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NOTE Shakespeare on War and Empire

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Ah, thank you very much. Of course, I'm getting a little notorious for my argument that Shakespeare

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was not really the guy we're told he was, who was probably really called Shakespeare,

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Stratford-on-Avon, England, but rather the Earl of Oxford, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward

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Now, my talk today doesn't bear on the authorship question very much. I just mention it tangentially.

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I'm finishing a book this weekend, I hope, called Outing Shakespeare, in which I argue

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not only that Oxford was the real author, but part of the reason he, Edward de Vere,

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couldn't acknowledge his authorship was that he was in love with another man, the Earl of South Hampton, to whom several of the works are dedicated, and so, taking a leap from the gay rights movement, I like to say, he's here, he's queer, he's Edward de Vere, just so you know.

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Excuse me. Well, the, and that bears very little on the question of war and empire in the works of Shakespeare.

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So I'm using Shakespeare the way we use Mark Twain. You know, when we say Mark Twain, we mean Clemens, and when I say Shakespeare, I mean Edward de Vere or whoever, and I'm certain it's de Vere, but I'll save that for another day.

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One of the striking things about the works of Shakespeare is, of course, their real—I hate the word nowadays—diversity. It used to be a good word.

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But he seems to cover everything, and he seems to be hard to pin down. Shakespeare has always been a very elusive writer, in a way.

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It's not easy to say Shakespeare believes such-and-such the way you can say John Milton or Dante, or even Virgil believes such-and-such.

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There's a quality about Shakespeare that, well, it's a kind of catholicity. It's called his universality quite often.

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I think that's stretching the point. He's vast, but he's not universal.

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And I think one of the things my book will achieve, if it succeeds, is to show Shakespeare as an individual.

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Now, there's another author whose work is usually published in these two volumes called Harold Goddard, who I think is the greatest of Shakespeare critics.

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It doesn't deal at all with the Shakespeare authorship question. It deals solely with the plays.

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And he has, I think, come closest of any orthodox Shakespeare critic to getting the essence of Shakespeare's particular outlook on life

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and making Shakespeare an individual again instead of just this towering vague genius in the clouds.

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One of the remarkable things about Shakespeare is found in the play Troilus and Cressida, set in the Trojan War, of course.

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The Trojan War was the one war that every educated man would know of.

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An educated Elizabethan would know more about the Trojan War than he would about English history,

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Because the one book, one secular book, that every educated man knew for sure was Virgil's Aeneid.

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And in book two, the fall of Troy is recounted. Of course, there were many other books.

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It was the central myth of the classical world. And a classical education, well, an education in those days was a classical education.

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Well, Shakespeare took that great theme in Troilus and Cressida and wrote maybe the most debunking account ever of the Trojan War.

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It does not glorify the war in any way. In fact, the spokesman for—if Shakespeare has a spokesman in that play, it may be the vile character Thucydides,

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Wars and Lecturies, still Wars and Lecturies, that's all it is to him.

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So this extremely, not only unromantic, but anti-romantic view of the Trojan War seems to be Shakespeare's.

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On the other hand, the one Shakespeare play that, at least a generation ago, most people were likely to have encountered, if only through the movies, is Henry V.

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Henry V is almost always treated as a glorification of war, specifically of Henry's invasion of France, culminating in the Battle of Agincourt.

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Here Dottard, I think, is extremely profound in searching an original and restores Shakespeare's real intentions.

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He was dealing with a national hero, Henry V, who in the popular mind I suppose looks like

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Laurence Olivier in the role, maybe somewhat Kenneth Branagh now. How many of you, by the way,

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have seen the Olivier version of Henry V? How many have seen Branagh's version more recently?

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Both plays miss what Goddard cites as the great ironies of Shakespeare's version. Olivier's

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version was intended as a kind of morale booster and propaganda film during World War II. The

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The poor beleaguered English, as they're shown in that film, are supposed to be like the

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poor beleaguered English of World War II. There's a slight difference that the movie

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overlooks, which is that the poor beleaguered English are in somebody else's country. And

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That's the clue to Shakespeare's real attitude for this whole expedition.

