenblatt's victim Shakespeare?
Several chapters of Will in
the World imagine the young Shakespeare's formative experiences.
Pursuit of Will's "primal scene of theatricality" begins with the first
play of someone else: one Willis, who stood between his father's legs
to watch The Cradle of Security at Gloucester, thirty-eight miles from
Stratford-upon-Avon. John Shakespeare and his family must similarly
have attended the Coventry mystery cycle still being performed in 1579.
Robert Nye's novel Mr Shakespeare is pressed into service to supply a
visit by William, aged eleven, to Kenilworth to see the Earl of
Leicester's splendid entertainment of the Queen. Did Shakespeare,
Greenblatt asks, recall the Kenilworth festivities in his image of
Arion in Twelfth Night? Some may feel uneasy at this: Nye, in promising
less biography, achieves more. Besides, other speculations come to
mind: John Shakespeare was too busy to go to Kenilworth; William read
about Arion in Ovid, or in emblematists and mythographers who actually
discuss meanings relevant to Twelfth Night (such as the power of
music). But Greenblatt, certain Shakespeare was not "bookish", prefers
extraliterary sources.
Next he explores a bolder imagining,
that secret Catholicism determined much of Shakespeare's life. This
takes up older speculations by Sir E. K. Chambers and Oliver Baker; the
more thorough investigations of E. A. J. Honigmann; and the recent
conjectures of Richard Wilson. Was the Shakeshaft serving the
Lancashire Catholic landowner Alexander Hoghton the same as William
Shakespeare? Sixteenth-century orthography was chaotic. Still, there is
no evidence Shakespeare ever used the spelling Shakeshaft, a Lancashire
name. On such foundations, Greenblatt invents a narrative of
Shakespeare's acquaintance with Edward Campion, the Catholic martyr.
Didn't Campion and Shakespeare both come from "comparatively modest"
families?
Shakespeare's Catholicism explains his leaving
Stratford: the Protestant inquisition was closing in. Once in London,
he used the famous story about poaching deer as cover; but he really
left Stratford for a far more serious reason: to escape Sir Thomas
Lucy, the McCarthy-like "relentless persecutor of recusancy". Would it
be a fatal objection that Lucy seems not to have had an impaled park
until 1618, or that Lucy seems to have been an amiable individual, who
kept a company of players? Greenblatt's imaginings are above
chronology, and above distinguishing between the two Sir Thomas Lucys.
Besides, the Lucy digression serves to support the construction of
Elizabethan England as a police state. Catholicism also "explains"
Shakespeare's low-profile existence in London. On the run from
Commissar Lucy, driven by "the great fear" of Elizabeth's torturers, he
made for the Smoke, where he left few traces because he wished to
escape notice.
The notion of Shakespeare as crypto-Catholic in
early life is not totally implausible. But there is no firm evidence
for it, certainly not John Shakespeare's "spiritual testament". After
long debate about its authenticity, scholars now regard the document as
a forgery. (Greenblatt claims that "more recent scholarship has
cautiously tended to confirm its authenticity" but doesn't substantiate
this.) As alderman, John Shakespeare engaged in Protestant iconoclasm;
one's imagination strains to combine official iconoclast with private
crypto-Catholic. Another story centres on William's aspiration to
become "gentle": to enter the top 2 per cent of Elizabethan society.
(Historians put the proportion at 5 per cent or more; but Greenblatt
likes to bring home the evils of hierarchy.) Evidence of Shakespeare's
aspiration is the renewal, in 1596, of his father's 1576 application
for a grant of arms. The twenty-year gap is attributed to John
Shakespeare's financial problems, due to alcoholism, recusancy fines,
or litigation. (Another explanation, not considered, might be the
declining value of land rents.) Greenblatt disapproves of rank being
bought, although it is not clear whether he opposes social mobility in
principle. The Heralds' genealogical fictions were a way of endorsing
meritorious claims to promotion. Incidentally, the "official of the
College of Heralds known grandly (after the badge of office that he
wore) as the Red Dragon Pursuivant" was actually Rouge Dragon, named
after a royal badge. William the social aspirer seeking heraldic
display jars with William the Catholic fugitive keeping a low profile;
but Greenblatt is not interested in consistency.
The same
financial difficulties are supposed to have kept William from attending
Oxford or Cambridge. This sundered him from the "University Wits" --
Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, and
the rest. These may have looked down on William as a social "upstart",
although Greene is elsewhere called Shakespeare's crony. Greenblatt
characterizes the Wits, vividly but conjecturally, in a group biography
of disparate writers who hardly formed a group. On Kyd, Greenblatt
accepts the libels of the popular tragedian's envious rivals, and has
him eking out his existence as a scrivener, without mentioning his
mysterious patron.
A recurrent theme is Shakespeare's unhappy
marriage. Greenblatt imagines it as so dysfunctional that Shakespeare
found it difficult to portray "fully achieved marital intimacy": his
married couples generally display lack of trust if not "mutual
loathing". But how many completely happy marriages are to be found in
drama generally? Untroubled marital felicity lacks dramatic interest.
What poisoned Shakespeare's marriage, in Greenblatt's view, was
religious difference: "Will's family almost certainly leaned toward
Catholicism, and Anne's almost certainly leaned in the opposite
direction". The evidence? Well, Anne's father, and brother Bartholomew,
both asked for simple funerals; "honestly buried" was the "code phrase"
for a stark Puritan burial. How absurd. It was an idiom anyone might
use whose family lacked the wealth for ostentatious ceremonies. The
archbishop James Ussher (no Puritan he) wrote, "friends and neighbours
should see that his body be honestly (decently) buried and Funerals
decently performed". Similarly, Greenblatt infers from Bartholemew
Hathaway's phrase "His elect" that "these are people far different from
. . . the Catholic Ardens". The term "elect", however, was not
distinctively Puritan, or even Protestant. Hooker, Milton, all sorts
and conditions of Christians used it: it even occurs in the Roman
Catholic Rheims New Testament of 1582 (Romans 8: 33, "Who shall accuse
against the elect of God?"). Greenblatt's argument is without
substance: the Hathaways were most likely conforming Catholics, as
Shakespeare's biographer Park Honan concludes.
Another reason
for thinking the marriage unhappy is that William was "dragged to the
altar"; elsewhere, contrariwise, he may have "eagerly" agreed to marry.
