To welcome him! Much more, and much more cause,
Did they this Harry.
(Chorus, 5.0.22–35)
As we shift perspective from Henry’s triumphant return to Julius Caesar’s to Essex’s then back to Henry’s, much gets blurred. The passage speaks to the audience’s understandable desire to leap over time, for the imminent Irish campaign to be over.
When examined more closely, however, the Chorus’s comparisons prove disquieting. Caesar had entered Rome harboring thoughts of returning the republic to one-man rule, and his short-lived triumph and tragic end was already on Shakespeare’s mind as he looked forward to his next play, Julius Caesar. Scratch the surface, and the analogy to Essex’s forecasted return “with rebellion broached on his sword” is no less troubling. Henry was a king. In contrast, Essex, like Caesar, was a military hero feared by rivals who sought his overthrow because they believed he would be king. Essex’s enemies, William Camden noted, seeing how the earl wished “nothing more than to have an army under his command,” feared that Essex “entertained some monstrous design, especially seeing he showed his contumacy more and more against the Queen that had been most bountiful to him.” His enemies may have felt their concern justified when Essex’s own followers claimed that he was descended from “the blood royal of England by Cecily Bourchier his great grandmother,” who was descended both from Thomas of Woodstock the youngest son of King Edward III, and also from Richard Earl of Cambridge, and that “hereupon he had better title to the scepter of England than any of the competitors” hoping to succeed Elizabeth.
If Shakespeare was aware of this lineage, it throws into a new light his handling of Essex’s ancestor, the same Richard Earl of Cambridge, who has a cameo part in Henry the Fifth as a traitor who betrays his monarch for foreign gold and is sent to his death. What Shakespeare knew from his sources, but buries too deeply in his play for audiences to readily see, is that the Earl of Cambridge really did have a strong claim to the throne, a better one than Henry V. It’s a point that is made much of in Sir John Oldcastle, staged the following November, in which Cambridge argues that Henry IV and Henry V are “false intruders and usurp the crown.” Heir of the third son of Edward III’s eldest son, Cambridge was unfairly passed over by these Lancastrians, who can only trace their descent from the fourth son of Edward III’s eldest son.
While it is unlikely that Shakespeare would deliberately link Essex with the traitorous Cambridge, the politics of Henry the Fifth are so inscrutable that it’s difficult to know for sure. Nowhere is the play more slippery than in its description of Essex returning from Ireland “with rebellion broached on his sword.” The line allows for the possibility that the unpredictable Essex, in command of a conquering army, could, like Henry V’s father, Bolingbroke, enter England at the head of such an army, rebelliously returning to London and counting on the commoners to come to his side. Had she heard these lines, Elizabeth might have shuddered.
In all likelihood she never did hear them. There’s no evidence that the play was ever performed before her. By the end of the year political events would have made that impossible. Despite its initial popularity, its focus on sensitive contemporary events assured Henry the Fifth—at least in its original form—one of the shortest first runs of any of Shakespeare’s plays. After it was “sundry times played” by the Chamberlain’s Men in 1599, a copy of it was first “stayed” or delayed, and then, having undergone extensive cuts, rushed into print in 1600 in a stripped-down version that eliminates the Choruses, all mention of Essex, Ireland, Scotland, collusion between the Crown and the Church, and anything else that might remotely cause political offense. It certainly looks like the company, in light of unfolding events, was trying to cover its tracks. This sanitized version was twice reprinted before the fuller, original version finally appeared in the 1623 Folio. But by then the play had dropped out of the repertory. Before the Restoration, Pistol is quoted or mentioned a couple of times, dramatists recalled enough to poke fun at one or two bits in it, and a version of the play was once performed for King James (surely trimmed of its slurs against the “weasel Scot” [1.2.170]). Otherwise, silence.
