Shakespeare and War

Shakespeare and War

Edited by

Ros King and Paul J.C.M. Franssen

Shakespeare and War

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Shakespeare and War Edited by

Ros King and

Paul J. C. M. Franssen

Selection and editorial matter © Ros King and Paul J. C. M. Franssen 2008 Individual chapters © contributors 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–20508–6 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–20508–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shakespeare and war / [edited by] Ros King and Paul J. C. M. Franssen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–20508–9 (alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Political and social views. 2. War in literature. 3. Politics and literature—Great Britain—History. 4. Literature and history—Great Britain. I. King, Ros. II. Franssen, Paul, 1955– PR3017.S355 2008 2008016417 822.3 3—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgements

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Notes on the Contributors

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1 War and Shakespearean Dramaturgy Ros King and Paul J. C. M. Franssen

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Part I Ideas of War and Peace 2 ‘The Disciplines of War’: Elizabethan War Manuals and Shakespeare’s Tragicomic Vision Ros King

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3 War in Shakespeare’s Edward III Ellen C. Caldwell

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4 Shakespeare and Peace Thomas Kullmann

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5 Some Social Costs of War Ruth Morse

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Part II Rhetoric of War 6 Henry V and the Performance of War R. Scott Fraser 7 Drums and Roses? The Tragicomedy of War in All’s Well That Ends Well Helen Wilcox 8 Political Speech and the Wars in King John Dana Chetrinescu Percec 9 ‘Faking It’: Provenance, Persuasion and the Renaissance Military Subject Simon Barker v

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Contents

Part III Translation and Adaptation 10 Religion and War in Romanian Translations of Henry V Madalina Nicolaescu 11 Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as Staged in Heiner M¨ uller’s Germania 3 Ruth Freifrau von Ledebur 12 ‘Something is Rotten . . .’ Niels B. Hansen 13 Never-ending Conflict: Man (and Woman) as Death Bearer in Testori’s Macbetto Carla Dente

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138 153

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Part IV War Time Interpretations 14 The Nightmare of Indifference: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 121 and the War in Former Yugoslavia Ivan Lupi´c

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15 Whose ‘Triumph’? The Taming of the Shrew in Berlin during World War II Zolt´an M´arkus

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16 ‘So the Falklands. So Agincourt. ‘‘Fuck the Frogs’’ ’: Michael Bogdanov’s English Shakespeare Company’s Wars of the Roses David Carnegie

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17 Meditations in a Time of (Displaced) War: Henry V, Money, and the Ethics of Performing History Diana E. Henderson

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Select Bibliography

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Index

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List of Illustrations 12.1 Munk asks Shakespeare to write in modern Danish. ‘Kaj Munk taler med Shakespeare’, Forum, Tidsskrift for Musik og Teater, vol. 3 (March 1935), 8–10. Cartoon by Hans Bendix, reproduced with permission from the heirs to his estate. 13.1 Ledi (Luisa Rossi) and Macbetto (Franco Parenti), Giovanni Testori’s Macbetto (dir. Andr´ee Ruth Shammah; photo, Tommaso LePera), Teatro Pier Lombardo, Milan, 1974. 13.2 Macbetto (Franco Parenti), Ledi (Luisa Rossi) and the chorus (Flavio Bonacci, Pier Giorgio Plebani, Laurent Gerber, Giovanni Battezzato); Giovanni Testori’s Macbetto (dir. Andr´ee Ruth Shammah; photo, Tommaso LePera), Teatro Pier Lombardo, Milan, 1974. 14.1 Ve˘cernji list, 18 August 1991. Reproduced by kind permission of Ve˘cernji list.

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Acknowledgements The original versions of the papers in this book were all written for the two seminars devoted to the theme of Shakespeare and War at the conference on Shakespeare and European Politics held in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in December 2003. We gratefully acknowledge the generous funding for this conference, and for the publications arising from it, from the universities of Ghent, Namur, and Utrecht, and from the following organisations: ACUME (the European Thematic Network for Cultural Memory in European Countries); IVT (Foreign Language Institute of the Utrecht Faculty of Arts); the Huizinga Research Institute and Graduate School of Cultural History; NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research); NSES (Netherlands Society for English Studies); OGC (Research Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht University); KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences); and the Shakespeare Society of the Low Countries.

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Simon Barker is Professor of English Literature at the University of Gloucestershire. His publications include The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama (2003), Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (2005), The Gentle Craft (2007), and War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (2007). Ellen C. Caldwell is Associate Professor of Humanities at Clarkson University. Her published work and her teaching span the social, political, and literary cultures of Early Modern Europe. David Carnegie is Professor of Theatre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Co-editor of the Cambridge Works of John Webster, he has published widely on Early Modern dramaturgy and stagecraft, and works in professional theatre as a dramaturg on Shakespeare productions. Dana Chetrinescu Percec is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Timis¸oara, Romania. She is the author of a book on Shakespearean iconography and a volume of essays on current Romanian topics. Carla Dente is Professor of English Literature at Pisa University, and board member of the International Shakespeare Association. She has edited Dibattito sul teatro. Voci opinioni interpretazioni (2006); Conflict Zones: Actions, Languages, Mediations (2004); Proteus. The Language of Metamorphosis (2005), and the hypertext, ‘Hamlet’ Promptbooks of the Nineteenth Century (2002). Paul J. C. M. Franssen is a lecturer in British Literature at Utrecht University and specialises in Shakespeare studies. He has published widely on Shakespeare and related topics, and co-edited two volumes, The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature (1999), and Shakespeare and European Politics (2008). R. Scott Fraser holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from York University in Toronto and is the Head of Drama at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He is the author of A Politic Theatre (1996). ix

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Niels Bugge Hansen taught for 40 years at the University of Copenhagen, where Shakespeare was a core subject in his teaching and research. In 2005 he edited and contributed to Charting Shakespearean Waters, volume 5 in the ‘Angles on the English-speaking World’ series. Diana E. Henderson, Professor of Literature at MIT, is the author of Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media (2006), and Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender and Performance (1995). She is the editor of the Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (2006) and Alternative Shakespeares 3 (2008). Ros King is Professor of English Studies at the University of Southampton. Her books include The Works of Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in Sixteenth-Century England (2001), and Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (2005). Thomas Kullmann is Professor of English Literature at the University of Osnabr¨ uck. He researches the literature and culture of Renaissance England and English children’s literature. Publications include two books on Shakespeare and one on the nineteenth-century novel. Ruth Freifrau von Ledebur, emeritus Professor of English Literature at Siegen University, works on Shakespeare, theatre representation and politics, and the teaching of literature. Her publications include Deutsche Shakespeare-Rezeption seit 1945 (1974), and Der Mythos vom Deutschen Shakespeare: Die Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft 1918–1945 (2002). Ivan Lupi´c is a Ph.D student in English Literature at Columbia University. His book Feigning Subject: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Their Transtextual Frames was published in Croatian in 2007. Zolt´an M´arkus, Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College, works on Early Modern English literature, European theatre, and cultural, literary, and performance theory. He is completing Shakespeares at War: Cultural Appropriations of Shakespeare in Berlin and London during World War II. Ruth Morse is Professeur des Universit´es at the University of ParisDiderot. Her books include Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Reality, and Representation (1991). She is completing Imagined Histories: Fictions of the Past from Beowulf to Shakespeare.

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Madalina Nicolaescu is Professor of English at the University of Bucharest. She has published widely on Renaissance Drama and on Women’s writing. Helen Wilcox is Professor of English at Bangor University, Wales. Her research ranges widely across Early Modern English literature, with interests in devotional writing, autobiography, tragicomedy and the work of women authors. She is preparing the Arden 3 edition of All’s Well That Ends Well.

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1 War and Shakespearean Dramaturgy Ros King and Paul J. C. M. Franssen

Wherefore do you so ill translate yourself Out of the speech of peace that bears such grace Into the harsh and boist’rous tongue of war, Turning your books to graves, your ink to blood, Your pens to lances, and your tongue divine To a loud trumpet and a point of war? (2 Henry IV, 4.1.47–52) Thus the Earl of Westmoreland, envoy of Prince John, to the rebel leader, the Archbishop of York. Rebellion, he says, should be dressed in wretches’ rags not the church’s white vestments of ‘innocence’. The Archbishop reposts that he has ‘justly weighed/ What wrongs our arms may do, what wrongs we suffer,/And find our griefs heavier than our offences’ (4.1.67–69). His is the classic Christian argument for just war derived from St Augustine: ‘For it is the injustice of the opposing side that lays on the wise man the duty of waging wars’ (City of God, XIX.7).1 While Augustine deplores the suffering caused by war, he accepts it as an inevitable ‘mark of human wretchedness’, and a demonstration of man’s need for God; ‘social and civil wars’ are ‘wars of a worse kind’, not because they cause more suffering than any other, but because they contravene the fellowship of a defined society (City, XIX.6–7). His arguments for the concept of just war are deeply assimilated into western political thought.2 They have been repeated frequently during the time in which this book has been in preparation, as has the promise that ‘peace is the aim of war . . . it is this peace that glorious victory (so called) achieves’ (City, XV.4). As he was also aware, however, the opposite is more often true; the usually unsatisfactory provisions for peace merely generate more war. Shakespeare’s history plays, up to their hopeful conclusion 1

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at Bosworth, certainly demonstrate that miserable fact. Even the ‘glorious victory (so called)’ at the end of Henry V is followed by the reminder of the losses of Henry VI, ‘Which oft our stage hath shown’. It is perhaps significant that Shakespeare’s later plays for the Stuart court dramatise the problems associated with James’s policy for European peace in a form that revels in fantasy. The first Henry IV play had been almost playful. Hal had appeared in various disguises; one of the rebels reports scornfully that he rides to the battle of Shrewsbury in polished armour with pennons flying, as if entering the lists of a tournament. Part 2 opens with the weary aftermath of that battle. Often treated as a mere sequel to Part 1, in fact it dramatises a much darker, more problematic attitude to war. The main characters are not just older, they reflect on their age, tiredness and lost ambitions; Henry IV never manages to undertake his crusade to Jerusalem, the ultimate religiously justified war, which by the eleventh century had been presented by papal authority as the supremely effective substitute for penance.3 Bathetically, he dies in bed in the ‘Jerusalem’ chamber. The rebels in this play, while appealing to the justice of their cause, threaten continuing war down the ages if their demands are not met: ‘And heir from heir shall hold this quarrel up/ Whiles England shall have generation’ (4.2.48–9). This indiscriminate pawning of the future is shocking, and Prince John is so angered that Westmoreland has gently to remind him to stick to his plan – to agree to address their grievances and thereby trick them into discharging their soldiers so that they can be arrested and executed. This politic strategy saves thousands of lives although it brings into question the honour of his proceedings. During the middle ages, it was honour, the chivalric code, which limited the deaths of soldiers in battle, although treatment of rebels at home and infidels abroad was not covered by such considerations; always, a ‘degree of brutality in the treatment of civilians was accepted as a natural concomitant of war’.4 With the revolution in military hardware, the site of war became the besieged, fortified town, which put civilians into the front line. In England, the natural defences of the coastline, combined with attempts to subdue Ireland, and speculations about a future union with Scotland, meant that by the end of the sixteenth century, the country was already unwittingly groping toward the concept of a ‘nation-state’, with all the tensions that that implies between monarch and people, and between the various, traditionally warring races of the British Isles. Shakespeare’s plays therefore use ancient quarrels to explore more up-to-date political problems. Whether dramatising the Wars of the Roses, the struggles for monarchical independence (in Cymbeline and

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King John), or for the Roman republic, the Shakespeare plays in which war features as a direct activity and subject are centrally concerned both with the identity of the nation and the nature of the contract between ruler and people.5

Shakespeare at war George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the Flashman novels who served in Burma in World War II, is convinced that the ordinary soldier can have insights about Shakespeare and war that elude literary critics. MacDonald had ordered books from home, including Henry V, which he had studied at school and for which he had developed a ‘deep affection’. Lying on his groundsheet one day he was approached by his sergeant who picked the play up, flipped through it with some scorn, but nevertheless walked off with it. Returning it a few days later, Sergeant Hutton asked him: ‘Was Shakspeer ivver in th’Army?’ Frazer replied that most scholars thought not, but Hutton was not convinced: ‘Ye knaw them three – Bates, an’ them, talking afore the battle? Ye doan’t git that frae lissening’ in pubs, son. Naw. ’e’s bin theer . . . An’ them oothers – the Frenchmen, the nawblemen, tryin to kid on that they couldn’t care less, w’en they’re shittin’ blue lights? Girraway! . . . ‘‘There’s nut many dies weel that dies in a battle’’. By Christ, ’e’s reet there. It’s a good bit that.’6 Whether or not Shakespeare really ever saw war at first hand, he cannot but have heard, seen, and read about its effects. There was a war being fought somewhere in Europe during virtually every year of Shakespeare’s lifetime, and for all but a mere fourteen separate years between 1500 and 1700. Elizabeth I may have occupied the throne of England for fortyfive years – longer than any other British monarch except Victoria and Elizabeth II – but longevity is not the same as security. The threat of war and invasion was constant throughout her reign, reaching a peak in 1588 with the Armada, and again in 1599, the year in which the Folio versions of Henry V and Hamlet were probably written. The 1580s and 90s saw English soldiers in official engagement in Ireland, in the wars of religion in France, and in the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule; English mercenaries were employed even more widely, and on all sides. Theoretical and practical manuals on warfare, which included copies of the standing orders issued by both English and Spanish armies in the Netherlands, and pamphlets on the interminable civil war in France were pouring off the presses, some detailing the massacres of civilians. Disillusioned and quarrelsome soldiers returning from the wars in France and the Netherlands constituted a public nuisance put down by a series of royal

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proclamations in the 1580s.7 In these circumstances it is not surprising that the majority of Shakespeare’s plays have military backgrounds. Even the comedies – All’s Well, The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream – use war as both backdrop and analogue to their ostensible subject. Since war is the most terrible of human activities, it is difficult to acknowledge that it can be experienced in real life, and presented in play form, on all points of the scale from terror to farce. What marks out Shakespeare as a writer on war is that he recognises this and regularly presents contrasting states simultaneously. As a number of contributors to this volume demonstrate, Shakespeare’s use of mixed genre in defiance of the literary theory of his time both injects a grass-roots reality of human experience and constructs a safe place for a satirical look at the state of England. These plays provide us with the entire gamut of possible reactions to war but never simply as human interest or simplistically as heroics. As one recent commentator on the reporting of war has remarked, ‘Human interest reporting is not enough. Who benefits from letting war happen, which groups expect to suffer most and which least while the fighting is under way, who manages to do best from victory or defeat – these are political issues.’8 Shakespeare is aware of such responsibilities. Egeon in The Comedy of Errors and Antonio in Twelfth Night are in danger of execution merely because, as representatives of foreign countries and former wars, they come from the wrong place at the wrong time. Both plays bring them face to face with the political causes of their distress, Dukes Solinus and Orsino, respectively. These dukes do not make U-turns on policy although they do exercise clemency to Egeon and Antonio as individuals. Both plays therefore leave us, even in their happy endings, with a strong sense of unease. What is someone who is arbitrarily prepared to kill the thing he loves, like Orsino, but a tyrant? If a king is the husband of his people, as James I claimed in his first speech to the English parliament,9 what is he doing putting them in harm’s way, leading them into battle?

Shakespeare and twentieth-century propaganda Shakespeare, however, has too often been used for pro-war propaganda. By the mid twentieth century, nearly two hundred years of thinking about him as national ‘bard’ meant that even fictions of his life could be enlisted in the national service.10 On Saturday 13 June 1940, ten months into the Second World War, the BBC Home Service broadcast a radio

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adaptation of Clemence Dane’s stage play Will Shakespeare (1922), about Shakespeare’s conversion from philandering husband to self-conscious artist aware of his national calling in times of colonial expansion and growing conflict.11 Shakespeare is torn between his long-suffering wife Anne, his lover Mary Fitton, and his sovereign, Queen Elizabeth, who, in the climax of the play, enlists him as the national poet. For that, however, he will have to give up all other ties: the state takes precedence over his marital duty to his wife and over the dubious pleasures of extra-marital affairs. None of the listeners in 1940 would have missed the implications for themselves of Elizabeth’s call for self-sacrifice. Punch had painted a rather different Shakespeare in a satirical sketch published only a few months earlier, on the day after the German invasion of Norway and Denmark brought an end to the ‘phoney war’. It consisted of a dialogue between Mr and Mrs Shakespeare about the pros and cons of Shakespeare joining the navy to help defeat the Armada. Mrs Shakespeare fails to understand why Drake, with his ‘imperialistic wars’, cannot leave the Spaniards alone, and does not believe that the country would be worse off under Spanish rule. Her husband thinks the experience of service might give him something to write about, but hesitates whether he is morally entitled to hazard his genius to the fortunes of war: ‘Suppose that I am killed by a cannonball, and all my plays perish with me!’ When he has finally decided to report to Drake the next morning, news is brought of the defeat of the Armada. The sketch ends on Shakespeare’s disappointed exclamation: ‘Damn!’12 Either way, whether Shakespeare’s person is mocked as a ditherer or elevated as a national icon, his very name had become closely tied to war propaganda. Nor is this an exclusively British phenomenon. The various contributors to this volume demonstrate that Shakespeare was pressed into service in both the pro- and anti-fascist cause in pre-war Denmark and Germany. Brecht’s adaptations influenced countless productions of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus in Britain, costumed in Nazi uniform as expressions of anti-militarism. The Nazis themselves preferred the comedies, although they revised The Merchant of Venice to get ‘rid of the ‘‘mixed’’ marriage of Lorenzo and Jessica’, in line with their policy on the Jews.13 After the war, Shakespeare was pressed into service as a cold warrior.14 A leaflet issued by the Dutch right-wing organisation OSL likened Claudius pouring poison into his sleeping brother’s ear to the dangers of Communist propaganda. Shakespeare’s texts were also translated and performed beyond the iron curtain to serve contrasting political agendas. Yet in more recent years, adaptations such as Peter Zadek’s Held Henry, Tom Lanoye’s Ten Oorlog, and Julie Taymor’s Titus

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have developed hints in Shakespeare’s work to deconstruct notions of heroism and the worship of violence.15

Reading Shakespeare on war In the face of such vehemently contested meanings, how should we read Shakespeare’s graphic writing on war? Rather than merely adopting a post-modern equanimity that claims Shakespeare does not mean but that we ‘mean by Shakespeare’,16 the contributors to this volume believe that it is important to demonstrate how the production of meaning takes place. Our objective has therefore been to distinguish between the texts that Shakespeare read and utilised in the writing of his histories, the possible significances that his plays would have carried under the political and historical conditions at the time he was writing, and the manner in which they have been rewritten, reshaped and re-presented to promote or critique the political and historical conditions of later ages. We wanted to keep clear in our minds the different levels of historical writing, story telling and political spin at all stages of the invention, transmission and reinvention of the plays that go under the shorthand name of ‘Shakespeare’. An early decision was therefore made to avoid the use of the fashionable critical term ‘appropriation’ as having too flattening an effect to describe this process fully.17 Ironically, the more common usage of that word is in a military context: the requisitioning of buildings and equipment by an army. In that case, the thing appropriated retains its essential structure while being pressed into new – even enemy – use. When Shakespeare’s plays are reused to serve particular political ends, however, they are invariably rewritten, cut down, or else extracted and taken out of context, so that their ethical complexity, which is the very aspect which excites and encourages repeated reading and performance, is reduced to moral, instructional certainty. With an estimated forty-one ongoing conflicts in the world today18 it is unsurprising that Shakespeare’s plays continue to be given contemporary meanings and significances. This book is about that phenomenon. It explores the cultural context that informed the writing of these plays and the processes whereby they have been reworked, translated, and interpreted to speak to later conflicts. We are therefore paying close attention to the way Shakespeare’s language works dramaturgically. For example, partly because of the practical difficulty of representing a pitched battle with ‘four or five most vile and ragged foils’ (Henry V, 4.0.50), Shakespeare uses description as a way of avoiding having to stage acts of war. More interestingly, description can be used to create a conflict

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between what is heard and what is seen that can make us question the veracity or legitimacy of the problem set before us. The wounds of the bloody soldier at the beginning of Macbeth are ‘real’; we see them bring him close to collapse by the end of a speech in which he describes, with an admiration that is both inflated and also sanitised, the even worse wounds that Macbeth has inflicted on his enemy: ‘he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chaps,/ And fixed his head upon our battlements’ (Macbeth, 1.2.21–2). This neat, bloodless unpicking of the way the body is stitched together, separating it into its constituent parts so that it also becomes ‘unseemed’ – unlike itself visually – is of course the way in which wars are usually reported so as to maintain support at home, except that the wounded, being too graphic a reminder of the cruelty and injustice of even the most justified war, are usually kept out of the limelight and not, as here, made the principal messengers. The presence of the ‘bloody man’ gives visual expression to the story he tells: a glorification of gore that purports to be a memorial for all the sacrifices and executions in the history of the world, ‘to bathe in reeking wounds or memorize another Golgotha’. But Golgotha, the place of Christ’s crucifixion, was already the ‘place of the skull’, reputedly ‘memorising’ the burial of Adam. The play’s use of the term is therefore excessive, even blasphemous. The nature of the reality of the stage blood we see, the stylised and mythologised wounds we hear about, and those we imagine, together set up a question that will be a recurring theme in the play: at what point does heroic slaughter become grotesque butchery? Criticism of Shakespeare, being historically a literary act, has often blurred the distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’, reducing both to ‘reading’. The critic’s literary imagination has tended to take all descriptions whether of an offstage or an onstage event as of equal value. The audience, on the other hand, is having both its auditory and its visual senses engaged simultaneously. And what we hear and see may be structured so as to enable us to question what we merely hear or see. Posthumus’s retelling of the battle in Cymbeline to the foppish lord who had run away, and who wants to be told a heroic tale of derring-do, is violent, even sodomitical in its language, in contrast to the formalised passages of armies over the stage described in the stage directions. At one point Posthumus resorts to ludicrous doggerel and vents his anger verbally, and perhaps also physically, on the lord not so much for running away but, apparently, for putting him to rhyme! The lord is terrified and runs away again.19 The contrast between what we see and hear in the speech, and between the speech and the conduct of the war in other scenes in the play, is deeply unsettling. Such dislocation reminds us that

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histories are unreliable, and yet that we need to retell these stories again and again in ways that raise questions that help us understand ourselves.

