In representing the reigns of English monarchs from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries on the late-sixteenth-century stage, Shakespeare helped to define the past as ‘other’ from the present. While Shakespeare’s history plays do not aim toward periodization in our sense of the term, his so-called first and second tetralogies do isolate a span of time characterized within the plays through a range of representational strategies, as distinct from the performative present of the 1590s. Henry V, the play that caps Shakespeare’s exploration of the pre-Tudor English monarchy, stands out in this regard, and is thus the most inviting site in his canon to examine Shakespeare as a historical thinker. The play, particularly through its Chorus figure, is famous for explicitly commenting on the practice of historical representation, and is the basis here for my investigation of how Shakespeare represented the relation between his Elizabethan present and what has come to be called the medieval past.1
To say that Shakespeare characterized the past as ‘other’ is not to suggest that he regarded the Middle Ages as inferior to his own time. Nor do I argue here that the kind of historical consciousness evinced in Henry V should be read as somehow more sophisticated than a medieval sense of the past. Scholars of medieval literature have for some time argued against the tendency among early modernists to portray the Middle Ages as a stagnant, intellectual backwater superseded by the complexity and vigor of the Renaissance. In Lee Patterson’s words, ‘medieval pre-modernity has with few exceptions been experienced by modernity as “Gothic”—obscure, difficult, strange, alien.’2 As Patterson points out, this view began in the Renaissance itself, especially among the Italian humanists who sought to distinguish themselves from their most immediate predecessors. I would not associate Shakespeare with this trend. I am instead arguing that for Shakespeare, the Middle Ages are not so much ‘obscure’ as they are enticing. It is a commonplace that Renaissance intellectuals longed for some connection to the classical past. Petrarch’s letters to ancient authors express this longing in explicit terms. Shakespeare’s history plays tapped into an apparent desire on the part of Elizabethan theatergoers to gain an imaginative experience of the ‘middle’ era. Shakespeare recognizes the desire for such an imaginative experience, and offers in response to this recognition a consciousness of the past that is defined less by its exemplarity or its place in a typological schema than by the sheer fact of its difference from the present.3
The distance effect Shakespeare creates in Henry V is not pejorative, then, but the affirmation of temporality. Specifically, in Henry V, he recognizes that there have been changes in the way that the past is recorded and circulated between the time of Henry V and his own era. Shakespeare organizes his recognition of these changes around three key developments of the sixteenth century, developments that undeniably mark major breaks from the world of the early fifteenth century when Henry reigned: the Reformation, the advent of the printing press and its role in historical writing, and the dawn of the professional theater and development of the history play as a major component of that theater. Henry V is thick with meditations on the discourse of history. I have perforce selected as the basis of my analysis here a few key scenes that correspond to those three indices of change: first, Henry’s remarks about funding chantries in memory of King Richard II, a distinctly pre-Reformation mode of marking and articulating the past; second, the Chorus’s reference to written versions of the Henry V story that remind audiences of the chronicle tradition and its development, enabled by the emergence of a print culture in England in the late fifteenth century; and third, the commoners’ discussion of the death of Falstaff, a scene that, through the characters present and the figure of Falstaff invoked, affirms the theatrical setting of the play, and thus the playhouse itself as a novel site of historical representation.
Henry V accounts for a variety of forms of historical awareness extant before its own time. This self-consciousness about the constitution and dissemination of historical knowledge is the central feature of the Shakespearean ars historica we can construct from this play. Change is highlighted, in other words, not as an occasion to make moral pronouncements or to convey a general sense of worldly mutability, but to examine the concept of history and transformations to how the past is represented and circulated. In Henry V, Shakespeare historicizes practices of historiography, and in so doing, demonstrates a rupture in English historical culture between what we now call the Middle Ages and his own late-sixteenth-century moment.
