Abstract
Edward de Vere’s Ramist sensitivity toward dialectical, strategical, and rhetorical issues matched his commitment to the logic of cause and effect. King Henry V exhibits that combination of sensitivity and determination: game-theoretic bankers must retain their strategic grip. Despite King Henry’s example, English politicians subsequently lost sociopolitical control, owing to a lack of strategic nous among King Henry VI’s advisors. They failed that requirement in pursuing self-defeating rationales. Mary Tudor’s accession indicted the managers of King Edward VI’s minority for their similar failure. Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, appreciated this comparison. Two of his own supervisors, Thomas Smith and William Cecil, as important figures to “The Boy King,” had suffered political ostracism under Mary.
You take a precipice for no leap of danger.
—William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII (5.1.139)
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Notes
- 1.
That focus precluded Anne’s use of the strategy of domestic bliss.
- 2.
While Pistol is bereft of Nell Quickly (“my Doll is dead” [5.1.72]), the less than honorable Bardolph and Nym “are both hanged” (4.4.57): the former for “for robbing a/church” (3.7.86–87); the latter presumably for the same crime, because Bardolph and Nym are “sworn brothers in filching” (3.2.38).
- 3.
“Of all the plays published under the ‘Shakespeare’ name,” observes Desper, “only III Henry VI retains a major role for an Earl of Oxford.” This play does acknowledge the historical importance of John de Vere, Thirteenth Earl of Oxford. “However, this play is usually assigned to the early 1590s, early in the standard chronology of the Shakespeare plays, and may well be considerably earlier than that” (29).
- 4.
“It was thought,” writes Holinshed, “that when they were at point to haue growne to agreement concerning manie articles, if the French king had not newlie fallen into his former disease of frensie, there had better effect followed of this treatie.” Owing to his sickness, however, “each man departed, before that anie principall articles could be fullie ordered and make perfect” (2:832).
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Wainwright, M. (2018). Chicken in King Henry V (Part 2). In: The Rational Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95258-1_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95258-1_14
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