One of the reasons Shakespeare is so important is not just because we can place him in his historical context and thereby draw out in fine detail the innovations he made in the art of storytelling, but also because he consciously understood himself and his work in a historical context. That context included not just the nation in which he lived but also the classical tradition that had been rediscovered in the Renaissance. Like any educated man of his era, Shakespeare knew Latin and would have been required to read the classics during his schooling. He also borrowed heavily from Italian Renaissance authors such as Boccaccio, and well-known English tales. Thus, Hamlet and King Lear were both existing stories that Shakespeare adapted.
Another source that the Bard used extensively was history itself. This includes Roman history, as in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. However, the works that are called his “history plays” are the ones taken from English history, of which there are ten. This group does not include King Lear and Macbeth. Those characters had some basis in reality, but the details of their lives were not well known enough for them to count as proper historical figures. More importantly, they were not tied to the royal family that was current in Shakespeare’s time, and, therefore, they had no bearing on the politics of the day. This gave the Bard significant leeway to alter the stories as he pleased.
The same was not true of the work that we are examining in this series of posts. The official history of the English royal family was a tightly controlled narrative. That’s why there was an officially sanctioned version of the story of Henry IV and his son Hal, who later became Henry V. The Elizabethan court enforced that narrative via strict censorship and severe punishments for anybody who was seen to challenge the legitimacy of the royal family, including its ancestors. The British Crown had enough trouble fighting off interminable internal dissent. It was not going to allow lowly playwrights to make matters worse.
This is a key point that we must keep in mind in order to understand what Shakespeare does with Henry IV. It’s possible to criticise the play on technical grounds, and these criticisms would be valid except for the fact that Shakespeare had no room at all to change the overarching plot of the story. He had to uphold the official narrative or face the wrath of the censor. Once we understand that, we are able to understand which parts of the story he did modify and what he was able to express thereby.
In Shakespeare’s hands, Prince Hal becomes the quintessential teenager that we know so well in our time. He is the original rock ‘n’ roller or rebel without a cause. Such a character would have been considered an outrage to Elizabethan sensibilities if Shakespeare had presented him as the hero in his own fictional story. But there is the wonderful irony at play. The reason the Bard could get away with it was precisely because he was following the official narrative. It was not he who had created the myth of the playboy prince; it was the propagandists of Henry V’s court and then, much later, those of Henry VIII.
None of this had anything to do with the real historical figure of Prince Hal, who was, in fact, the epitome of a faithful son and dutiful prince who fought alongside his father on the battlefield at age 16. The falling out between father and son happened later on, and the myth of the rebellious teenager was partly constructed in order to obfuscate that fact. In short, the official story of Henry V was a work of propaganda. Shakespeare took that propaganda and managed to create out of it a novel and innovative work that calls into question both the political and religious basis of the ruling class of English society. All of this was done in plain sight under the eagle eye of the court censor.
Thus, before we get into an analysis of the story that Shakespeare wrote, we’ll need to spend this post looking at how and why the fictitious narrative of Henry V had been constructed in the first place. In turn, that will allow us to appreciate how Shakespeare ever so delicately adapted it for his own purposes.
Now, as I have been at pains to point out in recent posts, stories are “real” because the transformations that are described in stories really do occur. However, the question arises: why do we tell stories? If the transformation has taken place in the real world anyway, what is the point of recounting it?
In terms of everyday stories, the reasons are fairly straightforward. Stories can be funny, and we tell them in order to amuse others. Stories can be poignant and relevant to some discussion that is otherwise happening. We throw them in to elucidate the broader debate. Most simply, though, people just like hearing stories in the same way we like hearing a catchy melody. Telling tales is a pleasant way to spend the time.
There are stories, however, that have socio-political importance. One of the purposes of these kinds of stories is to initiate people into a culture. We tell the stories of culture heroes of the past so that those who are still alive may emulate them. Let’s take Jesus as an example. While he was alive, Jesus had a number of followers, including those closest to him that we call ‘the disciples’. During that time, Jesus was actively teaching his followers, and he was able to give them individual lessons and feedback. We see that happening in the gospel story when Jesus lays tests for the disciples or criticises them for their lack of faith.
Self-evidently, that kind of teaching is no longer possible once the master has died. What is possible, and what we find in seemingly every culture, is to tell the story of the dead master as a way to pass on his teachings. One of the main purposes of such storytelling is to allow imitation. That is, you describe the transformations of the master so that the followers may copy that way of living and try to achieve the same outcome.