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We have to remember that Henry V was the culmination of a great tetralogy that began with Richard

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II and continued in both parts of King Henry IV.

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Henry IV, the father of Henry V, was originally Henry Bolingbroke who overthrew Richard II

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was a usurper, and so his whole line here has a bad conscience about the origins of their title to the English throne.

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It's typical of Shakespeare that the Scottish says he doesn't force his ironies on you.

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He just puts them there and you can very easily miss them.

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For example, at the end of Henry IV, Part 1, the partisans of Mortimer are put down.

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Henry IV calls them rebels. He would, because he claims to be legitimate. They don't think

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they're rebels at all, because they don't think he's legitimate.

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So at the end of the play, when Henry's forces have won, the first line in the very last

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The last scene is Henry's bloating. Thus ever did rebellion find rebuke. Here's a short memory. His rebellion didn't find rebuke.

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Well, that's how it goes. In Henry IV, Part II, then, as he's dying, having suppressed yet another uprising, he urges his son, who's shortly to be Henry V, to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.

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Advice that shrewd statesmen have used ever since, and a line I hope doesn't occur to

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Bill Clinton in the near future.

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The brother of Henry, at the end of Henry IV, Part 2, says that, yes, I will lay odds

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So the play ends with this hint that there will be a sequel in France, which the epilogue confirms.

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Okay, now we come to Henry V. The play opens, of course, with this famous chorus.

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The chorus of this one man comes out and apologizes to us for the inadequacy of what we are about to see on this poor wooden stage.

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He is saying we can't really reproduce the glory of Agincourt on this lousy stage here, but please indulge us with your imaginations.

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all for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention, a kingdom for a sage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene.

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Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, assume the port of Mars, and if his heels leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire crouch for employment.

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What pardon, gentles all, the flat, unraised spirits that have dared on this unworthy scaffold

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to bring forth so great an object. Well, it's interesting, famine, sword and fire are to

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be Henry's greyhounds. The play continues, the play begins actually, with the two prelates,

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the bishop of Ely and the archbishop of Canterbury, worrying that the king is about to tax them.

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So in order to avoid confiscation of Church properties, they decide to offer him something

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to divert him, his giddy mind, as it were. They're going to offer him a pretext for invading

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France. They know this is on his mind, and they cook up a claim to the throne of France

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for Henry. Now, on the surface, the play celebrates Henry, but if you look closer, as Goddard

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When the Archbishop comes to court, Henry greets him and asks him to justify this claim of his under the French Salic law, which forbids any woman from succeeding to the throne.

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That affects the genealogy in a very complicated way, and he thinks can justify his claim.

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I learned it, Lord, we pray you to proceed, says Henry, and justly and religiously unfold why the

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law salic that they have in France, or should or should not, bar us in our claim. And God forbid,

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My dear and faithful Lord, that you should passion rest, or bow your reading, or nicely

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charge your understanding soul with opening titles miscreate, whose right sorts not in

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native colors with the truth. For God doth know how many now in health shall drop their

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blood in approbation of what your reverence shall incite us to. Therefore take heed how

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Why You Impound Our Person, How You Awake Our Sleeping Sword of War, We Charge You in

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the Name of God, Take heed, for never two such kingdoms did contend without much fall

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of blood, whose guiltless drops are every one a woe, a sore complaint against him whose

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wrongs give edge unto the swords that make such waste and brief mortality.

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Under this conjuration, speak, my Lord, for we will hear, note, and believe in heart that

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The Archbishop of Canterbury then proceeds to deliver what is by all odds the most boring

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speech in Shakespeare. He goes through all the technicalities of Salic law and reviews

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the history of the succession of France, and after this tremendously involved explanation

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So that, as clear as is the summer sun, you are entitled to be king of France, in short.

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Well, the line always gets a laugh. Sometimes they try not to make it laughable, but it is. It's meant to be laughable.

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These ironies were not lost on Shakespeare. He wrote this play. So, I mean, he has a pretty good sense of audience reaction.