In the anonymously-authored The Famous Victories of Henry V, a play from the repertory of the Queen’s Men that was on the London stages at least as late as 1587, King Henry IV offers the crown to the Prince of Wales. The King woefully admits ‘God knows, my son, how hardly I came by it, and how hardly I have maintained it,’ to which the Prince replies: ‘Howsoever you came by it, I know not; but now I have it from you, and from you I will keep it.’4 The Prince claims ignorance of his father’s usurpation. He never mentions Richard II or meditates on the direct antecedents of his inheritance.5 One of Shakespeare’s great innovations from the Henry V story as told in The Famous Victories is his rendering of Henry’s conscience, which, albeit briefly aired, includes a specific nagging memory about the events of English history that have enabled his reign. The King prays:
My interests here elide the considerable psychological complexity of Henry’s crisis in order to focus on the specific way this moment invokes a sense of historical periods. Henry claims to have ‘interred new’ the body of Richard II, and also refers here to arranging for two related modes of intercession on behalf of Richard’s soul, both of them suppressed and out of use by the 1590s. The first is the payment of indigent people to pray for a departed benefactor.6 The second is the Chantry system, that is, chapels funded by usually wealthy testators to be dedicated to intercessory prayers and songs on the departed one’s behalf spoken and sung by actual priests.7 The major English chronicle accounts of Henry’s reign that pre-date Shakespeare’s play all make note of the conspicuous re-burial of Richard at Westminster Abbey shortly after Henry’s coronation in 1413.8 While they do write about the re-burial of Richard, neither Hall nor Holinshed, the most prominent prose works normally identified as source material for Henry V, mention the intercessory rituals Henry claims he arranged for Richard’s soul. Nor can this information be found, for instance, in the chronicles of Richard Grafton, another popular and prolific chronicler of the mid-sixteenth century.9
William Caxton’s late-fifteenth-century continuation of the Brut, known popularly as ‘Caxton’s Chronicle’, does note that Henry ordered the lighting of ‘tapers’ at Richard’s tomb, as well as his directive that masses and songs, connected with poor relief, be dedicated to Richard’s name. The description of Henry’s efforts on behalf of Richard’s soul in the 1480 Chronicles is implicated in a moment before the break with Rome. Caxton describes how Henry had ‘sente to Rome’ to ask advice on what to do about his father’s murder of Richard, ‘For which offence’ the Chronicles go on to say, ‘the Pope our holy fadre enjoyned him [Henry] to make hym [Richard] be p[rayed]ed for perpetually.’10 This narrative of events in almost identical wording can be found also in Caxton’s 1482 printing of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon and subsequent editions of that work. In Robert Fabyan’s 1516 Chronicle, specific reference to the Pope is omitted, but here we read of Henry’s order for tapers to be burned at Richard’s tomb ‘whyle the world endureth’, as well as an order that ‘one daye in the weke a solempne Dirige, and vppon the morowe a masse of Requiem’ should be sung for Richard, and that after such masses, money should be ‘gyuen weekly unto poore people’.11 Briefer reference to these practices, in sparser form, can be found also in John Stow’s 1592 Annales of England; this is the only post-Reformation potential source for Henry V I have found that mentions them.12 Fabyan, Stow, and these other sources do not specifically mention the word ‘chantry’, although the allusion to that paid-for-intercessory action is clear. Shakespeare thus made a point of fetching a detail for Henry’s speech that appears most commonly, with the prominent exception of Stow, in sources composed and initially printed before Henry VIII’s break with Rome. What is the effect of this deliberate reference to a ‘popish’ practice on the Elizabethan stage? A brief examination of the chantries and their dissolution might help guide speculation on the matter.
The chantries were dissolved through two acts of parliament, the first in 1545 under Henry VIII, and the second two years later in 1547 with the ascension of Edward VI. Duffy writes that ‘The Edwardine Chantries Act justified the dissolutions, not on economic grounds, but on the basis of religious principle.’13 A glimpse of this principle can be seen in the preamble to the 1547 Act, which characterizes the chantries’ purpose as ‘phantasising vain opinions of purgatory and masses satisfactory, to be done for them which be departed’.14 As this quotation indicates, from the reformer’s point of view, intercessory practices such as these were a sign of the perverted and superstitious doctrine of the Roman church, and thus a frequent target of reformer complaint. Connected to the doctrine of purgatory, their elimination was a key element of Protestant efforts to purge the English church of excessive, scripturally unjustified, ritual.15
Chantries had been an important and well-known feature of the theological cosmos of English Christianity. One historian, comparing the relative effect of dissolving the chantries with another mandated institutional dissolution, writes that the chantries ‘bore a far closer relation to the daily life of the people than did the majority of the monasteries’.16 It is clear that chantries represented a familiar practice with deep roots, and with often widespread effects. As historians have noted, in addition to serving intercessory purposes for individuals, chantries could also be dedicated to organizing more community-oriented forms of worship, and often catalyzed parish educational efforts.17 The abrogation of the chantries in 1547 could not have fully erased some notion of their existence from the minds of Shakespeare’s theatergoers just two generations removed.
