Abstract
Shakespeare’s Henry V ostensibly tells a story of enmity. The main plot of Henry’s triumphant subjugation of the over-confident French seems to have its emotional dynamic of hostility subtly but tellingly underwritten by the subplot: the story of Bardolph, Pistol and Nym enacts the ever-widening breach of sympathy and circumstance between the King and his erstwhile companions of the tavern. From the outset, however, the development of the opposition is structured by a tense emphasis on the close confines of the combat. The Globe itself may be an inadequate arena for a representation of the conflict, but in one sense at least it merely mirrors an actual facet of the war itself:
Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.1
The restricting ‘girdle’ of the Globe provides an apt correlative for the narrowness of the ocean, across which ‘fronts’ menacingly face each other.2
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Notes
King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (London: Routledge, 1995), Prologue, 19–22. All further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition and reference will be given in the text.
For discussion of this passage see also David J. Baker, ‘“Wildehirissheman”: Colonialist Representation in Shakespeare’s Henry V’, English Literary Renaissance, 22 (1993), p. 52.
Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 28.
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. J. S. Cunningham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), I: I.i.61, I.i.115, IV.ii.33–4, II: I.vi.3, III.i.49 and III.i.61.
Graham Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 189 and 190. Holderness also discusses the Brechtian nature of Olivier’s production, which ironically introduces a German element into an anti-German film. On similarities between Henry V and Tamburlaine, see James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 85; Robert Egan, ‘A Muse of Fire: Henry V in the Light of Tamburlaine’, Modern Language Quarterly, 29 (1968), pp. 15–28, and Roy Battenhouse, ‘The Relation of Henry V to Tamburlaine’, Shakespeare Survey, 27 (1974), pp. 76 ff. Lisa Jardine (Reading Shakespeare Historically [London: Routledge, 1996], p. 11) also compares Henry’s wooing to Tamburlaine’s. Michael Neill compares the two figures in passing (‘Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 [1994], p. 22), and Joel B. Altman heads one of the sections of his essay on Henry V ‘Playing the Tamburlaine’ (‘“Vile Participation”: The Amplification of Violence in the Theater of Henry V’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 [1991], p. 13). Gary Taylor also refers to a Henry who ‘was performing the part of a Tamburlaine’ in his 1994 Oxford World’s Classics edition of the play (p. 50).
Laurie Maguire also suggests a parallel between Hotspur and Lady Percy and Tamburlaine and Zenocrate (‘“Household Kates”: Chez Petruchio, Percy and Plantagenet’, in S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (eds), Gloriana’s Face [Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992], p. 146). Might it even be possible to detect a similarity between Tamburlaine’s decision to carry the body of Zenocrate with him and the continuing failure to inter the corpse of Catherine of Valois, still openly available in Westminster Abbey in Pepys’ day?
As You Like It, ed. Agnes Latham (London: Routledge, 1987), III.v.81 and III.iii.11–12.
See Sir D. Plunket Barton, Links Between Ireland and Shakespeare (Dublin: Maunsel, 1919), pp. 59–66, and Michael Cronin’s essay in this volume.
Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 15. See also
Lisa Hopkins, ‘“And shall I die, and this unconquered”: Marlowe’s inverted colonialism’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 2:2 (1996), pp. 1–23.
Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V’, reprinted in Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton (eds), New Historicism and Renaissance Drama (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1992), p. 106.
See Craik (ed.), Henry V, pp. 1–3, and Christopher Highley, ‘Wales, Ireland, and 1 Henry IV’, Renaissance Drama, 21 (1990), p. 109.
See Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 260.
On the question of Branagh’s Irishness, see Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled, pp. 202, 205–9, and Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically, p. 159, note 17. For an interesting account of the film’s politics in general, see Chris Fitter, ‘A Tale of Two Branaghs: Henry V, Ideology, and the Mekong Agincourt’, in Ivo Kamps (ed.), Shakespeare Left and Right (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 259–75.
On the question of the play’s representation of the Welsh and Scots, see Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets’, p. 106, and Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ‘History and Ideology: the instance of Henry V’, in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 224. Dollimore and Sinfield also point to the importance of Ireland as a subtext for the play (pp. 224–5), as does Lisa Jardine (Reading Shakespeare Historically, p. 161, note 42), who suggests that ‘Catherine’s English lesson is immediately preceded by a scene in which the united “English” troops deconstruct themselves into an Englishman, an Irishman, a Welshman and a Scot’ (p. 12).
See Glanmor Williams, Owen Glendower (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 23.
Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, partially reproduced in David Englander, Diana Norman, Rosemary O’Day and W. R. Owens (eds), Culture and Belief in Europe 1450–1600: An Anthology of Sources (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 293.
See Lisa Hopkins, ‘Fluellen’s Name’, Shakespeare Studies, 24 (1996), pp. 194–203.
Stephen M. Buhler, ‘“By the Mass, our hearts are in the trim”: Catholicism and British Identity in Olivier’s Henry V’, Cahiers Elisabéthains, 47, April (1995), p. 56.
See Thomas Beaumont James, The Palaces of Medieval England (Oxford: The Alden Press, 1990), p. 138, for Henry V’s building work on Richard II’s favourite palace at Sheen and his imitation in the Kenilworth pleasaunce (an island in the lake) of Richard’s island of ‘La Nayght’ near Sheen. Jardine (Reading Shakespeare Historically, pp. 13, 161, note 45) also refers to the intertwining of the stories of Henry V, Richard II and Ireland.
See Frederick Hepburn, Portraits of the Later Plantagenets (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1986). On the chivalric and heraldic elements of the Wilton diptych, see Michael Levey, Painting at Court (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), p. 22. On the evidence for its actual design and use as a portable altar on campaign, see Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987). Alexander and Binski date the painting to Richard’s reign, but to accept both their evidence for campaign use and the dating by other art historians to Henry’s reign would point, inevitably, to the assumption that it was Henry who took on campaign this icon of his predecessor.
Caroline Barron, ‘Richard II: Image and Reality’, in Dillian Gordon, Making and Meaning: The Wilton Diptych (London: National Gallery Publications, 1993), p. 13; for the prominence of angels throughout Richard’s personal iconography, see also p. 58. Though the possibility of an association between Shakespeare and the Earl of Pembroke may spring to mind, Shakespeare could not have seen the painting at Wilton, since it did not arrive there until the eighteenth century.
For Elizabeth’s iconographic dependence on the traditions of portraiture of Richard II, see Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 38; for the question of dating the Wilton Diptych, see Gordon, Wilton Diptych, pp. 22–3. For Richard’s appearance, see Gordon, Wilton Diptych, pp. 18–19.
Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 8.
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Hopkins, L. (1997). Neighbourhood in Henry V. In: Burnett, M.T., Wray, R. (eds) Shakespeare and Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25924-3_2
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