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Well, Henry's claim, then, has some kind of pretext here. It's extremely technical. It's interesting to note that his claim to France, shaky as it is, is not much shakier than his claim to the throne of England, which is pretty obviously shaky, and he himself knows this and admits it later on in the play, as we'll see.

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But at any rate, of course, our concern isn't here with his claim to the title. It's the pretext for war.

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And he keeps appealing to God all the time. He keeps saying,

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Now are we well resolved, and by God's help, and yours, the noble sinews of our power,

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France being ours, we'll bend it to our awe, or break it all to pieces, and so on.

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Then comes in the French Ambassador. Now, Henry, mind you, Henry has already decided to go to war,

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and you may recall the scene that follows next. The French Ambassador comes in with a gift

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and the gift of tennis balls to make fun of Henry's wild youth.

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And he's a little unsure whether Henry is going to, you know, shoot the messenger, as

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it were, if he tells him his mission.

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And so he asks him, is it okay if I show you, present this gift to you, you won't be angry?

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And Henry says, we are no tyrant, but a Christian king unto whose grace our passion is a subject

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The subject is as our wretches fettered in our prisons. Therefore, with frank and with

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uncurbed plainness, tell us the dolphin's mind. They open it up. He says, What treasure,

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uncle? The Earl of Exeter says, Tennis balls, my leave. Henry does one of the great slow

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We are glad the Dolphin is so pleasant with us. His presence in your pains, we thank you for.

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When we have matched our rackets to these balls, we will in France, by God's grace,

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play a set, shall strike his father's crown into the hazard. Tell him he hath made a match

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with such a wrangler that all the courts of France will be disturbed with chases. And

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We understand him well how he comes o'er us with our wilder days, not measuring what use

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we made of them, and so on.

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But then he says, again with that great sanctimony typical of Henry, Until the pleasant prince,

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this mock of his, have turned his balls to gunstones, and his soul shall stand sore-charted

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for the wasteful vengeance that shall fly with them, for many a thousand widows shall

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This is his mock-mock out of their dear husbands, mock mothers from their sons, mock castles

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down.

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Aye, some are yet ungotten and unborn that shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's scorn,

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but this lies all within the will of God.

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That's the real Henry touch. He'd make a good U.S. president. Finally, he concludes,

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His jests will savor but of shallow wit, when thousands weep more than did laugh at it.

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But always the appeal to God, always the sanctimony. Now, he'd already decided to make war on France

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when the tennis balls came. But when that insulting gift arrives, he is really driven to a rage and

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yet uses that as a justification of pretext and a provocation to war. So evidently he doesn't feel

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He says his uncle exited her ahead to the French court, where he promises that if they

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don't simply vacate the throne and yield it to Henry right away, there will be widows'

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tears, orphans' cries, dead men's blood, pining maidens' groans, and so on.

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Now, also in the play are scenes that don't work very well in the modern productions,

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and they're the comic scenes in between, the low characters who seem to parody Henry with

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their bravado, their threats and bluster and cries of, for example, Captain McMorris, the

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Irish captain, when he feels he's been insulted by the Welshmen, says, so Christ save me,

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When Henry comes to Harfleur, he urges the governor of the town to surrender or else.

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If I begin the battery once again, I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur till

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What is it, then, to me, if impious war, arrayed in flames, like to the prince of fiends,

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do with his smirk's complexion all fell feats, and link to war and desolation?

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What is to me, when you yourselves are caused, if your fair maidens fall into the hand of

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hot, enforcing violation? What reign can hold the sentient's wickedness when down the hill

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he holds his fierce career? We may as ruthless spend our vain command upon the enraged soldiers

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in their spoil, and send precepts to the Leviathan to come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfler,

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take pity of your town and of your people. For as yet my soldiers are in my command.