Those seeking to pinpoint Shakespeare’s political views in Henry the Fifth will always be disappointed. The play is not a political manifesto. Shakespeare resists reveling either in reflexive patriotism or in a critique of nationalistic wars, though the play contains elements of both. Henry the Fifth succeeds and frustrates because it consistently refuses to adopt a single voice or point of view about military adventurism—past and present. Shakespeare was aware that on some deep level, as their brothers, husbands, and sons were being shipped off to fight in Ireland, Elizabethans craved a play that reassuringly reminded them of their heroic, martial past. What better subject than the famous victories of Henry V? The siege at Harfleur would be a triumph (compensating for the humiliating defeat of besieged Blackwater). But Shakespeare also knew that this same audience—already weary of military call-ups and fresh demands to arm and victual troops, and unnerved by frightful reports from settlers and soldiers returning from Ireland—were by the eve of Essex’s departure of two minds about the campaign. Henry the Fifth thus takes its place among the many stories circulating in London at this anxious time—from the gossip at court and in the taverns to the official sermons and royal pronouncements justifying the imminent military expedition—and yet somehow manages to encompass them all. It wasn’t a pro-war play or an anti-war play but a going-to-war play.
In responding to his audience’s mixed feelings, their sense that the war was both unavoidable and awful, Shakespeare fills the play with competing, critical voices: the backroom whispers of self-interested churchmen, the grumblings of low-life conscripts, the blunt criticism of worthy soldiers who know that leaders make promises they have no intention of keeping, the confessions of so-called traitors, the growing cynicism of a young boy off to the wars, the infighting among officers, the bitter curses of a returning soldier. Much of the play, from beginning to end, is composed of scenes in which opposing voices collide over the conduct of the war. In truth, there’s not much else to the plot. Critics who complain that “a siege and a battle, with one bit of light love-making cannot form a drama” are not wrong as far as that goes. What they overlook is that all the debate about the war is the real story.
King Henry is himself responsible for a lot of this arguing and exhorting and speaks in many voices, each perfectly tuned to the demands of the moment. He is, when he needs to be, the inspiring battlefield leader, the cold-blooded commander ordering his men to execute their prisoners, the pious general giving thanks to God alone, the self-effacing wooer, and (while disguised among his troops on the eve of battle) the defensive, isolated leader. We see here signs of Shakespeare’s increasing interest in biography and character, spurred, perhaps, by his recent reading of North’s translation of Plutarch’s lives of the great Greek and Roman leaders. Shakespeare also knew enough from observing Elizabeth that the successful monarch was one with an intuitive sense of theater, one who not only knew how to perform many roles but who also knew (like Henry V) how to steer others into playing less attractive parts. Henry turns out to be a lot like Shakespeare himself: a man who mingles easily with princes and paupers but who deep down is fundamentally private and inscrutable.
With the innovative (and for Shakespeare unique) experiment of introducing each act with an extended prologue spoken by the Chorus, a sense of counterpoint sharply defines the structure and rhythm of the play, as the Chorus and the ensuing stage action offer competing versions of what is taking place. The idea of using a Chorus in this way probably came to Shakespeare late in his conception of the play—for they were sufficiently detachable to be eliminated when the play was first printed. The Chorus keep giving the story away in advance. But what Shakespeare loses in dramatic surprise he makes up for in the tension between what audiences are told and what they see for themselves—which becomes, far more than the antagonism between the French and En
glish, the main conflict in the play. Adjudicating between the competing claims of the Chorus and the action is demanding, though perhaps less so for Elizabethan audiences who saw the widening gulf between official propaganda and the harsh reality around them (and knew what could, and what could not, be said aloud about the war effort). Take, for example, the Chorus to act 2, which offers a stirring vision of a nation responding to a call to arms:
Now all the youth of England are on fire,
And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies.
Now thrive the armorers, and honor’s thought
Reigns solely in the breast of every man.
They sell the pasture now to buy the horse,
Following the mirror of all Christian kings,
With winged heels, as English Mercurys.
For now sits Expectation in the air
And hides a sword from hilts unto the point
With crowns imperial, crowns and coronets,
Promised to Harry and his followers.
