Heroicism and Realism: Henry V

The Fashioned Crown: Heroicism and Realism in Henry V
An analysis of Act III, Scenes 0-2


Shakespeare’s history play Henry V has been criticised widely for being a play whose propagandist nature has compromised the consistency of character and action: ‘what [Shakespeare] produced was a propaganda-play on National Unity: heavily orchestrated for the brass.’  These criticisms are reliant on mimetic assumptions: ‘in the characters and plot construction alike, one must strive for that which is either necessary or probable.’  These inconsistencies are certainly observable, but Shakespeare is famous for confounding tradition, and mimetic tradition is no exception. Defences against this criticism can be found by analysing Act three up to scene two, if one stays conscious of genre and mode. There are two modes that characterise the action in the play: heroic, and a kind of ironic realism.  In investigating the factors and internal logics that establish and comprise each, the play emerges as something more than mere propaganda.

Rank and order is of key concern throughout the play, and it itself is tied closely to the shifting in and out of the heroic mode. Act three opens almost immediately into this trope, the chorus itself in imperative mood: ‘Hear the shrill whistle, which doth order give to sound confused.’  It is important to understand the system of hierarchy in place during the setting and the production of the play. The king is God’s lieutenant on Earth, answerable only to Him and entirely ordained (as all things are) by His will. This means that treason is a direct affront to God, and usurpation, even over a poor king such as Richard II, provokes holy wrath:

It stresses particularly the theme which is so strong in Hall’s chronicle, the interpretation which asserts that…Richard was a weak king, that his deposition by Henry IV was politically necessary…but that the deposition also brought down God’s wrath in the form of the War of the Roses.

Despite the danger in upsetting order, the characters in the second scene can be observed vying for position among themselves. This is achieved under the guise of the comedy of one-upmanship: Captain Fluellen enters to encourage Bardolph, Nim and Pistol on into the fray (Nim in particular, who has voiced dissension: ‘for my own part I have not a case of lives’).  This dissension in itself is a testing of rank, a testing that heightens as Pistol and Nim begin what seems, essentially, to be good-hearted mockery of the captain:  

Be merciful, great duke, to men of mould.
Abate thy rage, abate thy manly rage,
Abate they rage, great duke, Good bawcock, bate
Thy rage. Use lenity, sweet chuck.

The terms in which Pistol addresses Fluellen are notably associated with station, and it is significant that ‘great duke’ and the mock-self-deprecating ‘men of mould’ quickly give way to ‘bawcock’ and ‘sweet chuck’. The familiar form of second person address is used throughout. Fluellen’s beating Nim, and Nim’s remark following this, ‘Your honour runs bad humours’,  which is essentially a withdrawal or admittance of defeat, returns Fluellen to superiority, all the while within a comic sense. It is highly pertinent that the possibility of tipping the balance of power, even on this minor scale, is only extant in the second scene. The first, composed entirely by Harry’s speech, admits no such possibility, and exists entirely within the heroic mode, whereas this second scene takes place obviously within the realistic. There is more indication of carnival, too, in the boy’s soliloquy: ‘As young as I am, I have observed these three swashers…I must leave them, and seek some better service.’  The audience no doubt sympathises with the boy, for the nature of the three to which he refers, their ‘pocketing up of wrongs’,  does certainly not go without notice. However, this disloyal desire is critically dangerous to the order on which the heroic mode relies:

The curse of usurpation is that it confuses Right, endangers all Order. That of rebellion is that it commits the Luciferian sin of pride.

While the boy’s aspiration is obviously not usurpation in its most blatant sense, its properties are undeniably similar. At this point the boy appears a kind of mirror image of Harry, perhaps inspired by the heroics to escape his current service. He is in the same company as Harry was, and likewise seems to be a better man than they:

‘I am boy to them all three, but all they three,
though they should serve me, could not be man to me,
for indeed three such antics to not amount to a man.’

The essential difference between the boy and Harry is their ranks: Harry was prince in this situation, but the boy is lower rank than even ‘these three swashers’. He is more like Henry IV, then, who deposed Richard II. Perhaps the boy is himself looking for entry into the heroic mode which Henry IV ushered in with the deposition of Richard.
If this is the case, then the heroic mode is marked as a construct set apart, ironically, from this code of hierarchy: even in the face of the utmost moral offence (the deposing of God’s chosen ruler, in the case of Richard and Henry IV) the heroic mode may yet be entered. This marks an important divorce between the mode and morality. More than this, it suggests that the juxtaposition of scenes one and two is more than a simple case of contrast. It is ‘travesty-by-parallel’.  This can be observed in the similarities between Pistol and Harry: ‘And sword an shield / In bloody field / Doth win immortal fame.’  That this is sung by Pistol in the dissenting company of Nim and the boy paints it in a certain impotence and irony. Here in the mode of ironic realism any rhetoric such as this is met coldly, and the rhetoric itself is so much more inglorious: ‘On, on, on, on, on! To the breach, to the breach!’  Bardolph appears taken in, but the transfiguration of the rhetoric in his own mouth renders it shallow, makes King Harry’s speech seem all the less genuine and all the more manipulative. Again this points to similarities between the king and Pistol:

There is something engaging about Pistol’s indomitable effort to make things more heroic than they are. He has style. And it is Henry’s style.

