Nostalgia and the Not Yet Late Queen: Refusing Female Rule in Henry V

Within the last decade, Henry V has assumed a surprisingly prominent place not only in Shakespeare criticism, but in wider critical debates over the relations between literature and hegemonic political power. Prompted by Stephen Greenblatt’s widely influential consideration of the Henriad in his essay “Invisible Bullets,” various critics have staked out Shakespeare’s only real “war play” as their own battlefield for contesting, as Jean Howard puts it, “how and why a culture produces and deals with challenges to its dominant ideologies.” ¹ Whatever their ideological stance, however, these critics have largely left untested Greenblatt’s crucial assumption that, in the Henriad ‘s counterpoint between hegemony and subversion (or at least imagined subversion), hegemony resides with and emerges from the Elizabethan monarchy, and subversion (even if illusory) resides with and emerges from the Elizabethan stage. In this essay I want to contend that Henry V is a Shakespearean experiment in exercising precisely the reverse relation between throne and theater. If we fully consider this play’s historical moment — its production late in the reign of not simply a monarch, but a queen — then Henry V ‘s association between theatrical enterprise and the enterprises of a dauntingly masculine monarch grants theater not the power of subversion, but rather the power of patriarchy, which is asserted over and against the waning and increasingly disparaged power of female rule.

I wish, then, to begin by addressing the first long speech in Henry V, and one of the longest in the play: the Archbishop of Canterbury’s disquisition on Salic law, the French tradition that kingship may never be claimed via descent from a woman. The mercenary motives behind Canterbury’s speech, and their influence on how we view Henry’s decision to fight for dominion of France, have been much debated; nevertheless, most critics have found it difficult to construe this speech itself as anything but a throwaway, a purely legalistic discussion that merely gives Henry the excuse to act. ² But I will argue that in fact Henry V is deeply concerned with Salic law, and — the Archbishop to the contrary — interested in how the English might safely take the French side of the Salic-law issue: that is to say, how an English king might legitimately claim political power without having derived any of that power from a woman. If monarchical power in Henry V is indeed intimately bound up with theatrical power, the play’s concern with the ruler’s gender also becomes one of characterizing dramatic power as wholly and properly male.

Salic law is never again mentioned in the play after this early scene; but we may begin to investigate its submerged importance by following Leah Marcus’s lead in her study of 1 Henry VI, and asking ourselves why Salic law might be an issue topical to the writing of Henry V. ³ The far more obviously topical reference in Henry V is the one that pinpoints the date of the play to an unusually precise degree: that is, the Chorus’s allusion to the Earl of Essex, “the general of our gracious empress,” and his anticipated triumph over the Irish (5.Chor.29–34). These lines, described by Gary Taylor as “the only explicit, extra-dramatic, incontestable reference to a contemporary event anywhere in the [Shakespearean] canon,” locate the play as having been written in the late spring or early summer of 1599. ⁴ But this same allusion — in its chronological specificity, in its naming of Essex, and in its hopeful (if cautious) projection of male conquest — also serves to locate the play firmly in that time of increasing speculation over who should rule when England’s now-aged gracious empress would be gone. Essex himself was deeply embroiled in the controversy, as he and Elizabeth’s Secretary Robert Cecil in turn sought favor from James VI of Scotland, Elizabeth’s likely but by no means guaranteed successor. The Jesuit polemicist Robert Parsons’s 1594 Conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland, even while advocating a Catholic successor to the throne, is dedicated to...