(Chorus, 2.0.1–11)
By March 1599, this inflated rhetoric would have produced a wince or two among muster-weary Londoners, few of whom, except for a handful of hopeful gentleman volunteers, were planning to “sell the pasture now to buy the horse” and follow Essex into battle for greater rewards. The cheery, official view of this Chorus is belied by the action that immediately follows onstage. It’s not the “winged heels” of young men eager to fight that we next see, but rather a group of foot-dragging, thieving conscripts, Nym, Bardolph, and Pistol, who grudgingly “must to France together” (2.1.91) and who fall to fighting among themselves. Their quarrel is set aside only when Pistol announces that he will sell provisions to the army (another deeply corrupt business) “and profits will accrue” that will ensure their “friendship” and “brotherhood” (109–12). The sole motivation these soldiers have to fight is that there’s money to be made by cheating the army that is cheating its troops. The alternation of Chorus and action reenacts the pattern of expectation and disenchantment that characterized the campaign to subdue Ireland. The competing views of the Chorus and these underworld characters do not so much qualify as disqualify each other.
This Chorus’s breathless patriotism would have been familiar enough to audiences from works like the just published poem by Thomas Churchyard, “The Fortunate Farewell to the Most Forward and Noble Earl of Essex.” These thumpingly alliterative lines from Churchyard’s poem are typical:
Now when green trees begin to bud and bloom,
On Irish seas Eliza’s ships shall ride.
A warlike band of worthy knights, I hope,
Are armed for fight, a bloody brunt to bide,
With rebels shall both might and manhood cope,
Our country’s right and quarrel to be tried.
Right makes wrong blush, and truth bids falsehood fly,
The sword is drawn, Tyrone’s dispatch drawn nigh.
But even Churchyard, who had been writing this kind of propaganda since the reign of Edward VI and was the author of a now lost book The Scourge of Rebels in Ireland, recognized that this effusive support for the campaign was a necessary counterweight to the misgivings contemporaries had about the military adventure. He defends his proselytizing poem on the grounds that it was important “to stir up a threefold manly courage to the mercenary multitude of soldiers, that follow this marshal-like General.” Of course, the need to encourage backsliding troops suggests something less than total enthusiasm on the part of these citizen-soldiers. After a long life as a poorly requited poet-soldier, now almost eighty years old and probably forced to churn out this kind of stuff to make ends meet, Churchyard knew better, but also knew that somebody was going to make money from this kind of publication, so why not him? Propaganda was necessary as a country went off to war; but few could have been naïve enough to swallow it whole—whether they came across it in Churchyard’s poem or Shakespeare’s Chorus. Shakespeare’s audience knew this, and he expected them to.
Shakespeare also introduces in Henry the Fifth what later became a staple of English comedy: the stage Irishman. Captain Macmorris appears in act 3, entering in the company of a Scottish captain, Jamy. Tellingly, both disappear from the play before the decisive battle at Agincourt, unlike their fellow captains—the Welsh Fluellen and the English Gower. A scene that shows Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and English captains united against a common enemy prophetically anticipates the notion of a united kingdom. But these kingdoms were far from united in 1599, and some were downright hostile during the reign of Henry V. That Shakespeare portrays these nations as allied is all the more strange, given the warning earlier in the play that if Henry is not careful, as soon as he goes off to the wars in France, the Scots will attack England’s “unguarded nest.” With the King of Scots the leading contender to succeed Queen Elizabeth, Henry’s warning that “the Scot… hath been still a giddy neighbor to us” (1.2.144–45) seems uncharacteristically impolitic on Shakespeare’s part. Many in the audience no doubt knew that Scottish mercenaries, fighting alongside the Irish, were awaiting Essex’s forces in Ireland (even as anyone familiar with the chronicles upon which Shakespeare drew would have known that Scottish and Welsh forces fought alongside the French against Henry V, while, confusingly, the Irish fought alongside Henry).