Henry V It is perhaps inevitable that in any collection of essays on Shakespeare and war there should be a number devoted to Henry V. But the range of angles on this play included here are complementary and, both separately and together, indicate a way of reading dramaturgically: one that is historically rigorous, while answering the demands of the present; and one that remembers it is dealing with writing intended for performance. Exploring the ways in which the same historical material has been presented in different times and different countries as commentary on, or product of, particular social, geographical and historical situations, we can appreciate more fully the fruitful ambivalences in Shakespeare’s language and reflect on the motives of those that have sought to reduce these to political certainties. All the essays agree that meaning resides in writing. A translation that chooses one word rather than another, a production that cuts or rearranges text, a piece of criticism that takes a speech out of context, all alter what it is possible to think about a play. The various essays on Henry V in this book together propose a way of reading across time so that the absence of a passage in one version draws attention to its presence in another and requires us to consider its function. It is important that this multivalent approach be devoted in such extended fashion to Henry V because although the ubiquity of Olivier’s film means that this is the history play that most people know best, the visual seductiveness of that film has also ensured that the play as printed is something we know least. The film’s literally picturesque cinematography, in which idealised medieval painted landscapes, based on Les Tr`es Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, dissolve into a heritage London or a green landscape standing in for France (it was of course Ireland), is combined with a succession of strategic textual cuts. This was Olivier’s way of creating a heroic Henry in whom he could believe, rather than the brutal warmonger he considered him to be – an opinion which was not merely modern, since Hazlitt too regarded Henry as a monster.20 So powerful is that film’s visual effect, superbly intensified by William Walton’s score, that in a real sense that film became the play – to the extent that Branagh’s remake was as much a version of Olivier as it was of Shakespeare. Olivier’s film, produced to celebrate an idea and an ideal of Britain, thus also came to signify an (anachronistic) idea of Shakespeare’s own patriotism. Using Shakespeare’s identity as ‘national

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poet’ as an excuse, Henry’s rousing speeches to the troops were thus, in the late 1980s, even enlisted by British Conservative politicians to rally support for unpopular domestic moves like the raising of interest rates. In the last twenty years, a small but cogent body of work has detailed the extent to which Shakespeare understood and utilised contemporary thinking on the philosophy, technology, strategy and legality of war.21 But none of this work compares the use of war in Shakespeare with the ways in which later ages have utilised Shakespeare in war. The international lawyer Theodor Meron, for instance, has demonstrated the law governing the prosecution of the Hundred Years War and shows the extent to which late medieval concepts of the just war, and laws governing truce or armistice and the treatment of prisoners underpin United Nations resolutions. While Meron’s book is invaluable for understanding the presence of these concepts within the language of Shakespeare’s Henry V, it does not explore the mechanisms whereby that language operates and therefore the respective values that might be attached to the concepts. For example, patriotic readings of the play have invariably cut or suppressed the gruesome speech that Henry makes before Harfleur, threatening rape, pillage and the murder of infants. Many recent critics have accordingly seized on that speech in particular (plus the Chorus’s reference to Essex in Ireland) in an attempt to prove that the play as written is jingoistic and unsuitable for a post-colonial age. The point at which invading soldiers and local civilians come face to face is, however, always fraught with the likelihood of atrocity, no matter the justice of the war itself. This is rarely acknowledged. It is not just that history is written by the victors, or that the dead do not talk, but that certain types of degradation are generally covered up by those who suffer and survive. Diaries written by an anonymous German woman during the fall of Berlin, recounting the multiple rapes of so many of her compatriots by Soviet soldiers, were greeted with disgust when they were published in Germany in 1945 and have only recently been republished. Writing about the return of men from war, the author explains ‘they loved to tell their stories which always involved exploits that showed them in a good light. We on the other hand will have to keep politely mum; each one of us will have to act as if she in particular was spared. Otherwise no man is going to want to touch us any more.’22 These plays show an awareness of the ubiquitous truth of such situations, which we refuse to acknowledge because to do so is to call into question the very possibility of the concept of justice in war. This is why we have chosen to put The Sentry by Carel Fabritius (1622–54) on

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the cover of this book. The human vulnerability of the sleeping soldier, his faithful alert dog, a glimpse of the legs of another sentry walking the walls, the truncated bas-relief of St Antony Abbott, selfless patron of pigs and skin diseases, and the strangely realistic yet architecturally impossible setting, combine in a moving vision of both the duty and the dereliction of war which, like Shakespeare’s plays, throws the search for meaning back at the viewer. Now, with Britain and America again controversially involved in overseas war, and with a narrow reading (therefore a gross misreading) of Henry V again sometimes enlisted in support, it is appropriate that this book explores that text in multiple ways. The different but complementary voices writing on this play in this book, exploring the way in which Shakespeare made it out of the materials available to him, and the ways it has been remade ever since in writing, performance and allusion are not just talking about that play but constructing a methodology for understanding the ways in which we have used, and continue to use, ideas about Shakespeare for particular ends. It is to be hoped that other books focusing on other topics and other plays will find it a useful model.

Notes 1. St Augustine, City of God, tr. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1972), 860–2. 2. See Holmes. 3. Helen Nicholson, Medieval Warfare (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 26–7, 23–38. 4. Norman Housley, ‘European Warfare, c.1200–1320’, in Keen 133–4. 5. See Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 6. George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here: A Recollection of the War in Burma (London: Harper Collins, Harvill, 1992), 128–30. 7. They were quarrelsome because they were often unpaid, and dumped at the ports without the means to get home. Modern psychology suggests that many of them may also have been quarrelsome because of the trauma they had experienced. 8. Jonathan Steele, ‘Correspondents’ course’, Guardian 20.03.04. 9. McIlwain, 272. 10. See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 11. Clemence Dane [pseudonym Winifred Ashton], Will Shakespeare: An Invention in Four Acts (New York: Macmillan, 1922). The radio production was produced by Barbara Burnham; a typescript remains at Birmingham University Library.

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12. A. P. H., ‘Little Talks,’ Punch 10.04.1940, 390–9. 13. Peter Smith, Social Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1995), 153. 14. Dennis Kennedy, ‘Shakespeare and the Cold War,’ in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, ed. A. Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 163–79. 15. See for example, Peter Zadek and James Leverett, ‘Radical Stagings of Shakespeare’, Performing Arts Journal 4.3 (1980), 106–21. 16. Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992). 17. See Jean I. Marsden (ed.), The Appropriation of Shakespeare (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991); and Alan Sinfield, ‘Against Appropriation’, Essays in Criticism 31 (1981), 181–95. 18. See the US defence think-tank website www.Globalsecurity.org, accessed 20.04.2007. 19. King, 96–8. 20. William Hazlitt, essay on Henry V in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), cited by Richard Levin, ‘Hazlitt on Henry V, and the Appropriation of Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly 35.2 (Summer, 1984), 134–41; 137. 21. Courtney; Meron (1993; 1998); Taunton; and de Somogyi. 22. Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin (London: Virago, 2005), 176.

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Part I Ideas of War and Peace

‘Your discipline in war, wisdom in peace’ (Richard III, 3.7.16)

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2 ‘The Disciplines of War’: Elizabethan War Manuals and Shakespeare’s Tragicomic Vision1 Ros King

FLUELLEN: Captain Macmorris, when there is more better opportunities to be required, look you, I will be so bold as to tell you, I know the disciplines of war – and there is an end. [Exeunt.] (Henry V, 3.3.80–3) A Welshman and an Irishman violently disagree about the strategic objectives of an English army as it lays siege to Harfleur in support of the English king’s claim to the throne of France. These convoluted international circumstances still retain their explosive resonance. Setting out the ‘disciplines of war’ as expressed in the deluge of war manuals that poured off the presses in London at the end of the sixteenth century is therefore evidently not the end, although it is a start. Those books included editions and translations of classical literature and war manuals, treatises on fortification and weapons handling, as well as accounts of the causes and progress of contemporary conflicts. All have a political agenda, preparing the English, both practically and emotionally, for war, whether in defence of their country’s boundaries or as support for the Protestant cause abroad.2 As with any instructional or non-fiction works in this period, there is a good deal of overlap between different manuals, with sections transferred verbatim from one book to the next. Some evidently derive from collections of mixed papers. Thomas Styward’s The Pathway to Martiall Discipline (1581), for instance, includes a set of orders for the Spanish army, which would have been in use in the Netherlands, excitingly advertised on the title page as having been discovered in a castle in Ireland that had previously been in the occupation of Spanish and Italian forces. Thomas Digges’s Stratioticos (1590) comprises a work of his 15

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father’s on mathematics, extended to include a consideration of the algebra necessary for a soldier; a dissertation on artillery and pyrotechnics; and standing orders, both from the French and Spanish armies, and from Leicester’s forces in the Netherlands. One handbook in particular, however, William Garrard’s The Art of Warre (1591), perhaps constitutes a significant source for characterisation and situation in plays as diverse as Henry V, All’s Well, and Othello. Garrard, a mercenary who had fought in the Spanish army for fourteen years, is usually open – and courteously complimentary – about his borrowings from previous experts in the field. These include Styward’s descriptions of military ranks and infantry tactics; a slightly longer version of the Spanish orders; Guillaume de Bellay on fortification and encampment; Bernadin Rocca on the law of siege warfare; and Digges on the appliance of mathematics. Garrard thus conveniently supplies most of the material that Shakespeare would have needed to create convincing impressions of the military life.3 But Shakespeare does more than merely incorporate information. He transforms it, repeatedly turning a single word or image from the manual into an entire characterisation. Nick de Somogyi has shown that the name Parolles and the wonderfully comic scene in which that particular wordsmith gets his come-uppance in a feast of invented languages as he tries to retrieve his drum, comically subverts Garrard’s person specification for drummers who are ‘oftentimes sent on messages, importing charge, which of necessitie require languages’ (Garrard, 51).4 Similarly, although the state of Corporal Bardolph’s nose is due to drink, the fire that is said to burn in it throughout Henry IV and Henry V seems to derive from Garrard’s instruction that a corporal must ‘make prouision of wood or coles, that he may alwaies haue fire burning in his corps of gard, aswel in the day as in the night, and aswel in the summer as in the winter: w[i]t[h]out which he ought neuer to keep watch, because it is a most necessary munition for the Hargubusiers, to light their match withal . . . ’ (Garrard, 26). Elsewhere, Fluellen is shown enthusiastically ordering soldiers up to the breach, even beating them, which Garrard says should not be necessary, but he refuses a command to go to the mines on the grounds that they have not been constructed according to ‘the disciplines of the war’; the ‘concavities of it is not sufficient’ (3.3.4–8). The distinctive word ‘concavities’, which lends itself to being spoken with a Welsh accent, seems inspired by Garrard’s explanation that insufficient height given to the ‘Caue or vaute’ results in the force of the blast being dissipated sideways (Garrard, 298). In all cases, Shakespeare comically undercuts the military ideal.

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Ranks and duties: ensigns Pistol and Iago The listing of military ranks is a conventional and ancient feature of war manuals. Garrard’s version of this often takes its details verbatim from Styward, but it is structured very differently. Styward deals with all of the ranks in the first of his three books, beginning with the General and working downward, and devoting his remaining two books to aspects of strategy. Garrard begins with the soldiery and works upwards over the entire course of his six books, incorporating along the way the different aspects of military activity that would be appropriate to each rank. It is not until book 5 that he considers that most vital of senior officers, the Master of Ordinance. As always, this person needs to be ‘learned in auncient and moderne hystories’ but the so-called military revolution occasioned by the introduction of gunpowder and the resulting developments in the art of fortification also required knowledge of science and technology:5 Hee must likewise have exquisite knowledge in the Mathematicals, considering thereby he shall be able, certainly to shoote, at all randons [i.e. randams, disturbances], to conuey Mynes vnder earth, to any Curtine, Bulwarke, or other place, that hee determines by violence of powder to rent in pieces. To make a coniecture & forecast, what quantitie of shotte, powder, etc. shall be requisite to serue the Campe, to suffise a battery, myne, or any other exployt. To sette out in due proportion every particular fortification, of Campe, Towne or Fort, where Ordenaunce is to be vsed, which cannot possibly without knowledge in these Sciences be sufficiently discharged. (Garrard, 281) In defending the star-shaped Venetian fortresses on Cyprus with their immensely thick bastions for absorbing the shock of artillery, and their complexes of gun emplacements, Othello has much more need for his lieutenant, his second in command, to be ‘an arithmetician’, as Cassio is reported to be, than yet another officer who can ‘set a squadron in the field’. But from the point of view of the passed-over Iago, the job has gone to someone who has missed out on books 2, 3, and 4 of the training. Iago, on the other hand, who has fought beside Othello ‘At Rhodes, at Cyprus and on other grounds’, and whose bravery and apparent trustworthiness have been so often demonstrated, would indeed, according to Garrard’s criteria, appear the ideal choice for ensign or ancient, the fourth rank after private soldier, corporal and

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sergeant (Othello 1.1.18–28). This officer must be someone of absolute trust and bravery since it is his task to carry the colours that the troops will follow into battle. He is literally the bearer of the honour of the regiment and occupies the most conspicuous and dangerous position. Ancient Pistol, therefore, might now rather deserve our sympathy. His sudden outbursts of violence in the plays in which he appears, his bragadocchio and doubtfully successful sexual predations, his language studded with vainglorious accounts of deadly encounters (many of them culled from popular literature) are also the symptoms exhibited by those suffering from shell shock, post-traumatic stress disorder – or whatever clinical term is coined for those whose life and psyche have been blighted by combat.6 This was not a condition that was invented in the First World War. Its symptoms are displayed in many of the war veterans that populate late Elizabethan drama, and may account for much of the violence that we know attended the return of soldiers from the French wars throughout the 1580s. If Pistol really had undertaken the role of ‘ancient’ or ensign, he might well be suffering post-traumatic shock. Garrard has an extremely lengthy description of this important position. Significantly, and ironically for both Henry V and Othello, the ensign should be the ‘conserver’ of the ‘generall reputation of all the band’. He must be ‘indowed with such custome, and vse himselfe with such courtesie and ciuilitie, that he may not onely procure the love of his confederates, and friends, but of all the entire companie’. Finally he must be ‘a man skilfull, hardy, and couragious, of able courage to aduance and beare up the Ensigne in all extremities, secret, silent, and zealous, able often to comfort, animate and enc[o]urage the company to take in hand, and maintaine such extremities, [and] enterprises, as they are appointed unto’ (Garrard, 62–8). Iago plays this part to the utmost, although as a darkly reversed shadow of Garrard’s model. Skilful, secret and zealous, he has the love and trust of every member of the garrison with the exception of his wife, who yet will do anything for him. We see him giving comfort to Desdemona, advising Cassio on the means to recover his ‘reputation’, while urging, animating and encouraging a succession of characters from Roderigo to Othello in the tasks to which, unbeknown to them, he has appointed them. While fulfilling every one of Garrard’s injunctions for good military governance, his sole objective is, again, a private grievance for which he needs to subvert the discipline of the camp. He begins by arranging the drunkenness and brawl on the court of guard – both cardinal offences in any military handbook

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from any period. Then his point of view begins to make its mark within Othello’s choice of language. In Venice, Othello had managed an easy balance in every speech between his love for Desdemona and his public duty. Once Iago gets to work introducing his prejudices about Venetian women, racism, ageism and the rest, Othello’s confidence in himself crumbles and he abandons those military markers that had punctuated and ordered his life. The result is total negation of self and a repeated reference to himself in the third person: ‘Farewell the tranquil mind . . . Farewell the plumed troops, and the big wars . . . Othello’s occupation’s gone’ (3.3.352–62).7 In just the previous scene, on the morning after his arrival in Cyprus, Othello had gone to inspect the defences (‘This fortification, gentlemen – shall we see’t ?’ 3.2.5), acting exactly by the book: when a Captaine doth enter into Garrison, hee must goe twise or thrise about the Towne, both within and without the walles, to behold and discerne where the Enemie might most endomage, as well by scalade as by batterie, and diuers time thorowly consider of the same, and use requisite fortifications, wyth repayres, bulwarks, Bastillions, Caualieres, Casemates Counterscarpes, Countergardes, halfe Moones, Trenches, Mounts, etc ayded therein by the industry of good Ingeniours [engineers]. (Garard, 319) The corresponding scene in Othello is very short: just six lines. If we accept that Shakespeare’s unit of construction is the scene rather than the act, it is numerically, by scene count, exactly in the centre of the play. It is certainly pivotal dramaturgically, for it is the last military duty we see him perform. Thereafter, scene by tortuously long scene, he slowly succumbs to Iago’s view of the world. Physical control ultimately deserts him in a welter of words for dislocated body parts, ‘noses, ears, and lips’. The collapse is total because it is so completely internalised. More devastating than Iago’s prosaic, spur of the moment diagnosis of ‘epilepsy’, the enemy has entered within his very walls and laid him waste (4.1.34–48).

Classical precedent and sixteenth-century practice It is commonplace for military historians to regard most late sixteenthcentury English war manuals as having been produced for the armchair general rather than the soldier in the field, partly because many seem too big and bulky to be taken easily on campaign, and partly perhaps

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because of their insistence on classical practices. Garrard regularly cites Roman military organisation, although he does on at least one occasion observe that changes in armaments since Roman times have necessitated a change in strategy: Therefore those that otherwise would vse it, doe ground their opinion vpon some ancient order of the Romaines or Grecians, wherein they are deceiued, because at this day we are constrained to varie our order, considering our armes be varied, which do now fetch and wound much more and further off, and are more pearcing then those of antient time. (Garrard, 64) Varying the order could indeed be sometimes very productive. William Louis of Nassau, who had just been reading Aelian’s description of Roman drill, wrote to his cousin Maurice on 8 December 1594, outlining the technique of volley firing that would quickly revolutionise military tactics, and arguing that ‘six rotating ranks of musketeers could replicate the continuous hail of fire achieved by the javelin and sling-shot throwers of the Legions’.8 Tensions between convention, up-to-the-minute best practice, and the common sense of individual experience are everywhere apparent in both theory and practice, but usually, when Fluellen talks about the ‘disciplines of war’, he is referring to the classics. He disparages the competence of the Irishman, Captain Macmorris on the grounds that ‘he has no more directions in the true disciplines of the wars, look you – of the Roman disciplines – than is a puppy-dog’ (3.3.16–18). The joke here may have been compounded for sixteenth-century audiences who would have been unlikely to dismiss the military prowess of the Irish quite so readily – although ‘discipline’ would equally have had little part in their beliefs in Irish wildness. For his part, Macmorris is angry both because the retreat has been sounded – ‘I would have blowed up the town, so Crish save me law, in an hour. O, tish ill done, tish ill done’ – and because of Fluellen’s tendency to stand around and ‘discourse’ irrelevantly about ancient history (3.3.35–49). Rhetoric well used, however, is perhaps the most important of all the weapons of war – as Garrard recognises – for without rhetorical persuasion, few people would bring themselves to ‘Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood, . . . Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage’ and submit to killing and being killed (Henry V, 3.1.6–8). Henry, as a character in this play, is a master in the art, and his speeches in the thick

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of battle at Harfleur and before Agincourt have been quoted by leaders great and small down the ages. But there is a fine line, partly dependent on context, between morale boosting and rabble rousing. Fluellen tells us that he saw Pistol at the bridge, ‘as valiant a man as Mark Antony . . . I did see him do as gallant service’ (Henry V, 3.6.10–15). Later, after Pistol has approached him in the most violently verbose language to demand Bardolph’s release, in a subversion of military discipline, he becomes confused: ‘I’ll assure you, a uttered as prave words at the pridge as you shall see in a summer’s day’. What he thought he saw seems to be a construction of what he heard, and Gower, who now realises that he knows Pistol of old, observes that ‘such fellows’, adept in ‘the phrase of war, which they trick up with new-tuned oaths’, are the ‘slanders of the age’ (3.6. 20–82). The next time we see Fluellen, however, in camp on the night before Agincourt, he has become equally exercised by the military need to keep silence. After Gower shouts to catch his attention, Fluellen complains: ‘If you would take the pains but to examine the wars of Pompey the Great, you shall find, I warrant you, that there is no tiddle-taddle nor pibblebabble in Pompey’s camp’ (4.1.69–72). He is obeying both historical and commonsense rules. Sound travels at night, and a noisy camp is both unwatchful and unrested. As Garrard puts it, the soldier must: be circumspect, that in the body of the watch a solemne secrete silence be kept, without singing, brawling, or any rumour or noise, and specially in the night, both in respect of the enimie, to heare when the Alarme is giuen, and to the intent that those which rest & sleepe, and are not yet in Sentinel, may be the more apt to resist & apply themselues to these factions & exercises, which are required of them with vigilant watchfulnes . . . (Garrard, 29) Fluellen’s concern is funny in performance, however, because of the excessive number of words he uses to make the point. Between his reference to ancient authority, his Welsh usage (‘I warrant you’), his copiousness (giving three examples where one would be more than enough), and his desire always to have the last word, his legitimate request for silence itself becomes twenty lines of ‘tiddle-taddle’ and ‘pibble-babble’. Dangerously, he flouts the very rule he invokes. Henry, however, who is eavesdropping in disguise, judges him only by his wellmeaning intentions, and objects on grounds of rhetorical style rather than military stupidity: ‘Though it appear a little out of fashion, / There is much care and valour in this Welshman’ (4.1.83–4). He has just

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been similarly indulgent with Pistol but he then immediately bumps into John Bates, Michael Williams and Alexander Court, perhaps the most convincing and sympathetic of all the ordinary working people in Shakespeare.

‘Just war’ and Shakespeare’s dramaturgy The nature and positioning of these three encounters is significant. It is not the business of a manual writer like Garrard to discourse on the nature and morality of war itself, merely to provide for its efficient prosecution. But in its continual and varied subversions of the military ‘disciplines’, Shakespeare’s dramaturgy allows space for just such questions. If we have just been laughing at Pistol’s and Fluellen’s use of language and their incompetence at waging war, we are in a better frame of mind to appreciate Williams’s scepticism at the disguised Henry’s defence of his war. Williams expresses doubt about the validity of the king’s cause, his right to go to war (the jus ad bellum), and fears that guilt must attach to anyone and everyone fighting in an unjust cause. He then dwells on the thoughts that are invariably uppermost in any soldier’s mind the night before a battle – the responsibilities he leaves behind him; his wife and children left without support; and his debts – concluding ‘there are few die well that die in a battle’. In this he goes further than the normal concerns of jus in bello and the injunction against taking ‘innocent’ life amongst the enemy, arguing that the deaths of ordinary soldiers will inevitably cause loss and extreme hardship to innocents at home, ‘for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument?’ Not dying well (not dying in a right cause) must be the king’s fault since a subject has no right to disobey: ‘Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it – who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.’ Henry, however, subtly twists his words, picking up on ‘dying well’, in the sense of ‘shriven’, and the word ‘debt’, which can mean sin (see the version of the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 7.12) but is also part of the play’s language of money.9 He turns Williams’s concern about responsibility to the living to a lengthy disquisition on individual sin: ‘no king, be his cause never so spotless . . . can try it out with all unspotted soldiers’, concluding that ‘every subject’s soul is his own’ and that every soldier should take the steps to salvation that he would take were he dying at home in his bed (4.1.133–84).