Shakespearean passages about "wedlock forced" and "hasty marriage" are
applied as proof texts to show their author thought his own eagerly
forced marriage "an almost certain recipe for unhappiness". But
Shakespeare's hasty marriage was by no means so unusual as to suggest
it was specially constrained. Certainly, "bastardy was severely frowned
on by the community". But a great many Elizabethan children were
conceived out of wedlock; "hasty" marriages were extremely common. In
the latter sixteenth century recorded prenuptial pregnancies (baptisms
less than eight and a half months after marriage) were over 20 per
cent. Since Greenblatt supposes that, without the possibility of
divorce, satisfaction in marriage was highly unlikely (an astonishingly
anachronistic assumption), it comes as no surprise when he interprets
Shakespeare's bequest of his second best bed to Anne as expressing
calculating hatred.
Materials for historical biography are of
four types: documents; the subject's own writings; the subject's books;
and the social conditions of the time. Shakespeare documents are easily
accessible in S. Schoenbaum's invaluable collections (which Greenblatt
is sometimes curiously reluctant to draw on). And it is not difficult
to discover (as Honan does) some of Shakespeare's books. The sources of
his plays, for example, show he must have owned or borrowed copies of
Holinshed's Chronicles, North's Plutarch (his patroness the Countess of
Derby gave an inscribed copy to a "William"), Henri Estienne's
Katherine de Medicis, and (from his friend Field the printer) The
Mansion of Magnanimity (1599) by Richard Crompton. And Shakespeare
apparently signed his name in a copy of William Lambarde's
Archaionomia. Ignoring all this, Greenblatt asks: "Why have scholars,
ferreting for centuries, failed to find the books he must have owned --
or rather, why did he choose not to write his name in those books . . .
?" And he answers that in Lancashire "Shakespeare would already have
imbibed powerful lessons about danger and the need for discretion,
concealment, and fiction". In any case, Greenblatt's Shakespeare was
just not "bookish".
As one might expect, Greenblatt relies
heavily on general social conditions. He paints a vivid picture of
Shakespeare's world: of the brutality, violence, spectacular
punishments, and ideological repressions of Elizabeth's tyranny. With a
novelist's copiousness, he weaves disparate strands into an entire
imaginary world. Sympathizing with Catholics and other oppressed
groups, he certainly doesn't idealize Elizabeth's reign. Yet he
sympathizes with Elizabeth herself. Is his rendering of Shakespeare's
world fair? It is not a proportionate one. Greenblatt passes over many
salient features, such as the rapid changes in the lexicon through
foreign borrowings; the growth of international trade and finance; and
the vast increase of geographical knowledge and natural history through
exploration. His London is not the London of Bacon and Gresham; yet
neither does he do justice to the provincial Great House culture, then
almost as important as the universities for philosophy, literature and
science. His is a world of stereotypes and flabby shibboleths.
But
what most undermines confidence in his generalizations is their
frequent inaccuracy. He has only to state a fact or a figure to blur or
falsify it. His old St Paul's Cathedral "boasted the longest nave in
Europe"; the real old St Paul's hadn't the longest nave even in
England: Winchester Cathedral had that. He exaggerates London's size:
"With a population nearing 200,000, it was some fifteen times larger
than the next most populous cities in England and Wales; in all of
Europe only Naples and Paris exceeded it in size". The real London
wasn't yet fifteen times as large as Norwich. Naples didn't merely
exceed it, but was ten times as large at the 1595 census. And Naples
and Paris weren't the only larger cities. In 1600 Constantinople had
more than three times London's population. London (less than 60,000 in
the early sixteenth century) also had to overtake Salamanca (133,000 in
1541 and 176,000 in 1591). Elizabethan Stratford, he writes, was "a
town with only some 2,000 inhabitants". That "only" speaks volumes
about Greenblatt's geography. For, of the 600 or 700 towns in
Shakespeare's England, at least 600 were smaller than Stratford, which
was large for a market centre.
Dates, important for a
biographer, tend to elude Greenblatt. He supposes the assassination
scare of 1580 was "early in (Elizabeth's) reign". Early, after
twenty-two years? In 1600, Greenblatt's Shakespeare was "still young
(only thirty-six years old)". With average male life-expectancy around
forty-five, Shakespeare was approaching old age: forty, in the Four
Ages scheme, was senecta. Greenblatt deals in historical "moments" of
elastic duration. So, the 1520s were "the crucial moment in the
development of the English language, the moment in which the deepest
things, the things upon which the fate of the soul depended, were put
into ordinary, familiar, everyday words". But, with the exception of
Tyndale's New Testament, all the fifty or so English translations of
the Bible belong to the 1530s or later. Tyndale's 1525 New Testament
was immediately seized by the Cologne authorities. Copies of his 1526
New Testament, also published illegally, were smuggled into England,
but almost all were confiscated or bought in and burnt. Readings from
the Scriptures in English seem not to have begun until 1538. Greenblatt
writes as if religious concerns were being put into English for the
first time: as if all the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English religious
literature, from Aelfric and Wulfstan to Wycliffe and Kempe and Usk and
Lydgate, never existed. In reality it is Greenblatt's own 1520s moment
that never existed. Such imaginary moments abound here, as when
Shakespeare "first walked across the bridge, and very soon after" he
recognized "the traitors' heads included two he knew".
The
succession of "moments" sometimes gives an impression of feverish
hurry, like history on amphetamines. When Edward VI died, Mary Tudor
"moved at once to reverse direction" and stop the Reformation. In real
history, as many as twelve of Edward's councillors found places at
Mary's council table. And "leading Protestants" did not at first have
to "escape" to Germany or Switzerland: their migration was encouraged
rather than hindered. Again, Greenblatt's Elizabeth "quickly made it
clear" at her accession in 1558 that the Reformation would continue.
The historical Elizabeth, however, carefully avoided such
clarification: she appointed as secretary a politique who had served
under Mary; she kept candles in her private chapel; and for months she
dissembled her ecclesiastical policy so well that she received an offer
of marriage from Philip II of Spain. The Edwardian Book of Common
Prayer was not reintroduced for six months. It almost looks as if
Greenblatt is drawing here on the film Young Bess. His supporters often
have occasion to remind us that any scholar can be faulted in little
matters of fact. True. But there are errors and errors. These reveal a
mind quite innocent of British history.
Even in cultural studies
Greenblatt misleads. He writes that the grammar school curriculum "made
few concessions to the range of human interests . . . no biology,
chemistry, or physics; no economics or sociology". Economics could
hardly be included: it was still in its infancy. But the curriculum
certainly included science: Christopher Johnson at Winchester taught
meteorology, geometry and astronomy. Nor was "rote memorization" valued
above memoria ad res. Again, why does Greenblatt deplore the "analysis
of texts"? At a good school, the "elaborate exercises in imitation"
seem to have been much like those in creative-writing programmes today.