Henry’s mention of chantries and intercessory practices in a late-Elizabethan play may have induced nostalgia for a world of such rituals, or may have worked to remind audiences of an unsavory practice now safely in the past. Such ambiguity fits nicely into the age-old debate over how positively or negatively audiences are meant to perceive Henry himself. The even more complicated question of whether Shakespeare personally was sympathetic to the Catholic doctrine invoked here is beyond the scope of my interests. I want to make a very simple point: Shakespeare represents Henry referring to practices that place him in a time period clearly distinct from the 1590s London stage, a temporally distant, past era.
In exhibiting self-consciousness about historical difference, Henry V acknowledges the awesome rupture of the Reformation, a break from the past which served as a prompt to initiate critical historical inquiry throughout the sixteenth century. As one member of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries remarked ‘when the popes aucthoryty was abolished out of England by King Henry the eight … there was spetiall care had of the search for Antient books and Antiquityes for manifestation unto the world of theise usurpations of the pope.’18 Faith and worship were now framed by a sense of the Church as a temporal, historical institution. The notion of change—here, of the Catholic Church’s break from the mission of the original, ‘true’ Church—became fundamental to how the past was conceived, and the task of the historian began to be the work of tracing and anatomizing such ruptures.
Henry’s historicizing gesture is most interesting in that it not only differentiates eras, but specifically historicizes a form of memory making, memory making that can be seen as doing historical work. The purely spiritual dimension of the chantry efforts cannot be denied. It is clear that testators who left sums to have masses held and prayers said in their honor did so in hopes that it would hasten their ascent to heaven. But they also had a worldly dimension and function. For one thing, such bequests were a form of ‘conspicuous consumption’ that witnessed the testators’ wealth as well as their piety.19 It was, in other words, a means of securing one’s legacy and ensuring one’s name would be kept in circulation in the temporal world. Ideally, it served to connect the past to the present. Stephen Greenblatt, for instance, has written of such intercessory practices as ‘linking the living with the souls of countless previous generations’.20 Although in one sense this was a metaphysical connection between past and present, one with the potential to suggest an atemporal Christian community, it also helped maintain a sense of the movement of time: those alive in the present pray for those who once lived but are no longer here.
The practice of bequeathing money to have masses and prayers said and songs sung straddles the line between personal and collective memory. When individuals leave money for the benefit of their own souls, and perhaps a narrow circle of the souls of their families and friends, the practice veers toward the private.21 But the fact that chantries could serve as community centers for education and other spiritual purposes gives them a more public, communal function. In Henry’s case, he has secured the efforts of intercessors on another’s behalf, and that other, a former monarch, is a very public, national figure. It is in this way that Henry’s words in this speech align the practice with a kind of collective memory making that amounts to historical work. While the practice as he describes it does not involve a written testament about Richard’s life or death, he has initiated a communal and long-term means—‘500 poor’ engaged ‘yearly’ and ‘two chantries’, where the priests sing ‘still’—of ensuring Richard will not be forgotten.
Henry proclaims to the French Princess at the play’s end that ‘we are the makers of manners’ (5.2.270–1). Culture, in Henry’s mind, is regulated from the top down. Henry has ordered that a large number of people ‘twice a day’ publicly crave ‘pardon’ for his father’s usurpation of the throne, thus suggesting a complicated official reading of the processes by which he became king, what one critic has called Henry’s acceptance of a ‘martyr myth’ about Richard.22 In his efforts to come to terms with the legacy of his inheritance, Henry engages in a mode of penance for his father’s crime against Richard that is also a means of promulgating history. And from the perspective of the present of the play’s performance, this means of promulgating history—intercessory church ritual—is obsolete.
This speech designates the era of Henry as pre-Reformation. Of course, this was a messier temporal split in the sixteenth century than such a modernly formulated tag implies. Yet, Shakespeare’s audience would be conscious of, in a broad sense, a pre-Reformation era marked by religious practices no longer in use. Indeed, by the 1590s, such practices had become symbols of what the Reformation changed. Sermons, political and theological tracts, plays, poems, ballads, and other works—not least of which being the regularly re-printed and widely available Acts and Monuments of John Foxe—from the mid-sixteenth century on relentlessly reminded the faithful of the Catholic rituals that had been expunged from the English Church. Shakespeare’s Henry V participates in this trend by highlighting outdated religious practices to differentiate King Henry’s time from its own time. And, by citing a defunct mode of relating to the past, the play represents variation in commemorative practices as an indicator of historical change.