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Williams has actually begun tentatively to advance the argument that if the damage to innocents is immoral, and since war cannot avoid causing such damage, it should be avoided.10 He knows that the stranger has not satisfactorily answered his basic objection to war, but he knows too that the stranger’s speech is irrefutable on its own terms: ‘Tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill upon his own head. The king is not to answer it.’ But that was not his point and he cannot quite put his finger on how that point has been so deflected. Bates then jumps in to the king’s defence with ‘I do not desire he should answer for me, and yet I determine to fight lustily for him’ (4.1.185–8). Developing a cue in the Quarto version of the play, some modern editions, notably Oxford, combine Williams’s and Bates’s single sentences at this point into one speech and give it to Bates.11 This destroys Williams’s sense of dissatisfaction and therefore removes Shakespeare’s dramaturgical critique of Henry’s rhetoric. Williams now expresses his distrust of the king’s promise that he will not allow himself to be ransomed. His doubt is quite justifiable. In a medieval battle, noblemen were taken captive because they could be ransomed; ordinary soldiers represented no financial advantage to their captors and were often killed.12 Some productions, anticipating the end of the scene, have made Williams extremely angry, even violent here,13 which also has the effect of removing sympathy from his point of view. But then the disguised king slightly overplays his hand. He promises that if Henry is ransomed he will never trust the king’s word afterwards. We, who are in his confidence and by virtue of that dramaturgy inevitably seeing things at least partly from his point of view, will be amused whether or not we believe him and his cause. But we also see that it is a ridiculous claim for Henry in his guise as a mere ‘gentleman of a company’ to be making. As Williams points out: ‘That’s a perilous shot out of an elder-gun, that a poor and a private displeasure can do against a monarch’ (4.1.40, 196–8). Indeed, as a result of the king’s disguise and at his direction, the rest of the Fluellen and Williams part of the plot is given over to the giving and settling of a ‘private displeasure’ – something about which the manual writers have very stern things to say. Williams’s halting attempt to question the philosophy of just war is thus reduced by Henry to a personal grievance in contravention of the disciplines of war, which is then concluded by a trick. Later, when this comes out in the open, he is paid off: Henry fills his glove with crowns and Fluellen, perhaps in lordly emulation, perhaps in slight embarrassment, offers him twelve pence to mend his shoes (4.8.58–72). Whether or not he accepts is

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a production choice, but the ethical question he has posed is never answered. The oft commented upon discrepancies between the story as anticipated by the play’s Chorus and the events actually presented are thus amplified in the gaps between the characters’ understanding of each other and their conflicting moral imperatives. The Chorus has admiringly presented us with a ‘little touch of Harry in the night’ (4.0.47). Garrard confirms that this would indeed be good practice – but only if the soldiers knew who it was who was speaking to them: ‘it is necessary that the Captayne Generall, doe sometimes ryde by night about the Campe, and admonish the watch that they remaine ready and vigilant, since that in the eies and eares of so fewe, the health & sauegarde of all the Campe doth consist’ (343). Henry’s actions, by contrast, are reminiscent of Plutarch’s Mark Antony, who would go ‘disguised like a slave in the night . . . peere into poor men’s windowes . . . and brawle with them’,14 and carry something of the same sense of moral unease. It is Styward’s manual that supplies a model oration for captains to use before a battle, which in its Christian faith in salvation, resembles not so much the Crispin’s-day speech Henry gives to the entire army, as that which he makes as a mere ‘gentleman of a company’ to Williams, Bates and Court: Then since by the King our Maister and Gouernour, we are appointed and procured to come to this warre, I haue determined my most louing Companions and fellow Souldiers to enter in battell, and valiantlie to aduenture my life with you: and if I perish therein, I shall be sure it shall be for the saluation of my soule, and the memorie of my person, for to die through Justice is not to die but to change death for life . . . For to a Prince it were great infamie and dishonour, the quarrel being his owne, should by the bloud of others seeke reuenge . . .15 But again, usage in the play subtly changes meaning. Henry’s disguise prevents the statement of his intentions as king from being entirely believed by his tiny onstage audience, and therefore raises problems of believability for us. He too is troubled – but more because of what he sees as the intolerable burden that they have sought to lay on him, ‘Upon the King’ (4.1.227). There is a sombreness about this scene, which is partly to do with the characters’ apprehension about their fate in the battle, partly with their anxiety about the ethics of what they are doing, and partly because of the tensions in the structure of which only we,

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the offstage audience, can be aware. The play celebrates Henry’s victory and the heroism of both king and soldiers. Yet at the same time, its dramaturgy, in both situation and language, repeatedly raises questions about the legitimacy of going to war on the leader’s word for the leader’s benefit. It is not the play’s business to solve the ethical dilemma that it poses. The question of what constitutes a just war is, after all, one that has not gone away.

The law and practice of siege Perhaps the most problematic speech for modern readers of Henry V is the one in which Henry threatens the citizens of Harfleur with rape and pillage if they do not open their gates to him. Garrard, as perhaps is only to be expected in a serving soldier, is only really concerned about the practicalities of waging war and of keeping order in war situations. He has no advice to offer to princes on this issue. Nor need he do so, for the brutal moral law on siege conduct, which allows the sacking of captured towns, is set out in sufficiently clear terms in the Bible: When thou comest nere vnto a citie to fight against it, thou shalt offer it peace. And if it answer thee againe peaceably, and open vnto thee, then let all the people that is founde therein, be tributaries vnto thee, and serue thee. But if it wil make no peace with thee, but make warre against thee, then thou shalt besiege it. And the Lord thy God shal deliver it into thine hands, and thou shalt smite all the males thereof with the edge of the sworde. Onely the women, and the children, and the cattle, and all that is in the citie, even all the spoile thereof, shalt thou take vnto thy self, and shalt eat the spoile of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hathe giuen thee. (Deuteronomy 20.10–14)16 As a good Christian prince, Henry has been careful to establish in his initial conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury that he has God on his side. Before Harfleur, in his lights, he acts humanely, and with biblical precedent, in giving fair warning. The terrible irony of all attempts to control war, to codify it and make it ‘just’, is that it puts a civilised or righteous gloss on precivilised behaviour. But we rarely admit that people put in the position of besiegers can feel an atavistic need for revenge, even though it is they who have been acting on the offensive. The besiegers are, after all, initially in the more vulnerable position. They need to dig themselves in for

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their own defence. Somehow, they have to make a breach in the opposing walls through the deadly mathematics of mines, countermines and bombardments. Then they have to storm the breach. Garrard describes the process that we also see staged in Henry V, including the bringing up of the pioneers with scaling ladders, and the necessity of co-ordinating the artillery bombardment so that the attackers do not fall prey to what we have come euphemistically to describe as ‘friendly fire’. Either way, closing up the wall with the besieging dead is no idle metaphor (3.1.0–2). In addition to the emotional and psychological effects of warfare on human behaviour, there are economic and practical considerations. Armies are invariably underfunded for the job they are expected to do. Corruption in European armies at this period meant that ordinary soldiers frequently went unpaid, their allowances being creamed off by their commanding officers – as Falstaff so genially explains and demonstrates in the recruiting scenes of both parts of Henry IV. Inevitably, therefore, the default position is that towns will be sacked. The problem (from the victor’s point of view) is twofold: how to prevent the sacking becoming completely uncontrollable; and how to give all the troops their fair share of booty.17 Nowe if it chaunce that the Towne be taken by assaulte, a publique band or cry must be made, that the bootie and sacke, shal be gyuen as well to them that haue stood in battayle, as to those that were at the Assault. Otherwise, it were almost impossible to constraine any one to keepe order, but that euery one would be at the spoyle. (Garrard, 304) Rule number 49 of the Duke of Alva’s rules of war therefore states that no one must loot ‘until the Generall make proclamation, that euerie man shall take booties: And if the general cause no such proclamation, to be made, & that souldiers make spoile, he shall incurre the paine of death’ (Garrard, 43). There is no humanitarian function here. The objective is to keep control and to maintain security. As Aeneias the Tactician, writing in Greek in the fourth century points out, soldiers weighed down with plunder are vulnerable to counter attack – as are those who are fighting about the spoils amongst themselves.18 In fact, Alva was notorious for allowing the Spanish army to go on the rampage even when a town had surrendered; his Rule 88 allows sacking in these circumstances at the discretion of the commander. A much copied painting by Pieter Breughel the elder shows the biblical story of the massacre of the innocents with soldiers in Spanish armour and

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Bethlehem masquerading as a Flemish village.19 But there have been many besieged towns throughout history that have taken up offers of safety in surrender only to find them withdrawn once the besieging army is admitted. It is a risk. Indeed, it is more than likely. For its part, the town had an absolute duty not to capitulate if there was the slightest chance that it might win out. Catch 22 indeed. The only moral absolutes in this impossible situation attach to the desecration of places of worship and religious artefacts, and to attacks on nuns, monks and priests. Garrard is clear on this issue and instructs the successful military commander that ‘Incontinently he must make cry through the Cittie, that none upon payne of hanging neither take nor spoyle any Churches’ (304). The threat of punishment, of course, does not necessarily prevent the crime. The aftermath in the event of victory in the field can be equally difficult to manage. Agincourt is noted for the unusually large numbers of French aristocratic dead, largely due to Henry’s notorious order to kill prisoners. The contemporary chronicles seem anxious about this unchivalric act, although most seem to concur that the battle was over and troops were beginning to stand down when he learnt of a possible counterattack. This makes his behaviour cold-blooded but necessary, and even French chronicles blame the event on various actions by French soldiers.20 In the play, Gower later states that the killing of the prisoners was a ‘worthy’ reaction to the slaughter by the French of the boys in the undefended baggage train, and Fluellen blames the French action as ‘expressly against the law of arms’. But the fact that, in the Folio version, the explanation is at odds with what we have seen is more than a representation of the ‘fog of war’; it allows us to question the morality of Henry’s position.21 At this point Fluellen likens Henry to Alexander the Great by using the pre-scientific theory of correspondence: there are rivers in both the towns of their birth, and ‘salmons in both’ (4.7.22ff). This is ludicrous in itself, but his rendition of Alexander’s name in Welsh pronunciation becomes ‘Alexander the Pig’. Audiences find this funny at face value, but it also affords a joke – unconscious on Fluellen’s part – on the great military commander’s reputation for both cruelty and excessive drinking (Garrard, 35). In response to Gower’s objection that the two are unalike because Henry ‘never killed any of his friends’, Fluellen triumphantly reminds us that Alexander, drunk, killed Cleitus, but Henry, sober, ‘turned away the fat knight . . . I have forgot his name’ (4.7.37–48). It is a tumultuous, and ludicrous, concatenation of parallel betrayal and expediency, dressed as praise, which encapsulates the moral problem of war itself.

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Critics sitting comfortably in their studies and classrooms tend to draw on their personal feelings for the characters they know, their notions of the obligations of friendship, and rosy beliefs in the concept of ‘just’ war, commonly blaming Henry for threatening the sack of Harfleur, for calmly endorsing Bardolph’s hanging for stealing a pyx, and for turning away Falstaff. It is clear that Lawrence Olivier initially felt intense distaste for Henry’s character in these instances,22 while Kenneth Branagh tried, as he presumably saw it, to humanise Henry by showing him weeping as Bardolph’s legs swung in the background. Olivier’s film was of course extensively cut to create an entirely heroic picture of Henry while, less famously, the speeches of Williams, Bates and Court were carefully rearranged to remove the criticism of war and of Henry’s actions.23 Although purging the text of both its horrors and its ethical doubts may have been an allowable propaganda act in the circumstances of the war against Nazism, it is one that has no place in modern discussion and performance of the play. The message that needs to be taken from the uncut Folio is not that Henry is reprehensible – in the circumstances, he behaves comparatively well – but that war, however necessary it may sometimes appear to be, cannot but result in a choice and balancing of injustice and atrocity. What is really remarkable about war crimes such as the sack of Antwerp – sickeningly depicted in George Gascoigne’s play, A Larum for London – or the mistreatment of prisoners whether in Henry V or in Abu Ghraib is not so much that they happen, as that they do not happen more frequently. They are only averted through the individual soldier’s morality and self-discipline, nurtured by military command, regimental expectation, and established best practice as set out in books and manuals such as Garrard’s. But when we ask our spiritual leaders, as Henry does, for a judgement on waging war that can be in our consciences ‘washed / As pure as sin with baptism’ (Henry V, 1.2.31–2), we might want to reflect that war is always and inevitably an outrage, no matter how responsible, well trained and disciplined the troops, and that what we are really asking for is a whitewash.

Notes 1. I gratefully acknowledge the support of a British Academy conference travel grant and conversations with David Lawrence in the preparation of this chapter. 2. Richard Crompton, for example, ‘an apprentice of the common law’, wrote The Mansion of Magnanimitie wherein is shewed the most high and honorable

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

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acts . . . performed in defence of the Princes and Countrie: set forth as an encouragement to all faithfull subjects (1599). See also Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 39–43, and Jorgensen. Somogyi, 179–83. Parker, 24–33; Hale. Somogyi, 170–4. Rosalind King, ‘ ‘‘Then Murder’s Out of Tune’’: The Music and Structure of Othello,’ Shakespeare Survey 39 (1987), 149–58. Parker, 19. See Henderson below, pp. 231ff. See Holmes; Christopher Allmand, ‘War and the Non-Combatant’ in Keen, 253–72. In Q, the scene has been heavily cut and rearranged. The speech under discussion here is given to 3 Soldier, who most closely corresponds to Bates. Clifford J. Rogers, ‘The Age of the Hundred Years War’ in Keen, 144. Cf. Emma Smith (ed.), King Henry V, Shakespeare in Production Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Plutarch, Lives, tr. Thomas North (1579), 983; cf. Shakespeare, A&C 1.1.54–6. Styward, 131. William Whittingham et al. (trs), The Bible, Geneva, 1560. Digges, 72, includes arithmetical demonstrations on dividing booty proportionately to the daily pay for each rank. Aeneias Tacticus, How to Survive under Siege, [by] Aeneias the Tactician, tr. with Introduction and commentary by David Whitehead (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 62. This text was available in Greek in the sixteenth century and translated into Latin by Isaac Casaubon in Polybius the Historian (Paris, 1610). See also David Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550–1672, History of Warfare, vol. 10 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2002). Atrocities, of course, occurred on both sides, as this pamphlet title demonstrates: The politique takinge of Zutphen skonce, the winning of the towne, and belagering of Deuneter [Deventer] With the honorable enterprise of Sir Roger Williams Knight, performed vpon a thousande and two hundred of the enemies souldiours . . . Who were all put to the sworde . . . (London: Iohn Charlewood, 1591). Anne Curry, Agincourt: A New History (2nd edition, Stroud: Tempus, 2006), 256–64. The quarto reverses the scenes to present Gower’s (and Holinshed’s) version of events unproblematically. Unpublished papers for the seminar, ‘Shakespeare in Time of War,’ Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting, 2005. Despite the argument advanced by Gary Taylor in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling with Three Studies in the Text of Henry V (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 72–119, the quarto, though shorter and with fewer characters, is not easier to cast with a reduced acting company. It is more likely that the Q revisions are ideological rather than theatrical.

3 War in Shakespeare’s Edward III Ellen C. Caldwell

The question as to whether the anonymous play Edward III can ever finally be attributed, even in part, to Shakespeare is not the issue in this chapter. The play’s importance for the subject of this book rather lies in that king’s importance to the sense of Tudor national identity at a time when England was again heavily engaged in continental wars. These were wars, however, which Elizabeth I was waging reluctantly, and without notable success, and for which she used privately raised armies. Edward’s personal and highly successful military campaigns in France, stemming from his innovative use of gunpowder, anti-cavalry tactics, and the devastatingly destructive chevauch´ee or scorched earth pillaging raid, had been memorialised in the 1557, Virgilian addition to the inscription on his tomb – ‘Tertius Edwardus fama super aethera notus / Pugna pro patria’ (‘Edward the Third, whose fame reaches to the high heavens, fight for your country’). The frontispiece to Stow’s Chronicle (1580 and 1592) shows him at the root of Elizabeth’s family tree, while the chivalric cult of the Order of the Garter, his invention, underpins Tudor and early Stuart royal ceremonial. All contribute to what D. A. L. Morgan has characterised as a sense of ‘Edwardian nostalgia’.1 But Edward III also contains anxieties about the Elizabethan succession and the ability of chivalry either to veil the brutalities of war or to justify its costs. It is therefore worth unravelling how the presentation of war in this play participates in ‘nostalgia’ for ‘li biau fait d’armes’ (glorious deeds of arms) while recognizing its limitations.2 The first part of the play, devoted to Edward’s claim to France, speaks to the succession question and the justification for war. Act II, long attributed to Shakespeare, presents Edward’s desire for the Countess of Salisbury. If we consider these scenes not as odd interludes clumsily welded to a war play, but as commentary on the claim to France and the invasion to follow, we are offered a conflicted if not negative view of 30

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those choices. The play’s war scenes reveal a disjunction between notions of chivalry, warrior kingship, and deeds of arms associated (however inaccurately) with the high Middle Ages and the reality that, by the late sixteenth century, warfare had evolved into something merely deadly and indiscriminate.3 In this contradictory assessment of the wars, admiration for Edward’s strategies, tactics, and conquests is simultaneously asserted and resisted.

Edward’s claim and succession crises At the end of Marlowe’s Edward II, the young King Edward III stands on stage with his father’s body and Mortimer’s head. To the former he says: Sweet father here, unto thy murdered ghost, I offer up this wicked traitor’s head; And let these tears distilling from mine eyes, Be witness of my grief and innocency.4 The word ‘innocency’ comes as something of a shock: surely in terms of stage presence, the decapitated head of an (upstart) earl and the body of a king are more visible witnesses than Edward’s tears, and, as Alan Dessen has suggested, offer some sort of challenge to the young king’s words.5 What have the reminders of violence to do with innocency? And Edward’s innocency of what? His father’s deposition and death? Mortimer’s death? His mother’s ‘retirement’? Edward III was proclaimed king in 1327 when his mother, Mortimer, the magnates and ‘commons’ deposed Edward II, who, they charged, was ‘pas suffisaunt de governer’ (‘unfit to govern’) and had broken the ‘serement qil fist a son coronnement’ (‘promise he made at his coronation’), although it was not until 1330 that he banished his mother and assumed regal power.6 Later called an ‘abdication’, Edward II’s deposition at Isabelle’s instigation created a precedent, which Richard II was to rue and the Tudors were to exploit. The word ‘innocency’ recurs in Edward III when Edward replies to King John’s accusations that he is a ‘foreigner’, a tyrant, and a ‘belly-god’: We presently will meet thee, John of France – And, English lords, let us resolve the day, Either to clear us of that scandalous crime, Or be entomb`ed in our innocency. (3.3.168–71)

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The antecedent to ‘that’ is not exact, and Edward’s claim to innocency is also rather vague. Craig Taylor explains that the legal dossier on Edward’s claim ‘made frequent reference to the principle of just war’.7 Edward’s claim to France (stemming from Henry II’s marriage to Ali´enor of Acquitaine) was itself the justification. Historically, Edward’s reasons for invading France and styling himself its king were more complex than those cited in the play or in the similar situation in Shakespeare’s Henry V.8 It has long been argued that Edward III’s initial aim was to bring about negotiations for sovereignty in Aquitaine, rather than to settle a permanent occupying force.9 Philippe Contamine, in a very suggestive essay, asks whether the Hundred Years War was a ‘conflit f´eodal, dynastique ou national?’ (‘a feudal, dynastic, or national conflict?’)10 The making of the nation and the violence required for its acquisition and maintenance are under interrogation in our play. In 1337, Edward III sent Philippe VI a letter of defiance: ‘Edouwars, par le grace de Dieu roy d’Engleterre et d’Irlande, a` Phelippe de Vallois escripsons’; ‘We, Edward, by the grace of God King of England and Ireland, write to Philippe de Valois.’11 Edward’s claim followed a French dynastic shift. The Capetian King Philippe IV le Bel had three sons, each of whom had died without male heirs. His last son was Charles IV, the claim of whose daughter Blanche reopened the question of female succession.12 Philippe VI de Valois, son of Charles, comte de Valois, and brother of Philippe IV le Bel, had already been named Regent, thus his claim was preferred over those of the female children of Louis X, Philippe V, or Charles IV.13 Even though the play ignores Philippe VI altogether and presents instead his son, Jean II, the outline of this complex succession question was well understood. It opens the play as Edward III asks, ‘Who next succeeded Philip le Beau?’ (1.1.6). Artois replies: Three sons of his, which all successively Did sit upon their father’s regal throne, Yet died and left no issue of their loins. (1.1.7–9) Later, a ‘French Citizen’ explains to his countryman that ‘Edward is son unto our late king’s sister, / Where John Valois is three degrees removed’ (3.3.36–7). Edward claimed the French throne through his mother, Isabelle. Elizabethan audiences of the play would have been aware that, like the last three direct Capetian kings and the last three Valois kings, the

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three latest Tudor monarchs had no issue, while the claim of James VI of Scotland to the English throne depended on the female line. They may have sensed some anti-Scottish sentiment in the play’s portrayal of the Scots.14 They would not have been aware that after the death of his eldest son, Edward III had entailed the English crown in the male line in an attempt to ensure the collaboration of his own three remaining and powerful sons in support of his under-aged grandson. A copy of this entail was in the possession of Sir Robert Cotton during the negotiations for James’ succession. In all likelihood, Cotton suppressed it since it would have cast doubt on James’s claim, which Cotton strongly endorsed. That Edward III late in his reign should entail the English crown in a way that would negate his claim to France is significant, and suggests that the populace – then and now – took the claim to France literally in a way that Edward did not.15 France itself presented another gnarly succession crisis with direct bearing on Elizabeth’s wars. In 1584, Henri de Navarre’s rights to succession were contested by the Catholic nobility, Spain, and in 1585, by Pope Sixtus V, who excommunicated Navarre and his cousin Cond´e. Political struggles between Ligueurs and Henri III continued, and when he had the duc de Guise and his brother assassinated in 1588, the Sorbonne ‘released and delivered’ his subjects from their loyalty to the king.16 When he recognized Navarre as his heir, Henri III was himself excommunicated, and his enemies began to style him ‘Henri de Valois’, much as Edward III had termed the French king ‘Philippe de Valois’. When Henri III was murdered in 1589, the Valois line died with him. After the death in 1590 of Navarre’s aged uncle, the cardinal de Bourbon, ‘Charles X’, Ligueurs were divided in their quest for an appropriate royal candidate, proposing an elective monarchy under the duc de Mayenne, Guise’s son; at the same time Spanish negotiators pressed the claims of the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Elisabeth and Philip II. Marriage between her and the young duc de Guise was also proposed,17 since her claim required the suppression of Salic Law.18 These problems of succession provided a suggestive analogue for contemporary shifts in geopolitical power-brokering in France, Spain, England, Scotland, and the United Provinces.

