Shakespeare's Kings

by John Julius Norwich

  Is the incident of the tennis balls history or legend? It is reported both by Holinshed and Hall, and appears also in a contemporary ballad as well as in several other slightly later works. But Walsingham's chronicle — which would surely have included it if it had really occurred

  - makes no reference to it, and nor does any contemporary French historian. It certainly seems highly improbable. So gratuitous an insult must surely have led to a complete breach of diplomatic relations between the two countries, whereas we know that the negotiations continued. The story most likely had its origins in the Chronicle of one John Strecche, dating from only a few years after Henry's death in 1422, according to which in his boyhood the Armagnac ambassadors offered to send him 'little balls to play with, and soft cushions to rest on, until what time he should grow to man's strength'; Henry is said to have replied angrily that in a few months he would play such a game in the streets of France that it would cease to be a joke.

  The second act of the play introduces the sub-plot, with the reappearance of the King's old Eastcheap companions: Bardolph, Pistol, his wife the former Mistress Quickly, her jilted suitor Nym - who does not figure in Henry IV but has been imported from The Merry Wives of Windsor — and, offstage, Falstaff himself, with the reports of his sickness and death. But since this book is concerned primarily with the historical accuracy of the plays, the fictitious characters need not detain us; we can pass on to Scene ii and the Southampton plot. Once again, Shakespeare's authority is Holinshed; he has not hesitated, however, to add a few touches of his own. The plot, when we first hear of it, has already been discovered, though the conspirators are not yet aware of the fact. The King plays them along, encouraging them to flatter him and to emphasize their own loyalty; he even goes so far as to suggest releasing

  the man committed yesterday That railed against our person

  so that they may object, and urge instead that the offender should be severely punished. (This last is a little Shakespearean invention to increase the dramatic impact of the scene.) Only when they have condemned themselves with hypocrisy as well as treachery does Henry hand them the 'commission papers' (another invention) which reveal to them the truth. None of them — not even Scrope — makes any attempt to defend himself; they simply confess, express their contrition and beg for mercy - which, it need hardly be said, they do not receive.

  After the brief scene in which the former Mistress Quickly tells of the death of Falstaff — Shakespeare thus in some measure fulfilling the promise made in the Epilogue of Henry IV Part II - the scene changes to the French court. King Charles VI is present, in full possession of his senses. Nowhere in the play is there any suggestion of his mental instability; indeed, in this scene his good sense stands out in marked contrast to the foolhardiness of his son the Dauphin, who persists in underestimating the English threat. (There is no historical evidence for supposing that this was the Dauphin's attitude, except for the earlier and equally suspect incident of the tennis balls.) The discussion is interrupted by the arrival of Henry's uncle the Duke of Exeter1 with his ultimatum: either Charles gives up his throne or, 'in thunder and earthquake, like a Jove', the English will come and get it. Exeter makes it clear, too, that his master has a particular contempt for the Dauphin, whose pride and arrogance are continually emphasized so that it is he, and not his father, who becomes the villain of the play; Charles, however, remains the principal spokesman, and it is he who closes the scene — and the act - with his dismissal of the ambassador and his promise of a full answer on the morrow.

  The substance of that answer is left to our imagination. By the opening of Act III we are at Harfleur, and the siege has begun.

  Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,

  Or close the wall up with our English dead.

  In peace there's nothing so becomes a man

  As modest stillness and humility;

  But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

  Then imitate the action of the tiger;

  Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,

  Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage.

  Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;

  Let it pry through the portage of the head

  Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it

  As fearfully as doth a galled rock

  O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,

  Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.

  Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide . . .

  Recognizing the limitations of his 'wooden O', Shakespeare confines his account of the siege of Harfleur to Henry's famous exhortation and a brief scene with Pistol, Nym and their ill-fated Boy in which he also introduces both the Welshman Fluellen - thought to be a portrait either of the soldier Sir Roger Williams, a follower of the Earl of Essex, or of the Welsh poet and courtier Ludovic Lloyd - and the Irishman Macmorris. In scene iii the city surrenders, the Governor explaining to the King that since the Dauphin had not been able to send help he had no

  i. Thomas Beaufort was not to be made Duke of Exeter until 1416. At this time he was still Earl of Dorset. But Shakespeare calls him Exeter, so Exeter he shall be.

  alternative but to yield. We are given no indication of Henry's treatment of the citizens, except for his injunction to Exeter to 'use mercy to them all'; interestingly, however, there is a reference to the appalling English losses through disease:

  The winter coming on and sickness

  growing Upon our soldiers, we will retire to Calais.