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If the clouds yet the cool and temperate wind of grace, or blows the filthy and contagious clouds of heavy murder, spoil and villainy, if not, why in a moment look to see the blind and bloody soldier with foul hand defile the locks of your shrill shrieking daughters, your fathers taken by the silver beards and their most reverent heads dash to the walls, your naked infants spit it upon pipes, once the mad mothers with their howls confused to break the clouds

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So, this is what the chorus of the play calls the mirror of all Christian kings, and Goddard,

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I think rightly suspects Shakespeare of having his audience on a little. There's the famous

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scene around the fire where Henry appears to his soldiers in disguise and tells them

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that war is God's beetle, war is his vengeance, so that the people, he takes a very optimistic

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View of War. War simply punishes the wicked who deserve it, the ones who have it coming.

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It's not the king's fault. He's always wriggling out of responsibility. At the end of that scene,

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he has the soliloquy in which he laments that everyone always blames the king for everything.

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My kings have it rough. He's the son of a man who gave us the line,

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Well, he is certainly his father's son, upon the king, but as our lives, our souls, our

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debts, our careful wives, our children, and our sins lay on the king, we must bear all,

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O hard condition, twin born with greatness, subject to the breath of every fool whose

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The sense no more can feel but his own ringing. What infinite heart's ease must kings neglect

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that private men enjoy? They've just been talking to the private men. They're scared stiff.

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They're terrified. The slave, a member of the country's peace, enjoys it. But in gross

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brain little knows what watch the king keeps to maintain the peace, whose hour is the peasant's

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Best Advantages. How can anyone miss the clear irony here? He's saying the slave enjoys the

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peace which the king worked so hard to maintain. He's saying this in France, where he's just

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brought these guys on the most absurd pretext to support his claim to the throne of France.

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He then prays, O God of battle, steal my soldiers' hearts, possess them not with fear.

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And at the end of that prayer, he promises that he will build chantries where priests

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will perpetually pray for the soul of Richard, whom his father has deposed.

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So there again we see Shakespeare is well aware of how shaky this is.

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This is Shakespeare's treatment of this great national hero of England, Henry V. He concludes

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the play on this note, Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, this is the chorus speaking,

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not necessarily the author, our bending author hath pursued the story, in little room confining

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Henry VI, an infant man's crowned king of France and England, did this king succeed,

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who states so many had the managing that they lost France and made his England bleed, which

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oft our stage has shown, which is a reference to the Henry VI plays in which Shakespeare

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has already shown the chaos that ensued in England after Henry's conquest, first wars

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in France, then civil war at home. This was the upshot of this imperial venture of Henry

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the Fifth. So as Mark, as Huck Finn says, well, kings is kings and you have to make allowances.

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And Shakespeare, whoever he was, did, but he had no illusions about them. Now, it's interesting that

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after four centuries we've had only a very few critics who've discerned the irony here, who've

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found what I think is pretty clearly Shakespeare's true intent. Now you couldn't just have a play

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showing Henry V as a lousy king, as a bloody usurper and murderer and everything. About the

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only way you could speak the truth about Henry V in that day is the way Shakespeare manages to do it.

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By showing Henry superficially is this glorious conqueror and there are a lot of great stirring

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The Chorus tells you the popular view of Henry, but that is not the author's view. He has

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to be very subtle about it, and he is, but it's all there. So much so that when they

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make these movies, they have to soften these things. First, they cut off these bloodier

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speeches like the big one at Harfleur I read you, where he threatens the girls, the old

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The Naked Infants Spitted Upon Pikes, The Mirror of All Christian Kings

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What is the point of a play one way or another?

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Did you ever see his Hamlet?

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How many have seen his Hamlet?

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Yeah, he sticks all that Freudian stuff in.

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Hamlet's always smooshing with his mother while the king is talking Shakespeare.

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You know, I like to say it was a real now movie then and it's a real then movie now.

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It's precisely the things they put in to make it seem up-to-date that date it fast.

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Shakespeare goes on. There's something so kind of eternal about him. Also, they added

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great heroics in the Olivier version. You saw Henry in battle. Shakespeare never shows

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Henry fighting. He tells you how heroic the expedition is, but he never fights, never

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Kenneth Branagh did something even Olivier hadn't done. There's a scene in which Bardolph,

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one of Henry's old friends from his wild youth, is caught robbing a church, and Henry orders

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Here's him hanged as an example so that the French people won't be too alarmed, you know,

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he has to keep his forces in some kind of discipline.