The only thing that wins the band over in the end is not Fluellen’s own rough brand of rhetoric (‘Avaunt, you cullions!’),  but a physical beating. The fact that the possibility of upheaval is present in both the boy’s will to rebel and in Nim’s flagrant disregard for Harry’s rhetoric, and the heroic mode in which it is encompassed, indicates another disparity from moral Right and the mode itself: Falstaff is dead. It is easy to place Falstaff as the embodiment of wrong in the play. He may appear as the updated Vice of morality plays, an anthropomorphisation of an abstraction. In this reading, his death at the beginning of the play is a segue into the reign of the heroic mode, the removal of all temptation from Harry’s mind: ‘Consideration, like an angel, came / And whipp'd the offending Adam out of him, / Leaving his body as a paradise.’  This reading is entirely naïve, however. If Falstaff were truly the root of discord, the threat of disorder would not hang so visibly over the heads of those engaged, for the moment, by rhetoric (or Fluellen’s beating). The removal of Falstaff’s influence does allow the action to reach this point, though:

Wit is critically destructive—of ideal systems which assume that human nature is what it isn’t.

With Falstaff’s presence, the illusion of the heroic mode, which provides just such an untenable ideal system with its pretence of companionship and conclusion in ‘National Unity’, would be impossible to maintain under his relentless quips. Indeed, it is conceivable that Falstaff’s power over Harry’s actions in the past could be in itself illusory:  

Many have preferred to imagine a crown prince whose waywardness is really an education in which he is becoming acquainted with his people…But there is stronger reason to think of him as perfect from the start.

There is evidence for this in Harry’s own promise that he will show his true self ‘when men least think I will.’  The statement, in its prophetic nature, is much akin to the language of heroics, and in its setting, given Harry’s perceived attitude at the time, it appears ridiculous: a further indication that the heroic mode is a well-employed illusion. If this is the case, the idea that Harry is ‘perfect from the start’ seems doubtful; but this need not be so. Rather, one must look at the effects of this ‘travesty-by-parallel’ on the heroic mode itself and on what the heroic mode comes to signify: kingship.

The duality of kingship is the driving force behind the duality in the play’s modes, and seemingly the justification behind criticism aimed at consistency of character and action: ‘Henry V’s awareness of the hollowness of the ceremony which surrounds him is one of the main reasons why we think of him as a mature human being.’  Harry sounds absurd when prophesying his own rise from vulgarity because, even when it happens, it is absurd. His being so eminently one of the people, or ‘acquainted with his people’, renders his two-fold role, as both human being and lieutenant to the Lord Almighty, starkly contradictory, just like the two modes with which it is associated. Harry himself requires affirmation of his role, of his heroicism, when he walks the camp in disguise. This in itself indicates his prophecy as uncertain bluster, his own kingship as a ruse of pomp (which he himself appears fooled by). There is evidence of this as early as 1 Henry IV, where the then-prince is pretending to be king:

We have Prince (as King) pretending just what he will have to pretend when he is King: viz. that Falstaff is ‘an old white-bearded Satan’, a ‘villainous misleaders of youth’.

In the same exchange Falstaff proclaims ‘Banish Jack and banish all the world’. The prince’s reply is ‘I do; I will.’  This is exactly what he does as king: the heroic mode usurps the realistic, leading to the final illusion of ‘National Unity’ which is projected through kingship:

O ceremony! Show me but thy worth:
What is thy soul of adoration?
Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form,
Creating awe and fear in other men?

Harry is very much aware of his role, the fabric of kingship, and this is what accounts for the apparently miraculous change in him. He is the classic ‘burdened man-beneath-the-Crown’.

Indeed, the introduction to act III is itself a request of the reader to enter into illusion: ‘Suppose that you have seen / the well-appointed king at Dover pier…’  The language is familiar, too: imperative after imperative, repetition in ‘follow, follow!’ and even a questioning of intrepidness in,

For who is he, whose chin is but enriched
With one appearing hair, that will not follow
These culled and choice-drawn cavaliers to France?

The rhetoric is that of King Harry, of course, in his speech in the first scene of this act. Shakespeare’s aim and motives appear multiple, then. Not only is the duality and illusory quality of kingship deftly explored through these two disagreeing modes which strip it from its purported moral, hierarchical construct, but so is the validity of criticism based on mimetic assumption called into question: with so much of the play’s staging as a blatant, expected kind of trickery (and this being, in part, the very point), how applicable can criticism of its realism really be? The play takes entire modes as set pieces, generates tensions between them and resolves those into something insightful and wholly genuine.









Bibliography of Works Cited


Aristotle, James Hutton ed., Poetics (Norton 1982).

Dean, Leonard F., ‘From Richard II to Henry IV: A Closer View’, Leonard F. Dean ed., Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism (Oxford University Press 1967).

Rossiter, A. P., ‘Ambivalence: The Dialectic of the Histories’ Graham Storey ed., Angel with Horns (Longman 1966).

Shakespeare, William, Henry V, Stanley Wells ed., The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works. (Oxford University Press 1999).

Shakespeare, William, 1 Henry IV, Stanley Wells ed., The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works. (Oxford University Press 1999).

Spencer, Theodore, ‘The Dramatic Convention’, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (Macmillan 1965).