“The Making and Breaking of Nations in Shakespeare’s Henry V.” Pp. 30-48. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Writing and Rewriting Nationhood: "Henry V" and Political Appropriation of Shakespeare
Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, 2022
Shakespeare's Henry V is often regarded as a nationalistic play and has been appropriated for political spin and propaganda to enhance the sense of national unity. Shakespeare captures the emerging nationalistic feeling of the Tudor era in Henry's emphasis on national history and pride, but various parts of the text suggest a more diverse and complex figures of the king and his subjects than a war hero and the united nation. Such complexity, however, is often ignored in political appropriation. Laurence Olivier's film adaptation during WWII glamorizes the war and defines the English nation as a courageous "band of brothers" through its presentation of Shakespeare's play a shared story or history of national victory. Kenneth Branagh's film in 1989, on the other hand, captures the ugliness of war but it still romanticizes the sacrifice for the country. In 2016, Shakespeare was made part of the Brexit discourse of growing nationalism at the time of the EU referendum. Brexit was imagined as a victory that will bring back freedom and sovereignty the country once enjoyed, and Shakespeare was used to represent the greatness of Britain. Shakespeare's text, however, depicts the war against the continent in a more skeptical than glorifying tone. The war scenes are scattered with humorous dialogues and critical comments and the multinational captains of Henry's army are constantly at odds with one another. Shakespeare thus provides us with a wider view of nationhood, resisting the simplifying force of politics.
Re-presenting Shakespeare: Interpretations and Translations. Ed. Sarbani Chaudhury., 2002
Abstract The phrase ‘Shakespeare’s English’ gives the impression of a homogeneous, cohesive language, complete in itself. Taking Shakespeare’s Henry V as a test case I would like to demonstrate that it is essentially a polyvalent language in the making, with tenuous relationships being established between ‘pure’ English and its dialect versions. Focus on the imperialist agenda of Henry V is now a critical commonplace. A major mode realising this agenda is linguistic imposition. Scot Jamy, Welsh Fluellen and Irish Macmorris are Englished through their contribution to Henry’s triumphant nationalism and through their learning to speak ‘King’s English’, the language of the ruler. Similarly, French Katherine’s right to become the future queen of England is determined by her ability to ‘love in English’. The colonised Other and the defeated Other can share in the dream of United Kingdom provided they ‘articulate’ their Englishness. However, their articulation is English, ‘but not quite’. It is this distance between ‘pure’ English and its inferior dialectical versions as it were, which becomes a paradigm of the fractured nationalist-colonialist discourse. Ironically, only two generations earlier, the superior purity of the English vernacular upon which the play focuses, had been categorised as an inferior and alien Other in relation to Latin, the language of the empowered in England.
Shakespeare’s Henry V: The Idea of Englishness and the Representation of the King, Henry V
Kosbed: Kocaeli Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, Türkiye, 2017
Henry V, one of the most significant historical plays of W. Shakespeare, reveals the politics of England during the period of the King, Henry V by bringing fact and fiction together. Throughout the play, the idea of Englishness is stressed through the expressions of Henry V, who emphasizes the importance of national spirit and patriotism for the development of the country. Considering the characteristics of the King in the play, it is clear that his actions, decisions and strategies play a very significant role in the political glories achieved. In this study, the tactics employed by Henry V in the work to overcome the enemies and to establish peace in the country will be analysed, therefore the aim of the article is to discuss the impact of the intelligence of the King, Henry V and the devotion to English identity upon the victories of the English nation in Henry V.
Babel on the Battlefield. Englishing the French in Shakespeare’s Henry V
2015
- This paper examines Shakespeare’s Henry V from the perspective of the play’s deep concern with languages and with the dynamics of their interaction. The drama is characterised by linguistic heterogeneity of various kinds, from the blatant bilingualism that sets it apart from other plays in the canon, to the welter of regional dialects, personal idiolects, and stylistic registers that are also played off against one another within it. At the same time as it enacts a confrontation between the English and French tongues, and the mentalities and cultural codes they respectively encode, it also juxtaposes different voices articulating contrasting evaluations of events and discrepant perceptions of the protagonist himself. The linguistic multiplicity of the play is therefore part and parcel of the ambivalence of attitude with which recent criticism of the play has increasingly been concerned. At the same time, it also implicates issues having to do with translation and other forms of cu...
Language and Literature 29(3): 203-222, 2020
Shakespeare's clearest use of dialect for sociolinguistic reasons can be found in the play Henry V, where we meet the Welshman Captain Fluellen, the Scotsman Captain Jamy, and the Irishman Captain Macmorris. But what might contemporary audiences have made of these Celtic characters? What popular understandings of Celtic identities did Shakespeare's characters trigger? Recent technological developments, largely in the domain of corpus linguistics, have enabled us to construct robust but nuanced answers to such questions. In this paper, we use CQPweb, a corpus analysis tool developed by Andrew Hardie at Lancaster University, to explore Celtic identity terms in a corpus developed by the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language Project. This corpus contains some 380 million words spanning the 80-year period 1560-1639, and allows us to tap into the attitudes and stereotypes that would have become entrenched in the years leading up to Henry V's appearance in 1599. We will show how the words tending to co-occur with the words Scots/Scottish, Irish and Welsh reveal contemporary understandings of these identities. Results flowing from the analyses of collocates include the fact that the Irish were considered wild and savage, but also that the word Irish had one particular positive use-when modifying the word rug. In discussing our findings, we will take note of critical discussions, both present-day and early modern, on 'nationhood' in relation to these characters and identities. We will also conduct, partly for contrastive purposes, a brief analysis of the English identity.