Henry V opens with a prologue that asserts authorial and theatrical control over the larger telling of history the play offers. The play’s ensuing initial scenes represent history in the more particular hands of the Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury serves as Henry’s preferred historian; the King, in his first line, asks for the Archbishop, and when Canterbury enters, Henry immediately asks him to hold forth: ‘My learned lord, we pray you to proceed, | And justly and religiously unfold | Why the law Salique that they have in France, | Or should or should not, bar us in our claim’ (1.2.9–12). In Henry’s formulation, the history he expects from Canterbury will be ‘just’ and religious. The implied, official expectation is that history is most properly controlled by the Church, for there it can be preserved and told free of corruption.
Canterbury delivers what is arguably the most ancient form of historical discourse: a genealogy. While Canterbury’s speech is more comically obscure and sinisterly conspiratorial than it is sincerely informative or persuasive, the key point for the play is that Henry employs it as the basis of his subsequent foreign adventure. The Archbishop’s speech indeed becomes reified as a written genealogy that Henry sends the French court as evidence of his title to the throne of France (2.4.88–95). The Church does not hold exclusive rights to history in the play. Henry himself makes his own study of the past evident, saying ‘You shall read that my great-grandfather | Never went with his forces into France | But that the Scot’ subsequently invaded England (1.2.146–8). Nonetheless, it is striking to note that the play represents its key historical knowledge as emanating initially from Churchmen: the oral declamation of the Salic law to the English court that takes the material form of a genealogy sent to the French. From Gildas, Nennius, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, through the chaplains of Henry V’s court thought to have produced the first biographies of his reign, there is a long native tradition in early Britain and England of monks and priests serving as historians. Shakespeare chooses to begin his play locating historical knowledge within this ancient tradition.23
Henry and his court learn the intricacies of the Salic law that, they believe, justifies the invasion of France. But for Williams and the common soldiers for whom he speaks, the justness of Henry’s cause is ‘more than we know’ (4.1.129). Henry in fact emphasizes the King’s exclusive knowledge of arcana imperium when he envies the common man’s contrasting ‘vacant mind’ and the fact that his ‘gross brain little wots | What watch the King keeps to maintain the peace’ (4.1.269, 282–3). Historical knowledge circulates outside the Church in Henry V, but it remains confined to royalty, high aristocracy, and military leaders.
In terms of the dissemination of the historical, Henry V makes evident that historical knowledge by the time of the play’s performance has moved beyond the confines of the Church and the high aristocracy. Toward the end of Henry V, the Chorus invokes the sixteenth century’s dominant form of historiography:
The Chorus refers to history through print; some in the audience will have ‘read the story’. When Caxton published his continuation of the Brut chronicle in 1480, he created a sea change in the dissemination of history to the English reading public by initiating the print publication of chronicles. D. R. Woolf writes that ‘throughout the Middle Ages the limitations on reproduction imposed by a chirographic technology had restricted the medieval chronicle … to a comparatively small audience.’24 By contrast, the printing press helped make works on history in the form of the chronicle ‘more widely accessible’, reaching even the ‘lower levels of the literate’.25 Attempts to accommodate an increasingly wide audience for history can be seen in the issuing of smaller redactions of the chronicles, such as Grafton’s ‘Abridgments’ of 1562 and 1576, and Stow’s several ‘Summaries’ starting in 1565. Such smaller books were both cheaper and, in the words of Thomas Heywood’s preface to a compressed historical work of his own, ‘more portable … to beare in the pocket, so that thou mayst say, that in this small compendium or abstract, thou has Holinshed, Polychronicon, Fabian, Speed, or any of the rest, of more Giantlike bulke or binding.’26
The point of the Chorus’s remarks here is partially to apologize to those who have read the story for the elisions the play will be making. In other words, the Chorus posits the ‘story’ as it might be ‘read’ in the chronicles as potentially public knowledge that the play will fail to corroborate. To be sure, the Chorus’s first words are to those who have not read the story; it is important not to exaggerate the number of playgoers who would have been expected to be also regular chronicle readers.27 And yet, that enough playgoers could be thought to be readers of these works to warrant a verbal nod to them indicates that the time of the play’s performance is different than the time the play depicts. When Henry says, ‘You shall read’ about the exploits of his ‘great-grandfather’, he is speaking to Canterbury, Ely, Exeter, and a few other members of the royal family and court. The kind of chronicle the Chorus is referencing when he speaks of those who have read the story has come into being after the time in which the play is set, and is thus distinct from the kind Fluellen and others in the play claim to read (see, for instance Canterbury at 1.2.163 and Fluellen at 4.7.94). The literate, book-buying playgoers in Shakespeare’s audience to whom the Chorus speaks about reading the story represent a ‘sort’ of consumers of historical knowledge that do not exist in the world of the play, where those who know and speak about national and world history are restricted to a small circle. The play cites a form of historiography, the chronicle, that was not in itself new, but that, by virtue of a novel mechanical mode of production and consequent faster, cheaper, and wider distribution, had an essentially different cultural impact than its pre-printing press ancestor.
