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Article Excerpt
Whether this was true that so he spake, as one that gaue too much credit to foolish prophesies & vaine tails, or whether it was fained, as in such cases it commonlie happeneth, we leaue it to the aduised reader to iudge.
But yet to speake a truth, by his proceedings, after he had atteined to the crowne, what with such taxes, tallages, subsidies and exactions as he was constreined to charge the people with; and what by punishing such as mooued with disdeine to see him usurpe the crowne (contrarie to the oth taken at his entring into this land, upon his return from exile) did at sundrie times rebell against him, he wan himself more hatred, than in all his life time (if it had beene longer by manie years than it was) had beene possible for him to haue weeded out & remooued. (1)
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I
THE FIRST SCENE of Henry V presents us with a king who has set his own plots and plans, the most important feature of which is to shelter himself from responsibility. This sheltering is motivated by his desire to escape the effects of guilt, the shadow of blame or responsibility that would or might result from an action taken unsuccessfully. (2) The etiology of personal rule (the man may feel compelled to play at being king based on his personal experience) and structural rule (the man plays the king in the manner he sees as proper to a ruler) divide the possibilities of action between the king's two bodies. In Henry V's case, these two bodies are formed in the two preceding plays of the tetralogy through the constant tension between the prodigal Hal and the plotting Hal. Henry V yokes these two bodies together in the opening scene, but in this resolution of tension there is a crucial latent content that is key to understanding the new king, here and later: his "changed man" status is a fantasy or charade that allows Hal to displace threats to himself onto other, larger causes. Along the play's entire length Henry V counters every event that contains a potential setback or threat to his becoming "the mirrour of all Christian kings." In other words, the success of the play as a presentation of the paragon of kingship (legitimate, unifying, empire-building, and heroic, not to mention charming and eloquent) rides on Henry's ability to deflect and thereby control or manage all conflicts and challenges. The play does this by producing Henry not only as a product of the internal logic of the Henriad, but also as a function of the play's relationship to chronicle history.
My methodological schema for analyzing what I call Henry's strategy of plotted self-exculpation will make use of Harry Berger Jr.'s own exploration of the Henriad in Making Trifles of Terrors, where he adapts Stanley Cavell's concepts of guilt and shame. According to Cavell, "shame is the specific discomfort produced by the sense of being looked at, the avoidance of the sight of others is the reflex it produces. Guilt is different; there the reflex is to avoid discovery. As long as no one knows what you have done, you are safe; or your conscience will press you to confess it and accept punishment. Under shame, what must be covered up is not your deed, but yourself." (3) Cavell's work also led Berger to read Shakespeare's plays using what he calls "discourse networks," or, more specifically, ethical discourses, as a way of avoiding the so-called "epigenetic fallacy," that is, the fallacy of conducting an analysis of literary characters as if they were real people. The ethical discourses that characters deploy in their speeches or, we might say (borrowing from Wittgenstein) the language games they play are, to name the most important: those of the sinner, victim/revenger, villain, donor, saint, and hero/honor seeker. (4) When, for example, a character is describing his or her motives for behaving like a sinner, these motives are drawn from social and cultural discourses that enable such description and thus the particular role the character is assuming: the discourses comprise the world of a play. A character may take up a discourse as a way of explaining desire, in order to avoid anxiety or fear, as a means to achieve power or avoid having to wield it, and so on. Fundamentally, what this way of conceptualizing characters gets us is a method that avoids endowing characters with that nature or subjectivity they claim for themselves. It's not simply that they don't have an inside until the play hollows it out as the effect of their speech. Without the matrix of discourse formed by spoken interactions among the figures on stage, character cannot emerge at all, much less grow in complexity.
To uncover the larger discourse networks of the community of the play, we must attend to three things: the dramatic character's etiology as available in his/her speech (what motivations, emotions, habits of thought, familial/social/cultural roles, likes and dislikes, prejudices, calculations, etc. does the character pretend to assume and why?); the actions a character takes (if a king, how does he rule? if a daughter, how does she acquiesce to or resist the patriarchal discourse that envelops her?); and finally, how the structure of the drama configures such characters in relation to what we might call "outside forces," even if these are only sources (such as chronicles and other dramas). For present purposes I will apply the first two in a reading of the opening scene of Henry V and then triangulate this reading, rendering it more three-dimensional by adding the perspective of the play's source material.
II
In at least four pivotal scenes in Henry V, the play presents a king who performs a strategy of plotted self-exculpation. By this I mean that he contrives to shift responsibility to others at critical times of decision making without their being aware that this is happening. These moments--establishing claims to French territory and possibly the French throne by manipulating the Church and the insult from the Dauphin; intervening in a conspiracy of nobles who have been lured by Henry's letters of commission; threatening the Governor of Harfleur with responsibility for the rape and murder of his people if he does not capitulate; and debating the issue of loyalty the night before Agincourt (Henry: "The King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers ...")--comprise a conspicuous habit of avoidance or, alternatively, a proactive, confrontational response to the exigencies of kingship.
As inner conditions are displaced to outer circumstances, a strategy emerges that marks the trajectory of Henry's successful rule (what in other contexts Linda Charnes calls "notorious identity"). (5) The mirror of all Christian kings is not only a product of his "famous victories;" (6) he is also a product of a guilt-management strategy that incurs shame to assuage guilt. The origin of this guilt is the Lancastrian legitimacy issue that has not disappeared with the death of Henry IV. Hal is still identified with this stain, although as Prince of Wales he has demonstrated no interest in dealing with the issue of shame. Only when he becomes king does he conspicuously attend to the causes of the "shameful" nature of the Lancastrian dynasty as evidenced by his ostentatious reburial of Richard and his building of chantries. But Henry's most important strategic shift in dealing with this legacy of guilt is to exculpate himself as king, initially by enacting a version of the saint's discourse, and then by using it to initiate the hero's discourse. (7)
At the outset, Henry V moves publicly out from under the shadow of usurpation by portraying himself as the symbol for English victimhood at the hands of the French, upon whom he will exact the revenge of empire retrieval. This discourse, however, will not of itself prove adequate to the current challenge. If the dramaturgical crux in this play is to present Henry's character as a product of the preceding plays of the Henriad with the additional imperative of raising his stature to that of Ideal English King, then it will be necessary to muster discourses other than simply those of the saint and the victim. The advantage of the saint's discourse is that it responds to a persistent question that Henry raises--"May I with right and conscience make this claim?"--and as Berger points out, this issue is "in its most significant manifestation pursued with increasing fervor through three plays by the son of Henry IV." But Berger goes on to say that the saint's discourse
sometimes overlaps with another discourse, the hero's discourse, or discourse of honor. The saint's discourse involves a story one tells oneself.., and one tells it to or solicits it from others primarily to persuade oneself, especially if one suspects that what one is doing may be reprehensible. But the hero's discourse involves a story one has to elicit and hear from others, a story that, like a prize, one has to win or earn by continuous displays or promises of a form of activity that in recent decades has come to be known as "laying one's body on the line." Now since this is not something that one can ask one's poor body to spend all of its time doing, there are long periods of foreplay and aflerplay during which honor is maintained by words rather than deeds, or by words as deeds. (8)
Henry's shuttling between the discourses of saint and hero in Henry V, a play enacted in the shadow of 1 and 2 Henry IV where he performs the sinner/villain's discourse...
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