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So they hang Bardot, his old friend, at his command, and in the Branagh movie, Henry is

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just weeping, tears streaming down his face as he watches his old friend hung up.

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There is nothing whatever in the text to suggest that Henry is in any way sorry, it's a completely

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cold-blooded act and well anyway there's a there's a lot more to support this interpretation

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but I think this is enough to make it clear that Shakespeare is not buying this heroic

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view of war and conquest that the English generally bought and I'm afraid still do.

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became a great imperial propaganda tool, but only because his point in this play in particular

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could be misrepresented so easily. In fact, his point could be missed so easily. I think

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you could even view Antony and Cleopatra as a kind of epilogue to Henry V in a way.

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That's why I think of our lately departed great Russell Kirk here because Russell was a man

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who preferred beauty to power and I think that's Shakespeare's philosophy in a nutshell

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if you can put something so vast as his outcome into a nutshell. That's what I think Antony

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and Cleopatra is about. Antony isn't interested in maintaining an empire. For him it's the

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Let Rome and Tybur melt, and the wide arch of the ranged empire fall. Here is my space.

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Kissing Cleopatra, he says, the nobleness of life is to do thus.

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That's Shakespeare. I think you can specify his attitude. I think he hated violence and war.

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Saw them as sometimes necessary, but rarely justified in the way they're executed in this world.

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Again, I can only recommend to you this wonderful study by Harold Goddard, which I think

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takes us closer to the heart of Shakespeare than any other critic has.

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So thank you very much and if you have any questions I'll be glad to try to answer them.

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Well, we don't know, first of all, we don't know anything about the original productions

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because we have only a few, you know, recorded entries for performances of any Shakespeare

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He's a very erratic scholar. In his book, Reinventing Shakespeare, he does make one point

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I think is terrific, and that is that Shakespeare became this propaganda tool for the British

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Empire, and in fact we owe to that some of his exaltation. I think he deserves to be

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I think he's the greatest writer in the world, except maybe for Homer, Virgil or Dante. I don't know who else there is in his league, but he wasn't a big deal in England for a long time, nearly two centuries, and in fact it wasn't until 1740 that any Shakespeare play was translated into another European language.

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Shakespeare was a pretty local phenomenon for a long time. I know there are those who take a different view, knowing Goddard's view, but I still think Goddard gives the fullest interpretation I've seen.

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Well, I think there is even in that speech. He says,

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He that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother. Be he ne'er so vile, this day shall

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How gentle his condition. That is, anyone who sheds his blood with Henry today will be a gentleman, no matter how vile his condition, that is, how lowly his status, I'll elevate him to the status of gentleman. He doesn't do it. There again, another broken campaign promise.

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Well, what performance? Well, Goddard agrees with that. Goddard would agree with that. Look, he says, look, Shakespeare gives you both. He gives you the whole experience of it. And the ironies are in there. It's not, it's not that the irony is everything. The irony, though, is the, the underside

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of it. This is what you find last. He says you should enjoy it at that level first. This

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is not to say you should be sitting there in the theater trying to penetrate, you know,

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to the deepest meanings. You can't in the theater. And I don't think these plays were written solely

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for the theater, as witnessed the fact that most of the mature plays, the later plays,

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have never worked as well in the theater as the early and middle plays.

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I'm going to say, this is a lot worth commenting on. I enjoyed being in it, and then I'm going to talk about how it goes.

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Two or three years ago, at Arlington, there was one time when there was a lot of violence,

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and how it kept going on and on, about the political versions of Andrew Jackson,

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and then turned around and quoted the St. Christopher speech, before he ever let you speak.

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But, again, there's sort of a parallel there between virtue and none. It exists, and it brings to mind, I'm in charge of a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery each year, in front of the Memorial Day, and we're always using military vans, of course there's an executive order put out by parties, and you can't play density, but they always often play the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

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Master of the Public speaks to me of the quintessential sexualized version of religion.

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The Lord says, we are going to splice you people down here like grapes.

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And everything is glorious if I shall suppress you.

