A Pageant of High and Low Mind

In their account of England’s story, the Tudors held Henry V as an ideal of kingship, and Shakespeare’s play Henry V upholds that view for this clean-shaven man with the three rings on his fingers, whose sensual mouth, long nose and cold eye we see profiled in the anonymous National Portrait Gallery painting. It is useful to have such a distinct profile for Henry because, whatever the ideal of kingship cherished by our Tudor forebears, Shakespeare gives resolution to a most particular man, one that tolerates inscrutability as among his core attributes.

Or rather, the dramatist works to create this particularity from a tension between the received idealisation and his own meticulous imagining of the breathing man, patriot-hero, deliberative self-fashioner whose youthful antics shadow him in this play. And whether working from source or meta-source, a part of Shakespeare’s care lies in how he illumines the manner of Henry’s relationships, for these can scarcely be called personal.

With a cast of over fifty, Henry V is a most populous pageant, and its people are drawn from all stations of life. There are lords and prelates, officers, soldiers, attendants, messengers, citizens, boys. There are traitors who will be unmasked and church-thieves who will hang. English, Welsh, Scots, Irish and French address each other in distinctive idiom, and while only three women are individualised in this drama of military adventurism, one of them, Mistress Quickly, taverner of Eastcheap, delivers perhaps the most poignant speech of the play in her account of Falstaff’s death. So here, as the Chorus reminds us in its opening lines, is a Realm being depicted with its centrepiece the king, who has been some two years on the throne when the play opens.

The point is this. If the play’s first design is to satisfy our curiosity as to Henry’s character, then vital to that interest is his identification with Realm. Mindfulness of Realm, as the pre-emptive consideration of his being, marks Henry’s utterance throughout. This is irrespective of whether he is in Counsel, exhorting troops at a siege, or making exchange with a single soldier when, purposefully anonymous, he wanders the encampments to brush, as it were, against the veritable fabric of his kingdom. “We must bear all,” he says in his lonely appraisal of kingly status on the night before Agincourt. His sense of self is inalienable from his sense of Realm, and we watch his intellect according, not merely with the requirements of his rank, but with the very orientation he imposes upon his being. This severity, seen beside the texture of everyday human badinage and affections, makes Shakespeare’s characterisation of him a most searching portrayal, infused as it is with archetype, “l’état c’est moi”.

We know from the Histories how this severity has been cultivated back into the days of his princely antics. Impressively, quietly, consistently, Shakespeare has placed this deliberation into the Hal of the two previous plays. The Plantagenet chronicle consists of eight plays from Richard II to Richard III, with Henry V placed halfway, and how carefully this play references itself among its several foreplays and afterplays. So for instance, before Agincourt (IV.i.298–310) Henry prays the murder of Richard II by his father will not be brought in divine retribution to influence the battle’s outcome; for the Almighty’s attention he is exhaustive in listing the reparations he has made for his father’s crime. Here is an x-ray of what bears on his mind; here is a most vulnerable intelligence in someone about to become a most exalted victor. For all Henry sits easily with his absolute powers, critically he also knows his Realm is prey to consequences outside these. Of all Shakespeare’s kings, this Henry is the most active in learning the condition of his kingship. He has no hubris, knows his place in the Chain of Being. Here is the art of characterising a “man-of-character”.

From several of the play’s exchanges we are reminded of Hal the former prankster and scapegrace, Falstaff’s “sweet wag”. Most chilling from this foreplay perhaps is the scene of impersonations from Henry IV Part 1 (II.iv.432–481) when Falstaff pretends to be Hal and Hal pretends to be his father. The latter delivers a rambunctious catalogue of insults that, for all their witty extravagance, cannot suppress the Prince’s real disdain for the old knight. The catalogue is followed by Falstaff’s eloquent, wheedling mitigation—what an ingenious opportunity for a disguised but real presumption for favour it is! Then comes Hal’s curt closure:

Falstaff: No my good lord; banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins, but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff … banish not him thy Harry’s company, banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.

Prince: I do. I will.

That “I do, I will” is unmistakeable; when the Realm succeeds to him there will be no special pleading. Here is a young man for whom anticipation is habitual. Before this mind there is a larger study than the winks and intimacies of that Eastcheap tavern. The curtness here prepares us for the repudiation he delivers at the end of Henry IV Part 2 where, newly crowned, he is approached by Falstaff, and rebuffs him:

I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.

I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,

So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane,

But being awaked, I do despise my dream …

Presume not that I am the thing I was,

For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,

That I have turned away my former self.