  At this point in the play we meet the Princess Katherine for the first time. Born on 27 October 1401, in the summer of 1415 she was fourteen years old - not perhaps too young, in the late Middle Ages, to have understood both of the agonizing double-entendres (foot = foutre, gown = coun = con) in her conversation with her companion Alice - to some of us, among the most embarrassing scenes in all Shakespeare. It is with considerable relief that we return to the court of France, imaginary though the ensuing conversation must be. Line 64 of scene v reveals that it is set in Rouen, although by this time, only a few days before Agincourt, with the English already across the Somme, the Constable d'Albret would surely have been with his army. (Holinshed and Hall, incidentally, both confuse Louis the Dauphin with his cousin Louis of Anjou, King of Sicily, and Shakespeare seems to have been led into the same trap.) It is a short scene, which serves only to emphasize the French determination to bring the invaders quickly to battle before they reach home ground at Calais — or possibly to extort from them an appropriate ransom. Holinshed tells us that at the French council of war - which was attended also by 'the dukes of Berry and of Britaine [Brittany], the earle of Pontieu the kings yoongest sonne, and other high estates' - the voting was thirty to five in favour; 'and so Montioy king at armes was sent to the king of England to defie him as the enemie of France, and to tell him that he should shortlie haue battell.'

  Before the herald can deliver his message, Henry hears from Fluellen of the successful crossing of the Ternoise in the face of strong French opposition. (In the play — though not in Holinshed — the credit for this is wrongly given to Exeter, who had as we know been left in charge at Harfleur.) At this point, too, he learns from the same source of the arrest and impending execution of Bardolph, who has been caught robbing a church. Clearly he has it in his power to pardon his old drinking companion; instead, he unhesitatingly confirms the sentence,

  Shakespeare's text - as opposed to most modern productions of the play - giving no indication that he even remembers him. The incident may be fictitious, but it accurately illustrates not only the King's mood but his extraordinary change of character since his accession. Accurate too, as far as it goes, is his answer to Montjoy's challenge. He does not

  - as the historical Henry did - sue for peace; indeed he even injects one or two gratuitous insults. At the same time he makes no secret of the condition of his army:

  My people are with sickness much enfeebled,

  My numbers lesse
ned, and those few I have

  Almost no better than so many French . . .

  My ransom is this frail and worthless trunk,

  My army but a weak and sickly guard.

  Yet, God before, tell him we will come on,

  Though France himself and such another neighbour

  Stand in our way.

  By now, as the last scene of Act III makes clear, the French can hardly wait for the battle to begin.

  Act IV forms the climax of the play. Its first scene, in which the King makes his round of the English camp on the night before the battle, is — for its poetry, for the opportunity it gives to a great actor, and for the extraordinary atmosphere that Shakespeare manages to evoke - perhaps one of the best-known that he ever wrote. There is no historical evidence that Henry did any such thing; nor, on the other hand, is it in any way unlikely. All great generals - and though Henry's strategy was occasionally at fault there can be little doubt of his greatness - show a care for their men, and his immense popularity with his troops proves that he could have been no exception to the rule. Something must have occurred during those long, sodden hours before the dawn to infuse into the exhausted army the spirit to turn almost certain defeat into victory; and 'a little touch of Harry in the night' is surely the most probable explanation. The three soldiers - John Bates, Alexander Court and Michael Williams — are Shakespeare's creations; 'old' Sir Thomas Erpingham, however, is a historical figure; at the time of Agincourt he was fifty-eight. It is he who, at the end of the scene, leaves the King alone on the stage to speak his final prayer before the coming conflict:

  O God of Battles, steel my soldiers' hearts

  and this immediately leads us back to that moral burden that the House of Lancaster could never entirely shake off - the guilt that Henry will always feel for his father's usurpation of the throne.

  'The sun doth gild our armour; up, my lords!' With this magical line, and more vainglorious speeches from the French side, the dramatic representation of the battle effectively begins. The scene then changes to the English camp, and leads to the great St Crispin's Day speech that, sixty years ago, every English schoolboy had sooner or later to learn by heart: the King's indignant retort to the Earl of Westmorland's surely comprehensible wish that

  we now had here

  But one ten thousand of those men in England

  That do no work today!

  There is good historical evidence for this incident, which is included by Holinshed — who does not, however, specify the figure and who makes no mention of Westmorland by name. Interestingly enough, the story is also told by Henry's unknown chaplain, in whose Gesta Henrici Quinti the retort is made not to Westmorland but to Sir Walter Hungerford, who had wished for 'another ten thousand of the best English archers'. Whether the chaplain's account was known to Shakespeare we shall never know: if it was not, the choice of the figure ten thousand could easily have been coincidental; if it was, the transfer of the speech to an existing character in the play would surely have been legitimate in the circumstances. Certainly from Holinshed is the second appearance of Montjoy, giving the King his last chance of paying a ransom to deliver himself and his army from almost certain destruction; but the herald receives - predictably - the same response as before.

  In his introduction to Act IV the Chorus has given us warning of how

  we shall much disgrace

  With four or five most vile and ragged foils

  Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous

  The name of Agincourt.

  The action of the battle is in fact compressed into three short scenes, of which the second already presents the French lords as fully conscious of their defeat and the third - of a mere thirty-eight lines - is almost entirely given over to the deaths of the only two English noblemen to have fallen, the Duke of York and the Earl of Suffolk. (The affecting story of their deaths as told by Exeter is plainly fabricated: Exeter was not even present at Agincourt - despite Holinshed's affirmation to the contrary - and York's death, as we have seen, was probably due to heart failure.) Just before the end of the scene, however, the mood changes: the King gives his terrible order to kill all the French prisoners. In his antepenultimate line he makes his reason clear: the noise of a distant alarum has persuaded him that 'the French have reinforced their scattered men'.