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But the song that they've suppressed is sort of an innocent, mental song.

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I was just wondering, it seems like a lot of the things that you've printed out have been really subtle, Irene, and I was wondering if you thought the Elizabethan audience would have caught on to some of those, and then, you know, would these plays have been seen as subversive and instinctive in time?

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of Subversion in the sense of aiming at some ultimate political effect. I think it's just

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a matter of Shakespeare keeping his head and inviting you to do it too. He says, Hamlet

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says that the purpose of drama is to hold the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her

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The Center of the Which One Must in Your Allowance Or Weigh a Whole Theater of Others

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I think he puts the subtleties that, for one thing, I don't think he was merely a commercial playwright.

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I do think that he was a man who didn't have to make a living at this and could afford to put his whole heart into it

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because he wasn't just beating deadlines and making a buck.

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Yeah, Tom?

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I think the young lady deserves a more candid answer.

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I mean, what if Shakespeare were perceived as writing a pan of Henry V?

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We know what happens under those circumstances in Elizabeth's England.

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You go to jail, you get into a nose slit-off,

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you'll find yourself either rotting in jail if you're lucky or put to death.

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Now, Elizabethan English is not a place where you can prove the royal mythology life is true, and secondly, I wonder if all these terrible things the English do to the brain, wouldn't that be cause for exaltation in the Elizabethan audience? That's their identity.

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And that strikes me that most of the ironies there would not have been perceived as ironies.

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But they were Christians.

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He's a Frenchman, doesn't he, Leon? There's a fine in which Dainty Deloitte is being established.

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Shakespeare certainly is dimly aware of that.

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Well, I'll recommend again Goddard's analysis of the Archbishop's speech, which I think is just one of the most brilliant passages of Shakespeare criticism I've ever read,

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in which he debunks it and appeals to the theatrical value too, in a way.

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I was wondering if you had a book of your thoughts, it would be on power and war and the like, the important branch, the chiefs of the air, the great theorists, the end theorists, and if you played a key figure in that whole battle of the state, would that make sense?

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when I first read it. It was so provoking to me. But, well, first of all, Ford and Ross's name means strong arm. He stands for power. And some people contend that he is the ideal, the sort of happy mean between Hamlet and Laertes.

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I don't think so. I think that the point of the play is summed up in the lines of, that's

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over-simplifying it horribly, but something like a key to the play is in the play of king's

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speech, what to ourselves in passion we propose, the passion ending that the purpose lose. I've

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often thought of it as a kind of Hayekian play. We can't control the consequences too much.

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We can't know the consequences fully, and when we act in passion, we set off things whose end we have no idea, and that's Hamlet's tragedy, he feels he has to do this to be true to his father, but the result is the destruction of the dynasty, and it's takeover by the enemy, Fortinbras, the recent enemy.

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Hey, Joe, how would you consider this analysis to a contemporary history of Sir Philip Sidney, who actually was more of a wounded than a poor man, and yet was raised that name at that time, sort of a paradigm of the history of literature.

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How would you contrast Henry V to Shakespeare's vision, and Sir Philip Sidney's vision of adaptability?

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Well, he died of a wound when fighting in Holland, as I recall, and he was exalted as a national hero. There was a great craze for Sydney right away, and he has remained to this day in the pantheon of English heroes.

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So is Henry. Well, of course, that was a different kind of war. That was not just a domestic war, a war over territory. It was part of the semi-religious war with Spain.

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Anyway, I don't think Shakespeare is commenting on that directly. There are indirect comments on Sidney himself in Shakespeare, but I don't think that bears on Henry V.

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Question asked.

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Yes, he was.

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Devere Oxford was quite capable fighter himself and won in their version of the Olympics.

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He won in the Justing.

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He was a mean man with a lance. Now, he did also have military commissions on several occasions

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and wanted to fight against Spain, but was recalled. So, you know, this is not to say

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Shakespeare was always anti-war, but he knew what, I think because Oxford knew what war

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was that we find Shakespeare taking the view he does of war. There was someone over here

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Okay, I guess I satisfactorily answered all curiosity on this one.

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Okay, thank you.