Shakespeare's Guilt Trip in Henry V

To know the author," cries a father over his mysteriously murdered son in The Spanish Tragedy, "were some ease of grief." ¹ Hieronimo's plaint might speak today for a scholarship often eluded by the decentered authors of early modern plays, collaborative texts that "began as productions in the theatre, where their writers were not known, and many of them first appeared in print without ascription of authorship (or anonymity); they are thus 'pre-anonymous'--that is, 'anonymous' only in a sense that existed before the word itself emerged with the author to describe their condition." ² To understand authorial identification as a form of interpretive satisfaction or "ease" is to conceive an existence through the perception of a lack: "The author's emergence is marked by the notice of its absence" (362).

By equating author with murderer, however, Hieronimo does more than indicate a nascent desire for authorship and an attendant frustration with anonymity. He also assumes a relation between authorship and punishable culpability, as the line completing his couplet makes clear: "For in revenge my heart would find relief" (2.4.103). In his influential account of the emergence of modern authorship, Michel Foucault asserts much the same relation: "Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, 'sacralized' and 'sacralizing' figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive." ³ But like many other early modern plays, The Spanish Tragedy persistently refuses to provide the authentic author its forensic emphasis seems to invoke, instead presenting "a dramatic text which is, in real terms, unauthored." ⁴ Hieronimo's wish "to know the author" assumes a determinate identity that the play does not provide. Rather than identify this unsatisfied desire as the birth pangs of authorship, I would like to consider it as a symptom of a more pervasive concern in English Renaissance culture--a symptom rendered more palpable on a stage where authorship is not uninvented or unimagined but the increasingly untenable answer to an increasingly self-conscious question.

The cultural whole of which this stage is a part was distinguished by a crisis of blurred agency and mobile responsibility. Politically, the "reason of state" question had raised but not settled the issue of whether and to what extent a prince was subject to private morality, and this debate had taken place in a broader conversation about the distribution of power and accountability between prince and people. ⁵ Theologically, questions of conformity and individual spiritual liability had been occasioned by Henry VIII's "national" excommunication and the bewildering reversals in official religion that followed hard upon his reign; the Reformation itself had forced its participants radically to reconceive the nature of guilt and the methods of repentance. ⁶ Economically, an emergent market had begun to reconfigure material exchange, often complicating the terms of production and consumption with a proliferation of "middlemen"; correspondingly, the force of legal contract increasingly supplanted the bond of honor and the unwritten obligation. These culturally central developments appear only in the margins of this essay, but I hope to show how the relatively marginal institution of theater was especially well situated to engage them. And some plays were better suited than others for such reflection in that theater. In Henry V these politically, theologically, and economically valenced crises of responsibility converge at a point in Shakespeare's career where reflection on them coextends with dramatic reflexivity. Self-consciously aware of its hero's tenuous ethical and legal position, of the difficulties facing the onstage penitent, of the middlemen obscuring authors and authority, Henry V presents authorship itself as a synecdoche of the accountable agency that Renaissance England complicated from several sides.

Structurally, the stage on which Henry V is played foregrounds the interrogation of responsibility. If in the world offstage the questions "Who is speaking?" and "Who is acting?" often resolve issues of agency...