This is a particularly poignant issue in relation to Jesus because he spent most of his time hanging around with the underclass of his society while railing against the political and religious authorities of his time. In order to imitate him, wouldn’t a proper Christian need to do the same? Well, that’s certainly how his immediate disciples understood the matter, and that is why most of them ended up getting crucified or otherwise put to death. In that respect, they faithfully imitated their master.
The problems began when the behaviour of the followers of Christ gradually deviated from that described in the Gospel story. Once the Christian church became merged with the Roman state, the meaning of being Christian could no longer include rebelling against the authorities since those authorities were the ones propagating the story in the first place. Therefore, the original story of Jesus came into conflict with the political and religious structures that claimed to speak for it. This is the hypocrisy that the Protestants realised more than a thousand years later and which motivated the Reformation.
It is no coincidence that the modern meaning of the word “sanctimonious” arose around the same time. Sanctimony once simply meant to uphold the external appearance of faith and honour. In the ancient and medieval worlds, just as in the time of Jesus, putting on the appearance of righteousness was enough. Nobody much cared whether your internal thoughts and beliefs matched your outward actions. Jesus flipped that by encouraging his followers to pursue inner virtue, including and especially when it brought them into conflict with established convention.
What is true in the realm of religion is also true of politics. There are established conventions and official narratives by which we determine whether a political figure is legitimate or not. In the English tradition, one of the foundational rules of succession was one that played a central role in many of Shakespeare’s greatest works. From the Middle Ages onwards, England had been run according to the doctrine of primogeniture, which means that the eldest son receives practically all the inheritance of the father. If the father happens to be king, the inheritance includes the crown. Therefore, the eldest son must become king. That was the rule that was in place, and the legitimacy of a king was based on following that rule.
What happened when the rule couldn’t be fulfilled? Most people would know that Henry VIII went to extraordinary lengths to try and secure a male heir. One of the reasons he did so was because the uncertainty created by the failure to beget a son had caused enormous problems in English political history. A famous example was the brutal civil war of the 12th century known as “The Anarchy”, which was caused by the fact that Henry I had no male heir and tried to make his daughter the queen.
A second example is one that is directly relevant to our subject here. Richard II failed to have a son, and this played a major role in allowing his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, to usurp the throne and become Henry IV. However, the failure to follow the rules of royal succession created uncertainty and placed Henry’s rule on shaky ground from the very beginning. That’s a big part of the reason why he needed to put down various rebellions, including the one described in Shakespeare’s play where Harry Hotspur and other rebels mounted a major challenge to the king.
As we have already mentioned, Henry IV’s son, Hal, faithfully joined with his father on the battlefield and helped to put down the rebellion. In this sense, he was a model son. However, partly because of his successes, and partly because of the failing health of his father, the relationship between them turned sour later on as the father saw in the son a challenge to his authority. One of the results was that Henry kicked Hal out of the royal council, a disgrace that could have marred the transfer of power later and thereby become a threat to the son’s succession. Even though the transfer of power eventually happened smoothly, Henry V (formerly Prince Hal) also had to fight off significant internal opposition in the early years of his reign.
That is the very brief political background to the story. There is no evidence whatsoever that the future Henry V was a rebellious child or that he led a life of dissolution and debauchery. Where, then, could the story have emerged about Harry’s supposed youthful indiscretions?
Well, funnily enough, this is where religion re-enters the picture. We have to remember that the kings of this era were mostly genuine exponents of the Christian faith. Indeed, Henry IV had visited the Holy Land, and his desire to launch a crusade was genuine, even though he never got around to doing it. But it was not the story of Jesus as a holy anarchist that was invoked in relation to Henry V but another very common religious narrative that occurs in many cultures.
Remembering once again that the transformations depicted in stories almost always have a basis in reality, one of the most famous kinds of religious transformation occurs where an aristocratic young man (it is always a man) uses his status and wealth to partake of wine, women, and song, only to suddenly transition into an austere religious practitioner after an epiphany of some kind. Perhaps the most famous example of this in world-historical terms is the Buddha, who lived a life of pleasure until the age of 29, when he had his religious conversion. Two prime examples from the Christian tradition were St Augustine and St Francis of Assisi. These were real transformations that happened in the lives of these men.