The Countess of Salisbury Edward III opens not in Normandy or Guyenne, but in the temporary ‘camp’ of David, the ‘treacherous king’ of Scotland who, ‘forgetting of his former oath’ (1.1.124–6), has invaded England and besieged the castle of Roxborough and the Countess of Salisbury within. As the Countess

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berates her absent cousin Montague for his failure to ‘solicit’ (1.2.4) the English king on her behalf, she refers with proleptic irony to the ‘rude wooing’ she will suffer if Montague is unsuccessful: Thou [Montague] dost not tell him what a grief it is To be the scornful captive to a Scot, Either to be wooed with broad untun`ed oaths, Or forced by rough insulting barbarism; (1.2.6–9) Of special significance in the passage are the references to the savagery manifest in the unintelligible, bestial nature of the Scots’ speech: their ‘babble’ as they ‘bray’. There is fuel here for the thesis that the Scots remained a threat to English cohesion and unity, all too clearly evidenced in their un-English language; Melchiori notes their ‘Scottishisms’ in his edition.19 Here, King David and Douglas cement the strategic accord between France and Scotland (significantly but ahistorically with someone from the house of Lorraine, from which James VI was descended), with vows of relentless harassment against the English. After Lorraine exits, the two Scots quarrel over the possession of the Countess and her jewels, which, as King David says, with a sexual pun on jewels, ‘are her own, still liable to her, / And who inherits her hath those with all’ (1.2.46–7). Although David and Douglas threaten rape of the Countess and destruction of English ground, they also signal Edward’s own attempt to possess the Countess and her beauty, which, she will say, ‘is soldered to my life’ (2.1.232), and to invade France and rob its riches. Later the Countess faces a more formidable siege, staged here as prologue to Edward’s invasion of France, and at the end of her trial, Edward compares her to Lucretia: Arise, true English lady, whom our isle May better boast of than ever Roman might Of her, whose ransacked treasury hath tasked The vain endeavour of so many pens; (2.2.192–5) Shakespeare’s own ‘endeavour’ appeared in 1592. The play’s sources (Painter, Froissart, and Holinshed) are unaware that Jean le Bel, the Li´egeois chronicler who was present at the deposition

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of Edward II,20 alleged that not only did Edward III fall in love with the Countess, but (David-like), he sent her husband, his loyal servant, into Brittany, then returned to her castle and raped her.21 If knowledge of this accusation reached the play’s author(s), it would probably have travelled not directly via Le Bel’s chronicle, but rather through Froissart’s refutation in the Amiens redaction of his Chroniques, which is not in Berner’s translation.22 Antonia Gransden has put forward the explanation that the story from Le Bel is based, with another account, on a common source – a source which was fabricated, as anti-English propaganda, with allusions to Livy’s Lucretia, reintroduced at the time.23 Acknowledging that there is much that cannot be known about the episode, she dismisses the allegation against the king as a likely literary construction. The parallel with Lucrece may lie behind Le Bel’s account; it is made explicit in our play. Despite some moments that may surely be played as comedy, the wooing is presented as an attack, with Edward abusing his power as king to coerce the Countess and her father. Although the king speaks eloquently both to Lodowick and himself/the audience, his remarks to the Countess are blunt, rude, deceitful, accusing, and relentless. She calls her father’s pandering an ‘unnatural besiege’ (2.1.413), emphasising in the love/war trope the violence and imperiousness of Edward’s desire. We are invited to interpret Edward’s claims to France in the same unfavourable light. The trope resurfaces in later scenes: ‘The quarrel that I have requires no arms / But these of mine’ (2.2.61–2). He is wrong, of course; his quarrel here and elsewhere will require fatal weapons. Earlier he had claimed that when the Countess talked of war, ‘It wakened Caesar from his Roman grave / To hear war beautified by her discourse’ (2.1.38–9). A vile phrase, perhaps, but since its locus classicus in Iliad IV, where Menelaus’ bloodstained skin is compared to a horse’s purple-dyed ivory cheekpiece, the aestheticisation of violence, especially in the depiction of war, has been difficult to resist.24 This may be particularly the case here since, according to legend, it was the Countess of Salisbury (in this case, the future wife to Edward’s son), whose garter, dropped while dancing at Edward’s court, occasioned his foundation of that chivalric order. One of the effects of the scenes with the Countess, which do seem to me Shakespeare’s, is to insist on the violence and unlawfulness of Edward’s desire and thus to counter the potential of chronicle plays to glorify war. Edward says he would swim ‘a Hellespont of blood / To arrive at Sestos,’ but the Countess replies, ‘you’ll make the river too’ (2.2.154–6). These scenes allude to a notion gaining currency among Elizabethans: monarchical legitimacy depends

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on the consent of parliament and the people. Monarchy becomes tyranny when it has to be imposed by force.

The presentation of war War in Edward III, thus introduced by Edward’s desire ‘beyond our law’ (2.2.144–5), appears in reports of four episodes drawn from Edward’s early campaigns against France: the battles of Sluys, Cr´ecy, and Poitiers, and the siege of Calais. These reports justify and glorify war (even as they grimly admit to its destructiveness) by linking past and contemporary concerns. Changes in the methods of waging war are reflected in reports of the physical damage wrought by cannons, in the representation of various responses to the pressure of battle, and in the effects of the chevauch´ees on non-combatants. There are several versions of the naval battle of Sluys on 24 June 1340, including Jean le Bel, Froissart, the Grandes Chroniques de France, Holinshed, and others. The play’s presentation of the battle reflects the recent English defeat of the Spanish Armada – indeed, it would be odd if it did not – both in its description of the order of Edward’s ships ‘figuring the horn`ed circle of the moon’ (3.1.72) and in its inclusion of cannons on board. On shore, King John and his son hear cannon shots, but the on-board action is not staged.25 The messenger’s report indicates that these cannons, which ‘from their smoky wombs / Sent many grim ambassadors of death’ were responsible for sinking ships and destroying men: Purple the sea, whose channel filled as fast With streaming gore that from the maim`ed fell As did the gushing moisture break into The crannied cleftures of the through-shot planks. Here flew a head dissevered from the trunk, There mangled arms and legs were tossed aloft (3.1.161–6)26 The gruesome picture of dismembered men tossed in the air as their ships sink reflects the results of the gunpowder revolution, just beginning when Edward fought this battle. Cannons are again mentioned in the play’s description of the battle of Poitiers (1356). Whether gunpowder artillery was actually used at Cr´ecy and Poitiers is contested, but by 1356, French, English, and Italian armies were all experimenting with such weapons in the field. The inaccuracy,

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instability, and difficulties in loading these weapons, however, reduced their efficacy to the panic provoked by noise and smoke. In the play, Salisbury’s last view of the battle finds the Prince surrounded by cavalry, pikemen, and ’brazen ordinance’: Here stood a battle of ten thousand horse, There twice as many pikes in quadrant wise, Here crossbows and deadly wounding darts . . . Off go the cannons that with trembling noise Did shake the very mountain where they stood. (5.1.136–8; 146–7) The French cannons are useless against English arrows and stones. Perhaps the scene also reflects the fact that while recognising their value or destructiveness, Elizabethan armies deployed few guns in the field, despite the ideal numbers cited in the military handbooks of the period.27

Chivalry vs. chevauch´ee After the surprise landing in 1346 at St Vaast-de-la-Hougue, Edward and his men marched through the Cotentin, seizing, pillaging, or burning towns and villages from Valognes, to Carentan, to Saint Lo – a strategy repeated time and again by Edward and his men in different regions of France.28 In the play, the chevauch´ee is reported from the point of view of a nameless Frenchman, who tells ‘his countrymen and citizens of France’ that ‘ransack-constraining war / Sits like to ravens upon your houses’ tops’ (3.2.46, 49–50). His lament is eloquent and graphic: ‘slaughter and mischief’ are personified as walking unimpeded through the towns; those who manage to escape the fire of war will ‘fall numberless upon the soldiers’ pikes’; and he predicts that ‘your wives will be abused, / Your treasure shared before your weeping eyes’ (3.2.50–73) – what Kings David and Edward attempt with the Countess, Edward’s troops will inflict on French non-combatants. English destructive marches through Normandy feature prominently in the first book of Froissart. Even when forbidden to do so, the soldiers looted merchant centres, while farms and villages were completely at their mercy. Edward himself burned the countryside before him as he advanced towards Paris. French historians today see this strategy as having had multiple dimensions – military, economic, psychological – for it transformed the entire kingdom of France into a

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‘frontier zone’ where no one was safe.29 Andr´e Plaisse contends that the murdering and pillaging of non-combatants was at odds with the chivalric ideal.30 Edward’s strategy reflects the changing makeup of armies, the ‘Infantry Revolution’, that would continue beyond the Hundred Years War. From the English chevauch´ees to the depradations of the e´ corcheurs to the notorious pillaging by the Spanish armies in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, the multiplied savagery towards non-combatants must be seen as a significant aspect of the military revolution, especially as nationalistic attitudes solidified, and hatred towards one’s professed enemies became entrenched.

Pitched battle: Cr´ecy and Poitiers At Cr´ecy and Poitiers, Edward III and his son introduced the measures so celebrated by the English when they remember Henry V’s victory at Agincourt: anti-cavalry tactics and the effective deployment of smaller armies against larger ones. In Edward III, the battle at Sluys (1340) is immediately followed by Cr´ecy (1346), and then Poitiers (1356), which is made simultaneous with the siege of Calais (1346–7). The battle of Cr´ecy is structured to spotlight the Prince of Wales, which encouraged Melchiori to read it as a ‘Garter Play.’ Unlike the mercenary Genoese, Poles, and Danes in the French army, the Prince is seen to thrive under the stress of battle. Froissart does not idealise all deeds of arms at Cr´ecy and Poitiers, where dismounted men ran among the fallen French men-at-arms and, instead of taking them prisoner for ransom, slew them on the field. At Cr´ecy, ‘pillards et ribauds’ (‘pillagers and scoundrels’) killed noblemen without mercy.31 Similarly, at Poitiers, the discomfited French noblemen were killed by the English at will.32 Such infantry tactics would become widely adopted. Instead of being composed of heavily armoured mounted men-at-arms, fighting to capture other knights for ransom, later European armies would be filled with ranks of commoners, more or less well-trained, armed with pikes and eventually muskets, fighting to kill one another.33 Through the course of the Hundred Years War and into the sixteenth century, this so-called ‘Infantry Revolution’ would produce larger armies of common men who fought wars with increasingly higher casualty rates.34 In looking back to the battle of Poitiers, the play presents the splendour of the French army as it is amazed and routed, not by cavalry forces, but by ‘one poor David’ with arrows and flints. The effect suggests that even small and badly equipped armies like Elizabeth’s, if well led, sufficiently valorous, and inventive, can win momentous victories.

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War and national identity: first France, then the Turk The development of French and English national sentiment during the wars and military transformations under Edward III and his successors suggests that a play of ‘Edwardian nostalgia’ might have seemed an apt vehicle for exploring late-sixteenth-century crises in national, monarchical, and religious identity, exacerbated by military exigencies abroad. Certain scenes in Edward III appear designed to solidify national unity through the disparagement of a hated and envied rival with vitriol against, as noted above, the ‘treacherous’, barbaric, ‘vile uncivil’, braying Scots (1.2.9, 12–13). The French are tyrannical, and they themselves call the Dutch ‘frothy’ and ‘ever-bibing’ (3.1.25–6) and England a ‘harebrained nation’ (3.1.51). Artois swears that he backs Edward’s claim because ‘love unto my country’ (1.1.33) demands allegiance to ‘the lineal watchman of our peace’ (1.1.36), ‘the true shepherd of our commonwealth’ (1.1.41). When John exhorts his men to fight, he makes the nationalistic and xenophobic argument which will eventually underpin all European claims on their subjects for military resources, development, and maintenance, and which still sounds uncannily modern: he tells his lords: ‘He that you fight for is your natural king, / He against whom you fight, a foreigner’ (3.3.143–4). Should Edward prevail, he will ‘enthrone himself in tyranny, / Make slaves of you, and with a heavy hand / Curtail and curb your sweetest liberty’ (3.3.148–50). Working against an overarching nationalism are extraordinary moments of resistance. The fractures inherent in constructed identity are revealed in those scenes comparing invasion to rape and insisting on the inhumanity of contemporary warfare, and in well-timed suggestions that national claims to legitimacy are merely rhetorical incitements to naked violence for the satisfaction of the monarch’s or the state’s ‘unlawful desires’. That these are intertwined is clear in Edward’s desire for the crown of a ‘mighty nation’ (1.1.146). In the middle of the battle of Sluys, Prince Philip replies to his father’s questions about Edward’s claim: I say, my lord, claim Edward what he can, And bring he ne’er so plain a pedigree, ’Tis you are in possession of the crown, And that’s the surest point of all the law; But were it not, yet ere he should prevail, I’ll make a conduit of my dearest blood, Or chase those straggling upstarts home again. (3.1.107–13)

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This startling confession has a major implication: possession alone is more legally binding than dynastic succession, but must be maintained with violence. By the play’s end the English do possess the French crown, a ‘wreath of conquest and reward of war’ (5.1.193), which they claim John spent towns and peoples’ lives in a fruitless and immoral effort to retain. If the late-Elizabethan chronicle plays were designed to help subjects identify their investment in the outcomes of war, many of these plays, including Edward III, now appear to us to have interrogated national identity. Charles Tilly’s axiomatic ‘wars make states and states make war’ describes this circular procedure, for war and its costly technological innovations cannot proceed without the continued justification of their costs.35 As Edward explains early in the play and as Elizabethans feared, ‘we shall have wars on every side’ (1.1.156). In his last speech, Prince Edward speaks pointedly to the succession of English power in its warrior princes, a reference perhaps to Henry V or to the absence of any such present hope in the 1590s. He asks ‘that many princes more, / Bred and brought up within that little isle, / May still be famous for like victories’ (5.1.220–2). He becomes prophetic when he wishes that his pains and dangers had been twenty times greater: So that hereafter ages, when they read The painful traffic of my tender youth, Might therefore be inflamed with such resolve As not the territories of France alone, But likewise Spain, Turkey, and what countries else That justly would provoke fair England’s ire, Might at their presence tremble and retire. (5.1.232–5) The playgoer is thus faced with the uncomfortable insistence on an endless spiral of violence in the service of political legitimacy.

Notes 1. D. A. L. Morgan, ‘The Political After-Life of Edward III: The Apotheosis of a Warmonger,’ English Historical Review 112 (1997), 856–81, esp. 874. 2. Froissart, Chroniques (Ainsworth and Diller), Prologue, 71. Translations from the French, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

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3. Hall; Eltis; Parker. 4. Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, in Complete Plays and Poems, ed. E. D. Pendry and J. C. Maxwell (London: Everyman, 1976, rpt. 1993), 5.6.99–102. 5. Professor Dessen in a class at UNCCH, early 1980s. 6. Claire Valente, ‘The Deposition and Abdication of Edward II,’ The English Historical Review 113 (1998), 852–81. 7. Craig Taylor, ‘Edward III and the Plantagenet Claim to the French Throne,’ in J. S. Bothwell (ed), The Age of Edward III (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2001), 155–69, 164. 8. Favier, 13–16. However, Kenneth Fowler, The Age of Plantagenet and Valois: The Struggle for Supremacy 1328–1498 (London: Elek Books Ltd., 1967), claims that the chronology begins with Henry’s accession to the crown of England in 1154 (10–11). 9. See Perroy. The term king-duke is that of Jean le Patourel, ‘The Origins of the War,’ in The Hundred Years War, ed. Kenneth Alan Fowler (London: Macmillan, 1971), 28–50. Alain Demurger, Temps de crises, temps d’espoirs: ´ XIV e – XV e si`ecle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990), 10. 10. Philippe Contamine, ‘De la modernit´e de la guerre de Cent ans: conflit f´eodal, dynastique ou national?’ in De Jeanne d’Arc aux guerres d’Italie: Figures, images et probl`emes du XV e si`ecle (Orl´eans: Paradigme, 1994), 13–37, 13. Contamine also claims that the insistence that late medieval France was not ‘French’ is a construction of British historians. 11. Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Sim´eon Luce, tome premier 1307–1340 (Paris : Jules Renouard, 1869), Vol. 1, p. 404, Amiens redaction paragraph 62. 12. In 1316, Jeanne, daughter of Louis X, eldest son of King Philippe IV, had already been denied the throne. The second son, Philippe V, also had four daughters who were excluded. 13. Perroy; Favier. Cf. C. T. Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War, c.1300–c.1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Robin Neillands, The Hundred Years War (London: Routledge, 1990); Desmond Seward, The Hundred Years War: The English in France, 1337–1453 (New York: Athenaeum, 1978). 14. Melchiori, 12–13. 15. Michael Bennett, ‘Edward III’s Entail and the Succession to the Crown, 1376– 1471,’ English Historical Review 113 (1998), 580–609. 16. ‘The repudiation of Henry III at Paris, 7 January 1589,’ in Potter, 216. 17. Potter, 211–15; Holt, 121–52. 18. Hillman, 8, 72–111, develops the theme of Isabella’s responsibility for the claims to France as context for Marlowe’s Edward II. See also Holt, 149. 19. Melchiori, 68–9, nn. 26, 33, 52, 57. 20. Valente, ‘The Deposition and Abdication of Edward II,’ 852–81; 856. 21. Jean le Bel, Chroniques, II, 30–4. 22. Froissart, Chroniques (Ainsworth and Diller), p. 687, Amiens redaction, II, 331. 23. Antonia Gransden, ‘The Alleged Rape by Edward III of the Countess of Salisbury,’ English Historical Review 87 (1972), 333–44. 24. Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘A ‘‘Beautiful Death’’ and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic,’ Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 50–74.

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25. In general, the report imitates the description of a land battle in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, published in 1592 (see Melchiori 28–9; 108, n.72; 112, n. 144). 26. Larry Champion, ‘ ‘‘Answere to this Perillous Time’’: Ideological Ambivalence in The Raigne of King Edward III and the English Chronicle Plays,’ English Studies, 69 (1988), 125, cites this passage as evidence that ‘reports of actual combat center not on cause and principle but on the specter of agony and grisly death’. 27. Henry J. Webb, ‘Elizabethan Field Artillery,’ Military Affairs 19.4 (1955), 198. See Arnold 47, 44, for details of supplies and their costs. 28. Plaisse, 30–1. 29. Anne Blanchard, Philippe Contamine, Andr´e Corvisier, Jean Meyer, Michel Mollat du Jourdin, Histoire Militaire de la France I: Des origines a` 1715, sous la direction de Philippe Contamine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 133: ‘l’ensemble de la France devint en quelque sorte pays de fronti`ere’. 30. Plaisse, 71–83. 31. Froissart, Chroniques (Ainsworth and Diller), p. 586, paragraph 284. 32. Froissart, Chroniques, ed. M. le baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, tome cinqui`eme 1346–1356 (rep. 1967; Osnabr¨ uck: Biblio Verlag, 1867–77), p. 439. 33. Clifford J. Rogers, ‘The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years’ War,’ Journal of Military History 57 (1993), 241–78; 249. 34. Parker, 16, projects that between Agincourt in 1415 and 1445, near the war’s end, the French reversed their 2:1 ratio of men-at-arms to archers; cf. Eltis 105–8. 35. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

4 Shakespeare and Peace Thomas Kullmann

King James I ‘was the most thorough-going pacifist who ever bore rule in England’. This startling pronouncement was made by George Macaulay Trevelyan in his Shortened History of England, published in 1942.1 Trevelyan, who was highly decorated for bravery in World War I, of course uses the word ‘pacifist’ as a term of abuse. The statement quoted is in fact only one of a string of accusations levelled against the Stuart king. According to Trevelyan, James was ‘the comic offspring’ of a ‘tragic union’, ‘conceited’, ‘garrulous’, ‘wise in book-learning but a poor judge of men’, ‘ignorant of England and her laws’. He ‘mismanaged the always difficult Roman Catholic question’, had ‘a physical horror’ ‘of naked steel’, and, what was worse, ‘utterly neglected the Navy’.2 As a leading proponent of the ‘Whig interpretation’ of history, Trevelyan cannot sympathise with a king who tried to establish autocratic rule and failed to recognise the privileges of Parliament. His assessment of James continued a long historiographic tradition. Nineteenth-century historians and intellectuals disliked James for being a Scotsman, and a homosexual. Charles Dickens, in his satirical Child’s History of England (1853), for example, wallows in the abuse he pours upon ‘His Sowship’, as James was supposedly called by one of his favourites.3 It was only in the last decades of the twentieth century that historians began to hold a revisionist view, recognising James’s political and diplomatic skills and his qualities as a peacemaker.4 This chapter explores that aspiration with regard to Shakespeare’s writing on war and peace, in King Lear, Cymbeline and The Tempest. James’s record in the field of foreign affairs is, in fact, impressive. In the Treaty of London he concluded peace with England’s arch-enemy, Spain, only one year after his accession (1604). This Treaty can be considered ‘a 43

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victory for English diplomacy’ which gave the English peace with honour and allowed them to keep up friendly relations with the Dutch Provinces. James successfully mediated between Sweden and Denmark in 1613, ‘negotiated a settlement of the immensely complicated Cleves-J¨ ulich dispute’ in 1614, and sought to establish well-balanced international relations through the marriages of his children.5 When the Thirty Years’ War broke out in 1618, James engaged in manifold diplomatic activities in an effort to stop or contain hostilities on the continent.6 While he was unsuccessful in bringing about peace, he managed to avoid involving his own realms in the conflict. James’s most ambitious project was certainly to bring about ‘the union of the Church . . . to the solace and universal peace of Christendom’, as he wrote to Jacques-Auguste de Thou, president of the Parliament of Paris and royal librarian to Henri IV, on March 4, 1604.7 To this end, he entered into correspondences with Protestant and Catholic theologians and officials, including the pope, called for an ecumenical council, encouraged participation in synods, wrote theological treatises and sought for alliances with Catholic powers.8 When, in 1609, James addressed his Premonition to the Emperor and ‘to All Other Right High and Mightie Kings; and Right Excellent Free Princes and States of Christendome’ he may have been justified in considering the European rulers his ‘louing Brethren, Cosins, Allies, Confederates and Friends’.9 The object of the Premonition was to refute the pope’s claim of having the power to depose a king. While it is not surprising that James should oppose this claim, he went to remarkable lengths to enlist the Catholic princes’ support for his point of view. James obviously decided to meet Roman Catholicism half-way, declaring his willingness to acknowledge the Bishop of Rome to be ‘Patriarch of the West’ and ‘Princeps Episcoporum’.10 James’s theological views corresponded to those expounded in that voluminous work Of the Church, by the theologian Richard Field, ‘a treatise evidently intended to be a semiofficial treatment of ecclesiology’.11 According to Field, the Bishop of Rome, as ‘the prime Bishop in order and honour’, was the appropriate person to preside over a general council to restore church unity. The main problems faced by James in his peacemaking activities were Parliament and public opinion at home. This was, of course, a conflict inherited from his predecessor: from the beginning of the Dutch revolt, English noblemen and parliamentarians had urged the Queen to go to war against Spain, while Elizabeth tried to resolve the conflict diplomatically, even refusing the sovereignty of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht when it was offered to her by the Dutch, and trying to cancel

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the Governor-Generalship assumed by Lord Leicester.12 She was unable or unwilling, however, to stop the war altogether. While she tried to avoid sending troops to the Low Countries, she encouraged the unofficial warfare conducted by English gentlemen captains against Spanish ships. While Elizabeth can be accused of vacillation, her policies certainly served a threefold purpose. She more or less succeeded in shifting personal responsibilities to others, she maintained a precarious balance between European powers, and she provided an outlet for those of her noble subjects who, like Drake, Raleigh, Leicester and Sidney, wished to prove their chivalric qualities in some kind of martial action.13 Like Elizabeth, James, throughout his reign, was urged to support Protestant causes and to keep a firm stand with regard to the Catholic powers of Europe.14 Nevertheless, he managed to end the war against Spain, going to great lengths to justify his peace policies to his subjects. In promoting a peace treaty with Spain, one of James’s first steps was to outlaw piracy. In his ‘Proclamation concerning Warlike ships at Sea’ issued on 23 June 1603, he refers to the ‘good amity and friendship with all the Princes of Christendome’, including the King of Spain and informs his subjects that while the privateers’ intentions may have been good, they will from now on be considered unlawful pirates. In his ‘Proclamation to represse all Piracies and Depredations upon the Sea’, issued on 30 September 1603, his tone stiffens. He calls ‘such Piracies and Depredacious crimes, most hatefull to his minde, and scandalous to his peaceable government’, and announces that those who ‘take any Ship that doeth belong to any of his Majesties Friends and Allies . . . shall suffer Death’. After the conclusion of the peace treaty between England and Spain on 18 August 1604 a proclamation was issued detailing that James now considered the King of Spain as belonging to his ‘friends and allyes’.15 Contemporary observers noticed that the conclusion of this treaty was not accompanied by public celebrations.16 After the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November 1605, one of James’s main concerns was to clear foreign powers, most notably Spain, from any suspicion.17 Instead, he blames internal Catholic opposition, as when, some years later, he explains that it is ‘the horrour and detestation of the POWDER-TREASON in the mindes of our Parliament’ that necessitates him to issue a proclamation ‘for the due execution of all former Lawes against Recusants’ (2 June 1610), following ‘an humble petition’ made by Parliament ‘to be more wakefull then heretofore we have bene upon the courses and steps of the Papists’.18 In the course of James’s reign the antagonism between the (anti-Spanish) ‘puritan’ and the ‘Spanish’ position intensified.19

