ALEXANDER HARRINGTON

The following is an article published in the Fall, 2003 issue of Dissent. Here is a link to that article as well as an article on apurely politcal subject published on Dissent's blog in 20012.  

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/author/alexanderharrington

 

War and William Shakespeare

By Alexander Harrington

This past winter, as the debate over invading Iraq intensified, I received an e-mail announcement for an "anti-war" production of Shakespeare's Henry V being staged in Los Angeles. For people who know the play only from Laurence Olivier's Anglo-patriotic, World-War-II-era movie, this may be puzzling. However, it will come as no surprise to those familiar with the play's production and critical history. That Henry V can support both patriotic pro-war and critical antiwar interpretations has been discussed to a fare-thee-well among Shakespeare critics, scholars, and directors.

Shakespeare's two-sided position can be seen even in a very quick examination of the play. In its first scene, the archbishops of Canterbury and Ely are fretting over a bill about to be passed by Parliament that would strip the church of much of its property. In order to get King Henry to kill the bill, Canterbury plans to offer a big contribution to the king's war chest for an invasion of France. Henry is descended from a French princess and claims that the crown should have passed to his great-grandfather when the last of the French descendents of the royal house died (the crown was given instead to a cousin of the royal family). The French have barred Henry's claim by holding up an ancient Frankish law (the Salic Law) that does not allow inheritance through women. In the next scene, Henry asks Canterbury whether the French argument is legitimate; if it is not, he believes, an invasion of France would be justified. In substance, Canterbury's argument is straightforward: the Salic Law was devised for territory that is now in Germany, not France, and the kings of France themselves have inherited through women. However, this argument is presented in such an absurdly intricate manner that, to an audience hearing it for the first time, it sounds like double-talk. It sounds like double-talk to Henry as well: after Canterbury's long speech, he repeats his question: "May I with right and conscience make this claim?" Canterbury replies, "The sin upon my head, dread sovereign." After exhortations from his nobles, Henry decides to invade.

Shakespeare is ambiguous as to whether Henry's claim is just. On the one hand, the audience knows that Canterbury has an ulterior motive for justifying the claim, and his speech comes across as obfuscation. On the other hand, his arguments are, given the values of dynastic politics, sound.

Later in the play, at a point when a lengthy siege has failed to get the French town of Harfleur to surrender, Henry tells the governor of the town that if the English are forced to continue the siege, he will no longer be able to control his soldiers. When the town falls, "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." When the governor surrenders, Henry instructs one of his lords to "use mercy" to the inhabitants. Perhaps Henry's threats were a bluff. Nevertheless, it is morally questionable to threaten rape and murder, the killing of the old, and infanticide-even as a tactic.

As Henry and his troops march from Harfleur to the English-controlled port of Calais, Bardolph, one of Henry's drinking buddies from his wayward youth is arrested and executed for robbing a church. Henry supports the execution and proclaims,

 

We would have all such offenders cut off: and we give express charge in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language; for when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.

The lines recall Henry's repudiation of Falstaff. Here he consents to the death of a friend, but at the same time he insists, like a good king, on the humane and respectful treatment of French civilians.

With Henry's numbers depleted by disease and his soldiers exhausted and weakened, the French strike back, and, near the castle of Agincourt, attack Henry's remaining twelve thousand troops with a force of sixty thousand (a historically accurate figure). Immediately before the battle, Henry rallies his outnumbered troops with the famous "St. Crispin's Day" speech. One would expect that a scene of combat would follow. Instead, Shakespeare gives his audience a comic scene in which Pistol, another crony from Henry's wilder days, extorts ransom from a captured French soldier (Shakespeare has made it clear in Henry IV, Part I, that ransom is one of the perks of war). In the next scene, the French nobility decry their shame: they are losing to a smaller and weaker force. They swear to die wreaking havoc. When the French return to the field, Henry panics and orders his men to kill their prisoners-a violation of the rules of war in both medieval and Elizabethan times. The shamefulness of this act is ironically pointed up by the fact that it follows the description of two English knights chivalrously dying in each other's arms. Later, we discover that the French have killed the boys who were guarding the English supplies. A captain says that it is in response to this French atrocity that the king has ordered every man to kill his prisoners. But the audience knows that Henry was unaware of what the French had done when he gave the order. Perhaps this is simply an inconsistency that Shakespeare failed to correct. Or is the captain rationalizing Henry's war crime? Or is Shakespeare deliberately obscuring the issue of right and wrong?

Whatever the answers to these questions, it is important to stress that there are no combat scenes during the battle of Agincourt-a fact often obscured by the insertion of such scenes into movies and some stage productions. Shakespeare's depiction of one of the most significant battles in English history consists of a comic scene about ransom and scenes of one side's going off to commit atrocities (the French) and the other ordering atrocities (the English). Surely there is irony here.