Turning
to female victims, he thinks it "likely" that "Anne (Hathaway) could
not read or write". Why likely? The first decades of Elizabeth's reign,
when the Shakespeares were educated, stood out as "a period of unusual
educational excitement and achievement" (David Cressy). But "Girls were
excluded from both grammar schools and universities". Excluded is
misleading; as John Morrill points out, this was not a gender issue:
girls were simply prepared for their future occupations. Little time
for anything else, when average female life-expectancy was so short --
in some areas, only nineteen years. In any case, reading and writing
were taught at ABC schools, where girls sat side by side with boys. Not
a word here about the movement to establish boarding schools for girls,
or about academies like Robert White's Ladies Hall at Deptford, which
performed a masque before Queen Anne in 1617. If all else failed,
surely our greatest writer (who according to Aubrey had been a
schoolmaster) would have taught his own wife to read.
Greenblatt's
victims include manual labourers: "There was virtually no respect for
labour; on the contrary, it was idleness that was prized and honoured".
Didn't the Protestant Reformers revalue labour and the active life,
then, or see the contemplative, monastic life as idle? Didn't Luther
discuss "whether we all ought to . . . work with our hands?" And what
about Hugh Latimer's "Sermon of the Plough"? More surprisingly,
perhaps, the account of literature and drama also misleads. It is not
the case that Shakespeare most often used the Bishops' Bible; he used
Coverdale's Great Bible of 1539 and the Geneva Bible of 1560.
Elizabethan homilies were not written by impersonal "central
authorities", but by John Jewel, mostly. One was by Edmund Grindal
(Spenser's Algrind), an individual who had a way of getting into
trouble with the "central authorities". Greenblatt thinks that "in
Shakespeare's work there are relatively few signs of the influence of
Spenser"; he could have found many if he had consulted the book-length
studies of Shakespeare and Spenser by A. F. Potts and W. B. C. Watkins;
but Greenblatt doubtless wished to minimize Spenser's bookish influence.
When
Greenblatt describes the acting company on tour as comprising "six to a
dozen" strolling players, he quite misunderstands his sources. Even in
the 1580s, the "six to a dozen" were only the leading actors; to these
must be added three or more hired men and as many boys. Modern research
based on minimum casting analysis (notably by Scott McMillin and
Sally-Beth Maclean) has shown that many plays required at least
fourteen actors; while the records show companies with fifteen, twenty,
or more actors. Perhaps Greenblatt is thinking of a cut down play
prepared for touring and used over and over? His touring companies
"could get by with a modest repertory". But Thomas Crosfield's diary
lists the Salisbury Court company as travelling with as many as
fourteen plays. In any case, travelling was a normal activity for an
acting company. We have to give up the older idea of occasional tours
bringing culture from London to the benighted provinces.
When
Greenblatt ventures on criticism of Shakespeare's plays, he distorts
them unmercifully. On The Merchant of Venice, he is not content to
focus on the "conceptual" Jew. He gives over twenty-six pages to a
digression about a Jewish immigrant, the Queen's physician Roderigo
Lopez, implicated in a popish plot to poison her. Shylock's tragedy
(that by flinching from self-sacrifice he breaks his "oath in heaven")
is passed over. In view of Shakespeare's many business dealings, the
play's biographical interest might be thought to include its censure of
London merchant ethics. Instead, Greenblatt tamely concludes that the
play's ending would have been "unsettling". A serious limitation to the
criticism is insensitivity to word associations. Greenblatt relates a
speech of Polonius, for example, to Robert Greene's attack on
Shakespeare as "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers". This
phrase "must have stung", for Polonius, reading aloud Hamlet's love
letter, stops at "most beautified Ophelia", and remarks "that's an ill
phrase (word), a vile phrase, 'beautified' is a vile phrase". Now,
there is not the slightest reason to connect Hamlet's use of
"beautified" with Greene. It was a fashionable word in complimentary
address: Thomas Nashe uses it in his dedication of Christs Tears over
Jerusalem (1594), and so does R. L. in Diella (1596). It occurred in
the Homily on Matrimony, as Harold Jenkins notices in his easily
accessible edition of Hamlet. The word was made fashionable by Sir
Philip Sidney, a paragon of taste: it is used prominently in the
Arcadia (1590), where Philoclea mourns her sister, "Alas, thou art gone
to beautify heaven". Shakespeare himself, moreover, often used
"beautify" elsewhere. In calling the word "vile", then, Polonius
betrays his own lack of taste. Not to see that is to get the speech and
the character entirely wrong.
There is only one interesting idea
in Greenblatt's criticism of the plays. He suggests that Shakespeare
frequently created mysterious verisimilitude by deliberate omission, by
"the radical excision of motive". This may seem a brilliant
generalization until you ask yourself whether any earlier drama gave
more information about motive than Shakespeare's. For the modern
mimesis of inward, psychological motivation was in fact newly emerging
in Shakespeare's time. Excision of motivation was impossible: it wasn't
there to excise. Greenblatt, with all his imagining, finds it hard to
imagine a state of art or society other than his own.
Greenblatt's
imaginings mostly depend on literalistic biographical assumption.
Repeatedly conflating dramatist with characters, he imagines each play
as directly transcribing Shakespeare's life. Each character is
Shakespeare himself, or someone Shakespeare knew. Consequently the
dramatist is robbed of creative invention. He is a slave to his
experience; the imagination is all Greenblatt's. "There is no easy,
obvious link between what Shakespeare wrote . . . and the known
circumstances of his life", Greenblatt reminds us. But in practice he
keeps forging just such easy links. Following Honan, he sensibly enough
identifies Stratford material in The Taming of the Shrew. Then he takes
off: like Christopher Sly, Shakespeare "too felt dazed by his recent
transmutation. He had gone from a provincial nobody to a professional
actor and playwright". At the same time Sly resembles Shakespeare's
father, his debts and drunkennes "reminiscent of home". And Falstaff,
too, recalls John Shakespeare, "a father who cannot be trusted";
although elsewhere Falstaff is Greene. Biographical assumptions are
compulsive. Hamlet has only to say "I have bad dreams" for Greenblatt
to write "Shakespeare's bad dream". Romeo has only to mention a glove,
for Greenblatt to recall that the stock in trade of John Shakespeare
the glover was "the stuff of metaphor" for his son. (Yet gloves are far
more salient in The Changeling, without Middleton's father being a
glover.) If witches appeared in an Oxford play in 1592, Shakespeare
must have attended. Shakespeare the Warwickshire peasant rides again;
not being "bookish", he had to draw everything from life.