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James’s interior policies were also characterised by peacemaking projects. They were, however, only partly successful. James’s plan for a union of Scotland and England, pursued from 1604 to 1607, met with ‘Parliament’s rabid hostility’.20 With regard to the prevailing religious tensions, James succeeded in maintaining a tenuous equilibrium between Calvinist and Arminian clergy, tolerating Roman Catholics as long as they kept quiet.21 In pursuing this policy, James again worked against public opinion, which was dominated by Calvinist Puritanism. Although in his 1609 speech to parliament James compared kings to God22 and obviously aspired to be an absolute monarch – in accordance with notions of kingship developed in continental political theory – he was aware of the actual limitations of his power.23 He therefore made ample use of the strategies of persuasion open to a Renaissance prince, influencing discourse through the means of lavish public display.24 The principal image of James propagated by himself was that of a peacemaker: ‘He was hailed as a new Augustus, as Great Britain’s Solomon and, by the relentless repetition of the motto Beati Pacifici . . . , as a possible restorer of unity to a divided Europe.’25 While James could not stop Protestant militancy, he managed to establish a discourse of peaceful kingship or empery which effectively put an end to the romance of chivalry which had determined the political ambitions of Elizabethan courtiers, at least after the death of his son Prince Henry. When James distinguished Shakespeare’s theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, by allowing them to call themselves the King’s Men in 1603, he also expected this company to contribute to his royal splendour. By 1603 Shakespeare was already a well-established court dramatist. During the reign of Elizabeth, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were invited to play at court 32 times, more than any other external theatrical company for which payments are recorded. During James’s reign, 175 court performances by the King’s Men were recorded; as far as can be seen from the records, Shakespeare was the playwright whose plays were performed most often.26 Shakespeare and some of his fellow-actors took part in James’s coronation pageant on 15 March 1604,27 and were paid for attending on the Spanish ambassador, Don Juan de Velasco, for a period of eighteen days in August 1604, at the time of the peace negotiations.28 I should like to argue that the King’s Men might have been expected to support the king in influencing public discourse, and that one of their tasks was to propagate James’s concept of universal peace. In Shakespeare’s earlier plays James could find ample evidence of the dramatist’s peaceful attitude. Almost all of the plays end with some kind of reconciliation. The two tetralogies of the histories, in particular, end

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in celebrations of peace restored after much bloodshed in war. Richard III ends with the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, but it is even more important that a lasting peace is established: Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord, That would reduce these bloody days again And make poor England weep forth streams of blood. Let them not live to taste this land’s increase, That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace. Now civil wounds are stopped; peace lives again. That she may long live here, God say ‘Amen’. (5.5.35–41) In Henry V Henry defeats the French forces at Agincourt and annexes the kingdom of France to that of England. While there is considerable ambiguity as to the appropriateness of and justification for this war,29 its result may certainly cause patriotic feelings among the audience. The English victory is duly celebrated at the end of Act IV and the beginning of Act V, where the Chorus compares Henry’s triumphal entry into London to that which the Earl of Essex might make upon his return from Ireland (5.0.30–4). This reference to Essex (a notorious war-monger) is usually understood as a compliment, but we should notice that the Chorus specifies that the citizens of London had ‘much more cause’ to celebrate Henry V than Essex (5.0.34). If, as is quite possible, Shakespeare knew about Essex’s imminent failure, the reference could be considered particularly insidious. In Henry V, as in known history, the English triumph marks simply an intermediate stage. At the end of the play, the emphasis is put on the peace established between the nations of England and France, rather than on the English victory. The French King expresses his hope ‘that never war advance / His bleeding sword ’twixt England and fair France’ (5.2.349–50), and the French Queen is given occasion to state her wish ‘That English may as French, French Englishmen, / Receive each other, God speak this ‘‘Amen’’ ’ (5.2.362–3). As in the passage quoted above, peace is considered to be a divine gift. The plays presumably written from 1603 onwards contain elements reminiscent of James’s political thought in general and his pacifism in particular. It has long been observed that Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure recalls certain aspects of James’s behaviour and echoes some of the ideas in his Basilikon Doron.30 King Lear and Cymbeline, set in an

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ancient British past threatened by civil war and invasion, reflect James’s project for the union of ‘Great Britain’. Macbeth takes up a Scottish topic, featuring historical events which ultimately led to the establishment of the Stuart dynasty. Recently scholars have found the idea of Shakespeare as a court propagandist unpalatable. Following Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion that Shakespeare’s plays are ‘relentlessly subversive’,31 they have laboured to find hidden subversion in the plays, contending, for example, that Duke Vincentio is in fact a weak sovereign32 (although he is never called weak in the play). Some scholars have even found resemblances between James and King Lear,33 but, as R. A. Foakes notices, ‘Lear behaves in a way precisely opposite to that James had recommended to his heir’,34 dividing the kingdom among his daughters whereas James propagated national unity. I should rather like to argue that Shakespeare was indeed subversive, in that he tried to assist King James in subverting public opinion. King Lear is a case in point: Lear’s division of the kingdom of Britain could be seen as that political fall of man which James, through a union of Scotland and England, was going to rectify. In this context it is striking that the foreign monarch who tries to restore Lear’s kingship is the King of France, who in Shakespeare’s and James’s own day was the head of a Catholic nation.35 The political dynamite contained in King Lear can possibly be assessed from the fact that several references to the French invasion found in the Quarto text of 1608 are omitted or toned down in the Folio version, the manuscript behind which was probably a prompt book.36 Most notably, Kent in the Quarto text informs us that a power is coming from France (8.21–5) and that the King of France himself ‘spreads his banners in our noiseless land’ (16.55). By contrast, the Folio only mentions servants who are ‘spies and speculations’ to France (3.1.15). In both the Quarto and Folio texts, however, Cornwall states that ‘the army of France is landed’ (3.7.2, 14.2). And both texts agree that Cordelia is acting from filial duty: ‘No blown ambition doth our arms incite, / But love, dear love, and our aged father’s right’ (4.3.27–8 [Folio], 18.28–9 [Quarto]). There is no reason to question Cordelia’s sincerity as her love is consistently contrasted with her sisters’ callousness. As R. A. Foakes points out, the changes do not concern the fact of the French invasion (which, after all, is central to the plot in the sources), but put Cordelia rather than the French king at the head of the invading army.37 The play therefore suggests a sympathetic view of a country, which by many Englishmen of Shakespeare’s days was considered to be inimical, thus giving ideological support to King James’s endeavours to establish friendly relations with

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powerful Catholic countries by means of diplomacy. Many among the audiences of King Lear may not have shared James’s views about foreign policies. I should like to suggest that it is for this reason that Shakespeare chooses an indirect, roundabout way of conveying his distribution of sympathies. As the play is set in the legendary past, the ‘subversion’ of received public opinion would probably take some time to ‘sink in’. Another play intimately connected to James’s kingship is Macbeth.38 As Banquo and Fleance are among James’s ancestors, the play has often been understood as, among other things, a celebration of the origins of the Stuart dynasty. Scholars have been puzzled, though, by the fact that the Stuart dynasty is only referred to obliquely, in the ‘Show of eight kings’ (4.1.127, SD) presented to Macbeth by the Weird Sisters. The last one of them carries a glass, which shows to Macbeth ‘many more’ kings, who carry ‘twofold balls and treble sceptres’ (4.1.137), which probably alludes not just to ‘the double coronation of James at Scone and at Westminster’39 but to the prospective union of three countries (including Ireland). I should like to argue, though, that the main political point of Macbeth is not the Stuart dynasty but the relationship between England and Scotland: Malcolm and Macduff flee to England, to escape from Macbeth’s tyranny, and the English Army invades Scotland to restore the rightful heir to the Scottish throne. The play shows England as a champion of Scottish freedom, and celebrates an English–Scottish alliance. In the play this alliance brings about peace; similarly, King James professed to establish peace by uniting the two kingdoms. It is in the ‘romances’ that Shakespeare treats the topics of peace and reconciliation most extensively and that his pacifism becomes most apparent. In Cymbeline, set in Britain’s legendary past, the Roman envoy, Caius Lucius, reminds Cymbeline of the tribute his uncle Cassibelan agreed to pay to Rome. It is the wicked queen and her son Cloten who decline the further payment of tribute to the Roman Empire: LUCIUS: When Julius Caesar . . . was in this Britain, And conquered it, Cassibelan, thine uncle, Famous in Caesar’s praises no whit less Than in his feats deserving it, for him And his succession granted Rome a tribute, Yearly three thousand pounds, which by thee lately Is left untendered. And, to kill the marvel, Q UEEN: Shall be so ever.

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CLOTEN: There will be many Caesars Ere such another Julius. Britain’s a world By itself, and we will nothing pay For wearing our own noses. (3.1.2–14) The British request to be independent from Rome would certainly not have sounded unreasonable to Shakespeare’s audiences. There are several signals, however, by which Shakespeare indicates to the audience that Lucius’ position is in fact correct. The refusal of payment comes from the two wicked characters who take it upon themselves to answer the envoy in the king’s stead. Their foul language is contrasted to the courtesies of Lucius who praises Cassibelan’s ‘feats’ of arms. As the weak king he is, Cymbeline only follows suit: You must know, Till the injurious Romans did extort This tribute from us we were free. Caesar’s ambition . . . against all colour here Did put the yoke upon ’s, which to shake off Becomes a warlike people, whom we reckon Ourselves to be. (3.1.46–53) In the context of the rest of the scene and the play, the quality of being ‘warlike’ is almost seen negatively: a warlike people is bound to fight wars, and to suffer gratuitous bloodshed. Cymbeline himself, however, provides a reason why he should be warlike and peaceful at the same time: ‘Thy Caesar knighted me; my youth I spent / Much under him; of him I gathered honour . . .’ (3.1.69–70). In fighting Rome, Cymbeline violates the rules of knighthood, friendship and hospitality. The concept of British nationalism and independence won by means of a military conflict is discredited. Shakespeare is careful to point out, though, that the British were nonetheless distinguished by bravery and prowess: in the battle against the Romans they are victorious. As in Henry V, there is a certain ambiguity as to the appropriateness of patriotic pride. There is no question, however, as to the desirability of peace. King Cymbeline in the end decides to resume paying the ‘wonted tribute’ to Rome. It is because of this decision that peace is not only concluded but will be maintained:

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Publish we this peace To all our subjects. Set we forward, let A Roman and a British ensign wave Friendly together. So through Lud’s Town march, And in the temple of great Jupiter Our peace we’ll ratify; seal it with feasts. Set on there. Never was a war did cease, Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace. (5.6.479–86) Just as the other play set in Britain’s legendary past, King Lear, Cymbeline appears to contain topical allusions which might be considered subversive: ancient Rome could well be identified with modern Rome, i.e. Roman Catholicism. Whatever his personal confessional belief, what matters is that Shakespeare’s play to a certain extent supports King James’s political agenda. It is evident, though, that Shakespeare went beyond James in making Cymbeline not just conclude peace but actually submit to Rome.40 James definitely wanted to be free from Rome politically, and Shakespeare may well be criticising James in Cymbeline for not going far enough in his endeavours to promote universal peace. The Tempest, of course, sums up the discourse of peace and reconciliation. The rightful duke is restored to his dukedom within a political order held together by the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda. Unlike Prospero, King James had never been ousted from his throne, but like Prospero he considered himself, and perhaps really was, a very learned man who spent a lot of time in his library. Like Prospero, again, James intended to secure peace by means of dynastic marriages, marrying his daughter Elizabeth to the Elector-Palatine and trying to marry first his son Henry and after Henry’s death his son Charles to a Spanish princess. The main political point of the play, though, is certainly that it is possible to be reconciled to one’s enemies even though these enemies have really been sinful and vicious and may, like Antonio, not even be likely to change. Prospero concludes an alliance with the King of Naples although this king supported his wicked brother. He forgives those who have trespassed against him but he does not turn the other cheek: ‘most wicked sir, whom to call brother / Would even infect my mouth’ (5.1.130–1). The real-life equivalent of Prospero’s magic powers was diplomacy. Even if courts and princes are evil, politics has to go on.

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In his continuous diplomatic efforts to achieve peace, James was careful not to make too many concessions. He always insisted on making peace on his own terms; when this could not be achieved, however, he kept negotiating rather than declaring war. It may jar with received notions of poetic independence to assume that a great author like Shakespeare wrote some of his best plays in the pay of a king, a king despised by many historians for his weakness, his autocratism and his unsympathetic personality. However, once we accept that literature does not happen in any apolitical sphere but takes part in the political discourses of its age and language, we may come to terms with the idea that King James and Shakespeare collaborated on a shared project, a project to which from the point of view of the twenty-first century we may well accord some sympathy. This is not to say, of course, that Shakespeare engaged in mindless adulation. While the king and queen did see performances of Shakespeare’s plays, their target audience obviously included people remote from the court and court politics. It was these Globe theatre audiences whose political outlooks Shakespeare set out to disturb. Neither did Shakespeare merely, and slavishly, follow James’s ideological lead. His visions of universal peace and religious unity probably went much beyond what James would ever have been prepared to accept. Cymbeline’s decision to submit to Rome could well be interpreted as a call to rejoin the Church of Rome and submit to the pope – if this is what Shakespeare intended, his subversive affirmation of court politics contained another layer of anti-constitutional subversion. His attitude may have resembled that of Bishop Richard Corbett (1582–1635), one of the most ardent adherents of Anglican Arminianism in the wake of Andrewes, Hall and Laud, who in the 1620s wrote ‘The Fairies’ Farewell’, a poem which takes a nostalgic look at ‘merry England’s’ Roman Catholic past: Witness those rings and roundelayes Of theirs, which yet remain, Were footed in Queen Mary’s days On many a grassy plain; But since of late, Elizabeth And later James came in, They never danced on any heath As when the time had been.41 To criticise King James for stopping ‘those rings and roundelayes’ is most unfair: in 1618 James promulgated The King’s Majesty’s Declaration

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to His Subjects, concerning Lawful Sports to be Used, known as the Book of Sports, to promote folk customs and defend them against Puritan enmity.42 Corbet, perhaps like Shakespeare, may have felt that James just did not go far enough.

Notes 1. George Macaulay Trevelyan, A Shortened History of England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 280. In Trevelyan’s earlier England under the Stuarts (1904, rev. 1925, London: Methuen, 1965), the tone is much more subdued, although he does speak of the ‘indelible negative impression upon England’ left by the Stuart kings; ibid., 70. 2. Trevelyan, 277–80. Trevelyan’s assertion is not quite correct. James did not so much ‘neglect’ the navy as knowingly condone its corruption because to do otherwise would have undermined the structure of his government (Ros King, privately). 3. The Works of Charles Dickens, ed. Andrew Lang, Gadshill edition, 34 vols., vol. 30 (London: Chapman & Hall, n. d. [1898]), 359–60. 4. See, e.g., Cogswell, Houston, 30–1; Patterson, 357–64; 361, n.110. 5. Houston, 67–70; cf. Patterson, 155–6. 6. Patterson, 293–338. 7. Patterson, 1–3; in a proclamation issued on 12 November 1604 James calls Henri IV of France ‘our good brother The most Christian King’, thus according to a Catholic monarch a title which emphasised his Catholicism. See James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (eds), Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. I: Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 98. 8. Patterson, passim. 9. Patterson, 89. 10. Patterson, 95. 11. Patterson, 118. 12. See, e.g., Elizabeth Jenkins, Elizabeth the Great (London: Gollancz, 1958), 265–7, and J. B. Black, The Reign of Elizabeth, 1558–1603, The Oxford History of England (1936, Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 333–70. 13. Cf., e.g., McCoy, 57, 74f. 14. See, e.g., Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts, 108, 119–20. 15. Stuart Royal Proclamations, I, 30 ; 53–4 ; 91. 16. Stuart Royal Proclamations, I, 91, note 3. 17. ‘Proclamation denouncing Thomas Percy and other his adherents as Traitors’, 7 November 1605, Stuart Royal Proclamations, I, 125–6. 18. Stuart Royal Proclamations, I, 245–6, 249. 19. Cf. S. L. Adams, ‘Foreign Policy and the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624,’ in Kevin Sharpe (ed), Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 139–71; 140. 20. Houston, 37; for details, see R. C. Munden, ‘James I and ‘‘the growth of mutual distrust’’: King, Commons, and Reform, 1603–1604,’ in Kevin Sharpe (ed), Faction and Parliament, 43–72; 58, 62–6.

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21. Houston, 56–66; cf. Stuart Royal Proclamations, I, 249, where James refers to ‘so many of Our Subjects, who though blinded with the superstitions of Poperie, yet caried a dutifull heart towards our Obedience’. 22. McIlwain, 307. 23. On various interpretations of James’s notion of ‘absolute’ rule cf., e.g., Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: the Scottish Context and the English Translation,’ in Linda Levy Peck (ed), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 36–54; J. P. Sommerville, ‘James I and the Divine Right of Kings: English Politics and Continental Theory,’ ibid., 55–70; Paul Christianson, ‘Royal and Parliamentary Voices on the Ancient Constitution,’ ibid., 71–95. 24. Cf., e.g., Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1994); on the ambivalences of Jacobean court culture and the issue of peace cf. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Cultural Diversity and Cultural Change at the Court of James I,’ in Peck (ed), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, 99–112. 25. Houston, 67; on James’s notion of himself as a Roman Emperor see Goldberg. 26. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), vol. 4, 117–30, 168–83. 27. An account of Sir George Hone, Master of the Great Wardrobe, lists the gift of four and a half yards of red cloth to Shakespeare and eight of his fellow-actors ‘against his Majesties sayd royall proceeding through the Citie of London’. See E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), vol. 2, 73. 28. Cf. e.g., Gerald Eades Bentley, Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 113–14, and Ina Schabert (ed), Shakespeare-Handbuch, 3rd edn. (M¨ unchen: Kr¨ oner, 1992), 160. 29. See, e.g., Fraser and Morse in this volume. 30. See, e.g., J. W. Lever, ‘Introduction,’ Measure for Measure, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1965), xlviii–l. 31. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 65. 32. See, e.g., Brian Gibbons, ‘Introduction,’ Measure for Measure, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 37f. 33. See, e.g., Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 106–9. 34. ‘Introduction,’ King Lear, The Arden Shakespeare (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 15. 35. On the contrast between the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy in scene 1.1 and an identification of Burgundy with the Low Countries cf. Thomas Kullmann, ‘Burgundy in King Lear,’ Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft West: Jahrbuch 1987, 109–13. 36. See, e.g., Foakes, ‘Introduction,’ 127–8, 140–1. 37. ‘Appendix I: Two Textual Problems,’ in Foakes (ed), King Lear, 393–402. 38. According to Stanley Wells, ‘Macbeth is the play of Shakespeare’s that most clearly reflects’ the ‘special relationship [of the King’s Men] with their sovereign’, William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, William Montgomery, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford:

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39. 40.

41. 42.

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Clarendon, 1986), 1099. On parallels between Macbeth and James’s ideas and interests see, e.g. Kenneth Muir, ‘Introduction,’ Macbeth, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1962), liv–lv. Macbeth, ed. K. Muir, The Arden Shakespeare, 4.1.121, note. This ending may, of course, also allude to James’s habit of presenting himself as a Roman Emperor who, like Caesar Augustus, was free from political interference and could guarantee peace to his unified empire. On this, see King, 80–1. Quoted from: The Faber Book of Children’s Verse, ed. Janet Adam Smith (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 205–6. See, e.g., Trevelyan, England Under the Stuarts, 140–1, and Leah S. Marcus, ‘Politics and Pastoral: Writing the Court on the Countryside,’ in Sharpe and Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, 139–59.

5 Some Social Costs of War Ruth Morse

vae victis Woe to the vanquished. (Livy, History, V.xlviii.9) This is an essay about what makes war, what war makes, what minor characters make of wars and the men who make them, but above all about those who stand and wait in times of war. It addresses the question of how we are to pose our questions with our modern concepts, given how distant is the rhetoric of Shakespeare’s wars, whether those of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, or those of Thebes and Troy. Shakespeare comprehends the points of view of soldiers, but also of other characters sucked into the maelstrom of public violence, of legal armed conflict. In the course of his evolving career, his characters offer sometimes consistent views of contradictory ideas, and he is always sensitive to the paradox that in the search for the Just War, legitimated by over-arching law, it is not Truth which is War’s first casualty, but Law itself. None of his characters ever finally offers a solution to the problem of discriminating a Just War from anything which is just war. War is always ruin – not only for the vanquished, but in many ways for the victorious also. All of his characters must consider consequences. Arguments about Shakespeare’s engagement throughout the English history plays with the idea of ‘Epic’ occupied many critics after the Second World War, and established commonplaces of controversy (unifying the nation state, good and bad kingship, strength and tyranny, magnanimity and extravagance).1 Epics established ideas about writing war, about war as foundation myth, as passage to immortality, as in some sense the telos of masculine, aristocratic aspiration. Most studies have therefore concentrated on the nobles, ‘the great and the good’. 56

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The great epics, however, always weighed their legendary heroes’ public achievements against the public and private costs of those achievements: being wily or honey-tongued, or even pius were never unalloyed virtues. Dishonesty helped Odysseus to survive and Aeneas to found a new Troy, and if we ignore their evident flaws or the damage done by both men to their companions and consorts, let alone their enemies, we miss the complexity of the poems, and also of the genre. Innocent or not, bystanders are seduced, suffer, and die: whether the character is a spearcarrier or an abandoned princess or goddess, standing by is a dangerous activity. Recent historicist work has expanded the range of enquiry, but even Nick de Somogyi’s fine Shakespeare’s Theatre of War focuses on war’s agents.2 For wars which were just out of reach of living memory – by which I mean audience memory, or inherited memory, or assumed memory – there were contrasting aspects of historical experience: first, discharged soldiers transformed into predators using their variously-honed military skills for brigandage and mendacious mendicancy. Second, there was still memory of the devastated countrysides of northern England and southern Scotland, eastern Ireland and western France, which therefore disgorged their displaced persons on the cities (thus edging toward anti-pastoral). And, third, against the supposedly aristocratic presumptions of epic poetry or handbooks on the Art of War, there was the ugly, patronising attitude that since the poor are always with us, they are also always expendable. When they are poor, the displaced are not just human flotsam and jetsam, at the mercy of social currents, but refuse – Flemings to be pushed into the sea. The third especially, the poor, appear only as the commonest of common soldiers, and have only the briefest of walk-on parts, whether as Falstaff’s pathetic recruits or the men upon whom Henry eavesdrops the night before Agincourt (on stage as the ‘also cast’ as those cast out). But there is another kind of poor, which cuts transversally through society, not those men who ‘work for all’, but their war-impoverished dependents, their wives and daughters, for whom war and its aftermath, like nature’s famines, pestilences, and plagues, creates not a natural, but a cultural disaster. Let me therefore reiterate the two traditional assumptions I wish to avoid: the syllogistic slide from the idea that the genre of war glorifies it, that in glorifying war as the supreme activity of men, it thus simultaneously promotes itself as the king of genres and the assimilation (whether triumphalist or not) of Shakespeare’s English history plays to that genre of war. In what follows I wish to turn from genre to look rather at the way the plays insistently suggest a background which foregrounds itself to

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ask that we notice, that we take more care of these, not only throughout the two English historical tetralogies, but elsewhere as well.3 One of the ways we recognise Shakespeare’s concentration upon the unimportant characters, the suffering patients of the agents of war, is the way they emerge, idiosyncratically, in his contributions to collaborative plays. This chapter will compare three of them with single-authored plays. The extract we identify as Hand D in the play Sir Thomas More appeals as Shakespeare’s in part because of its unusual point of view. Shakespeare, or rather, his character, More, offers prolepsis as restraining argument. When More asks his listeners to imagine the fleeing poor, he supplies them with a future counter-factual mental picture. It may be objected that riots are not war, but my point is the characteristic use of image as argument, a rhetoric of recontextualisation, and Shakespeare’s ability to surprise by point of view, reversal, or revivified rhetorical trope. More asks if these are the consequences we desire; rhetorically speaking, in the exercise of dialogic argument, is this an action ‘worthy to be done’? In what follows I am interested in the rhetoric which surrounds what we might now call the ‘social costs’ of war and its concomitant violence. By opening with More, I hope to invite reconsideration of what constitutes ‘war’ and its surroundings (pillage, for example, or the punishment of the defeated or the fleeing). Riots are civil disorder, but would not have been considered as like ‘war’ in the literary sense because they are internal disruption, what Sir Edmund Tilney, as censor, tendentiously called ‘insurrection’ or ‘mutiny’, little local difficulties inflicted on aliens, guest-workers, foreigners among us, ‘wretched strangers’ being robbed (only call it confiscation), expelled, beaten in the streets.4 Uprisings or revolts (those preludes to civil war), however, remind us how close chastising riots can be to the breakdown of the commonwealth, internalising the external, which is, indeed, part of More’s point.5 He even conflates the vocabularies which are familiar to the play’s blue-pencilling censor, Tilney. More’s choices of words implicitly move the argument (I italicise the telltale words): To kneel to be forgiven Is safer wars than ever you can make, Whose discipline is riot . . . What rebel captain, As mut’nies are incident, by his name Can still the rout? Who will obey a traitor?