(Henry IV, Part 2, V.v.48–59)

Significantly this repudiation from the former play is known abroad in this one and bears on how we assess its hero as a moral being. For Henry’s rejection of Falstaff is both reasonable and heartless. In IV.vii.35–55 Fluellen adverts to the matter, approving of King Harry’s “right wits and good judgements” as he and Gower compare their sovereign to Alexander the Great. Earlier, and more ambivalently, Mistress Quickly reports on the ailing Falstaff, diagnosing, “The King has killed his heart”, (II.i.91) while two scenes later she describes the encroaching “cold” of the old man’s dying. It is hard to be unmindful of that “cold” when a scene or so later, at Harfleur, Henry summons his “dear friends” to go once more into the breach. Dear friends? Falstaff, both alive and dead, is a figure who dogs the king and causes an unease-of-community within the Realm that qualifies the theme of heroic-patriotism. On the one hand, a monarch has marked a clear line between a “former self” and the favouritism others might claim from it. This is prudent and fair, recognition that kingship imposes a particular moral alertness. On the other hand, an affectionate rogue dies, it seems, from a broken heart and Mistress Quickly allows us to know how the intimate life of community presses its claims on us and is real beyond the expediencies of state power.

To this effect, the scenes of this drama finely interleave those of intimate interaction in London street or French camp, with those where the ruler interfaces with his Realm, whether in state room or on the battlefield. So, while one vibrancy in the action will vitalise individuals and their vernacular—Bardolph, Mistress Quickly, Pistol, Fluellen—another quieter and countervailing movement serves to make a singularity of Realm and Ruler, and this is given highlight by the contrast drawn between the morale of one realm and another, those “abutting” monarchies, England and France. Hard upon the first scene’s longueurs of argument where the claims against France are pressed, come the quickfire exchanges between Bardolph, Nym, Pistol and Mistress Quickly where we note the soldiery are querulous and need some venture to direct their adrenalin. In turn, this scene is followed by the “stage-play” in which the three traitors are entrapped before the court at Southampton. This flicker between different registers of language, formal and colloquial, illumines the span of Henry’s sovereignty, and his awareness of it.

There is no challenge in Henry V as to where natural authority lies, and Henry’s conduct throughout shows the resolution with which he has turned from “that former self”. But his very consciousness of doing so shows also the detachment with which he constructs self as he needs it. Certain of his traits persist from the foreplays. For instance, in unmasking the three traitors (II.ii) he takes some relish in stage-managing their downfall, as he did in the ruse of the ambush at Gadshill, and here again we glimpse, fainter in this instance than Prospero in The Tempest or Measure for Measure’s wandering Duke, Shakespeare’s recurrent interior stage-manager. And just as the prince’s whim was to immerse himself in the low-life of Eastcheap with Falstaff, Peto and Poins, so as king he will wander incognito among his troops to learn their temper on the eve of battle. In both instances we note the deliberation, like an author immersing himself in a setting to gain background.

So the picture, both of kingship itself, and Henry’s being the King, is finely made. He is clear-headed and shrewd; if he is to wage war in France, he will first adequately garrison his kingdom against the Scots. In counsel his eloquence takes a natural lead from Archbishop and French Ambassador alike. While the actual claims against France seem rather too legalistic to unleash war’s havoc, Henry’s response to the gift of tennis balls is courteous and deadly. On the battlefield this leadership is equally eloquent …

… with one further remarkable quality in its intelligence. At the commencement of the play, when considering war with France, he quizzes his right to waste the “brief mortality” of his subjects in such a venture. In his pre-Agincourt soliloquy, he compares his status as king to that of slave, doing so with a penetrating dispassion. Then famously, when Westmoreland reminds him how pitifully few his forces are, he cheers his staff by embracing this very weakness. Then he says:

Old men forget, yet all shall be forgot,

But he’ll remember, with advantages,

What feats he did that day.

(IV.iii.49–51)

It is that “all shall be forgot” I find so penetrating in its illumination of Henry’s intellectual calibre. Here is a man, aware of his high station, yet with a most acute parallel awareness of the smallness of individual existence. Where this recognition occurs in someone of rank, it is surely a moral attribute as much as it is a sanguine recognition of scale. Henry may get compared by others to Alexander the Great, but his own measure of existence is sober and crystalline. And he knows how forlorn is his predicament at Agincourt. Yet he can take this ontological status of all life, and put it before a bedraggled, outnumbered army to transform it into the will to victory. In addition to his practical shrewdness and decision, we see illumined the essentially poetic power that informs his intelligence; he holds his Realm relative to the compass of reality, a king alert to the particulars of the everyday—here the need to garrison against Scots marauders, here the unmasking of treachery—at the same time mindful of the scale of this in the eye of eternity.

But then reality itself is under scrutiny in this play as, prior to each act and again in the conclusion, our omniscient Chorus mediates between where we stand in a theatre and where Shakespeare wishes us to be in our imaginations. Here is no instantaneous realism as we encounter it in the jittery Elsinore guards of Hamlet’s first scene, no immediate intimacy to which the opening lines of The Merchant of Venice direct us for Antonio’s ill-morale. As Henry V begins, we have in prospect a history, of people and events from our general knowledge, for which the playwright intends a pageant of re-enactments. His small theatre must embrace rival nations, kings and taverners.

So his Chorus begins with a reminder that we each possess a projective imagination; we can transform this “cockpit’ into Southampton, Harfleur or Agincourt for the duration of his play, and we do apply our fancies accordingly. But we also watch ourselves making this transfer of attention from one register of reality to another, and are conscious of the fashioning we undertake and its foundation in the artifice of this attending Chorus.

