Henry V and the Reformation of the Word

Abstract

There is an obvious reason for concluding this study with Shakespeare’s Henry V. If Bale’s King Johan, is often seen as a point of origin for the history play, Henry V can be seen as something like its end. Performed in the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign, it marks Shakespeare’s final engagement with the English medieval past. Moreover, elements within the play reinforce this mood of culmination. The choric speeches that precede and conclude act five are suffused with the sense of an epic endeavour coming to a close. These events are of such magnitude as to be almost beyond representation: that ‘due course of things / Which cannot in their huge and proper life / Be here presented.’¹ Yet, the play’s resolution is as contentious as any other aspect of its presentation of events. Notoriously, the final Chorus also contains a reminder of the future awaiting England under Henry VI: ‘Whose state so many had the managing / That they lost France and made his England bleed’ (Epilogue, 11-12). An equal wariness might qualify the assumption that Shakespeare’s apparent relinquishment of the genre marked the exhaustion of its possibilities: the history play continued to thrive far more vigorously than is often imagined and the dramatist’s own interest in historical material changed rather than terminated.² Henry V is better seen as continuing Shakespeare’s enquiry into the ends of history rather than representing its end.