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Or how can well that proclamation sound, When there is no addition but ‘a rebel’ To qualify a rebel? You’ll put down strangers, Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses, And lead the majesty of law in lyam To slip him like a hound – alas, alas! Say now the King, As he is clement if th’offender mourn, Should so much come too short of your great trespass As but to banish you: whither would you go? What country, by the nature of your error Should give you harbour? (123–5, 128–42) The imaginative conclusion is that the mutineers will discover that in banishment they too ‘must needs be strangers’ (130) driven to seek asylum ‘in a nation of such barbarous temper’ (131) so that the breakdown of law and order will come full circle. The argument is certainly complete, and it convinces More’s audience. What is striking is the way the assumptions of legality are built into the description, including a short but pithy demonstration of the difference between natural rights and contractual, therefore rescindable, agreements. The idea that the breaking of laws hitherto respected as natural will engender the breaking of social bonds is ancient, but also contemporary. My first example thus begins with a pictured flight, of imagined consequences which More shares with the Master of the Revels, to call attention to assumed categories. Alerting ourselves to our own categories, examining our terminology and thinking about how it may have shifted, semantically, from the sixteenth century, always requires a certain degree of attention to the obvious. I have just used the current phrase, ‘seek asylum’, which revivifies an old, sacral ideal, specific to claiming the sanctuary of the altar; in that sense the claimant partook of inviolate holy space. In Shakespeare’s day ‘refuge’ had not yet given us ‘refugee’, and ‘victim’ (like ‘holocaust’) was still associated with religious sacrifice, almost always of animals; that is to say that there is teleology implied in the idea that the sacrifice was for something, part of some kind of petition or propitiation. Our much-used ‘victim’ is entirely absent from Shakespeare’s plays.6 He uses ‘fugitive’ only three times, with an implication not just of ‘refugee’, but also of ‘deserter’, which returns us to More’s legal orientation. Joan La Pucelle seduces Burgundy by predicting that

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once the English have no further need of him he will be ‘thrust out like a fugitive’ (1 Henry VI, 3.3.67).7 The retreating Parthians are ‘fugitive’ in Antony and Cleopatra (3.1.7), and, more accusingly, Enobarbus uses the term when he calls himself ‘a master leaver and a fugitive’ (4.10.21).8 In the large, connotative sense, there is the implication of losing the law’s protection which More extends to losing the social agreement which also protects the law. Like Machiavelli’s challenge to the pieties of political power, Shakespeare inconveniently recurs to the pity of war not by a simple act of reversing, but by recontextualising the proper of war, and asking us to look at an image of that horror. In his day men knew that war was hell, but that was not the main thrust of their thinking, or writing, about it. The topos of rhetorical training, ‘honourable or dishonourable to be done’ always invited complex demurrals. I would hazard that one essential quality in all strategic writing about war, which distinguishes Shakespeare on war’s alarms by its absence, is an almost complete lack of surprise.

Belligerents Recontextualising also implies attention to the presuppositions from which arguments, as descriptions, depart. Defining the categories of persons involved also asks us to think about the ways that apparently peripheral characters may nonetheless be central to the events described. Our modern vocabulary of persons not directly engaged in warfare has had to be extended from pre-existing vocabularies denoting, as the norm, fighting men. War is supremely the experience where the contradictions inherent in our beliefs are acute, unresolvable, and fatal. The ontology (and not just the telos) of those who ‘fight for all’ (to use the medieval language of the three estates) ruins not only their own estate, but also the earthly and earthy estates of those who pray for all and those many more who work for all. Some further verbal examples will indicate the extent of changes in the course of the last hundred years. ‘Civilian’, not surprisingly, emerged as a nineteenth-century usage, and we need to be alert to the semantic peregrinations of ‘civil’ itself. Romeo and Juliet’s opening sonnet plays with the two derivations, from ‘civitas’ and the city behaviour we account ‘civilised’: ‘where civil blood makes civil hands unclean’. If we needed ‘civilian’ it was as an addition to ‘citizen’, not unlike the way ‘casualty’ moved from its aleatory denotation, ‘casual’ or ‘chance’, to something we no longer think of as chance except for the unlucky individual, or ‘civilian’. ‘Non-combatant’, as would still have been obvious a generation

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ago, when national service – if not taken for granted – was still a fact of life in Britain, or France, or the United States, did not originally designate those unfortunate enough to live in territory laid to the sword, but those members of fighting forces who did not fight: men of religion or medicine, or the inevitable musicians who were integral to armies. Even the OED’s first definition is striking: ‘one who is not a combatant, as a civilian in time of war; spec. in the army and navy, one whose duties do not include that of fighting, as a surgeon, purser, or chaplain’. The idea of trailing camp followers, portative dependent whores, cooks, or farriers, escapes the great dictionary, product of an age of state-organised armies.9 The examples given are earlier in the twentieth century for the first definition, much later for the second. Shakespeare’s English armies carry both definitions. As other contributors to this volume have shown, Fluellen’s outrage over the killing of the baggage boys in Henry V is one of those places where, at least in the Folio text of the play, Shakespeare muddies the waters, giving two interpretations for the historical Henry’s order to kill the French prisoners. It is Gower who interprets the order as revenge for the boys and for the sacking of the king’s tent (4.7.5–11). Henry’s command – in the previous scene – is more opaque, stemming historically from a fear of being over-run by the enemy, who could be reinforced by prisoners within the camp (4.6.35–8); that is, the ‘external’ is, at least temporarily, ‘internal’, and the legalities varied, depending on what could be enforced, and who won. The customs of quarter and ransom were old, but so was the duty of prisoners to revolt if they could. Since the unidentified French soldiers loot as well as kill, it would seem that, far from being a strategic attack, their unlawful or at least ‘unjust’ killing of non-combatants illustrates rather the breakdown of military organisation or control. It constitutes the kind of riot against which More warned. Not only is ‘the’ law not clear, it is not clear to what ‘law’ one might appeal. And the poor had their own customs, though we seldom see them in literature; one well-known exception is Malory’s scene after the final Arthurian battle when Arthur’s men need urgently to spirit the dying king away, because ‘the churls’ are already in the battlefield, robbing and killing the dying or dead. Thus far, of course, we are only looking at males, young and not so young, and at a contested, but largely positive, evaluative-descriptive world in which soldiers are still valorous and wars appeal to the traditions of epic achievement, secular man’s heroic calling to corporate glory in victory and individual valiance in defeat. It is hard to replace modern negativities about the futilities and destruction of war, the impossibility

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of ‘playing the game’, with another kind of surprise which we may experience in rediscovering the semantic shifts which took place under the effects and extent of the last century’s global warfare. It was during the Second World War that words, now familiar from the terrifying advance in the vocabulary of victimhood, burgeoned and extended their scope. ‘The refugees . . . or, as they term these people here . . . the Displaced Persons’ in 1944 and, a year later, ‘The real difficulty was and is the care of the slave laborers, men, women and children . . .’ who are now called DPs.10 We also need to historicise ‘Prisoners ‘‘of war’’ ’, because that is not a usage hallowed by time and epic. How are we to discuss ‘exchange’ of prisoners, hostages, refugees, les sinistr´es of war, and does it matter when or where the ‘returns’ occur? What of the ‘atrocities’ committed against those who never returned? The OED knows no such association before the propaganda of the Great War, after the invasion of Belgium in 1914. The dictionary cites Wilfred Owen in 1918, ‘I have found in all these villages no evidence of German atrocities. The girls here were treated with perfect respect’, although an illustrative quotation from a poet should also alert us to the bias toward literary sources which is so much a characteristic of the OED as it is of memory.11 Capture and captivity evolved, and bring us to the problem of exchange, and of value. Sparta’s ‘with your shield or on it’ affected to make no distinctions in how one was captured. One was not captured. Emasculation, slavery, and execution were what the vanquished could expect. They were booty. There was, however, regular exchange of captured soldiers, as there was agreement about the taking, release, and execution of hostages. By the time of the medieval poems of war, at Thebes or Troy, and in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, there is a disreputable exchange of Antenor against Criseyde, a traitor for a traitor’s daughter, a woman neither aristocratic, nor a soldier, nor a Greek. In Shakespeare’s play, Calchas’s request at the beginning of 3.3 is obsequiously unpleasant. Calchas speaks of ‘buying’ his daughter (3.3.28). Later, Paris more politely expresses it as ‘to render him / For the enfreed Antenor, the fair Cressid’ (4.1.38–9). But Paris’s interest is in Helen, and he challenges Diomed as to who is the worthier possessor of that prize. Diomed’s angry (and illegitimate) disparagement of her ‘contaminated carrion weight’ as the sole cause of war, earns the rebuff ‘you do as chapmen do, / Dispraise the thing that you desire to buy’. In claiming the corresponding virtue, ‘We’ll not commend what we intend to sell’, Paris also insults Cressida as merchandise (4.1.76–9). Both women are reduced to things exchangeable for cash. As Diana Henderson also argues later in this volume pp. 231ff, monetarising value is always parlous

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in Shakespeare. Neither Shakespeare’s Troy nor his Greek camp is pretty, but part of what constitutes their ugliness turns on what we must recognise as traffic in women, sullying the argument of war. Christianity was supposed to have brought certain improvements in the ‘laws’ of war, and to have discouraged the murder, castration, or enslavement of the vanquished, taken for granted in the ancient world. Shakespeare is largely silent about this development, with his remarkable restraint, or self-discipline, about the alterity of those times. Quick recourse to the Harvard Concordance reveals that ‘hostage’ appears only in plays set in Antiquity, where there were agreements about how these exchanges were conducted, and only in the strict sense (Coriolanus, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus). Woe, indeed, to the vanquished.

The vanquished There are inevitably, to paraphrase recent debates, civilian casualties as well as military ones. Much turns on the agreements which comprised at least the idea that there might be conventions in warfare long before the formalities of Geneva. Edward III is a kind of ‘rhetorical reader’ in the conduct of war, which includes the French Prince Charles attempting to persuade Villiers to break his parole (4.3.37–44). Other contributors to this volume have dealt with Henry V’s harshness before the walls of Harfleur, following on, perhaps, from the merciless siege warfare of Tamburlaine, from the wrong readings represented by Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well or the treachery of Much Ado About Nothing. Edward III contains a contrasting scene at the siege of Calais, which asks us to think hard about some French enemies. A number of poor citizens come to ask Edward’s mercy after they have been expelled by the ‘captain of the town, . . . That so expense of victuals may be saved’. The following dialogue ensues: KING EDWARD: A charitable deed, no doubt, and worthy praise! But how do you imagine then to speed? We are your enemies, in such a case We can no less but put you to the sword, Since, when we proffered truce, it was refused. FIRST POOR MAN: And if your grace no otherwise vouchsafe, As welcome death is unto us as life. KING EDWARD: Poor silly men, much wronged, and more distressed! Go, Derby, go, and see they be relieved,

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Command that victuals be appointed them And give to everyone five crowns apiece. The lion scorns to touch the yielding prey, And Edward’s sword must flesh itself in such As wilful stubborness hath made perverse. (4.2.12–35) This, of course, offers us a contrast to the scene we know as ‘the burghers of Calais’, and their public humiliation, saved by the intervention of a merciful woman among the victorious, Queen Philippa (5.1.54–5). Shakespeare rings his changes: it is the Dauphin who is unable to relieve Harfleur, the French king who fails Calais. Froissart originates the story of the Burghers of Calais, which makes me more willing to believe in Queen Philippa’s intervention (Philippa of Hainault apparently counts as English), without claiming to assimilate it to gendered mercy. Gender does have its place, and its variety in terms of social status. I want to offer some examples of combatant women who become non-combatant, and vice versa. The Two Noble Kinsmen gives us several different kinds of example. Theseus’s marriage procession is interrupted by three queens. At least, they were queens; now they are widows, wretches, their husbands killed in a war in the ‘foul fields of Thebes’ against ‘cruel Creon’, who has refused the burial of their bodies. As they kneel before Theseus, his Amazonian queen, Hippolyta, and her sister Emilia, the stage image becomes an argument for the law of war, in a situation where there is no law, not even customary respect for the dead. They appeal ‘For pity’s sake and true gentility’s’. One might expect Amazons to be Amazons, and fight, against the presumptions of gender, but they do not. The second queen, addressing Hippolyta as ‘soldieress’, remarks that Theseus in marrying her has ‘shrunk thee into / The bound thou wast o’erflowing, at once subduing / Thy force and thy affection’ (TNK 1.1.1–85). Emilia herself takes up the theme of speaking pictures: . . . If that you were EMILIA: The ground-piece of some painter, I would buy you T’instruct me ’gainst a capital grief, indeed Such heart-pierced demonstration; but alas, Being a natural sister of our sex, Your sorrow beats so ardently upon me

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That it shall make a counter-reflect ’gainst My brother’s heart and warm it to some pity, Though it were made of stone. (1.1.121–9) ‘Mercy’ in this scene means taking pity on the widows by helping them in their struggle against ‘cruel’ Creon. Rereading these lines, it strikes me as ‘correct’ that the queens ask the Amazons not for their right arms in battle, but for their influence on Theseus. In this the queens are good strategists, and in their urgent appeal they mention that Creon, drunk with victory, will provide a sitting duck target, ‘his army full / Of bread and sloth’ (1.1.158–9). In King Edward III, in a modern, Christian, world, we have an example of a non-combatant, a woman, forced by siege into a more active war role, not fighting, but commanding her castle – as, indeed, the Paston women did in the fifteenth century’s civil broils.12 The Countess of Salisbury worries that her messenger lacks the eloquence that we have just seen in the speaking pictures of misery. Given that King David and Douglas are already arguing about who gets the lady (and her jewels) once they have captured the castle, we might think here of a pre-misery, except that the eaves-dropping Countess is there before us (1.2.62–4). Careful reading of the metaphoric love/war passages reveals, by their absence, a number of possible courtly-love comparisons which Shakespeare rarely exploits. In his plays of war the language of wooing is almost always undercut by the language of virtue. Pole’s capture of Margaret of Anjou in 1 Henry VI (5.5) is an important exception, and I shall suggest a second at the end of this essay, in patri- and fili-cide. Margaret repeatedly asks him for the terms of her imprisonment or ransom while he stands debating with himself, since he is married, as to whether he can take her as a paramour and whether she would accept. Pole’s eroticised prison is a sign of self-indulgence, failure to master himself and, therefore, a condemnation, expressed theatrically in humour: she misunderstands the debate he is having with himself; he cannot find an excuse that is not ‘wooden’; she remarks, ‘He talks of wood, It is some carpenter’ (5.5.45–6). Edward III, by contrast, refers to the countess as an empress, but not to himself as her hostage or prisoner (2.2.38–9); and although he once says, ‘That very smile of hers / Hath ransomed captive France, and set the king, / The Dauphin, and the peers at liberty’ (2.2.103–5), he is speaking only of his delay. Ransom generally means prisoner-exchange, as it does with Pistol and Le Fer before Agincourt in Henry V, or the Dauphin’s

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three messages to the Prince of Wales in Edward III Act 4 before Cr´ecy: ransom, escape on a fast horse, preparation for death. The only serious question of a possible ransom comes when the Earl of Salisbury asks his prisoner, Villiers, for a safe-conduct to Calais (4.1), which Villiers grants. The honour of this action implicates the honour of the Dauphin Charles when he dissuades his father, King John, from ignoring the safe-conduct and hanging Salisbury, in double derogation (4.5). King Edward points the moral when King John demands to know how much ransom Edward will ask: But had you done at first as now you do, How many civil towns had stood untouched That now are turned to ragged heaps of stones? How many people’s lives mightst thou have saved That are untimely sunk into their graves? (5.1.202–6) Here, too, the rhetoric of reproach, including the familiar double pun on ‘civil’, asks us to think about the issues which inform the plays of war. At each stage in ‘unjust’ proceedings, characters’ arguments assume rhetorical positions in an old-fashioned kind of representation. A royal offence against the disciplines of ransom justifies rebellion in 1 Henry IV, where the king seems all too happy to leave Mortimer in ‘Wales, / there without ransom to lie forfeited’ (4.3.97–8). It is not clear that this can be called a legal point in the state of law, but part of the pity of war is the way laws are summarily suspended, and men summarily executed.

Vae victis One sequent aspect of war and war’s alarms is confusion. Under the cover of riot and war many violences and violations are possible, and hidden. My last example considers the capture of a war leader in the context of the invasion of a foreign army which is also a civil war, conflating external and internal, and an imprisonment which leads not to ransom, but to murder. This is a rare subject in Shakespeare. There are a few possible examples in the English histories, and one might reach back to Marlowe, to consider Bajazet or Edward II before moving to Richard II or the contrasting, legitimating, battle-death of Richard III. To return to the idea of the image as rhetorical demonstration, let me evoke the double image of civil war which marked the Henry VI plays, with a son carrying the body of his father, and the father carrying the

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body of his son. King Lear ends with the apotheosis of this most personal consequence of war. We do not always put Cordelia in the category of prisoners executed against the disciplines of war, but that is, among all the other things, her legal position. As a foreign princess, she ought, like Edward III’s prisoners, to enjoy the privileges of her status. However, like George of Clarence barring his brother’s path, the native princess threatens her sisters who need – like Richard of Gloucester – to get her out of the way. But there is nothing judicial about her murder, nor can she fight, as Richard II does, against the shameful, excruciating, criminal’s humiliation her humiliated, aged father cannot stop. Lear ‘might have saved her’, he says (in both versions), but the tenses Shakespeare gives him suggest that his interference is not revenge, but something much worse. Lear says, ‘I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee’, with a verb whose grammatical aspect is continuous action. While Cordelia was hanging, then, not after she was hanged. Perhaps Lear’s actions here, too, have brought about what he so desired to halt, and his cry against ‘murderous traitors’ (or ‘murderers, traitors’) projects an accusation against himself. Does Shakespeare, beyond his characters, have views about the sufferers from the effects of war? It is clear that some plays seem to privilege arguments which tend to reinforce honourable behaviour in war, where ‘honourable’ can also include devastating actions, such as destroying rebellious castles or fortified towns. He did not have our vocabulary, with all its new, necessary distinctions about the particular kinds and statuses of war’s victims. His characters exploit what seem to be legal, conventional, and regular agreements. He did not imagine industrial slaughter. But he knew that the fate of one victim awakens the imagination to pity, if not to fear, and that the aggregate of many fates amounts to a largescale discussion of war and war’s alarms. All, I think, that we can say, is that the heads of argument are clear enough, and define what would elsewhere be Fluellen’s favourite topic, the ‘disciplines’ of war. But by dramatising, at different times, through different characters, the acts and arguments of war, Shakespeare’s achievement is to complicate such discussion, because of the variety and complexity of the horror he images.13

Notes 1. These arguments are resumed in numerous places; see e.g. Rackin; Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Ronald Knowles, Shakespeare’s Arguments with History (NY and Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

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2. In the rather different context of war conceptualised in terms of the theatre, Somogyi cites Camden’s note ‘that a number of English troops ‘‘feigning themselves to be fugitives’’, lured many of the besieging enemy to their deaths at Bergen op Zoom in 1588’ (97) as well as contemporary worries over ‘masterless men’, including boasters such as Pistol (142–6). 3. See Griffin; Ruth Morse, ‘Telling the Truth with Authority: from Richard II to Richard II,’ Common Knowledge 4 (1995), 111–28. 4. Tilney’s comments – and More’s – are quoted from The Riverside Shakespeare, 1683–1700. For a longer discussion, see Jeffrey Masten, ‘More or Less: Editing the Collaborative’, Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001), 109–31. 5. ‘ . . . you had taught/ How insolence and strong hand should prevail,/ How order should be quelled – and by this pattern/ Not one of you should live an ag`ed man,/ For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought/ with selfsame hand, self reasons, and self right/ Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes/ Would feed on one another’ (Hand D, 89–96). 6. See Laurie Maguire’s brilliant discussion of ‘victims’ and ‘abuse’, in her ‘Performing Anger: The Anatomy of Abuse(s) in Troilus and Cressida,’ Renaissance Drama 31 (2002), 153–83. 7. Michael Hattaway’s note in the Cambridge edition simply glosses as ‘exile’, ‘refugee’ or ‘deserter’. Andrew Cairncross’s Arden 2 (1962) recalls ‘a runaway slave with no standing or rights’. 8. David Bevington annotates using our modern collocation, ‘fugitive from the law’. We can trace this association back to Kittredge in 1941, ‘Enobarbus is willing to be ranked with fugitive slaves and masterless vagabonds’ (the only citation in the New Variorum Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Marvin Spevack for the Modern Language Association, 1990). 9. Thus it may be worth mentioning that ‘conscientious objector’, a coinage adapted from its original opposition to inoculation, is a Great War innovation, necessarily dependent upon Armed Forces recruitment as well as Protestant appeals to individual moral interpretation. 10. OED (suppl. s.v. ‘displaced’) and John Ayto, Twentieth Century Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), who compares this use to ‘stateless’, 271, 241. 11. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) makes this point throughout. 12. Benjamin Griffin studies the context of historical romance for the figure of the Countess in a series of plays (110ff). 13. More than the usual thanks are due in the long evolution of this muchshortened essay: I acknowledge the careful reading and fertile suggestions of Stefan Collini, the members of the Utrecht seminar, and the acute interventions of the volume editors.

