Abstract
The discussion of gender in the second tetralogy ended with its last play, Henry V, but in that work, as important as considerations of women are, there are other significant aspects on which this chapter will focus. Shakespeare’s sense of innovation marks his work in the history play and other genres. In representing history and culture, Shakespeare’s poetry, dramatic and nondramatic, shows lively experimentation. The very tensions within these works create some of the dramatic power of Shakespeare’s art.
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Notes
This chapter is a revised version of my article, “Shakespeare’s Henry V: Towards the Problem Play,” Cahiers Elisabethains 42 (October 1992): 17–35, which derives from a chapter of “Irony in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy” (1983). I thank the editors of Cahiers Elisabethains for permission to include it in this book. Here are some selected works on Henry V in the past two decades: On irony and ambiguity as part of the craft of acting of, see John Barton, “Irony and Ambiguity,” Playing Shakespeare: An Actor’s Guide (1984; repr., New York: Anchor Books, 2001), 149–66.
John S. Mebane, “‘Impious War’: Religion and the Ideology of Warfare in Henry V,” Studies in Philology 104 (2007): 250–66.
Theodor Meron, “Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth and the Law of War,” American Journal of International Law 86 (1992): 1–45.
Paola Pugliatti, “The Strange Tongues of Henry V,” Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993): 235–53.
Anne Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Thomas Healy, “Remembering with Advantages: Nation and Ideology in Henry V,” in Shakespeare in the New Europe, ed. Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova, and Derek Roper (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 174–93.
P. K. Ayers, “‘Fellows of Infinite Tongue’: Henry V and the King’s English,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 34 (1994): 253–77.
Peter C. Herman, “O, ‘tis a gallant king’: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Crisis of the 1590s,” in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 204–25.
Jonathan Baldo, “Wars of Memory in Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996): 132–59.
Janet M. Spencer, “Princes, Pirates, and Pigs: Criminalizing Wars of Conquest in Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996): 160–77.
Steven Marx, “Holy War in Henry V,” Shakespeare Survey 48 (1996): 85–97.
Willy Maley, “Shakespeare, Holinshed, and Ireland: Resources and Con-Texts,” in Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 27–46.
Robert Shaughnessy, “The Last Post: Henry V, War Culture, and the Postmodern Shakespeare,” Theatre Survey 39 (1998): 41–61.
John Sutherland and Cedric Watts, Henry V, War Criminal? and Other Shakespeare Puzzles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Ellen C. Caldwell, “The Hundred Years’ War and National Identity,” in Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise N. Baker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 237–65.
Dennis Kezar, “Shakespeare’s Guilt Trip in Henry V,” Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 431–61.
Corinne S. Abate, “‘Once more unto the breach’: Katharine’s Victory in Henry V,” Early Theatre 4 (2001): 73–85.
Camille Wells Slights, “The Conscience of the King: Henry V and the Reformed Conscience,” Philological Quarterly 80 (2001): 37–55.
William Leahy, “‘All would be royal’: The Effacement of Disunity in Shakespeare’s Henry V,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 138 (2002): 89–98.
Thomas McAlindon, “Natural Closure in Henry V,” Shakespearean International Yearbook 3 (2003): 156–71.
Andrew Gurr, “A New Theatre Historicism,” in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 71–88.
Sara Munson Deats, “Henry V at War: Christian King or Model Machiavel,” in War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare, ed. Sara Munson Deats, Lagretta Tallent Lenker, and Merry G. Perry (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004), 83–101.
Andrew Gurr, “The Transforming of Henry V,” Shakespearean International Yearbook 5 (2005): 303–13.
Clayton G. Mackenzie, “Henry V and the Invasion of France: Rethinking the Moral Justification,” Upstart Crow 25 (2005): 65–70.
Dermot Cavanagh, “History, Mourning, and Memory in Henry V,” in Shakespeare’s Histories and Counter-Histories, eds. Dermot Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves, and Stephen Longstaffe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 32–48.
B. J. Sokol, “Tolerance in Shakespeare: An Introduction,” Shakespearean International Yearbook 7 (2007): 177–96.
Anny Crunelle-Vanrigh, “Henry V as a Royal Entry,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 47 (2007): 355–77.
Simon Barker, War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
Terry Sherwood, The Self in Early Modern Literature: For the Common Good (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2007).
Stephen O’Neill, Staging Ireland: Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007).
David Schalkwyk, “Proto-nationalist Performatives and Trans-theatrical Displacement in Henry V,” in Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theatre, ed. Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 197–213.