Before the play’s climactic battle, Henry speaks in rousing terms of Agincourt as an event that in the future will be remembered and discussed between ‘neighbors’ and passed on through generations: Henry promises that ‘this story shall the good man teach his son’ (4.3.45, 56), suggesting a potentially more democratic notion of historical dissemination. Henry’s statement that those who accompany him into battle can become speakers of history is still a select privilege of surviving the day. It is after all only those ‘happy few’ who will return to England to perpetuate the battle as oral legend (‘Remember with advantages’) rather than as history in mass circulation (4.3.60, 50, emphases added). The play suggests a past in which historical knowledge circulated within a Church– Aristocracy–Military loop. This representation does not tally with the realities of fifteenth-century historical culture. There is evidence, for instance, that members of London’s merchant milieu took an interest in reading pre-print era histories.28 But according to the logic of Henry V, print chronicles had by the late sixteenth century eclipsed the elite forms of written and spoken history we see represented as dominant in the era in which the play is set.
The play’s most outspoken proponent of historical knowledge is the Welsh captain Fluellen, who continually cites classical precedent. It is in his praise of “Fortune” as “an excellent moral” that Fluellen makes evident his habits of thought (3.6.38). Historical knowledge for him is part of the same fabric of wisdom and universal truth as the figure of Fortune. Historical truths are exemplary, and should be drawn upon, following the Ciceronian tradition, at key moments to guide present behavior. The prescriptive potential of history is always more important than the details of historical events or persons it encodes, for the past is most importantly figural: as Fluellen says, “there is figures in all things” (4.7.34). Thus, the ancient Alexander the Great announces the Henry of the present, for both, according to Fluellen’s eccentric reasoning, are warrior-kings who come from regions that have rivers stocked with salmon.
Henry himself, albeit affectionately, points out that Fluellen’s historical sensibility is quaint. Hearing him invoke Pompey’s camp as a model for the English, Henry remarks ‘Though it appear a little out of fashion, | There is much care and valor in this Welshman’ (4.1.83–4). Henry gives credit to Fluellen’s loyalty, but this does not erase his charge that the Captain is out of date. More importantly, though, Fluellen’s own words give audiences and readers ample opportunity to find his historical method faulty and inadequate. David Quint, in an important article on Henry V’s relation to debates within humanist circles about the production and uses of history, has shown in particular Fluellen’s inability to make his own Alexander comparison coherent.29 Fluellen elsewhere shows a capacity to exercise poor judgment in making sense of the present through historical analogy when he describes the rascal Pistol, who the Welshman himself will later have cause to cudgel, ‘as valiant a man as Mark Antony’ because of his superficial use of ‘prave words’ (3.6.13–14, 63).
Chroniclers like Holinshed and Hall do invoke the prescriptive value of history to justify their enterprises. Yet, in the preface to Holinshed’s 1577 Chronicles, while the author claims to represent truth, he deliberately cedes ultimate interpretive power to the reader, preferring to ‘shew the diversitie of their [his sources] writings, than by over-ruling them, and using a premptorie censure, to frame them to agree to my liking: leaving it neverthlesse to each mans judgement, to controll them as he seeth cause.’30 This is a move to shift interpretive responsibility from pedantic interlocutors to readers. Moreover, the mode of comprehension exhibited in Fluellen’s precept-driven method was harder to achieve in the massive chronicle works that strived for accumulation of information as much as anything else. Despite the best efforts of a writer like Hall, who explicitly sought to impose a larger moral pattern onto his history of the Wars of the Roses, John Donne could still refer to him, along with Holinshed and Stow, as responsible for the production of ‘trivial household trash’.31 The quotidian events of history became for the chronicler significant and interesting in and of themselves. The copia of the chronicles, through sheer density of detail, allowed for a moral uncertainty about the events depicted. This potential for the meaning of any event to be obscured within the ‘Giantlike bulke or binding’ of a chronicle was a primary source of disgust with the form by humanist-educated writers like Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey.