Part II Rhetoric of War

‘When he speaks not like a citizen, you find him like a soldier’ (Coriolanus, 3.3.53)

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6 Henry V and the Performance of War R. Scott Fraser

From the opening Chorus, with its reference to Mars, the God of war, Henry V is most obviously concerned with the re-enactment of the military exploits of its eponymous hero. Inevitably, criticism of the play tends to focus on the political evaluation of the manner in which Henry conducts his kingship and campaign. So, for Stephen Greenblatt, the play ‘deftly registers every nuance of royal hypocrisy, ruthlessness, and bad faith’.1 In reply, critics such as Robin Headlam Wells go so far as to state: ‘Ruthless, Henry undoubtedly is, but to accuse him of bad faith is to deny him his most outstanding and most dangerous characteristic, namely his frank and single-minded fidelity to his cause . . . Henry is a man inspired by a heroic ideal’.2 Most famously, Norman Rabkin has claimed that ‘in Henry V Shakespeare created a work whose ultimate power is precisely the fact that it points in two opposite directions, virtually daring us to choose one of the two opposed interpretations it requires of us’.3 Yet such emphatic viewpoints are derived from the character in isolation, as separate from the play’s narrative structure and the audience’s interpretation of the character within that structure. The extant textual evidence points to a similar division of viewpoints. The first quarto of 1600 differs radically from the Folio version of 1623. Traditionally dismissed by editors as ‘bad’, the quarto is much shorter and consistently removes negative aspects of Henry’s character. In contrast, the Folio text presents a much more complex figure of the king. As Andrew Gurr has put it in The First Quarto of Henry V, The history of ideas about the relationship between Q1 and F is complex, though it does show an intermittent evolution towards the idea that Q may have some authority, if not as an authorial text then as a 71

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performance text. The Folio, however, is the text that from the 1660s onwards always formed the basis for stage productions. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries Henry V was the play most studied in schools, especially for its Choruses and Henry’s two great speeches, Harfleur and the band of brothers. Only one of those highlights is in the quarto text.4 But Gurr’s assertion that the quarto is ‘probably closer to the version of the play that Shakespeare’s company first put on the stage in 1599 than any form of the play that modern audiences have seen’ (2), remains to be proven. Indeed, while editors such as Gary Taylor acknowledge the possibility of the quarto being a promptbook, they tend to see it as a memorial reconstruction rather than an authorised text.5 Both editors agree that the Folio was set from an authorial manuscript, and is therefore closer to the text as Shakespeare wrote it for his company. It is the Folio which becomes, in Gurr’s terminology, a ‘maximal’ text – produced with the knowledge that any performance would employ a truncated or ‘minimal’ version of it.6 While it is generally true that the more one includes from the Folio, the more ambiguous Henry becomes, the above also serves to highlight an aspect of the play which is often overlooked in criticism: the importance of the performance of the siege of Harfleur as part of a narrative and image pattern which runs formally throughout the Folio text of Henry V. In this chapter, I will look closely at the way that siege is presented as a means of understanding its importance to the formal construction of the text. What that construction says about the performance of warfare should help us understand the divergence in critical and directorial opinion about Henry as king, and the play as a whole. To understand the importance of the siege, it is necessary to begin this reading with the Chorus’s speech: ‘Then should the warlike Harry, like himself / Assume the port of Mars’ (Prologue, 6–7, my emphasis).7 The rhetoric here creates intangible slippage between the actor playing the king and the historical king fulfilling himself by playing the role of archetypal war leader, while glancing perhaps at other theatrical representations of the king on stage. It goes on to point to the overall inadequacy of theatrical performance in reproducing the historical event (‘Can this cock-pit hold / The vasty fields of France?’). In an acknowledgement of this impossibility, the Chorus implores the audience to employ its ‘imaginary forces’ and ‘thoughts’, ‘For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our Kings’ (Prologue, 11–12, 18, 23, 28). Pamela Mason has interpreted the speech in a typically contemporary way:

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The priority in Henry V is not with exploring character but rather in the play’s profound consideration of the theatrical construct. Shakespeare’s investment in his choric architecture insists upon an intellectual engagement with the process whereby a creative partnership can be forged between stage and audience. The speech which opens Henry V presents in the form of an uncompromising direct address to its audience Shakespeare’s dramatic manifesto.8 While the metatheatricality of the speech is undeniable, I would argue that it goes beyond a statement of dramatic intent to an implicit statement of historical purpose: the theatrical construct is a metaphor for the interrogation of chronicle history and previous literary and dramatic presentations of the king. Harry is ‘like’ himself, as the audience knows him from Hall and Holinshed. But at the outset of Shakespeare’s Henry V we have an acknowledgement of the impossibility of the accurate reconstruction of an historical figure or event. We are asked to ‘Admit me Chorus to this history/ Who Prologue-like your humble patience pray/ Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play’ (Prologue, 32–4, my emphasis) and are then presented with a Chorus who, having been ‘like’ a Prologue is only ‘like’ a Chorus in that he ironically draws attention throughout the play to the disparity between the stage action proper and his own descriptions of Henry. Certainly this is why Gurr feels the Chorus is absent from the quarto (11). But it must be noted that it is a disparity that is reproduced throughout the Folio, with references to various forms of historical records and reported offstage action juxtaposed with what is performed before the audience. It is the gap between these two which puts the audience in the position of judge of the play as a performance, and of the king’s actions and the performance of war. And just as the audience interrogates the performance the play presents, the play itself interrogates its own historical sources. A case in point occurs in the very first scene between Canterbury and Ely, which is absent from the quarto, largely one suspects because of what it says about the nature of and rationale for the war. Here the two men discuss what is, in effect, the church’s bribe of financial support for the invasion in order to prevent the loss of half of its land. To avoid that loss, Canterbury will, ‘As touching France . . . give a greater sum / Than ever at one time the clergy yet / Did to his predecessors part withal’ (1.1.80–3). It is interesting that it is this corrupt Archbishop who voices in this very same scene a litany of praise for Henry, which is unequalled throughout the play. Not only does his corruption impugn his support for the war, it calls into question the kind of praise found in Shakespeare’s sources.

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Interestingly, Holinshed only praises Henry after he has reported his deeds. In Shakespeare, praise is uttered at the beginning, by a character whose rhetoric, as we have already seen, is unreliable. And as the play unfolds, its dramaturgy further problematises our responses. In the Folio, the ambiguity surrounding Henry’s claims is ironically reinforced in the Salic Law speech – the only justification for the war in the play. Given that this is uttered by Canterbury, whose motives are now clear to us, we must immediately question its veracity. Its very length and complexity ensures that we hear it as duplicity masquerading as truth. Thus, when Henry asks, ‘May I with right and conscience make this claim?’ and Canterbury replies, ‘The sin upon my head dread sovereign’ (1.2.96–7), we know he is speaking truer than he intends. More importantly, the king has, for the first time, stage-managed a scene in which the justification for the war is put on another’s head. Lest the audience forget the corruption of that head, Canterbury then repeats the bribe in public, including all of Henry’s soldiers in his imagery of death: ‘O let their bodies follow, my dear liege, / With blood and sword and fire, to win your right’ (1.2.130–2). The bill regarding the confiscation of church lands is not mentioned. Henry has religious and financial backing for his war against the French. And the Archbishop has initiated a train of verbal imagery of religious reference, blood, and mutilation, which runs throughout the play. If Canterbury’s mention of his own decapitation begins the process in the scene, however, it is Henry who, in response to the Dauphin’s taunt, gives the first full articulation of such war: . . . for many a thousand widows Shall this his mock mock out of their dead husbands, Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down; Ay, some are yet ungotten and unborn, That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin’s scorn. (1.2.284–8) This combining of imagery and narrative pattern most obviously prefigures the speech at the siege of Harfleur, where Henry tells the Governor of the town, that if he does not surrender, The gates of mercy shall be shut up, And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart, In liberty of bloody hand shall range

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With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass Your fresh fair virgins and your flow’ring infants. What is it then to me if impious war Arrayed in flames like to the prince of fiends Do with his smirched complexion all fell feats Enlinked to waste and desolation? What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause, If your pure maidens fall into the hand Of hot and forcing violation? (3.3.87–98) Here, Henry defines himself as a rapacious soldier, and employs the same verbal tactic he has used with the clergy, the Dauphin, and indeed the traitors, blaming others for the violent nature of his bloody war (‘you yourself are the cause’). Just as Canterbury was asked to justify that war, with any blame for an unjust action falling on him, and the Dauphin accused of being the cause for the terror of the war, now it is the Governor of the town who will be blamed for the violence of the king’s action. And should it not be clear enough, Henry repeats and expands his scope in the same manner as did Canterbury, to include all of the men of Harfleur in the blame, while implying that all of his soldiers are indeed like their king. They all must surrender, 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 reverend heads dashed to the walls; Your naked infants spitted upon pikes, Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen. What say you? Will you yield, and this avoid? Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroyed? (3.3.110–20) All of the men of Harfleur will be ‘guilty in defence’ if Henry’s men violate the town and its inhabitants; and therefore Henry is but one of many, and not to blame. Just as the biblical Herod was one of the

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‘bloody-hunting slaughtermen’, Henry will now be forced to act in the same manner if the men of Harfleur do not capitulate.9 To appreciate fully the wider significance of this speech and of the siege itself, it is necessary to consider the scene in both its literary and historical context. In terms of literary trope, the siege is of significant allegorical importance in medieval literature. One thinks most immediately of Le Roman de la rose and its application of the siege as a sexual metaphor, or of the La¨ıs of Marie de France; and in English theatrical terms of the Castle of Perseverance, with its allegory of the soul and its fusillade of flowers. According to Malcolm Hebron, not only did Chroniclers concentrate on dramatising sieges: Commentators on the scriptures employ extended siege imagery of their own in explicating a variety of passages. Preachers and authors of homilies use the siege as a picture of the soul endangered by sin, a device also employed frequently in religious poetry and moral dramas. The symbolic properties of sieges are further explored by poets writing allegories and love lyrics, in their descriptions of the travails of the lover, and the beloved beleaguered by his advances . . .10 The deviation from the trope in Henry V is the employment of imagery of neither love, nor sexuality, nor the soul; but of slaughter and of rape. One might argue that such rhetoric is simply a necessary part of ending such a siege in a play which is much more graphic than any of its medieval predecessors; or that the rhetoric serves to end the siege without further violence. For example, Katharine Eisaman Maus puts it as follows: On the face of it, it might seem surprising for a general to characterize his own troops as rapists and murderers. Yet Henry’s tactics are entirely deliberate: by describing his soldiers’ potential victims as members of families – as daughters, fathers, infants, mothers – he heightens the impact of their violence. The rampaging army, he implies, will shatter not merely individuals, but whole networks of affiliation. The speech effectively intimidates his auditors, who give up without a fight.11 While the speech undoubtedly strikes fear into his ‘auditors’, this reading ignores the Governor’s reason for surrender, found both in the chronicle sources and the play, which is that the Dauphin reports that his troops are not ready to raise the siege. Henry is therefore invited to ‘Enter our gates, dispose of us and ours, / For we are no longer defensible’ (3.3.121–7).

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Ironically, then, the violent speech that Shakespeare gives Henry is unnecessary. It is present, I think, because it subverts the behaviour of the commander of this particular siege. For not only is the proper behaviour of the commander essential to the medieval literary convention,12 but sources regarding Henry’s behaviour in war do not present him in this way. For example, even a history as propagandistic as the anonymous and popular Gesta Henrici Quinti, written just before and in order to garner support for the second invasion of France,13 is careful to present Henry’s behaviour during the siege as calm, rational, and following a Christian course. What is further interesting in this particular case is that Holinshed does not report such a speech in his account of the siege of Harfleur. Rather, following the description of several third-party interchanges of diplomacy, he only refers to the distress caused after the sacking: . . . The soldiers were ransomed and the town sacked, to the great gain of the Englishmen. Some writing of this yielding up of Harfleur do in like sort make mention of the distress whereto the people, then expelled out of their habitations, were driven; insomuch as parents with their children, young maids, and old folk went out of the gates with heavy hearts (God wot), as put to their present shifts to seek them a new abode . . . (127–8)14 Though here one finds children, maids, and old folk ‘with heavy heart’, it is hardly the image of carnage and rape found in Henry’s speech. It would appear that Shakespeare has to go to Henry’s second invasion of France to find even a hint of a darker and more arrogant commander. In Holinshed, it is not until the siege of Rouen that we have a hint of the kind of rhetoric found in Henry V: And as for the poor people lying in the ditches, if they died through famine the fault was theirs that like cruel tyrants had put them out of the town, to the intent he should slay them; and yet had he saved their lives, so that if any lack of charity was, it rested not in him . . . And as to assault the town, he told them that he would they should know he was both able and willing thereto, as he should see occasion; but the choice was in his hand to tame them either with Blood, Fire, or Famine, or with them all; whereof he would take the choice at his pleasure and not at theirs. (130–2) While here we find what may be the germ for the king employing the same rhetorical strategy as Shakespeare’s character (that of putting others

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in the position of determining the nature of the action he will take in war), we still do not have the extreme language of rape and carnage found in Shakespeare’s play; and though both the official and unofficial medieval sources may be seen as more sceptical of Henry than the dramatisations of his life in Shakespeare’s day, the king found at the siege of Harfleur in Shakespeare’s Henry V is much darker than any previous dramatic or chronicle presentation of him.15 Further, while the kind of behaviour that Henry describes often did occur following a siege, and was even justified in medieval law, it was questionable in the period in which the play was first performed. As Theodor Meron notes, there was a clear distinction between the treatment of those captured in battle, and those captured after a siege: Unmitigated brutality was reserved for the latter . . . Only through the conquest of fortresses could a territory be effectively occupied. Resistance therefore was grimly viewed and severely punished . . . These harsh norms, seldom questioned in medieval times, were challenged by the Renaissance writers on jus gentium.16 Meron emphasises the ‘humanity’ of Shakespeare’s king, by reflecting on Henry’s line to Kent to ‘Use mercy to them all’ – meaning the conquered inhabitants of the town. He notes that, ‘In emphasizing the signal importance of mercy, Shakespeare was close to the medieval convention that regarded justice and mercy as twin attributes of kingship, as of course they were of God himself’ (78–9). Yet Kent’s is but a single line following a speech of such rhetorical violence that it is difficult to imagine it being given the weight that Meron does. This reading is even more problematical in light of the overall narrative structure of the play; and, as we shall see, the dramatic enactment of such violence. This is not, of course, to imply that Shakespeare is creating a wholly negative portrait of the king and his war. Rather it is to point out how the play is constantly interrogating the chronicle sources and the popular Renaissance stage images of Henry in such a way as to question their validity. Indeed, the play provides the audience with a juxtaposition of scenes of action and narrated perspectives on war, and it is this formal patterning which promotes such interpretation. For example, the positioning of the siege in the play is crucial. In the Folio, just as in the chronicles, Henry lands in France and quickly begins the siege. However, it is the action Shakespeare invents around Harfleur which further puts the commander’s actions into perspective. Notably, the Act begins with the Chorus introducing the scene, reminding the audience

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that Henry has rejected the offer of Catharine and ‘Some petty and unprofitable dukedoms’ (3.0.30–1). Henry appears as the heroic king with his famous ‘Once more unto the breach’, and we are left with the comical scene in which Fluellen complains that what he has witnessed is not like what he has read in history. For him, the siege is not like ‘the pristine wars of the Romans’; and Macmorris replies that ‘It is no time to discourse . . . there is throats to be cut’ (3.3.48, 51). Indeed, given this order of events, it seems obvious that Henry’s speech to the Governor of Harfleur shows that he is a man of action and the cutting of throats, not a man of pristine discourse in the conduct of war. That the surrender is followed by the scene in which Catharine learns English (and notably one body part at a time), is both comical and darkly ominous. The imagery of the body is repeated in Williams’s graphic protest before Agincourt. Interestingly, both the quarto and Folio retain this protest (although the quarto attributes it to the more anonymous ‘2 Soldier’). Shakespeare’s scene goes against the trope of the comical history tradition in which an encounter between a romantically disguised king and unsuspecting subject would normally be entirely positive.17 Here, Williams and the disguised king fail to agree: WILLIAMS: But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all, ‘We died at such a place’ – some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. (4.1.128–35) True to form, Henry makes no claim for the justness of his war, but instead asserts that ‘The King is not bound to answer for the particular endings of his soldiers’; and ‘Every subject’s duty is the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own’ (4.1.146–7, 164–5). Theologically and legally true in the medieval sense, it is a brilliant variation on Henry’s strategy of allowing the clergy to take responsibility for the justness of the war, and making the citizens of Harfleur the potential cause for the rapaciousness of his army. Yet, as Meron points out, ‘[t]he view, voiced by the soldier Williams, that princes are personally responsible for an unjust war, had already crystallized in the jus gentium of the Renaissance period’ (72). Here it is not a question of the king’s fault, or how ‘good’ is the cause; it is a question of the virtue of each individual soldier that determines their afterlife. The question about the ‘goodness’ of the war is carefully avoided. While Bates appears to accept this response, and Henry adds

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that he has heard the king will not be ransomed, Williams remains unconvinced, claiming ‘Ay, he said so, to make us fight cheerfully, but when our throats are cut he may be ransomed, and we ne’er the wiser’ (4.1.179–81). Not only is this the most direct attack Williams makes on the honesty of the king, but it foreshadows the most devastating indictment of Henry’s actions in the play: the killing of the French prisoners. Found in the chronicles, this event is present in both the quarto and Folio versions. Yet it is most often cut from performances, or sometimes moved to follow the French killing of the boys with the luggage. Notably, Gary Taylor insists that the prisoners were actually killed on the Renaissance stage because ‘the text unequivocally implies this, having brought them on for no other reason . . . This coldbloodedness is Henry’s personal – and decisive contribution to the victory’ (32). Taylor goes on to argue that the killing demonstrates a dramatisation of the enormous disparity in numbers between the English and French forces (the English having to dispose of their prisoners simply in order to be able to fight). While there is validity in this rationale, I would like to argue that the interpretation of the scene should be taken further. Given the narrative and image patterns established above, here we actually see the play’s most direct indictment of Henry and the war itself. For unlike the earlier scenes, battle (as opposed to a siege) is something Henry cannot stage-manage. It is beyond his control. The narrative pattern is therefore broken and, left to act quickly and of his own volition, he has the prisoners killed. The repetition of bloody imagery is finally realised before the eyes of the audience and we no longer have just the rhetoric of slaughter, but the very performance of it on stage. Certainly it is his ‘personal – and decisive contribution to the victory’, but it is one covered in blood. It is the closest that a play so highly conscious of its own inability to perform historical warfare before its audience comes to reproducing it. Arguably, this is the very climax of the play on stage. That such slaughter might upset even a contemporary audience would explain both why the scene is absent from The Famous Victories, and why (having learned French from the Boy in a parody of the way that Catharine learned English) the quarto inserts Pistol’s ‘comic’ line, ‘Couple gorge!’ (15, 33) after Henry’s order. For Gurr, ‘it seems that Pistol’s words were added in order to tone down the horror of Henry’s order’ (12). Certainly this would make sense. But in the Folio, there is no such line. Instead, the killing is framed with the reports of deaths off stage. The scene opens with the highly mythologised ends of Suffolk and York – a stark contrast to the on stage killings. Later, following the report that

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the French have killed the boys with the luggage, Fluellen introduces the subject of the prisoners. Gower puts the two events together in what we have seen is the wrong order as cause and effect and then states, ‘Our King is not like [Alexander the Great] . . . He never killed any of his friends’. As if the audience would not remember Falstaff, the Folio goes out of its way to remind us that the cause of the old rogue’s death was his rejection by Henry. Ironically, Fluellen describes him in detail, but forgets his name – which probably makes any audience remember it all the more before Gower supplies it. The implication is that Henry is as ruthless with his ‘friends’ as with his prisoners. With the battle over, Henry is able to stage-manage events once again, and the slaughter imagery is resurrected at the end of the play. Burgundy protests, asking him directly, ‘Why that the naked, poor, and mangled peace, / Dear nurse of arts, plenteous, and joyful births, / Should not in this best garden of the world, / Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?’ (5.2.33–7). Henry replies bluntly that, ‘If, Duke of Burgundy, you would the peace . . . you must buy that peace’ (5.2.68–70). Of course, Catharine’s value has now increased and therefore when the French leave to discuss terms, he reminds them that ‘She is our capital demand, comprised / Within the fore-rank of our articles’ (5.2.96–7). Given the victory, Catharine has already been won. She has no choice; and as many have noted, the wooing scene becomes a brilliant parody. It too is filled with references to parts of the body; for as Henry tells her, ‘take me, take a soldier, take a soldier, take a King’ (160). Given how he has defined himself as a soldier before Harfleur, and demonstrated at Agincourt, we have a sense of what the equation might mean in a king and husband. It is, of course, the Chorus who has the final ironic word, referring to ‘this star of England’, but then problematising the description by pointing to the futility of all of the activity we have witnessed, both in this play and in those stage performances which have preceded it: ‘they lost France and made his England bleed, / Which oft our stage hath shown’ (Epilogue, 12–13). What the audience sees in this play cuts against what they have been told, both in the theatre and in chronicle history. In the face of the enormous popularity of the subject of Henry V in the period, Shakespeare’s Folio text provides an interrogation of that myth and the dramatic and chronicle sources that fostered it. That interrogation, hinted at in the opening Chorus and expanded by the scene including the churchmen, really begins at the siege of Harfleur, where the trope of the medieval siege is manipulated in such a way as to cause an audience to begin to question the actions of the king. Depending on the nature of the minimal text performed (whether it is closer to the one-dimensional

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quarto, or to the more ambiguous Folio), the audience can witness a combination of the king’s stage-management of events and manipulation of imagery to achieve his ends. The comical history tradition is then manipulated on the eve of Agincourt, with Williams’s protest. But it is only in the heat of Agincourt itself that Henry is unable to stage-manage such events to cover his ambitions, and the rhetoric of the slaughter of war is performed at the play’s climax. This overall patterning of the Folio serves to raise implied questions about the war: its justification, its performance, and its mythology. Such questions are all the more lingering as they go unanswered, particularly at the final Chorus.

Notes 1. Stephen J. Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets,’ in his Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 21–65; 56. 2. Robin Headlam Wells, ‘Henry V and the Chivalric Revival,’ in Shakespeare and History: Shakespeare Yearbook 6 (1996), 129, 139–40. 3. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 34. 4. Andrew Gurr (ed.), The First Quarto of King Henry V (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 4. 5. Gary Taylor (ed.), Henry V (Oxford: OUP, 1982), 14. 6. Andrew Gurr, ‘Maximal and Minimal Texts: Shakespeare v. the Globe’, Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999), 68–87. 7. References to Shakespeare are from Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997). 8. Pamela Mason, ‘Henry V: ‘‘the quick forge and working house of thought,’’ ’ in Michael Hattaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 177. 9. See King James Bible, Matthew 2: 16–18. 10. Malcolm Hebron, The Medieval Siege: Theme and Image in Middle English Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1–2. 11. Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘Henry V,’ in The Norton Shakespeare, 1448. 12. As Hebron accurately notes: ‘One of the most important themes is the depiction of the commander, and the ways in which his strategic and ethical approach to the siege warfare is portrayed’ (34). 13. ‘The combination of its main theme and its date of writing (between November 1416 and July 1417) leaves little doubt as to its immediate purpose: to justify the King’s second French expedition and encourage support for it.’ Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell, trans., Anonymous, Gesta Henrici Quinti: The Deeds of Henry V (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), xxiv. 14. Richard Hosley (ed.) Shakespeare’s Holinshed (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968).

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15. This includes even John Page’s first-hand account, which dared to go so far as to present the king as a rather haughty and arrogant siege commander. See John Page, ‘The Siege of Rouen’, in J. Gairdner (ed.), The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century (London: Camden Society, 1876), 1–46. 16. Meron (1993), 102–3. 17. See Anne Barton, ‘The King Disguised: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Comical History,’ in Joseph G. Price (ed.), The Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1975), 92–117.