Take a Soldier, Take a King": The (In)Separability of King and Conflict in Branagh's Henry V
Literature Film Quarterly, 2005
Take a Soldier, Take a King": The (In)Separability of King and Conflict in Branagh's Henry V William Shakespeare's play of Henry V offers a striking portrait-or perhaps more accurately, portraits-of a medieval English monarch viewed from the perspective of an ultimately successful military campaign which culminated in the decisive English victory at Agincourt. The play itself-the raw material from which both Lawrence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh crafted their cinematic renditions-offers a notoriously dualistic and divided view of the monarch. On the one hand, the play has been described as offering a portrait of England's most celebrated medieval monarch, Henry V-"the mirror of all Christian kings." The Signet Shakespeare, for example, describes the play as having "a simple plot . . . [with an] undoubted hero" (xxiv), and the old Arden Shakespeare, even more enthusiastically, proclaims Henry's perfection in physical, moral, and spiritual terms. Less enthusiastically, however, Shakespeare's portrayal of this intriguing monarch has just as frequently been cited as a portrait of sheer Machiavellianism. Less given to revealing his thoughts in soliloquy than Shakespeare's other monarchs, Henry V remains an elusive figuremysterious, unfathomable, unknown and unknowable to others save through his actions and the interpretations that we place upon them. The Machiavellian view of the king, a view increasingly brought into focus through the lens of post-colonial and anti-imperialist readings, emphasizes the king's manipulation of others, his evasion of responsibility for the consequences of his actions, and ultimately, the flimsiness of his pretences for engaging in a war justifiable only on the grounds of an aggressive imperialism.
French speech as dramatic action in Shakespeare's Henry V
Language and Literature, 2013
In Henry V, the use of French by the French characters serves a purpose beyond the mere characterisation of them as French. This is something that has not been fully acknowledged by critics to date. This article demonstrates first the singularity of non-English characters actually speaking in a different tongue in Shakespeare's plays, and the way in which the text draws attention to such speech. Three crucial scenes are examined in which, unable to communicate semantically as full human beings, the French speakers are not only represented as vulnerable in their relationship to the English-speaking characters, but made so in relation to the Anglophone audience. These scenes are used to illustrate how foreign language operates dramaturgically to privilege the physicality of speech, thereby emphasising the bodily reality of the character/actor. The sexual implications of this in two of these scenes, and their echo of England's conquering of France, is also discussed. Because it is the act of speaking a largely incomprehensible language that draws attention to this physically-based vulnerability, the full resonance of larger themes of the play related to mortality, dominance, and nationhood can therefore be realised fully only in performance.
Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy: The performance of national identity
Cardiff University, 2015
Abstract Shakespeare’s history plays have been conceived of in tetralogies that re-tell the nation’s past and champion the English monarchy. Where the nation is no longer England, but the British union, state funding for productions of these plays in ‘national’ institutions continues. This thesis investigates the hypothesis that the idea of what nation is has impacted on representations of the history plays in production. It identifies and analyses the significance of the discourse of national identity located within the heart of the ‘national’ institutions of the National Theatre (NT) and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), and explores the ways in which these institutions have re-told and re-produced the second tetralogy (Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, Henry V), in the light of Britishness. Using archival research, this study reconstructs live performances of the second tetralogy at the NT (2003, 2005), and the RSC (2013-15) to explore the cartography of the land as mapped onto the stage. It then analyses whether the repeated binary divide (political, social and economic as ‘real’ nation, vs. discourse, culture and identity as ‘imagined’ nation), is mimicked or upset in the theatre. Dominant trends suggest that these productions can be viewed as either reconstructive representations, creative re-imaginings, or deconstructions of an outdated mode or idea. This analysis leads to a conclusion that a dynamic relationship exists between the staging of a production and the cartography of the land represented in the plays, and that the theatre is a unique space in which the repeated divide in nation studies can be upset. The representation of these nationalism issues points to a fundamental difference in conception of the plays overall at the NT and RSC and the need for a clear conception of what the nation is, in order to achieve a coherent representation of these history plays.
War, Peace and the Machiavellian Monarch in Shakespeare’s 'Henry V' and 'Richard III'
A discussion of the role, construction, and deconstruction of monarchy and masculinity in Shakespeare's history tetralogies. Comparing the tetralogies as narrative mirrors, the essay further explores the influence of contemporary political theory (such as, for instance, Machiavelli) in shaping and informing the play's exploration of divine right and royal prerogative, with broader reference to an overall discussion of a competing construction of historical narrative itself.