When William Camden in the preface to Britannia writes, ‘I have in no wise neglected such things as are most materiall to search and sift out the Truth’ he is speaking of factual rather than moral truth, and thus indicates a growing imperative among historians to get the story right whether or not that story lends itself to educative purposes.32 As a ‘culture of fact’ emerged in the epistemologies of both legal and historical work, records and documents attained more authority as the evidentiary basis of knowledge about past, a development Shakespeare acknowledges through his use of and reference to histories playgoers may have ‘read’.33 Hence, the Chorus’s need to apologize to ‘such as have’ read about Henry V for disappointing expectations of delivering the full narrative in favor of dramatic compression.
The play depicts the era of Henry V as a time when historical knowledge originates within the Church and is passed outward to the royal court and to military leaders, without going much farther than this selective group. In Henry V Shakespeare suggests this aspect of English historical culture to be antiquated in the Elizabethan era, due to the growth of the printed chronicle tradition to which the Chorus refers. In Fluellen, we see an interest in the past focused on exempla, precepts, and incredible analogies, and concerned with didacticism and utility. Of course, Fluellen’s utilitarian notion of history has never really been displaced. And, indeed, it was in favor, at least in more competent form, among late-Elizabethan humanists. Nonetheless it is an approach to the past put under stress by the chronicle tradition, and clearly being parodied here as old fashioned, conveying again the impression that innovations in how the post is told occur, and thus that older forms of history can be superseded.
Early in the play, the Archbishop of Canterbury makes reference to a battle almost as famous as Agincourt, the English victory over the French at Crécy in 1346. Canterbury tells of Henry’s famous ancestor and his deeds there:
The French king later echoes Canterbury’s lines about this particular battle between England and France (2.4.53–9), and Fluellen mentions it indirectly (4.7.91–3).
The persistence of the Crécy reference owes something to the London stages. The anonymously-authored Edward III, believed by some scholars to be a Shakespearean composition, was listed in the Stationer’s Register in 1595, and published in 1596, but is possibly an even older work. Edward III contains a scene in which King Edward removes to a hill to watch whether his son, the Black Prince, can fight his way out of a battle against enormous odds. Canterbury and the French king in Henry V refer to this episode in specific detail. However, this incident does not appear in that precise form in the chronicle sources. In other words, the knowledge of Crécy articulated in Henry V would seem to derive from the popular stage play that, according to its title page, was ‘sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London’.34 There can be little doubt that many members of the audience of Henry V would be familiar with Edward III, and would recognize these references to the Black Prince’s heroics through their memories of that earlier play. Through Canterbury and the French king’s reminiscences, Henry V thus calls attention to another new form in which the past can be represented, a form available to Elizabethan Londoners on an almost daily basis: theatrical performance.
Henry V is Shakespeare’s most metatheatrical history play; perhaps it is his most metatheatrical play of any kind. While exploration and complication of the ancient theatrum mundi trope is pervasive in the Shakespeare canon, nowhere else does he so explicitly and lengthily comment on the palpable theater in which the specific play at hand is being performed. The Chorus’s repeated references to the stage, props, actors, and other specific conventions of representation, including the admission that battle scenes proceed through ‘four or five most vile and ragged foils, | (Right ill dispos’d, in brawl ridiculous),’ (4.Prologue.50–1) are extreme examples of what Roland Barthes, drawing on linguistic theory, calls ‘shifters’ in the historical utterance, verbal formulae whereby the producing agent of history is revealed through the act of promulgating it.35 The Chorus’s shifters are almost exclusively apologetic. Yet, despite these effusive apologies for inadequacy, the play itself affirms the theater as a vehicle of historical transmission.
One of the main effects of the Chorus’s theatrically self-conscious rhetoric is that it makes clear that the play is happening in a present moment the players and the audience share. In other words, the Chorus keeps the ‘liveness’ of theater, what distinguishes it from other forms of historical representation, at the forefront of audience experience of the play. Performance in the professional theater is still by the 1590s a relatively recent form of representing history, an addition to the chronicles and other print materials that disseminated the past throughout the late fifteenth and entire sixteenth centuries. The history play did not emerge ex nihilo in the Elizabethan era. The genre has roots in the medieval mysteries, for instance. But the kind of national histories put on in the late sixteenth century, before a heterogeneous, paying audience in largely secular, urban, diurnal, permanent, purpose-built theaters, was, by virtue of this new context, undeniably a new form of presenting the past. The Chorus highlights professional theater itself as a recent innovation when it calls attention to the ‘playhouse’ where the playgoers ‘sit’, a reference to the physical structures that only came to dot the London landscape in the later sixteenth century (2.Prologue.36).