In the case of the two Christian saints just mentioned, their stories were very well-known throughout Christendom in the time of Henry V. Most importantly, it was believed that such men had been chosen by God, since only this could seem to explain the sudden and violent change in their characters as they threw off all worldly possessions to live a life of poverty.
Again, there is no evidence at all that such a religious transformation happened to Prince Hal. In any case, the story was only constructed many years later when he had become Henry V. Henry’s brother paid an Italian scholar called Tito Livio Frulovisi to write a biography of the king describing the conversion and how it reunited him not just with his faith but also with his father. The implication was that Henry had been saved by God, who brought him back onto the path of righteousness and made him king. All of this was a fabrication designed to give legitimacy to a kingship which was suffering from internal rebellion.
By modern propaganda standards, it was all incredibly unsophisticated. In fact, Frulovisi seems to have plagiarised most of his work directly from other sources. Moreover, the narrative seems to have delivered very little actual political benefit to Henry V during his reign. If that was all there was to it, the whole thing might have been simply forgotten. However, a century and a half later, the fictitious story of Henry V’s religious epiphany was rediscovered and reinvigorated by the propagandists of the court of Henry VIII.
We noted earlier how changing social and political realities tend to bring elements of important stories into dissonance with succeeding generations. To be a Christian in the time of Jesus was very different to being one in the time of Constantine or later in medieval Europe. One of the main functions of the Catholic Church was smoothing out the inconsistencies between the narrative and reality. However, it’s a fine line between smoothing out inconsistency and engaging in blatant hypocrisy and lies.
The rank hypocrisy of the Catholic Church led to the Reformation, which caused major religious and political changes between the rule of Henry V and that of Henry VIII. One of those changes was the fact that the papal blessing, once given to kings as the seal of divine approval for their reign, had lost its validity. But if the Pope were no longer the authority who could vouch for the divinity of a king’s rule, who could?
The answer was found in a modification to the divine right of kings. According to the new doctrine, kings were already divinely blessed, irrespective of what the pope had to say about it. In accordance with Protestant beliefs, the king’s divinity came from internal rather than external authority. It was a personal connection with God that was not mediated by priest or pope.
Now, in the time of Henry VIII, these ideas were still new and not universally accepted. What the king needed was some historical examples to help bolster his case. The entirely fictitious story of Henry V’s religious conversion was just what the doctor ordered. Here was a king who had undergone a religious epiphany and had been chosen by God. As an ancestor to Henry VIII (sort of), he was a prime exemplar of the new doctrine of the divine right of kings and proof that the royal line had always been blessed by God. That is the reason why Henry VIII’s chroniclers got to work embellishing the story by turning the wayward Prince Hal into the kind of playboy that Edward VII would later be. All of this was designed to enhance the miraculous nature of Hal’s conversion and thereby the inherent divinity of the royal line.
It was this narrative, created by the propagandists of Henry VIII, which had become official court doctrine by the time that Shakespeare picked up the story many decades later. Prince Hal was known as a pleasure-seeking youth who willingly gave up his wicked ways to faithfully serve God, king, and country. To reiterate, all of this was an inversion of the truth. Hal had started off faithful to his father and become unfaithful later. The grubby business of political infighting within the royal family, which is a major theme in Shakespeare’s greatest works (Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, etc.), had been airbrushed away and replaced by a quasi-religious fairytale.
To say it one more time, Shakespeare was not at liberty to deviate one iota from that fairytale. His portrayal of Henry IV had to include a young prince who lived a life of excess and then underwent a dramatic transformation to become a faithful servant to his father. That is what the play shows. It is what Shakespeare did with the rest of the story that shows us his real intent.
It is indicative of a major change that had taken place in English society between the time of Henry V to that of Elizabeth I, that the Bard was able to remove almost all of the religious themes from the story. Clearly, the court censor didn’t care that the prince does not have a religious epiphany. Instead, Shakespeare’s Prince Hal reunites with his father out of political and familial duty, nothing more.
But the far more important point that is related to this is that Shakespeare’s Prince Hal never renounces the life of pleasure. On the contrary, he tacitly supports it through the character who ended up becoming the crowd favourite: Falstaff. Falstaff is the pleasure-seeking Fool who had been a stock character in comedies since the ancient world. Shakespeare elevates him to the position of wise Sage. He is actually the mentor to Hal, providing the prince with a different view on life.
It is through Falstaff that Shakespeare manages to critique both the religious and political establishments of his day, all while staying faithful to the official propaganda line. We’ll see how he did it next week as we begin our analysis of the story proper.