Throughout,
the method is to imagine a biographical possibility, then build further
speculations as if inferring from evidence. "Let us imagine that
Shakespeare found himself from boyhood fascinated by language, obsessed
with the magic of words". But imagining must be turned into argument:
"There is overwhelming evidence for this obsession from his earliest
writings, so it is a very safe assumption that it began early". With
hardly a pause, imagining has become a safe assumption. Never mind that
the "earliest writings" are not very early. Details can now be touched
in: Shakespeare's obsession may have begun "from the first moment his
mother whispered a nursery rhyme in his ear: 'Pillycock, pillycock'".
Again the fatal switch from subjunctive to indicative: "This particular
nursery rhyme was rattling around in his brain years later, when he was
writing King Lear". Perhaps becomes was, excluding other possible words
-- in which, perhaps, Shakespeare had just heard the rhyme for the
first time -- or invented it (for there is no evidence it existed
earlier). Nothing wrong with imagining, so long as the biographer
sticks to perhaps, no doubt, in all likelihood, presumably, or even the
dangerous almost certainly.
Will in the World brings Greenblatt
to a turning point. After the vacuous textuality of deconstruction, new
historicism seemed to reaffirm the historical context that meaning
depends on. Many serious scholars were relieved to hear that unified
authorial personalities might still exist. In the United States,
Greenblatt became unchallenged leader of the new movement. It
subsequently emerged, however, that he had little interest in the
complications of real history. He preferred a simplified,
cultural-studies model put together from factoids, stereotypes and
ideological assumptions, draped round the Foucaldian monolith of
repressive government. Worse, Greenblatt's manipulation of evidence was
exposed by Anne Barton (the affair of the cardinal's hat), Michael
Neill (the incident of the Bantam torture), and others. After that, it
would be no surprise if Greenblatt wanted to have done with scholarship
altogether. Besides, with the talk of neohistoricism, he may have
apprehended the decennial changing of the guard that dominates
criticism in the US. Perhaps he thought, Time to refashion myself. Why
not go retro, and revive the speculative biographical criticism that
went before formalism? Not that Will in the World quite represents a
retreat from new historicism. Shakespeare is still "simultaneously the
agent of civility and the agent of subversion", and history is still a
series of dateless "moments". Only, occasionally, Greenblatt will have
a fleeting qualm or misgiving, as when he writes "But, to be fair" or
"of course, these are merely speculations".
How did the
intelligent Greenblatt come to write so sloppy a book? Almost all the
factual errors could have been avoided by consulting a few reference
books that wait on the shelves of every Renaissance scholar. Did he
avoid looking things up, because he knew he was right? Or did he sit
light to history in the hope his book would be filmed (Shakespeare on
the Run)? Or was a more radical self fashioning involved: a crossover
into historical fiction? Such a move would not be ridiculous. One can
admire the imagination with which he keeps false surmises going,
against all the evidence. As fiction, however, Will in the World is not
an unmixed success either; its subject veers too much between
Shakespeare's imagination and Stephen Greenblatt's own. Yet, as
biography, it is not bookish enough, and shows contempt for its readers
-- as if toy history were good enough for them.
Alastair
Fowler's next book, How To Write, is forthcoming. He is the author of
Time's Purpled Masquers: Stars and the afterlife in Renaissance English
literature, 1996, and the editor of The New Oxford Book of
Seventeenth-Century Verse, 1992.
L'Homme Armé: Katherine's English Lesson, Italian Mannerism and the Political Interpretation of Shakespeare
by Robert Grudin
Fig.1
An abortive language lesson. A beaten coward. A punished theft. A catalogue of genocidal atrocities. An image of the human face contorted into a thing of horror. What are these shady elements doing in a play about glorious empire and the “mirror of all Christian kings?” Everything! Invented by Shakespeare out of whole cloth or imported from another language and other art forms, these elements convey the heart of political insight in Shakespeare’s most political play, Henry V. They create an ironic counterpoint to Henry’s military adventures, implying that his glorious image of England is in fact a fragile overlay on corruption and chaos.
Let us begin with the language lesson, in its entirety:
Enter Katherine and an old Gentlewoman.
Kathe. Alice, tu as este en Angleterre, & tu bien parlas
le Language
Alice. En peu Madame
Kath. Ie te prie m' ensigniez, il faut que ie apprend a parlen:
Comient appelle vous le main en Anglois?
Alice. Le main il & appelle de Hand
Kath. De Hand
Alice. E le doyts
Kat. Le doyts, ma foy Ie oublie, e doyt mays, ie me souemeray
le doyts ie pense qu'ils ont appelle de fingres, ou de fingres
Alice. Le main de Hand, le doyts le Fingres, ie pense que ie
suis le bon escholier
Kath. I'ay gaynie diux mots d' Anglois vistement, coment
appelle vous le ongles?
Alice. Le ongles, les appellons de Nayles
Kath. De Nayles escoute: dites moy, si ie parle bien: de
Hand, de Fingres, e de Nayles
Alice. C'est bien dict Madame, il & fort bon Anglois
Kath. Dites moy l' Anglois pour le bras
Alice. De Arme, Madame
Kath. E de coudee
Alice. D' Elbow
Kath. D' Elbow: Ie men fay le repiticio de touts les mots
que vous maves, apprins des a present
Alice. Il & trop difficile Madame, comme Ie pense
Kath. Excuse moy Alice escoute, d' Hand, de Fingre, de
Nayles, d' Arma, de Bilbow
Alice. D' Elbow, Madame
Kath. O Seigneur Dieu, ie men oublie d' Elbow, coment appelle
vous le col
Alice. De Nick, Madame
Kath. De Nick, e le menton
Alice. De Chin
Kath. De Sin: le col de Nick, le menton de Sin
Alice. Ouy. Sauf vostre honneur en verite vous pronouncies
les mots ausi droict, que le Natifs d' Angleterre
Kath. Ie ne doute point d' apprendre par de grace de Dieu,
& en peu de temps
Alice. N' aue vos y desia oublie ce que ie vous a ensignie
Kath. Nome ie recitera a vous promptement, d' Hand, de
Fingre, de Maylees
Alice. De Nayles, Madame
Kath. De Nayles, de Arme, de Ilbow
Alice. Sans vostre honeus d' Elbow
Kath. Ainsi de ie d' Elbow, de Nick, & de Sin: coment appelle
vous les pied & de roba
Alice. Le Foot Madame, & le Count
Kath. Le Foot, & le Count: O Seignieur Dieu, il sont le
mots de son mauvais corruptible grosse & impudique, & non
pour le Dames de Honeur d' vser: Ie ne voudray pronouncer ce
mots deuant le Seigneurs de France, pour toute le monde, fo le
Foot & le Count, neant moys, Ie recitera vn autrefoys ma lecon
ensembe, d' Hand, de Fingre, de Nayles, d' Arme, d' Elbow, de
Nick, de Sin, de Foot, le Count
Alice. Excellent, Madame
Kath. C'est asses pour vne foyes, alons nous a diner.