It is in this new, specially circumscribed space that the audience’s ‘thoughts … now must deck our kings,’ thoughts produced in the ‘quick forge and working-house’ of the mind (Prologue.28; 5.Prologue.23). One specific mental activity that Henry V calls upon its audiences to perform is to remember Sir John Falstaff. Knowledge of Falstaff is not ‘historical’ in the sense that he is not, as represented in this play, a persona from the documented English past. Yet knowledge of him is knowledge of explorations of the English past on stage in 1 and 2 Henry IV, not to mention The Merry Wives of Windsor. He is linked closely enough to Hal/Henry V over the course of these plays that awareness of this figure amounts to knowledge of Henry and the events of his and his father’s reign. While the presence of Falstaff in some sense de-historicizes the plays, and thus cuts against the emphasis on truth I have cited as an emerging part of the chronicle tradition to which the voice of the Chorus is sensitive, this character does stand for an aspect of historical representation that contributes to the complication of the exemplary theory of history: the pleasure of history. As a source of distinctly theatrical pleasure in the plays—he was almost certainly played by the company’s famous clown, Will Kemp—Falstaff helps to create and meet a desire to experience history for different reasons than to learn lessons. And knowledge of him, and why he merits mention in Henry V, is crucial to audience experience of some scenes in the play.
In the first such scene, as the setting shifts from the English court to a tavern, the Boy interrupts a conflict between two of Falstaff’s lackeys from the Henry IV plays, Nim and Pistol, saying ‘Mine host Pistol, you must come to my master, and your hostess. He is very sick, and would to bed’ (2.1.81–2). The Hostess exits with the Boy, noting of Falstaff: ‘by my troth, he’ll yield the crow a pudding one of these days. The King has kill’d his heart’ (2.1.87–8). The last line is a reference that would be cryptic if audiences were not aware of the King’s rejection of Falstaff at the end of 2 Henry IV. A scene later, Falstaff’s death is reported in the best historiographical traditions by an eyewitness, the Hostess:
The Hostess provides not only information such as the approximate time of ‘Sir John’s’ death and his final words, but adds the tactile description of what his dying and soon dead body felt like. This scene, and the many recollections of Falstaff’s wit it includes, can make sense in its own right, but the overall level of detail in it would be odd unless it is in reference to a character with whom audiences have some previous memory and some investment of interest. Shakespeare, in other words, could confidently engage in some dramatic shorthand to communicate information and make a few jokes in this scene: the ‘yield a crow a pudding line’ certainly depends here on awareness of Falstaff’s infamous girth for its particular power as a dark jest. The original audiences for Henry V could rely on their theatrical knowledge to discern these elements of the play. The scenes about Falstaff’s death exhibit a reasonable assurance that audiences have seen and retained information from history plays.
Of course, any discussion of Falstaff is complicated by the controversy over his name itself. In one sense, the figure of Sir John Falstaff has no existence beyond the realm of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and, perhaps, an ambiguously related figure in 1 Henry VI. As is well known, though, the character Sir John Falstaff was in 1 Henry IV originally called Sir John ‘Oldcastle’. Even though the name was probably altered to Falstaff by the time 2 Henry IV, The Merry Wives, and Henry V were written and performed, there is evidence from the period to suggest that audiences well into the seventeenth century still associated the character with the name Oldcastle, and that perhaps 1 Henry IV was still being performed with the character so named.36
The controversy itself deals with the fact that Sir John Oldcastle was a historical figure, especially revered in Protestant historiography as a great heromartyr who would not merit the apparent slander of his characterization as a fat, gluttonous, thieving knight in Shakespeare’s plays. There is not space here to rehearse this knotty issue and its political and editorial implications.37 But if it is true that audiences had a long-term association of Falstaff with Oldcastle, a figure with an existence independent of the playhouse, it would alter the dynamics of my claim here that knowledge of Falstaff as a figure linked with Henry V signals access to the past through theater. It is worth considering, then, Shakespeare’s own explicit commentary on the matter in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV:
If you be not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katherine of France, where (for any thing I know) Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already ‘a be kill’d with your hard opinions; for Oldcastle died [a] martyr, and this is not the man. (Epilogue.26–32)
The fact that Shakespeare could include reference to the Oldcastle controversy in the epilogue to 2 Henry IV indicates how well known the theatrical figure of his fat knight had become to audiences. Establishing Falstaff as distinct from Oldcastle is the goal of the epilogue, which is further advanced in Henry V through the specific details of how he dies: in his bed attended by the Hostess, not as a martyr gruesomely killed in a manner described and also depicted in a woodcut in Foxe’s widely disseminated Acts and Monuments. Shakespeare explicitly separates Falstaff from Oldcastle in preparation for his Henry V play, asserting that Falstaff is a character born within the sphere of the theater: ‘this is not the man.’
