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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
(114-26).
68 Branagh enthusiastically celebrated the homosocial element in the play: "There's tremendous adrenaline, tremendous bonding, tremendous camaraderie" (Nightingale |note 27~, 18).
69 The Archbishop registers the scandal of Henry's companions when he describes them as "unletter'd" and "rude," part of the "popularity" (1.1.55, 59).
70 On the importance of combat to the cult of chivalry see Malcolm Vale, War and Chivalry (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1981) and Richard C. McCoy, The That |these events~ had a real truth in history, sharpens the sense of pain, while it hangs a leaden weight on the heart and the imagination . . . |W~e think that the actual truth of the particular events, in proportion as we are conscious of it, is a drawback on the pleasures as well as the dignity of tragedy.
William Hazlitt(1)
Premised on the antagonism between history's "real ground" and the imaginative pleasures of tragedy, Hazlitt's meditation reveals a tension that underlies much discussion of Shakespeare's history plays. Hazlitt's polarizing of history and pleasure is echoed in Shakespeare's Henry V when the Archbishop extols Henry's rhetorical gifts:
List his discourse of war, and you shall hear A fearful battle rend'red you in music.
(1.1.43-44)(2)
The pleasures Canterbury indicates rhetoric can induce by transforming gruesome historical events becomes in Hazlitt the balm for "the sense of pain" endured in grappling with the "actual truth" of history: "All the beauties of language and all the richness of the imagination . . . relieve the painfulness of the subject." However seductive, the invitation to modulate this play's history into delight may not be so easily accomplished, history comprising as it does, in Annabel Patterson's words, "both |the play's~ content and its context."(3) The impulse, however, testifies to that history's fragility, the recurring need to recapture the matrix of sociopolitical dynamics, especially those of class, that are integral to the drama's significance. The commoners in the play are pivotal in this regard. As the king's interlocutors (4.1) they articulate a probing skepticism that exposes the evasions required to dampen the class resentment war incites. In doing so, they crystallize important political problems from the play's present (the late 1590s) that were constituents of the government's military policy. They also provide disturbing reminders of Henry's own seemingly irrepressible past. Finally, these figures prompt us to take seriously the Archbishop's injunction--"List his discourse of war"--to examine the rhetoric surrounding Henry's military enterprise, disrupting it as they do by the clash of styles and perspectives they inject. The sense of dissonance and unease evoked in all these ways contravenes the pleasure offered by Henry's "sweet and honeyed sentences" (1.1.50), inhibiting the audience from taking that language at face value.(4) Instead, the play sets in motion what Bakhtin called "unresolvable dialogues" over the meaning to be given to Henry's martial enterprise.(5) In an audience constantly exhorted by the Chorus to exercise its intelligence on the performance, those dialogues prompt critical reflection on war as well as on the character of political leadership incident to it--"confining mighty men," as it were, "in little room" (Epi. 3).
To sharpen the sense of how differently Shakespeare's play registers when its history is muted I will examine Kenneth Branagh's movie Henry V, both because it is the best-known contemporary interpretation of Shakespeare and because it puts into cinematic practice one contemporary critical perspective on the playwright's work. Through his own act of history-making--the re-shaping of Shakespeare's text--Branagh alleviates the discordance the original play enacts, replacing the "irrevocable ills" of its history (Hazlitt's phrase) with a reassuring confirmation of Henry and his military exploits.
"SUBJECT TO THE BREATH" OF SUBJECTS
When in 2 Henry IV the new king rejects Falstaff, he acts on the expectation that segregation will protect him from the contamination of disreputability ("I banish thee . . . Not to come near our person by ten mile" |5.5.63, 65~). Henry's position as monarch depends upon the social distance, imaged here as geographical distance, between him and the commoners who were once his compatriots. His relationship to them encapsulates dynamics of solidarity and difference that, while personal to Henry, also characterize class interaction in Elizabethan society.
These dynamics come to the fore in Henry's confrontation with the soldiers in Henry V 4.1, where Shakespeare (who may well indicate his own allegiances in this scene by naming the primary interlocutor "Will") turns the convention of the disguised king into a vehicle for interrogating the moral and rhetorical conditions under which Henry's war is fought.(6) The device allows the playwright to dramatize the exchange in contentious terms, without a frontal assault on the conventions of deference that ordinarily regulated conversation with the king.(7) In particular the scene allows for the expression of misgivings by those who, lacking any say in the instigation or conduct of wars, are nonetheless called upon to fight them. The image of political dialogue this episode embodies is incompatible with the insularity from its subjects claimed by absolutist monarchy, summed up in Henry's words: "The King is not bound to answer" (4.1.155). There is here a challenge, albeit oblique, to the claim of executive privilege asserted by political leaders (whether royal or presidential) who are pressed with demands for accountability.(8) Binding the king to answer exposes royal rationales to the objections of the soldiers and the scrutiny of the audience.