7 Drums and Roses? The Tragicomedy of War in All’s Well That Ends Well Helen Wilcox

Although war is a recurring feature of Shakespeare’s plays, regardless of their genre, it does not necessarily follow that his representation of war is a stable point of reference or ideologically consistent. Indeed, there are aspects of the wars depicted in his plays which might be said to be genre-specific. In the comedies, for instance, we may observe that conflict is almost always located in the past and often coloured by symbolic or amorous purposes, as in the opening of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Theseus disconcertingly reminds Hippolyta that ‘I woo’d thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries’ (1.1.16–17). The tragedies, on the other hand, construct war as integral to their mood of crisis; conflict creates as well as mirrors the rottenness of Hamlet’s Denmark, for example, and the discord of Othello’s Cyprus. The wars of the Roman plays embody the tragic hubris of imperial politics – ‘O my brave Emperor, this is fought indeed!’ (Antony and Cleopatra 4.7.4) – while the English history plays contextualise and explore the ambitions behind dynastic and national warfare. The so-called ‘problem plays’ and the late plays or ‘romances’ have a shared tendency to test generic boundaries and to probe even more unsettlingly the audience’s confidence in the honour of soldiers, lovers and leaders. These plays set satire and romance, the generic extremes of pessimism and optimism, side by side, weaving ‘good and ill together’ in the manner of the ‘mingled yarn’ of life itself, as observed in All’s Well That Ends Well (4.3.71–2). This merging of tragic potential with almost-happy endings, cynicism with hope, is most accurately suggested by the use of the generic label ‘tragicomedy’ for these two groups of plays.1 The inseparable nature of tragedy and comedy, and (perhaps more significantly) the implied capacity of the one to undermine the other, were powerfully suggested in a recent Dutch production of Cymbeline. 84

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Throughout the closing scenes of the play, when peace had been restored and life had triumphed over apparent death, the blood spilt in the preceding battles dripped slowly down the steps which formed the stage.2 Two of Shakespeare’s most cynical portrayals of war are to be found in his tragicomedies. The great cause of Troy is summed up as a squabble over ‘a whore and a cuckold’ (Troilus and Cressida 2.3.72–3), while the Tuscan wars in All’s Well are reduced to the loss of a drum. In both cases, the hybrid nature of the dramatic action, involving elements of the comic and the tragic but holding back from the securer conventions of either genre, would seem to match the plays’ representation of war in all its ambivalence. As a test case for the investigation of the genres of war in Shakespeare, let us take a closer look at All’s Well That Ends Well and examine the dramatic phenomenon that I would term the tragicomedy of war.

Functions of war in All’s Well That Ends Well War fulfils several needs in All’s Well, but most of these have little to do with the immediate or apparent purposes for which most battles are fought, such as political triumph, the aversion of an imminent invasion, or the defence of a religious allegiance under threat. The play’s main characters are French but the wars are in Italy; there is hardly any danger involved on the battlefield, precious little anxiety, and a complete absence of identification with any cause or principle. These wars are a sort of boys’ game, taking place outside France and safely off-stage – a knowing parallel, perhaps, with the wars of Shakespeare’s own lifetime, fought not on English soil but in Ireland and the United Provinces. All’s Well supplies its audience with minimal information about the nature of the conflict that is being fought; we simply hear that it is a ‘braving war’ (1.2.3) between the armies of the Tuscan city states of Florence and Siena. Quite clearly, the cause does not concern the French; their bored young gentry are in search of action and glory, ‘sick / For breathing and exploit’ (1.2.16–17), and it seems to make no difference to them or their monarch which side they fight upon. As the King of France pronounces near the start of the play, ‘our gentlemen that mean to see / The Tuscan service’ (1.2.13–14) have a free choice as to which army they join. This attitude to fighting abroad would not have been alien to the earliest audiences of All’s Well, a play which all evidence suggests was written in the earliest years of the Jacobean era.3 In precisely this period, the war in the Low Countries between the Protestant rebels and the Spanish authorities was entering a more ambivalent phase after the long

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years of English support for the Protestant cause under Elizabeth I. In letters from 1603 and early 1604, Sir Ralph Winwood, the English envoy in The Hague, wrote that soldiers from England and Scotland were being advised by King James to decide for themselves whether to fight with the United Provinces, or for the forces representing the king of Spain. According to Winwood, the king hoped to ‘preserve and maintaine an indifferent Form of Neutrallity’ in the months leading up to the Somerset House conference in August 1604, and he allowed the fighters on both sides ‘the same Liberty’.4 The parallel with the advice of the King of France in All’s Well is striking: ‘freely they have leave / To stand on either part’ (1.2.14–15). Whether for strategic reasons or from a weariness with the posturings of war, All’s Well keeps its distance from the details of the Tuscan wars. The Duke of Florence, for whom Bertram and the other French lords choose to fight, is denied the right to put his case to the audience; the third act begins with the Duke telling the foreign soldiers that they have now heard ‘the fundamental reasons of this war’ (3.1.2), thereby drawing attention to the fact that we have not witnessed the explanation. The response of the French lord to the Duke – ‘Holy seems the quarrel’ (3.1.4; my italics) – still leaves us unsure of the grounds for war, as we are forced to rely upon an indirect impression of the ‘quarrel’.5 The play’s definition of male honour in warfare, therefore, is not dependent upon commitment to an identified cause or principle – other than that of honour itself. By Jacques’ definition, the soldier is nothing if not ‘jealous in honour’ (As You Like It, 2.7.151). Near the beginning of All’s Well, the King of France recalls the time when he and Bertram’s father, the late Count of Rossillion, together ‘in friendship / First tried our soldiership’ (1.2.25–6). The Count is defined as a man whose ‘honour’ was ‘Clock to itself’, who ‘might be a copy to these younger times’ (1.2.38–9, 46). If Bertram and his contemporaries were to follow Bertram’s father’s example, the king concludes, they would be ‘But goers backward’ (1.2.48), modelling themselves on a hero from an earlier era. This is very significant to the play’s construction of soldierly honour. Such ideals are firmly cast in the past, not just within the play’s narrative and its immediate political context, but also by associating honour with the era of the play’s source texts.6 All’s Well draws upon an older romance tradition of chivalry in war, including the rhetorical configuration of the soldier’s life as a pseudo-religious devotion. The ‘sinewy swordmen’ whom Bertram and Parolles observe leaving for the wars are sent on their way with the blessing, ‘Mars dote on you for his novices!’ (2.1.59–60, 47).

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However, these future monks of war, supposedly upholding an honourable tradition of warlike dedication, are soon revealed in a less flattering light. Indeed, the association with Mars has already been tarnished by the encounter in the opening scene with Parolles, who is (symbolically) the very first soldier on stage in this play. When Helena identifies him as ‘born under Mars’, Parolles adds, ‘When he was predominant’. Helena, however, corrects him – ‘When he was retrograde, I rather think’ – since in his cowardice Parolles goes ‘so much backward’ when he fights (1.2.196–200). The phrase is an ironic echo of the French king’s advice to look ‘backward’ in copying the romance ideal of the soldier. Within the first scene of the play, a dignified sense of past warlike honour has been replaced by its dishonourable shadow, in which ‘goers backward’ are now those who run away ‘when fear proposes the safety’ (1.2.202–3). As elsewhere in Shakespeare’s tragicomedies, the military cause in All’s Well is depicted in terms of the desires of individuals rather than the responsibility of a group.7 Bertram, frustrated at being told that he is too young to go to war, plans to ‘steal away bravely’ and is reassured that ‘There’s honour in the theft’ (2.1.29, 34). However, his motive – personal resentment of remaining at home as ‘forehorse to a smock’ (2.1.30), rather than any loyalty to the cause of war – is less than honourable. When he finally does join up, his purpose is even more narrowly individual: he wants to escape his enforced marriage to Helena. Once again, the chivalric code is invoked and yet at the same time weakened: ‘He wears his honour in a box unseen, / That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home’ is Parolles’s reductive verdict (2.3.276–7). A far more accurate definition of honour is offered by Bertram’s mother, the Countess, who declares that her son’s ‘sword can never win / The honour that he loses’ in his rejection of Helena (3.2.95–6). On the other hand, Bertram’s defiant claim that ‘Wars is no strife / To the dark house and the detested wife’ (2.3.288–9) highlights the assumed misogyny of the world of war while, ironically, reminding us of the strange absence of actual warlike ‘strife’ in All’s Well. This is a play in which there are no battles and hardly any deaths, and the one reported achievement of Bertram the soldier is, again, disturbingly personal: ‘with his own hand he slew the Duke’s brother’ (3.5.6–7), reminiscent of the individual vendettas in the closing scenes of Troilus and Cressida. The image of war in All’s Well is relentlessly personal and deliberately superficial; it is the mere appearance of bravery, typified by the braggart Parolles festooned with ‘scarfs’ and ‘bannerets’ (2.3.203–4), a man whose ‘soul . . . is his clothes’ (2.5.43–4). The return of the soldiers is shown in a parade which is the communal equivalent

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of the flashy Parolles. As the admiring women try to spot Bertram in the passing army, Diana points him out as ‘That with the plume’ (3.5.78). Parolles is not the only man whose soul is revealed in his clothes; the comment is a judgement on the whole world of war in All’s Well That Ends Well. It is no accident that the victory parade is introduced, according to the Folio stage directions, with ‘Drum and Colours’ (3.5.74), since both of these tokens of war anticipate the plot to show up Parolles in his falsehood and cowardice. The lost drum, the attempted recovery of which leads the colourful Parolles into an ambush and all too hasty revelations of disloyalty and dishonour, becomes an emblem of the man himself – he is variously known as Jack Drum or Tom Drum.8 The drum, ‘this instrument of honour’ (3.6.66), should have represented the very best of military discipline, but leads instead to Parolles’s cowardly and unnecessarily graphic betrayal of his comrades. The drum epitomises the emptiness of soldierly values evoked by the play as a whole. As Bertram rejects Helena and prepares to leave France for the Tuscan wars, he vows never to return ‘Whilst I can shake my sword or hear the drum’ (2.5.91), and as he sets off into battle he promises Mars that he will prove ‘A lover of thy drum, hater of love’ (3.3.11). In the bizarre depiction of Parolles’s love of the drum – ‘Is’t but a drum? A drum so lost!’ (3.6.47) – we hear the noisy beat of the false bravery and insubstantial loyalty shared by Bertram and Parolles. The latter swears to recover the regimental drum ‘By the hand of a soldier’, and Bertram promises him fame if he does so ‘even to the utmost syllable of your worthiness’ (3.6.70–2). Both undertakings not only remain unfulfilled but are ironically inverted. In his desperation to recover the drum, Parolles is ultimately forced to admit that ‘any drum of the enemy’s’ (4.1.61) would do just as well. After hearing Parolles betray him as ‘a foolish, idle boy’, Bertram in turn denounces Parolles as a ‘Damnable both-sides rogue!’ (4.3.215, 222). The soldiers’ promises in this play, like the sound of the drum, are hollow. The functions of war in All’s Well, then, are multiple but mutually reinforcing. The French soldiers’ involvement in the Tuscan wars is utterly lacking in principle; their role appears to be that of gentrified mercenaries in a war whose purpose is never declared in the play. If honour is the ideal to which Bertram and Parolles pay lip-service, it is damaged and undermined from the very beginning; if brotherly bonds between soldiers are supposed to be the reality of wartime solidarity, then the episode of Parolles and the drum cures the audience of that illusion. The process of trapping Parolles, terrifying him, bullying him in strange tongues and then giving him the chance to betray everyone on his side

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is, ironically, the fullest military encounter of the entire play. This tells us a great deal about the kind of war depicted in the play: it is not ‘God’s vengeance’ (Henry V 4.1.174) but the tragicomedy of one soldier’s revenge on another. And it is not only Parolles who is ‘discovered’ and disgraced in this process; all those who set up and carry out the trickery, or observe and laugh at the discomfort of their fellows, are shown up in turn. Indeed, though the play might seem to anticipate the end of protracted wars in the early days of the Jacobean period, its depiction of the last phase of the hostilities is dominated by unflinching mockery of the soldiers’ world.

War and desire Among those whose weaknesses are revealed by the desperate confessions of Parolles – who loves words as ‘a fish loves water’ (3.6.85) and is prepared to betray anyone to save his own life – is Bertram himself. Significantly, Parolles does not pass comment on Bertram’s exploits in war, but has plenty to say about this young Count’s ‘ruttish’ wooing of Diana (4.3.216). Parolles’ interrogation, therefore, which ostensibly concerns battlefield cowardice, becomes a statement of how closely the love of war and the war of love are interlinked in the play. The honour (or dishonour) of the soldier is consciously set in contrast to the ‘honour of a maid’, which is here defined as her ‘name’ or reputation (3.5.12). However, both kinds of honour come under attack in the play. We have already noted how the idea of the soldier’s honour is rendered almost untenable in the course of All’s Well, but from the start there is also very little coyness in the discussion of a woman’s honour, especially when defined as her chastity. In an unexpectedly bawdy encounter in the opening scene, Helena converses with Parolles, a man whose cowardly flamboyance would seem the very opposite of her determined modesty. When the dialogue moves by means of military metaphors to discuss the protection of virginity from ‘underminers and blowers-up’, and the ‘military policy’ for virgins to ‘blow up men’ (1.1.120–2), we realise that the languages of war and sexual desire cannot be understood separately in this play. Indeed, it is almost impossible to consider war in All’s Well without reference to desire. When the King of France, for instance, is giving advice to the departing French soldiers, he urges them in a traditional courtship metaphor ‘not to woo honour, but to wed it’ (2.1.15). Instead of proceeding to give them tips on fighting in battle, in the next breath he warns them to ‘take heed’ of ‘those girls of Italy’ (2.1.19), mixing the

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material impact of love and war as well as interweaving their rhetoric. The inseparable nature of these two sorts of desire – for military success and sexual satisfaction – is reinforced when Helena presses Diana’s mother to let her arrange the bed-trick by which the riddling Bertram is to be trapped. The Count’s wooing is aptly described by Helena: he ‘lays down his wanton siege before her [Diana’s] beauty’ (3.7.18), just as the Florentine soldiers are laying siege before the walls of Siena. Indeed, the parallels between love and war are so extensive that we begin to wonder if the one is not an allegory of the other. For example, the lineup of marriageable courtiers at the French court, from which Helena is able to choose her husband, is a direct foreshadowing of the military parade of war heroes from which Diana, too, picks out Bertram as the one ‘with the plume’ (3.5.78). In a similar symmetry of construction, the gulling of Parolles during his hunt for the lost drum is juxtaposed with the tricking of Bertram, that very same night, into bed with Helena. While Parolles is trapped on account of his inordinate need of the drum and his unstoppable urge to boast of his exploits, Bertram is caught out by his uncontrollable desire for Diana and his willingness to exchange the ring he should be preserving. The parallels are deeply revealing: while Parolles attempts to snatch back the drum which will restore his self-esteem, Bertram is trying to steal two more symbolic circles, a ring and a maidenhead. The association of military and amatory exploits among (aptly-named) brothers in arms has a long history. English soldiers in the early modern garrisons in the Low Countries were, like their predecessors in battle, no strangers to the triangular relationship of soldier, wife and mistress – though it is to be presumed that few of these entanglements were resolved by a bed-trick as in All’s Well. In the Dutch town of the Brill, where English reinforcements coming to the aid of the United Provinces caused considerable disruption, magistrates’ records reveal the tensions between the soldiers and the local townsfolk. One entry in particular could almost be imagined in the archives of Shakespeare’s fictional Florence. On 30 June 1601, a Dutch woman from the Brill had to ask pardon for the injury that she had caused to the wife of ‘Dirck the Englishman’.9 Bertram’s local mistress, Diana, on the other hand, far from causing injury to Helena, expresses concern for the as yet unknown ‘poor lady’ who is the abandoned wife of a ‘detesting lord’ (3.4.64–5) and shows sisterly solidarity once she has met Helena in person. Bertram’s promise to give Diana ‘all rights of service’ (4.2.17) proves worthless once she meets him again at the court of France; as Lafew comments in exasperation on seeing Bertram’s serial deceptions, ‘I will

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buy me a son-in-law in a fair . . . I’ll none of him’ (5.3.147–8). Bertram’s fickle behaviour confirms Diana’s own mother’s opinion that submission to men’s desires is as the surrendering of ‘our [women’s] roses’, after which the men, who have taken the blooms for their own pleasure, turn and ‘mock us with our bareness’ (4.2.18–20). The world of All’s Well is divided into distinct groups – men and women, French and Italian, court and country, transient soldiers and local residents – but in many senses it is a society of individuals struggling to fulfil their own personal desires yet doomed to disappointment even as they achieve them. The tragicomic tension between desire and disillusionment is frequently experienced in the play as a kind of metaphorical warfare. The French king’s search for a cure for his fistula, for instance, is expressed as the hope of relief from ‘the malady / That doth my life besiege’ (2.1.9–10; my italics).10 The young men are said to be ‘sick’ in their longing for action in battle, just as Petrarchan lovers symbolically sicken and die for love of their mistress. If they are able to take part in war, it is assumed that this will be a ‘physic’ to cure them (3.1.18–19). The intertwining of metaphors concerning love, war and sickness suggests that the characters in All’s Well inhabit a realm where conflict is the norm. Indeed, one of the Countess’s earliest descriptions of her son, Bertram, implies an internal battle between his will and his duty: he is one in whom ‘blood and virtue / Contend for empire’ (1.1.62–3). Not all the wars in this play, therefore, are material or visible conflicts: human life, whether in the individual body or the body politic, is defined in the language of conflict.

Does all end well? By the end of the play, the ‘drums and roses’ of my title (as well as the distant ‘guns’ echoed by it) have been abandoned. Parolles, gulled into a modicum of self-knowledge, will have ‘no more drumming. A plague of all drums!’ (4.3.298–9). The war ends with a ‘peace concluded’ (4.3.40) – no doubt anticipating a treaty in the Low Countries in 1604 – but Parolles, the only soldier in the play who is not also a courtier, has lost everything: his job, his friendship with Bertram, his drum and his selfesteem. However, Parolles discovers a kind of humility through accepting that he must be ‘simply the thing I am’ (4.3.333) and in the end he finds a new and altogether better master in Lafew. Meanwhile, Helena, having given up what Diana called the ‘roses’ of her virginity in the battle of love, is able to solve every aspect of the riddle set her by the unloving Bertram. Strangely, she also discovers in her experience of the bed-trick

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what ‘sweet use’ men can make of that which they think they ‘hate’ (4.4.22). So is there hope for the marriage of Helena and Bertram at the end of the play? Will peace be achieved in this conflict? Perhaps all has indeed ended well and it is true, as Helena claims, that ‘the fine’s the crown’ (4.4.35). But what might ‘well’ mean in this context?11 When the king states in the final scene that ‘all yet seems well’ (5.3.333), the audience may still have in mind the rascally poem written by Parolles about Bertram in which Parolles, true to his name, equivocates on the word ‘well’: ‘Half won is match well made; match, and well make it’ (4.3.225). There is a sense in which the happy ending of All’s Well That Ends Well is ‘half won’. The war has ended, but with more focus on the cowardice and unscrupulousness of its soldiers than on an honourable victory. The lovers’ riddle has been solved, but the audience is left wondering whether it was fair to either party, what hopes there are of a successful marriage, and whether Bertram was really worth all the trouble. When he appears at the French court for the final confrontation, it is typical that we are deliberately left uncertain whether the ‘patch of velvet’ (4.5.95) on Bertram’s cheek is covering up a scar gained in battle or caused by syphilis caught in some skirmish of love with a less scrupulous mistress than Diana. In a play which has, even from the beginning, laid such stress on its ending, perhaps we are entitled to expect a more confident, less provisional conclusion. However, this unease is endemic in a genre which must eventually yield the transformation of tragedy into comedy, by whatever method may be to hand. This is the ultimate case of the end justifying the means, a philosophy which we see at work in both war and love. When a husband must be (re)gained by a bed-trick, and a war must be won with the assistance of foreign courtiers eager for some action, then a retrospective satisfaction is perhaps the only outcome from such tragicomic conflict. Tragicomedy makes rich and extensive use of coincidence, magic, trickery and spectacle, and this conscious theatricality serves to temper the optimism of its endings. In Shakespeare’s tragicomedies, a monk is revealed as the all-manipulating Duke in Measure for Measure, Hermione’s statue breathes and moves at the end of The Winter’s Tale, and only the masques and ‘insubstantial pageant’ of The Tempest achieve a necessary, even if temporary, ‘sea-change’ in the characters on the island (4.1.155, 1.2.401). There are two moments when All’s Well draws particular attention to its own spectacle, and each concerns what we might call the ‘theatre of war’. Both occur during that strangest of all battlefield scenes, the gulling of Parolles, when the central focus – the drum – is

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in fact the absent, hollow centre of the action, and the war has turned into a mocking conflict between comrades. Firstly, as the blindfolded Parolles, a parody of Cupid, is led out to be cross-examined, we are made aware of the extreme theatricality of the encounter. Bertram introduces the taunting of his one-time friend by speaking in the manner of the director of a play: ‘But shall we have this dialogue between the fool and the soldier?’ (4.3.97–8). The meeting of those two archetypal characters, and the fact that they turn out to be mirror images of each other, stands as an emblem for the play’s construction of warfare.12 Secondly, the focus on the drum, a recurring symbol of war as well as of Parolles’s weakness, is itself a superbly theatrical device. As Parolles is questioned about his colleagues’ ‘expertness in war’, he refers to one as having ‘led the drum before the English tragedians’ (4.3.265–7), drawing on the association of the drum with actors’ troupes in early modern England. The drama of war, here, is put on a par with the performance of tragedy announced by the beating of a drum preceding the players. But it is absolutely in keeping with the mood of All’s Well that the drum should also evoke comic theatre. As the trickery of Parolles’s ambush is being planned, the comment from his fellow-soldiers is most telling: ‘O, for the love of laughter, let him fetch his drum’ (3.6.34–5). It is this comic principle that ultimately prevails, flawed but triumphant, in the play’s representation of war and in its conclusion.

The tragicomedy of war In this reading of All’s Well, some of the associations between the dramatic representation of war and the characteristics of tragicomedy have been tested and explored. It is my hope that the idea of Shakespeare’s genre-specific treatments of war will continue to be investigated. This genre-conscious approach should not yield an ahistorical reading of text and theatre – far from it – but can locate the playwright’s choices in literary as well as political and social contexts. The choice of the tragicomic mode gives specific shape and colour to the subjects treated by the play, including, as we have seen, the process of waging war. Like tragicomedy, every war involves aspects of both destruction and resolution; like tragicomedy, war promises uncertain results that are always provisional. Less bound than histories and tragedies by any vestigial obligation to historical accuracy, tragicomedy can dramatise and interrogate the ideals of military action and soldierly honour, and explore the complexities of conflict and desire. As this analysis of All’s Well has demonstrated, the creative possibilities of tragicomedy – interlinking the

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sharpness of satire with the structures of romance – enable a vivid and disturbing representation of war. The freedom of the genre, whose positive ambivalence has been described by Annabel Patterson as ‘fruitfully ‘‘edgy’’ ’,13 is appropriate to a profound enquiry into the lure of military conflict, drums and all. By ending relatively ‘well’, this play reminds us that the waging of war is, above all, an aspect of the drama of human folly and desire rather than – in this genre, at least – the driving force of history or the source of tragic suffering.

Notes 1. For further discussion of this important Renaissance genre, see McMullan and Hope; King; Nancy Klein Maguire (ed.), Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics (New York: AMS Press, 1987). For discussion of the grouping of the problem plays and romances together, see, among others, G. K. Hunter’s introduction to the New Arden edition of All’s Well That Ends Well (London: Methuen, 1959), lv–lvi. 2. Diever Shakespeare Company, The Netherlands, September 2002. 3. See, for example, the discussion of dating in Susan Snyder’s edition of the play (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 20–4. 4. Ralph Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State (London, 1725), II.22, II.6 (4.06.1604; 3.10.1603). See Willem Schrickx, ‘All’s Well That Ends Well in its Historical Context,’ Shakespeare Jahrbuch 131 (1995), 106–15. 5. R. B. Parker comments that the war is ‘merely a convenience, a backdrop without