The collision of past and present alliances becomes even more complicated when we turn to the fantasy of English and Irish fighting side by side in the play. Even before the desertion of hired Irish troops at Blackwater when the battle started going badly, the English had been ambivalent about paying Irishmen to fill out their ranks. After that defeat a serious effort was made to purge the army of Irish soldiers. Irish captains were held especially suspect. It’s no surprise, then, that when the Welshman Fluellen starts telling the Irish captain Macmorris that “there is not many of your nation—” he is angrily cut off by the Irishman before he can complete the thought: “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?” (3.2.120–23). The stereotypical hot-blooded Irishman even threatens to cut off Fluellen’s head.
Macmorris’s name may provide a clue to his defensiveness. The so-called old English or Anglo-Norman, who had settled in Ireland centuries earlier, had adjusted to local custom by changing their names’ original prefix “Fitz” to the Gaelic “Mac.” No wonder, then, the part-English, part-Irish, and part-Norman Macmorris is so touchy about his unfixed national identity: What is his nation? English? Irish? An Anglo-Irish mix? If so, what of his loyalties? As a frustrated Irish captain in the English army named Christopher St. Lawrence put it: “I am sorry that when I am in England, I should be esteemed an Irishman, and in Ireland, an Englishman.”
Even as Shakespeare was exposing contemporary prejudices toward England’s Gaelic neighbors, he was revealing traces of his own. If we look at the Folio text of this scene (which can be traced back to Shakespeare’s own manuscript), the speech headings permit a glimpse of how Shakespeare himself imagined his own characters. Throughout the scene, stage headings for Macmorris and Jamy substitute for their names their national types, for Shakespeare thought of them less as individuals than as “Irish” and “Scot.” The Welsh occupy a middle ground: Fluellen is first called Fluellen before he, too, is reduced to national type, “Welsh.” In contrast, the Englishman Gower is always called “Gower.” There were some deep cracks in the edifice of cheerful British allies standing shoulder to shoulder.
Shakespeare’s interest in national stereotypes is closely related to his obsessive interest in the play in dialects and in the connection between nationality and language. In addition to the distinctive and often comic English dialects spoken by Macmorris, Jamy, and Fluellen, there’s the broken English spoken by Katharine of France, the schoolboy French that Henry falls back on when wooing Katharine, and the slightly muddled French spoken by the prisoner Monsieur le Fer. We are even treated to an extended and obscene English lesson in which the sexual surr
ender of Katharine is prefigured.
One result of all this mangled English is that characters have a great deal of trouble understanding what others say or mean. English lessons notwithstanding, language stands as an insurmountable barrier to erasing national difference because identity is so intertwined with how one speaks. Henry embodies Englishness precisely because he can’t—or won’t—speak French. As he tells his future wife, “It is as easy for me, Kate, to conquer the kingdom as to speak so much more French” (5.2.185–86). Katharine speaks for many in the play when she admits: “I cannot tell wat is dat” (5.2.178). The audience comes to know just how she feels, for Shakespeare invents over a score of new words or phrases in the course of Henry the Fifth, including “impawn,” “womby vaultages,” “portage,” “nook-smitten,” “sur-reined,” “congreeted,” “enscheduled,” and “curselarie.” These, and rare words like “leno,” “cresive” and the recent Dutch import “sutler,” keep spectators struggling to get a firm grasp on what is said and what is meant. There’s a further irony here, one that Shakespeare is keenly aware of: in the act of expanding its linguistic boundaries, the English language must appropriate (or from another perspective, be contaminated by) other languages.
There’s a telling example of this cross-cultural confusion, with an Irish twist, in the scene in which the braggart Pistol can’t believe his good fortune that a wealthy Frenchman has surrendered to him. Pistol’s secondhand language tends to be stitched together from old disgarded scraps, including Marlovian rant. When he hears French and sees treasure in this scene, his mind immediately runs to a popular Irish ditty, “Calen O costure me,” which he characteristically mangles:
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 12