Princess Katherine's lesson is noteworthy for a number of reasons. It is an example of what I call in class, for want of better words, a "sandwich-scene" – that is, a scene whose tone contrasts sharply with two scenes that surround it in time and are tonally similar to each other. In this case, we have two big serious masculine scenes, "stuff'd with epithites of war" (Henry at the gates of Harflew, III.iii, and the French court in a nervous council, III.v), set in ironic contrast with the awkwardly salacious trans-lingual punning of the French princess and one of her ladies-in-waiting. Dynamic changes of this sort are by no means rare in the three latter Lancastrian plays, but here the tone is special. The scene is written entirely in conversational French, has but the most tenuous relationship to the development of plot, and would seem to have been thrown in partly to introduce us to the future English queen and partly for "comic relief." And the comic elements – note lines 51-62 -- are, even for Shakespeare, uncommonly gross. Why break up the ascending glory of Harry England and his bride-to-be with such gratuitous faux pas? Was the Chorus, who desired a "muse of fire that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention," preparing us for variations on foutre and coun?
For years such questions slumbered under the negligence or, perhaps, the modesty, of Shakespearean interpretation. Recent scholarship has put a political, even jingoistic spin on the scene but does not, to my mind, get down and dirty enough. Katherine’s English lesson is not only obscene, but symbolically so. To begin with, the language of the English lesson has a coherent thematic strategy. This strategy involves a reconstitution of the human body (the 'subject' of the lesson) from an everyday presence into an sardonic emblem. Katherine's French-English catalogue is almost exclusively devoted to external human body-parts:
main = "hand"
doigts = "fingres"
ongles = "nailes" (mistaken once as "mailes")
bras = "arma"
coude = "elbow" (mistaken once as "bilbow")
col = "nick"
menton= "sin"
pied = "foot"
robe = "count"
The humor here is linguistically polymorphic, sometimes deriving from an English definition (e. g., "bilbow"), sometimes from a French (e. g., "count"), once even from Latin ("arma"). The thematic meaning, however, is decided isomorphic. The first five words, especially as a French speaker would pronounce them, all have military or otherwise violent associations:
hand = hante (French for javelin- or halberd-shaft)
fingres = fangs
mailes = chainmail (Fr. maille)
arma = Latin for weapons
bilbow = sword
The four words that follow associate with sin and sexuality:
nick = the devil (Old Nick)
sin = sin
foot = foutre (French for copulate) count = coun (French for vagina)
Katherine's mistakes are not just titillating; they are ominously poetic. In detailing elements of the familiar human form, she figuratively creates a monster, or rather, a monstrous distortion of humanity from a dignified presence into a mean agency of violence and sex. Her errors, themselves symbolic of one culture's inability to understand another, conjure up the greed and passion that compound with this inability in times of war.
Katherine's emblematic creature is profoundly appropriate to what, I hope to show, is the real inner text of Henry V. It resonates in Henry’s own words when, addressing the French at the walls of Harflew (only moments before Katherine’s language lesson), he threatens brutally that if the town does not surrender, the English soldiers will range through the streets “with conscience wide as hell”
mowing like Grasse
Your fresh faire Virgins, and your flowring Infants.
What is it then to me, if impious Warre,
Arrayed in flames like to the Prince of Fiends,
Doe with his smyrcht complexion all fell feats,
Enlynckt to wast and desolation?
What is't to me, when you your selues are cause,
If your pure Maydens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing Violation?...
...why in a moment looke to see
The blind and bloody Souldier, with foule hand
Desire the Locks of your shrill-shriking Daughters:
Your Fathers taken by the siluer Beards,
And their most reuerend Heads dasht to the Walls:
Your naked Infants spitted vpon Pykes,...
(III.iii.13-20, 34-38)
Katherine’s image of man combines with other subterranean elements in the play to produce a kind of "anti-Henry," a persistently negative image not so much of the historical ruler as of the kind of politics that Shakespeare makes him represent. But in order to understand how this all comes about, we must first examine the scene's stylistic and philosophical contexts.
Emblems and Emblematic Images in the Lancastrian Tetralogy
Shakespeare's fondness for emblematic metaphor -- that is, for extended metaphors that create mental pictures similar to those found in Renaissance books of imprese -- has been documented for over a hundred years. He indulged in this form of expression most fully during the middle period, and especially in the Lancastrian Tetralogy. Richard describes the antic Death keeping his court in the "mortal temples" of a "hollow crown." He pathetically sketches himself, now as a "mockery king of snow," now as a human being turned into a clock of sorrows. Young Hal limns out for Falstaff another kind of clock, whose signifiers are the very pleasures by which time is wasted:
...unless hours were cups of sack and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses; and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-color'd taffeta,...
Henry IV, Part One, I.11.6-10
In Henry V Canterbury portrays the activities of the successful modern state in artfully visual detail as those of a beehive (I.ii.187ff.); and the scholarly Fluellen constructs for Pistol a verbal emblem of the goddess Fortuna:
By your patience, Aunchient Pistol: Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore his eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning, and inconstant, and mutability, and variation; and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls.
Henry V, III.iv.30-36
Closely related to emblematic metaphor, though less complexly detailed, are poetic descriptions of the human form as transmogrified into some "other," symbolically important, identity. In these Henry V is rich as well. Fluellen characterizes Bardolph as a face of fire:
His face is all bubukles, and whelks, and knobs, and his lips blows at his nose, and it is like a coal of fire, sometimes plue and sometimes red, but his nose is executed, and his fires out.
(III.iv.102-106)
Later, Fluellen will unintentionally satirize imperial authority by mispronuncing an old title, "Alexander the Pig" (IV.vii.13ff.). King Henry tells his troops in war to "imitate the action of the tiger," and then, in a speech we will return to, commands a terrifying transformation of physiognomy:
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-figur'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let it pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
(III.i.3-14)
Shortly afterwards, under the conjuring of Henry's own rhetorical imagination, his troops become "greyhounds in the slips" (31). With all these transformations in mind, we should note also Shakespeare's use of playfully allegorical names: the obvious Falstaff, Pistol, Quickly and Tearsheet; the less obvious Poins (Fr. poing, fist), Nym (nim, steal), Peto (It. peto, fart). In these names, just as in Katherine's English lesson, humanity is devalued from a complex presence to a set of base and narrow vectors.