The overriding question in war is that of responsibility, dramatized in this play by recurring images of the victims: "The guiltless drops |of blood and~ . . . waste in brief mortality" Henry admonishes the Archbishop with (1.2.25, 28); the widows, childless mothers, and orphans the English blame the French for (1.2.284-88 and 2.4.105-9); the "fair virgins," "flow'ring infants," and old men who will be sacrificed if Harfleur does not surrender (3.3.14, 20-21, 36-40); and the dismembered soldiers so graphically described by Williams in this scene ("all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopp'd off in a battle" |4.1.135-36~). The task for political leaders who urge war is to sanction this carnage, and secure obedience to marching orders, while disclaiming personal responsibility: in official rhetoric war is never a private project, subjectively motivated, but thrust upon the leadership by the most compelling of external circumstances, typically the insupportable conduct of the enemy in violation of the rights of the nation or its allies.(9) The soldier's dilemma, on the other hand, grows out of the compulsory character of his participation: either criminal disobedience to the king who con scripted him, or damnation for unlawful homicide. "I am afeard," Williams says, "there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument?" (4.1.141-43). The king's initial response is disingenuous, comparing the innately murderous enterprise of war with accidental death while traveling. He then deflects attention to the pre-existing, sinful condition of his soldiers, ignoring the moral cloud that hangs over war itself since, as Williams has pointed out, the conduct required of soldiers so squarely violates the ethical code for acceptable social behavior. Finally, Henry audaciously grafts his military enterprise onto a scheme of divine justice: "War is |God's~ beadle, war is his vengeance" (4.1.169). But the utopian picture of war as the instrument for meting out justice is contradicted both by the repeated incantations of the slaughter of innocents noted above, and by the outcome of this battle itself: the young (and unarmed) boys are treacherously killed.
Though Williams is momentarily persuaded that the soldier is personally answerable, he is immediately at odds with the king again, over royal rhetoric:
K. Hen. I myself heard the King say he would not be ransom'd. Will. Ay, he said so, to make us fight cheerfully; but when our throats are cut, he may be ransom'd, and we ne'er the wiser.
(4.1.190-94)
His response is another reminder that the skeptical soldiers are quite capable of resisting the blandishments of the king, treating his speeches as strategies to secure their compliance and Henry as willing to sacrifice the truth to do so.
Henry tries to recuperate the king's position with personal endorsement ("If I live to see it, I will never trust his word after" |4.1.195-96~), but this only prompts Williams's ridicule:
You pay him then! That's a perilous shot out of an elder-gun, that a poor and a private displeasure can do against a monarch! You may as well go about to turn the sun to ice with fanning in his face with a peacock's feather. You'll never trust his word after! come, 'tis a foolish saying. (4.1.197-202)
The personal relationship Henry's declaration envisions is only appropriate among those of his same class--aristocrats in his inner circle. For commoners his threat is, as Williams rightly recognizes, a futile fantasy, its impotence signifying in particular the lack of any effective means of redress for subjects who are lied to by their king, and, more generally, the great political gulf between Crown and commoner. That gulf is hinted at again in the conclusion to Henry's encounter with his soldiers. Not only does he fail to establish with them the fraternity he extols, his conversation with Williams ends in a quarrel that is renewed after the battle, when Henry makes this sympathetic figure the butt of his joke. Anticipating Williams's understandable resentment, Henry then tries to buy him off with money (4.8.39-61). But this soiling of Henry's triumph persists with the presence of the bitter Williams on stage throughout the body count that certifies the English victory.
The distance between Crown and subject played out here is a double-edged sword. While the king's power rests on the social and political difference that rank embodies, undue emphasis on inequality will undermine the consent necessary to peaceful and orderly government even under a relatively absolutist monarchy. Even those without privilege or power must be given to feel they have some stake in the system, a feeling the rhetoric of rank, with its emphasis on distinction, cannot engender but only erode. Hence the potency of the concept of divinely ordained hierarchy as an image of the sociopolitical order. It conferred dignity upon each person, whatever his/her location in the scheme (through the concept of place and the doctrine of vocation). It also provided a vision of solidarity through shared...
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