Abstract
The social dilemma of Chicken expresses disorderly sentiments. King Henry V reveals the importance of Chicken as a foreground strategy during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The play parallels Henry’s French predicament with Elizabeth’s Spanish dilemma. These international crises also parallel Edward de Vere’s personal and familial experiences of Chicken. In personal terms, various events reveal Oxford’s propensity for Chicken, including his disagreements with Queen Elizabeth, his feud with Thomas Knyvet, and his desire to serve against the Armada. In familial terms, French defiance of King Henry V required concerted English daring. Richard de Vere, Eleventh Earl of Oxford, exemplified the necessary determination. William Shakspere’s lineage reveals no estimable counterpart.
Which oft our stage hath shown—and for their sake,
In your fair minds let this acceptance take.
—William Shakespeare, King Henry V (Epilogue 13–14)
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Notes
- 1.
Some historians question Jacques Charpentier’s involvement in Ramus’s death. See Graves (106, n. 1).
- 2.
“Upon making full submission, he was, by 7 August, wholly reconciled with the Queen” (Allen 51).
- 3.
Indeed, Blundeville’s appreciation of Ramism seems to have steadily increased, and in 1599, as Marion Trousdale chronicles, “Blundeville published The Art of Logike ‘specially for such zealous Ministers as have not been brought vp in any Vniuersity’” (22).
- 4.
Ramón Jimenéz (2001), for example, argues King Henry V is “a logical expansion of the twenty scenes in Famous Victories” (8), a source text in which Prince Hal’s maturation into King Henry V is sudden and complete, with the prodigal realizing his errors by his father’s deathbed.
- 5.
The Dauphin betrays the sort of preconception that clouds Daphne Pearson’s judgment of Edward de Vere.
- 6.
The tennis court dispute also finds a parallel in the strategic game between Achilles and Ajax in Troilus and Cressida. Queen Elizabeth and Commander Ulysses are the respective umpires, but while Elizabeth made a strategic move, Ulysses attempts to cure competing pride without one. He maps out a coordination problem in which “[t]wo curs shall tame each other” (1.3.389). After requiting Hector’s challenge, however, Ajax is even prouder than before, and the historical analogy with the tennis court dispute is again revealing. That Queen Elizabeth found in favor of Edward de Vere over Philip Sidney can only have added to the “insolence and pride” (505) that John Aubrey blames for the earl’s eventual downfall. The mature Oxford’s art appears, therefore, to prefigure his own life from Aubrey’s perspective, and just as complete success failed to crown Elizabeth’s intervention, so unmitigated triumph failed to seal Ulysses’s strategy.
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Wainwright, M. (2018). Chicken in King Henry V (Part 1). In: The Rational Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95258-1_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95258-1_13
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