Henry and Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus
If Henry's dread reworking of the human visage is emblematic, it is so in a particularly topical sense. In the middle and late 16th century, the pictorial transfiguration of the human face had enjoyed a growing vogue under the leadership of the illustrious Milanese artist, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Court painter to the Holy Roman Emperors Ferdinand I, Maximillian II and Rudolf II (at whose palace in Prague Sir Philip Sidney, Edward Dyer and Fulke Greville had been guests), Arcimboldo had pioneered the idea of the anthropomorphic landscdape, in which rocks, soil and vegetation suggest human features. He had also magnified the idea of the ‘composite head’ from a bizarre iconographical device into a subgenre capable of expressing political and philosophical theory. Arcimboldo's portrait of Rudolf II as Vertumnus (fig. 1) is perhaps the most notable example of this art. Here the monarch is depicted as a human mask of fruits and vegetables, with sanguine apple cheeks, genuine cherry lips and what appear to be mulberry eyes and pomegranate teeth. The painting's dizzy effect at first viewing is allayed, though never fully dispelled, by the suggestive abundance and fertility of the natural images. What initially seems grotesque becomes (the sooner to eyes versed in Renaissance semiotics) endowed with a special mystery. This mystery relates Rudolf's imperial identity to the inexhaustible variety of nature, to nature's triumphant fertility; it suggests that kingship, properly understood, partakes of cosmic variety. More technically, Arcimboldo's Vertumnus can be seen as a graphic figuration of the rhetorical idea of copia, called into the service of imperial apologetics. By turning the emperor into a life-catalogue, it suggests his ability to be all things. As Massimo Cacciari puts it,
The king is Spring and Winter, Summer and Autumn, Fire and Water, Earth and Air; he embraces within himself the drama of the humours and of the elements, he is phlegmatic and choleric, sanguine and melancholy. He is the power of the drama itself, the expression of its inexorability.Vertumnus was the god of changing seasons, of ever-returning growth. Arcimboldo's presentation of Rudolf as Vertumnus is thus not only one of material but chronological copia, of abundance in time. And this abundance in time is conceived (as Arcimboldo's Seasons and Elements imply) as the king's ability to transform himself, as political necessity dictates, into one sharply defined character after another. The Neoplatonic doctrine of unlimited human potentiality, put forth by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Paracelsus (tempered possibly by Machiavelli’s idea of the ruler as lion and fox), reappears in Arcimboldo as the radical adaptability of princely character. Though Shakespeare might not have seen any of Arcimboldo's colossal fantasies, he might well have heard of them. Evidence suggests that Arcimboldo’s work was collected by Philip II of Spain, and by the late 1590's his paintings were famous not only in Prague but also in Milan, where it was extolled in the publications of Giovani Paolo Lomazzo and Gregorio Comanini. Anthropomorphic landscapes similar to Arcimboldo’s became a minor vogue in Europe in the early 17th century. By 1605 the racy legend of Vertumnus had grown fashionable enough for two plays of that title to be performed during James I’s visit to Oxford (the King fell asleep during one of them), and one of these plays is widely regarded as a source for Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (c. 1611) – a play unified in its attention to the theme of art – is reminiscent of Rudolf and Arcimboldo in its Bohemian setting, its direct reference to Italian mannerism (Giulio Romano, V.ii.94-100) and in the names of at least two characters. Shakespeare devotes a short episode to the goddess Flora, a figure whom Arcimboldo had painted famously as a woman constructed entirely as petals, and goes to the length of imitating this conceit in words, as his heroine Perdita considers heaping her boyfriend (Florizel!) with flowers (IV.iv.110-29).
Revisiting Henry V, we notice that the King’s hortatory comments before Harflew quoted above are much in the same vein as two of the Italian master's most dramatic subjects, the anthropomorphic landscape and Rudolf as the element Fire (figs. 2 and 3). In Arcimboldo's fantastic landscape, the brows appear as houses (or, in other versions, rocks) 'o'erhanging' the eyes; in his Fire the hair and chin are aflame, the ear is a fire iron, the eyes are jutting powder-charges and the body is compounded of explosive weaponry. Bizarre as it may appear, this wild image is not parodic: Fire wears around his neck the Hapsburg Order of the Golden Fleece. Rather, Fire is symbolic of what might be called the military mode of temporally-abundant kingship: kingship as controlled fury.The king who is all seasons, is all humours as well, and one of these is the choler necessary to terrify barbarians and subdue the proud.
Of course the "man for all seasons" idea was a Renaissance staple, done almost to death by the likes of Machiavelli, Castiglione, Elyot and Rabelais. Shakespeare's indulgence in it would not per se connect him with any one of these writers, not to mention Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Arcimboldo is nonetheless useful as a gloss to Henry V, not only because his work helps explain the play's "emblematic" articulation of politics, but also because his characterization of kingship as radically variable is matched by Shakespeare's extravagantly varying characterization of King Henry. Like Arcimboldo's Rudolf, Shakespeare's Henry is capable of presenting a mind-boggling abundance of personalities, a calendar of kingship. Boasting of his (politically significant) ability to master the language of tapsters, young Hal tells Poins,
I am now of all the humors that have shown themselves humors since the old days of goodman Adam to the pupil age of this present twelve a'clock at midnight.
(Henry IV, Part One, II.iv.92-95)
His own variations of personality are even more profound than those he advises for his troops. Canterbury describes him as a sort of human kaleidoscope, equally brilliant in multiple professional callings:
Hear him but reason in divinity,
And all-admiring, with an inward wish
You would desire the king were made a prelate;
Hear him discourse of commonwealth affairs,
You would say it hath been all in all his study;
List his discourse of war, and you shall hear
A fearful battle render'd you in music;...
(I.i.38-44)
A similar versatility obtains in Henry's behavior at large. In earlier life he has plotted and carried out a personality-change of epic proportions: a self-reformation that astounds England. Now, as "the mirror of all English kings," he responds to mutability with massive vicissitudes of his own. When Harflew resists him, he is fierce; when the town yields, he is merciful. In ceremony, he is august; in counsel, deferent; in disguise, informal; in triumph, pious. To the French, he is bitterly defiant; to his own men, anticipating Agincourt in the rather syrupy "band of brothers" oration, he is humbly affectionate. To Canterbury he is the arch-rhetorician; wooing Katherine, he is all bluff soldier. Like Arcimboldo's Earth (fig. 4), a regal composite of animals including lion and lamb, cat and fox, Henry would seem to have all types of character at his disposal. Cacciari's gloss on the Vertumnus --
The king is every mask and every name. His power consists in having the extraordinary ability to "convert" himself into any semblance: therefore Vertumnus.