This ploy, reminding us that we each must fashion reality from the players and backdrops, is a congenial conduit to the play’s protagonist, who applies a cool intelligence to his own self-fashioning. Furthermore, the five further appearances of the Chorus give presence to the Realm itself as armourers hammer breastplates and yeomen sell a pasture to buy a warhorse, or later conjure the forlorn isolation of Henry’s army as they “inly ruminate” within the “womb of night”. From this predicament the hero-patriot will hearten his force with his St Crispin’s Day speech, and his warmth and affection are at their most expressive when addressing the mass, his people as people. It is therefore a brilliant strategy on Shakespeare’s part that whenever Henry speaks his inmost mind, he should do it either in unattended soliloquy, or in disguise. In Henry IV Part 1 he delivers his candid opinion of Falstaff while impersonating his own father. When, before Agincourt, he moves incognito among his soldiers, observing their temper, he says this of his own sense of self:

I think the king is but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me; all his element shows to him as it doth to me, all his senses have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing: therefore when he sees reason of fears, as we do, his fears out of doubt be of the same relish as ours are. Yet, in reason, no man should possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, should dishearten his army. (IV.i.103–14)

The introspection here is impressive. So also is the wile by which Henry is able to both identify with the common soldier’s lot and excuse the monarch from showing any identification with it. And yet most notable here is his relish for being another person as he discloses his inmost mind to his common subjects. It is devious, as it is devious at the tavern charade when he lambasts “that trunk of humors, that bolting-hutch of beastliness”, Falstaff. This, as it were, reflex-into-charade when personal exchange is required from him, is the complement of Henry’s equally instinctual grasp of what the instrument of authority means, and illumines why he makes the repudiation of Falstaff so ruthlessly.

The conclusion of this pageant serves to slightly disconcert rather than resolve a story. Its principal action shows how a victor woos the daughter of the vanquished, and it is clear the lover is in trouble. Henry must declare a true and ardent self to her. But he lacks the incognito or disguise that have empowered his candour previously. So his courting is trite, wooden, and appropriately in prose, a contrast to the exhortations before Harfleur and Agincourt where his audience is all-male and several. Henry wants a wife, and devotes a long speech to proclaim his eligibility for this match where there is a language obstacle between wooer and wooed. He gives a partly fair account of simple soldier and bluff fellow, partly a beguiling sophistry that disarms his being an enemy of France by restoring her country to her through the common property of a marriage. Does Katharine enchant him? She rouses in him no poetry as Juliet does in Romeo or Cleopatra does in Antony.

The scene (V.ii) is comic, redolent of the lads’ immature courting in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and suggests more the possibility of a new story than the tying together of the pageant we have watched with its unmasking of traitors, siege and battle, pitiable death of a loveable old rogue, the summary hanging of thieves, massacre of camp-followers and retaliatory execution of prisoners, this fabric of history that the Chorus has urged us to imagine. For Shakespeare has presented both the exhilaration of warfare and its cruel squalor, the grandiloquence of leadership and the vernacular badinage of soldiery, and the gliding of a sovereign in and out of these parts of the fabric.

Of course the betrothal scene indeed augurs a new phase of the pageant as the Chorus’s Epilogue projects how the son proceeding from Henry’s and Katharine’s marriage will undo all his father’s French gains. So the courtship comedy has dark substance on either side of it.  Extra-textually, we know the three parts of Henry VI were long written and performed by the time Henry V was presented, which is to say Henry V serves as a flashback in Shakespeare’s unfolding of the Plantagenet story. An idealised kingship has much human frailty before and after.

I see the betrothal scene as a last look at the concentration of Henry’s intelligence upon his Realm. The bluff crudity of his lovemaking shows him improvising yet another self to serve statecraft. In this instance it is a self to deal with the most intimate of human exchanges, one that will put a seal on the French military adventure and bond the two abutting monarchies. He wins the girl, unsurprising in the political circumstances. “Shall Kate be my wife,” he asks her father. “So please you,” answers the vanquished King of France, to which the victor replies:

I am content, so the maiden cities you talk of may wait on her; so the maid that stood in the way for my wish shall show me the way to my will. (V.ii.38–41)

But these dealings issue from an unmistakeably steely mind, and remind us that the curt rebuff to Falstaff in the earlier play, “I do, I will”, shows this steeliness to be his most indelible characteristic.

I return to that painting in London’s National Portrait Gallery, the left hand raised to show his rings of office, fingernails pared, the black hair severely cropped so that it resembles a beret, the clothing dark but pleated with gold and crimson. The ears are large and the eyes rest on some interest beyond the picture. One supposes this to be his Realm, but his expression is dispassionate. To see him in profile is to know there must always be the other side, an undisclosing aspect to his nature; this is the inevitability of possessing rank. In his concentration, he seems unapproachable, and yet to approach him in this, the very particularity of his rank and person, is the feat of characterisation I think Shakespeare achieves so adroitly in this play.

Alan Gould’s ninth novel, a picaresque titled The Poets’ Stairwell, is published by Black Pepper Press in Melbourne.