Nonetheless, at the end of the battle, Shakespeare places God squarely on the English side. The English have won against extraordinary odds. The French have lost ten thousand men, the English twenty-nine (historically, the French lost approximately seven thousand, the English no more than five hundred). Shakespeare offers only one explanation for this incredible outcome: it is a miracle. Henry says,

 

O God thy arm was here;
And not to us, but to thy arm alone,
Ascribe we all! When, without stratagem,
but in plain shock and even play of battle,
Was ever known so great and little loss
On one part and on th' other? Take it, God
For it is none but thine.

IN A MECHANICAL tally of the evidence for a patriotic and a critical interpretation of the play, the critical interpretation probably comes out slightly ahead. So it's not surprising that, in a time of war, the theatre community (which is by and large liberal to left and anti-militarist) would mount productions of the play. But if you rely too much on the textual evidence, you will miss the effect of the play in performance. Shakespeare has given Henry such extraordinary speeches that, in the hands of a skilled actor, he comes across as an irresistibly inspiring and charismatic military leader. If you want to present Henry V as an unambiguous antiwar play, you have to fight the power of Henry's speeches.

Indeed, in this summer's Shakespeare in the Park production in New York City directed by Mark Wing-Davy (whose take is, for the most part, antiwar) Liev Schreiber delivered most of the speeches in an extraordinarily controlled manner and seemed to be resisting the rhetorical power of the language that Shakespeare gave him. In an article praising Adrian Noble's 1984 antiwar production at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the critic Chris Fitter describes Noble's staging of Henry's stirring "Once more unto the breach" exhortation to his troops:

 

Harfleur at 3.1 is a smooth, vast wall of gleaming grey steel. . . . . Ascending this height are three parallel scaling ladders, onto the middle of which, Henry throws himself after "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more/ or close the wall up with our English dead." As soldiers swarm eagerly up the two flanking ladders, Henry freezes three rungs up, and to the astonishment of the troops now above him, who exchange puzzled glances on their heights, Henry breaks into the lengthy and now redundant grandiloquence of a further thirty-two lines. At his ardent climax, crying "God for Henry [sic], England and St. George!" he throws up his arms in surrender to euphoria and topples stiffly backwards into the arms of Exeter and his "brothers." His troops thus recommence the assault alone, Henry being below in fraternal delirium.

To avoid glorifying Henry and war, Noble had to stage the speech in a way that contradicts the action implied by the text.

Still, Olivier also had to contort the script to make it unambiguously patriotic. He plays up the comedy in Canterbury's Salic Law speech to the point where it obscures what is actually happening in the scene. He also cuts Henry's threats to Harfleur, the execution of Bardolph, and the killing of the prisoners. Kenneth Branagh's brilliant 1989 film, which preserves the play's ambiguity, also cuts the killing of the prisoners. One could speculate that Branagh wanted to play a morally ambiguous, but still heroic Henry, and that including the killing of the prisoners would have tilted the scales too far against Henry for Branagh's comfort.

Henry V is not an isolated case of Shakespeare's moral ambivalence on political questions. It is part of a larger cycle of history plays known as the major tetralogy (Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2, and Henry V). Throughout these plays, Shakespeare resists presenting his audience with clear-cut rights and wrongs. Often characters who behave in a morally distasteful fashion turn out to be effective rulers who serve the greater good of their country.

I want to suggest that it's the moral ambiguity of Shakespeare's history plays that suits the times in which we live-and not their messages, however interpreted by directors on the right or left. Consider as a case in point the left's position on U.S. foreign policy. During the cold war, it was relatively straightforward and unambiguous: the democratic left opposed Soviet communism as a totalitarian abomination, but did not think that opposition to communism justified the U.S. government's support of right-wing dictators such as Chile's Augusto Pinochet or Iran's Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. But now look at the contemporary case of U.S. support for Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan.

IT IS A BIT of a stretch, but Musharraf would make a fine character in a Shakespearean history play. Always ambitious, he led the overthrow of a democratically elected government in a military coup and seized power for himself-and was condemned by the United States for doing that. However, the democratically elected leaders that he replaced were corrupt, and he seems to have enjoyed strong popular support. A short time later, al-Qaeda targeted tens of thousands of civilians in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and succeeded in killing almost three thousand. The United States then put pressure on Musharraf to assist us in overthrowing the Taliban government of neighboring Afghanistan, which was closely allied to al-Qaeda. Musharraf agreed, and the United States entered into an alliance with Pakistan. Because many Pakistanis sympathized with the Muslim radicalism of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Musharraf lost popular support and took repressive measures to quash his opposition. Now he is no longer a benign despot, and the United States is no longer condemning him; he is a stalwart ally.

What should the left's position be on issues such as U.S. support for Pakistan? Watching Henry V won't help us answer questions like that, but it might help us understand why, as with the moral/political questions in the play, there is no easy answer. This is a time for the history plays, not because they are pro-war or antiwar, or favor one king or country over another, but precisely because of their deep ambiguities. Let us hope that new productions of the plays preserve their complexity rather than giving easy answers to the hard questions they raise.

 

Alexander Harrington is the artistic director of the New York-based Eleventh Hour Theatre Company, for which he has directed all the plays in Shakespeare's major tetralogy, including Henry V.