– could be applied with equal accuracy to Shakespeare's Henry.
Yet is Henry any more than this? Castiglione’s The Courtier, that most influential of all books in the ‘man for all seasons’ tradition, points to the need for a kind of philosophical awareness that regulates and reflects upon the various modes of political action. But Shakespeare’s Henry shows no sign of possessing such a consciousness. True, he can complain of the stress of leadership, but his complaints are spoken in a vacuum of self-knowledge. His character would seem in accord with Cacciari’s comment that
not even the king can exceed the game of names and masks. ...He is the prisoner of the drama in all its entirety and complexity: he encloses it all in himself, he remembers it all, far from surpassing it, far from being free of it, far from being able to have an existence of his own outside the scene where it is being played out.Note: The change to pitch (12) and font (4) must be converted manually.Note: The change to pitch (12) and font (1) must be converted manually.
The question is whether a similar combination of mobility and determinism, a similar imprisonment in drama, is the fate of the playwright himself. Postmodern interpreters have long suggested that this is so -- that Shakespeare, like all creators of political fictions, is profoundly entangled in his own mystifications. But Katherine's English lesson and other elements in Henry V suggest greater authorial scope. Indeed, they expose a side of the play that seems at once critical of political paradigms and aware of their necessity. This sophisticated form of social consciousness is apparent in Shakespeare’s treatment of two of Henry’s old drinking cronies, the Ancient Pistol and Bardolph.
King Henry, Pistol and the Death of Bardolph.
The underside of King Henry’s politics, and the dark side of politics in general, are most clearly expressed by one of the play's most extensive inner structures: the system of correspondences that ironically connects, from beginning to end, Henry's regal soldiership with the villainous soldiership of the Ancient Pistol. First, Pistol goes to France in Henry’s army and is the only other individual figure whose sayings and doings we are constantly reacquainted with throughout the play. Second, as Harold Goddard once noted, the situations Pistol encounters, and his manner of dealing with them, again and again mimic or parody Henry's far grander actions, and do so in such a way as to call them into question. Goddard describes one episode of this mimicry in detail but refrains from treating the others. Let me attempt to do so:
1- Both Henry and Pistol, bent on international conquest, face preliminary difficulties at home. The king buys his way out of his difficulties by gaining the Archbishop's anticipatory absolution from sin in return for saving the Church from grievous depredations at the hands of Commons. Pistol buys his way out of his difficulties by repaying Nym eight shillings and thus assuaging Nym's anger at the loss of Mistress Quickly. In so doing, the king secures the Church, and Pistol secures his whore. (Henry V, I.i,ii; II.i)
2- Both characters early on are involved in slanging-matches (Henry with the distant French Dolphin, Pistol with Nym) in which both protagonists indulge rhetorically in an unusual form of mycterismus: Henry repeatedly using the word 'mock' and Pistol hammering to death the word 'solus' (I.ii.284-286; II.i 46-51):
Henry. ...for many a thousand widows
Shall make his mock mock out of their dear husbands;
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;...
Pistol. "Solus," egregious dog? O viper vile!
The "solus" in thy most mervailous face,
The "solus" in thy teeth, and in thy throat,
And in thy hateful lungs, yea, in thy maw, perdy;
And which is worse, within thy nasty mouth!
I do retort the "solus" in thy bowels,...
3- In France, both characters win early successes through verbal skills rather than military prowess. Henry harangues and threatens the citizens of Harflew, who yield to him. Pistol wins Fluellen's approval at the "bridge" skirmish by uttering "prave words." (III.iii.1-43; III.vi.63-66)
4- The only clash involving both Frenchmen and Englishmen onstage is Pistol's confrontation with the French Soldier: a victory of word over deed, of bombast over cowardice. Pistol's victory thus becomes the ironic stage symbol of imperial conquest (IV.iv). The French Soldier buys Pistol off with deux cent ecus; France buys Henry off with a marriage and an heirship. (IV.iv.40-48; V.ii)
5- Henry, in disguise, falls out with the soldier Williams, and they exchange gloves by way of future identification; the king makes Fluellen wear the glove in his cap; after Williams and Fluellen scuffle the king makes amends by filling Williams' glove with crowns. Pistol insults Fluellen by telling him to "eat his leek;" Fluellen wears the leek in his cap until he may be revenged; Pistol is beaten by Fluellen and must make amends by eating the leek. (IV.i.197-220; IV.vii.153-159; IV.vii.1-61; V.i.)
Both characters return to England, Henry as a glorious monarch, Pistol as a bawd and cutpurse; but the apparent disparity of these endings is rendered ambiguous by the parallelisms that precede them. Humorous plot-parallel, a device known to English audiences since the Second Shepherds' Play and practiced by Shakespeare as early as Love's Labour's Lost, is here applied with bitter effect. Shakespeare, who would soon make Hamlet baldly define politics in terms of brigandage and pandering, no doubt had these connections in mind when composing Henry V.
The ironic duet set up by Henry and Pistol is accompanied by a set of satiric variations on the theme of soldiership. The French nobles (III.vii) are paper tigers, lame fops whose sensibility lists towards bestiality and cannibalism. Bardolph, Pistol and Nym are all cowards, while Fluellen is a military pedant adept at taking offense with his own allies. The French Constable militarizes God (Dieu de Batailles!) -- a phrase soon anglicized by Henry himself. Henry repeatedly draws the connection between conquest and concupiscence. Fluellen's Alexander the Pig is a bitter reversal whose effect is to strip away the sanctimonious glorifications of war and expose the brutish motives working beneath.
Katherine's language lesson is born of the same dark inspiration. Katherine and Alice create a grotesque and demystified war-machine, an image of man declined into savagery, an avatar that would have pleased the Conrad of Heart of Darkness. In its figurative confusion of conquest and rape and in its grim implications about human potentiality, their creation is a critical link in the ironic infrastructure of Henry V. The emblematic image of man conjured up in the English lesson connects with other bizarre and sinister images of soldiership to develop the dark side of Henry V: the ironic counterpoint to the play's overt exaltation of monarchy at war.