Falstaff does not appear in Henry V, probably for reasons that have to do with the theater business: Will Kemp’s departure from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.38 Falstaff’s character resonates instead as a memory (albeit one that is slipping from the mind of Fluellen (4.7.50)). Falstaff’s memory is still vivid for the Hostess, Nym, Pistol, Bardolph, the Boy, and presumably audiences as well. Such ‘low’ characters, as Phyllis Rackin and Richard Helgerson have asserted, perhaps even foreground the theatrical form of the history plays further by associating characters closely with the ‘common’ players who enact them.39 Pistol, for instance, is, in the Folio text, twice called a ‘counterfeit’, a word often used in anti-theatrical literature of the period to describe actors (3.6.61 and 5.1.69). Rackin further notes that Pistol, whose name itself is an anachronism, speaks in a language ‘stitched together from scraps of plays that were not written until the sixteenth century for a theater that did not even exist’ in the time Pistol is supposed to be living.40 Such anachronism, rather than blurring the ‘planes of historicity’ the play achieves elsewhere, affirms the difference of time periods by highlighting the time of the play’s performance as distinct from the time it enacts.
Shakespeare’s gesture toward his own theater work, and toward his audience’s awareness of that work in terms of history, occurs again in the epilogue to Henry V, in which he employs the most explicit historical ‘shifter’ of the play: ‘Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen | Our bending author hath pursu’d the story’ (Epilogue.1–2). By the end of the Epilogue, he expands this self-reference to remind audiences of other history plays he has written, the Henry VI plays, that many of them would have had the opportunity to have seen: ‘Henry the Sixt, in infant bands crown’d King | Of France and England, did this king [Henry V] succeed, | Whose state so many had the managing | That they lost France, and made his England bleed, | Which oft our stage hath shown’ (9–13). In a famous moment in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, Fitzdottrel claims his historical know-how derives from seeing stage plays. If awareness of history through drama was axiomatic by 1616, the year Shakespeare died and The Devil is an Ass premiered, the possibility of such dramatic-historical awareness was being constructed by Shakespeare almost twenty years earlier in Henry V.
Mark Salber Phillips has written that ‘elementary dimensions of historical representation’ can be understood as producing ‘distance effects’.41 The ‘elementary dimensions’ that create distance effects in Henry V mark historical change through emphasizing differences in how successive ages produce and circulate historical knowledge. Such dimensions here include showing Henry engaged in outdated historical forms, such as using the chantries to memorialize Richard; and to be contemporary with the circulation of history in a form that is narrowly distributed and reductively didactic, in contrast to a form that is widely circulated and plentiful complex, that is, the Chronicles with which the Chorus assumes playgoers of the 1590s might be familiar. The commentary of the Chorus about the act of performing history, coupled with an emphasis in the play on the memory of Falstaff, a creature of the theater, subsumes the whole representation of the past the play delivers in the practice of the professional theater, a novel enterprise of the late sixteenth century.
None of what I have argued here is to deny the ways that historical work is always a site of current contestation, wherein issues from the past are adduced or actively suppressed to achieve contemporary ends. The Oldcastle affair alone attests to this, as does the putative reference to Essex’s Irish campaign in the Chorus’s lines that preface Act 5. Such things inevitably demonstrate how presentoriented the past always is in historical representation. Yet, my aim here has been to point out those ways that, within that present-centered framework, the form and language of Henry V work to assert discontinuity between time periods. It would, of course, be wrong to say that Shakespeare in his histories of the fifteenth-century English monarchy ‘invented’ some notion of the English Middle Ages, the way Petrarch and other Italian humanists can be said to have invented the ‘Dark Ages’ between classical antiquity and the quattrocento.42 But in Henry V Shakespeare does differentiate what we now call the medieval era from his own era through noting developments and innovations in how the present processes and broadcasts the past, a differentiation made most vivid throughout the play in references to the new form with which he worked to make history: commercial performance.