James Hirsch, “Shakespeare’s Stage Chorus and Olivier’s Film Chorus,” in Shakespeare on Screen: The Henriad, ed. Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Mont-Saint-Aignan: Publications des Universités de Rouen and du Havre, 2008), 169–92.
Alexander Welsh, What Is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 50–66.
Tom Rutter, Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Laetitia Coussement-Boillot, Copia et cornucopia: La poétique shakespearienne de l’abondance (Bern: Lang, 2008).
Frederick Boas, Shakspere and his Predecessors (New York: Scribners, 1899), 345.
C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy, cited in W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy,” in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 1015
Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973
Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980)
Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 454–515.
See, for example, J. A. K. Thomson, Irony: An Historical Introduction (London: Allen & Unwin, 1926)
D. C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969)
Lilian Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
See B. A. Farrell, The Standing of Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)
Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (London: Methuen, 1984).
See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latin and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944)
Alexander Sackton, Rhetoric as a Dramatic Language in Ben Jonson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948)
Donald Clark, John Milton at St. Paul’s School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948).
E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967)
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), esp. 194–217.
Although I find Norman Rabkin’s view provocative, I think that Henry V is a both-and play rather than an either-or play. Richard Levin’s views also contribute to the debate, but he thinks of irony too much as undercutting. Unlike Levin, I would say that William W. Lloyd’s view of irony (1856) is ironic. See Rabkin’s, “Rabbits, Ducks and Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977): 279–96
Levin’s New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), esp. 4–5
John Jump, “Shakespeare and History,” Critical Quarterly 17 (1953): 233–44
Zdenek Stríbrný, “Henry V and History,” in Shakespeare in a Changing World: Essays on His Times and His Plays, ed. A. Kettle (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1964), 84
Pierre Sahel, “Henry V, Roi Ideal?” Études Anglaises 28 (1975): 1–4
Gordon R. Smith, “Shakespeare’s Henry V: Another Part of the Critical Forest,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 3–26
E. W. Ives, “Shakespeare and History: Divergencies and Agreements,” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 19–37
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “History and Ideology: the Instance of Henry V,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. J. Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), 206–27
Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” in Political Shakespeare, ed. J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 18–47.
William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. J. H. Walter (1954, repr., London: Methuen, 1977).
William W. Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (1931; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 24
Peter Ure, William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays (London: Longmans & Green, 1961), 7–8
R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays: From Satire to Celebration (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 61
Richard P. Wheeler, Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 1–2
Northrop Frye, The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 8
In addition to these problems of structure and genre, critics have often stated the difficulty of defining a problem play or problem comedy. For example, see E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1949), 1
Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare: A Study of “Julius Caesar,” “Measure for Measure” and “Antony and Cleopatra” (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), ix
The complexity of Shakespeare’s history plays can be seen in the diverse response to them in detailed discussions, from Thomas Courtenay’s Commentaries on the Historical Plays of Shakespeare (1840; repr., New York: AMS, 1972) through E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto &Windus, 1944)
Graham Holderness’ Shakespeare’s History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985).
For an examination of temporal crisis, see, for instance, John W. Blanpied, Time and the Artist in Shakespeare’s English Histories (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983).
For another view, see Brownwell Solomon, “Thematic Contraries and the Dramaturgy of Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 31 (1980): 343–56.
Allan Gilbert, “Patriotism and Satire in Henry V,” in Studies in Shakespeare, eds. Arthur D. Matthews and C. M. Emery (1953; repr., New York: AMS, 1971), 40–64.
For act and scene division, see J. H. Walter, introduction to King Henry V (1954; repr., London: Methuen, 1977), XXXV.
Anne Barton, “The King Disguised: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Comical History,” in The Triple Bond, ed. Joseph G. Price (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 92
G. P. Jones, “Henry V: The Chorus and the Audience,” Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978): 93–105
Lawrence Danson, “Henry V: King, Chorus, and Critics,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983), esp. 27–33.
Jean-Marie Maguin, “Shakespeare’s Structural Craft and Dramatic Technique in Henry V,” Cahiers Elisabéthains 7 (1975): 51–67.
For more general views on time and ending in fiction, see Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), esp. 76–89
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
Marilyn Williamson, “The Episode with Williams in Henry V,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 9 (1969): 275–82
For the first systematic ironic reading of the language of this play, see Gerald Gould, “A New Reading of Henry V,” English Review 29 (1919): 42–55.
C. H. Hobday, “Imagery and Irony in ‘Henry V’,” Shakespeare Survey 21 (1968). 107–13.
William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 208.
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© 2009 Jonathan Hart
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Hart, J. (2009). Henry V. In: Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103986_9
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