  Strangely enough, however, at the beginning of scene vii only a few lines further on, Captain Gower attributes the decision to the King's anger on hearing of a French raid on the English tents, which ended in a massacre of the boy servants who had been left in charge of them; and when Henry enters again with the words

  I was not angry since I came to France

  Until this instant

  he seems to confirm Gower's view. If we go back to Holinshed we find a still more confused account; and Shakespeare evidently shares the confusion. But for him, unlike Holinshed, there is an additional important consideration: he must at all costs keep the sympathy of his audience for the King. Gower and Fluellen are obviously speaking for the entire army when they express their disgust at the French atrocity - which, as Fluellen points out, is 'expressly against the law of arms' -and their support of Henry's order.

  By contrast, the beginning of the following scene with Montjoy the herald is taken almost word for word from Holinshed: first the request to bury the French dead, then the King's demand for confirmation that the day is indeed his - which Montjoy immediately gives - and finally the naming of the battle after the neighbouring castle of Agincourt. The scene continues with Shakespeare's invented characters and the incident of the exchanged gloves; history reappears only towards the end of scene viii, with the English herald bringing Henry the list of the principal casualties on both sides. All these are taken directly from Holinshed, as is the thanksgiving to God with which the act ends:

  Let there be sung Non nobis and Te Deum,

  The dead with charity enclosed in clay,

  And then to Calais, and to England then,

  Where ne'er from France arrived more happy men.

  The story of the King's triumphant return to London is given to the Chorus, in the introduction to Act V. We are told not only of the cheering crowds, 'Whose shouts and claps outvoice the deep-mouthed sea', but also of Henry's refusal to allow 'His bruised helmet and his bended sword' to be borne before him through the city.1 The other function of the Chorus at this point is to bridge the five years between Agincourt and the Treaty of Troyes in May 1420. For Shakespeare it was essential that the great Battle should form the climax of his play; there was no space for the King's second expedition, for the taking of Caen and Rouen or for the murder of the Duke of Burgundy. We must therefore omit

  All the occurrences, whatever chanced,

  Till Harry's back return again to France

  and move directly on to the reconciliation of the two former enemies and Henry's marriage to the Princess Katherine, by which that reconciliation was sealed. There is in fact a short preliminary scene, in which Fluellen settles his score with Pistol; but this serves only to point up the pomp and ceremony which opens the final scene of the play. The first part of this is dominated by the great speech in praise of peace by the Duke of Burgundy - Philip the Good, now twenty-four, whose father John had been assassinated in the previous year. It is pure Shakespearean invention - and none the worse for that.

  The scene continues with the second long conversation, in a mixture

  1. Holinshed adds: . . neither would he suffer any ditties to be made and soong by minstrels of his glorious victorie, for that he would wholie haue the praise and thanks altogither giuen to God'.

  of English and French, between the King and his bride-to-be. Less embarrassing than its predecessor, it nevertheless shows a distressing lack of consideration on Henry's part for the Princess's extremely Hmited English, to say nothing of several more double-entendres1 which do not sound wholly appropriate in this context. (True, they are mild enough in comparison with the King's exchanges with Burgundy that follow;
2 one can only hope that the pair have moved beyond the hearing of poor Katherine, who remains onstage throughout.) The two Kings -Charles VI still apparently in perfect possession of his faculties - then confirm that there are now no longer any outstanding matters between them. There is even agreement on the official formula by which the English King is in future to be addressed by the French court, a formula which leaves no one - including the audience — in any doubt of Henry's most important single achievement: recognition by the French as Charles's heir, heritier de France. Pious hopes and good wishes are expressed on both sides and the Chorus speaks a short epilogue, pointing the audience both forward to Henry's son and successor and back to the Henry IV plays 'which oft our stage has shown' - they having been already written several years before.

  Much critical ink has been spilt over the question of what sort of play its author intended King Henry V to be. Is it the nearest thing he ever wrote to a patriotic pageant, an epic celebration of English glory, or is it a diatribe against war and the abuse of power? The answer, surely, is that it is both. Shakespeare would have seen no contradiction between the two. One approach or the other alone would have made it two-dimensional; by combining them, he gave his play fullness and depth. Essentially, it is about conflict, but not only the obvious conflict between the English and the French. There is also the age-old moral conflict about the justification for aggressive war, to say nothing of Henry's own inner struggle in which his energy and ambition are set against the vicarious guilt he feels for the murder of Richard and

  For example line 140, 'I could quickly leap into a wife'; or line 260, 'I cannot tell vat is baiser en Anglish'. (The colloquial meaning of baiser, delicately described in one dictionary as 'going all the way', has been current in French since the days of Clement Marot (1496-1564) or even before.)