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What generalizations about kingship do Shakespeares plays support? The first is that kings and their kin are the source of social disorder, not a defense against it. The second is that the office of king cannot be truly stable because it calls up in the monarch of the moment preemptive strategies meant to cut off challenges, which become provocations to the very challenge he fears. The third is that the concept of legitimacy can work only to the detriment of the reigning king, because not one of the monarchs can make a sufficient case for his legitimacy. The fourth is that identifying ones own hold on power as a preeminent interest of the state profoundly contaminates the customs of duty and good faith which are the real basis of a humane social order. The fifth is that a ruler who has violated these constraints in his own interest is himself profoundly distrustful and contemptuous of them, having himself proved their liability to corruption. The sixth is that the king must sustain assent to his role by a strategy of calculated self-creation, which displaces the kinds of motives and considerations that would be in keeping with the responsibility of a magistrate to the general good. There is a great continuing relevance in these plays, since the word king can be replaced by the name of any modern political office that is vulnerable to the same abuse, or of any contemporary office holder whose self-interest leads him to betray the public trust.
Interpretation of the Henry IV plays rests heavily on interpretation of Henry V. The elaborate ruse by which Prince Hal conceals his kingly nature until the time of his fathers death is made dramatically interesting by Falstaff and the other low characters with whom he bides his time while it remains in his interest to feign delinquency. Then he emerges as a full-fledged warrior, armed with a pretext for invading France. This he does with notable success, securing for himself the status of heir to the French king. And there the play ends. Shakespeare had already written the plays in which his son and successor, Henry VI, who is crowned as an infant and never emerges from the haplessness and dependency of an endless childhood, loses all that was gained in France and becomes the passive center of dynastic conflict and civil war.
If there is no relation between the career of Henry V and the disastrous reign of his successor, then Shakespeare has written pageant, not history. Either we are to share the thrill of early victory in a lost war, as if there were no more to the tale, or we are to ponder the origins and consequences of the war. Shakespeare creates in Henry V the spectacle of derring-do that seduces the human. But we should bear in mind that all the posing as reprobate and that posturing as a warrior means this Henry, in his socks, as it were, did not seem to himself an entirely plausible king.
The three plays chronicling the emergence of Henry V dramatize in an extreme form a calculated self-creation through which he manages to dazzle opinion and galvanize loyaltyand thereby distract those who might otherwise fall to reflecting on his tenuous claim to the throne. Whatever may have happened at Agin-court, the gains in France were costly. In Shakespeares version of events, two countries suffered dearly so that authority would be consolidated in the figure of one man who had no purpose in the exercise of his authority other than to put it beyond question. That he should make a casus belli of the French kings legitimacy, when the grounds on which his own could be questioned are vastly less tenuous and abstruse, and when his awareness of the weakness of his own claim to the English throne is his true motive, is preposterous. But it is not improbable. The excitements of war are uniquely effective at obscuring the very obvious. And for that reason Henrys purpose in raising the issue is not to settle a legal dispute but to launch a war, as his dying father has advised him to do.
If such issues do indeed arise in the plays, if the institution of the monarchy is indeed questioned in them, then they are not only history plays, but political plays as well. History, as the term has been applied to these plays, is a strangely inert critical category, seeming to imply that the history of a polity can be other than political. It is as if Shakespeare, in rehearsing famous episodes from the chronicles, had passively or actively endorsed a common narrative, without venturing any thought of his own about history itself. If that is true, then the speeches and characterizations are essentially embellishments added to enhance the interest of the material. The scale of meaning of the plays, the level of seriousness appropriate to their interpretation, is radically circumscribed by these assumptions. The tendency to deny that they are to be read as a cycle, that together they interpret a crucial period in English history, is another consequence of these assumptions.
In 1616, the year of Shakespeares death, Oliver Cromwell was seventeen and Charles Stuart, the future Charles I, who as king would be tried and executed by Parliament, was sixteen. The two main actors in the great drama of the English Civil War, also called the Puritan Revolution, were his younger contemporaries. Geneva and Holland had driven out hereditary rulers and were flourishing as Calvinist republics. War between the Calvinist house of Navarre and the king was ongoing in France. A man of Shakespeares sensitivity might well have felt the tremors of the coming upheaval in England.
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