But to say that these elements make Henry V a subversive or anti-war play is to miss the point. Henry V, we must remember, is the culmination of Shakespeare’s most patiently evolved study of politics: the Lancrastrian Tetralogy, chronicling the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V. Richard II is portrayed by Shakespeare as embarking on a rampage of mismanagement that leaves his realm in chaos and his authority in shreds. His usurping cousin, Henry IV, struggles to maintain order in an England wracked by corruption and civil war. On his death bed he advises his son, Prince Hal, to “busy giddy minds with foreign troubles;” and indeed, when Hal as Henry V wages war, it is against a backdrop of domestic conflict, conspiracy and crime. Shakespeare may shadow the King’s war darkly, but only after abundantly establishing its historical antecedents.
But did these antecedents really make Henry’s war necessary? Shakespeare, who was never a servile adherent to historical detail, is less interested in this question than in exploring a theoretical position: the Machiavellian argument, notorious then but almost idiomatic today, that political chaos responds only to a governor who can ‘manage’ truth and falsehood, and who, additionally, can deliver serious doses of grief. Machiavelli is the originator of Henry IV’s ‘busy giddy minds with foreign troubles” theory. Machiavelli states outright a political imperative that will lurk in the words and deeds of Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry V: that, under disordered circumstance, the ambition and dishonesty of humanity at large necessitates aggressive and disingenuous behavior on the part of the ruler. Machiavelli's Prince is neither a godly figure nor a figure of crime, but a canny politician, versed in the depravity of nations, capable of conforming to the changing face of Time. Machiavelli's Prince, at least according to Machiavelli, is no villain, but rather a response to epidemic human villainy.
Shakespeare Henry comes closest to stating this Machiavellian position outright when he roams his camp in disguise on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. A soldier named Williams challenges him on the war’s legitimacy, and he responds with a catal;ogue of human disorders and misdeeds, arguing that war is God’s way of punishing the wicked:
Besides, there is no King, be his Cause neuer so spotlesse, if it come to the arbitrement of Swords, can trye it out with all vnspotted Souldiers: some (peraduenture) haue on them the guilt of premeditated and contriued Murther; some, of beguiling Virgins with the broken Seales of Periurie; some, making the Warres their Bulwarke, that haue before gored the gentle Bosome of Peace with Pillage and Robberie. Now, if these men haue defeated the Law, and outrunne Natiue punishment; though they can out-strip men, they haue no wings to flye from God. Warre is his Beadle, Warre is his Vengeance: so that here men are punisht, for before breach of the Kings Lawes, in now the Kings Quarrell: where they feared the death, they haue borne life away; and where they would bee safe, they perish. Then if they dye vnprouided, no more is the King guiltie of their damnation, then hee was before guiltie of those Impieties, for the which they are now visited.
Though Henry has conveniently shifted responsibility from himself to God, his drift is still clear: domestic depravity necessitates global aggression. War is the “beadle” who punishes fomenters of civil unrest. Yet it can be said that the King, too, is making ‘war his bulwark’: using it to stabilize his unquiet nation.
Thus though Henry V is an artful and subtle play, there is nothing ambiguous about it. It is a story of textbook Machiavellian policy in action. True to Machiavelli, Henry gilds political necessity with the name of sanctified war. Shakespeare gives us the Florentine ball of wax, from the war’s glorious self-promotions down to its foul underbelly.
Does this make Shakespeare an adherent of Machiavelli? Admittedly, Machiavelli was a revolutionary force, a radical theorist who made his influence felt on leaders and thinkers as diverse as Charles V, Rousseau, Jefferson, Marx and Chairman Mao. Moreover, the arch-political Machiavelli, his violent message cloaked in serene intellect, made excellent drama. But Shakespeare, like his hero Antony, has a habit of rising above the elements he works with.
Consider the way in which he rounds out his favorite theme of the whole tetralogy: thievery.
Henry, we remember, served out his tutelage with a gang of thieves, including Falstaff, Bardolph and (later) Pistol. Shakespeare makes sure that each thief gets his comeuppance in Henry V. Falstaff dies, calling out to his Lord. Bardolph is hanged, significantly, for thievery. Pistol is cudgelled by the moralist, Fluellen, and served notice of his infamy by the equally moral Gower:
Gow. Go, go, you are a counterfeit cowardly Knaue, will you mocke at an ancient Tradition began vppon an honourable respect, and worne as a memorable Trophee of predeceased valor, and dare not auouch in your deeds any of your words.
All these punishments, it would seem, reinforce the message that Henry’s Machiavellian policy is purging his nation of vice. But Pistol survives, and his final words (since he is Henry’s ironic alter-ego) are to be taken seriously:
Doeth fortune play the huswife with me now?
Newes haue I that my Doll is dead i'th Spittle
Of a malady of France,
And there my rendeuous is quite cut off:
Old I do waxe, and from my wearie limbes
Honour is Cudgeld. Well, Baud Ile turne,
And something leane to Cut-purse of quicke hand:
To England will I steale, and there Ile steale:
And patches will I get vnto these cudgeld scarres,
And swore I got them in the Gallia warres.
Vii80-89
Pistol’s decision to steal when he gets back to England suggests that Henry’s policy, while a successful stop-gap, is no cure for the internal disorder that provoked the war. And this suggestion is reinforced by the Epilogue, discussing the fate of the biggest thief of all, Henry himself:
Small time: but in that small, most greatly liued
This Starre of England. Fortune made his Sword;
By which, the Worlds best Garden he atchieued:
And of it left his Sonne Imperiall Lord.
Henry the Sixt, in Infant Bands crown'd King
Of France and England, did this King succeed:
Whose State so many had the managing,
That they lost France, and made his England bleed:...
“Fortune made his Sword!” Another reference to The Prince, which was considered the manual for opportunists. But, as Pistol complains, what Lady Fortune gives, “Huswife Fortune” may take away. The Epilogue reminds us that Henry V died young, before he could consolidate his power, and that his fall paved the way for the worst fortune of all, the Wars of the Roses. Shakespeare, it would seem, is impressed by the Machiavellian solution, but not wholly convinced.
Conclusion: Henry V as Copia
An abortive language lesson. A beaten coward. A punished theft. A catalogue of genocidal atrocities. An image of the human face contorted into a thing of horror. These apparently various and dissonant elements now take on a startling unity: a unity not perceptible as linear consistency but rather as a distended Renaissance copia. Using the broadest possible pattern of associations, concentrating on extreme positions, sinister undertones and ironic contradictions, he has taken a historical war and turned it into a discourse on war: a profound reevaluation of war as a psychological, moral and political phenomenon. By developing the play as a copia – by creating it as an exploration rather than the statement of a paradigmatic position – Shakespeare has produced a strikingly durable commentary, a mirror by which we may test our own attitudes towards war into the indefinite future.