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This chapter is divided into two parts. Part 1 focuses on how success spoils Hal and Falstaff. It shows that shows that in 2 Henry IV, subjectivity becomes reified and hence subordinated to power, and the dramatic and poetic themes begin to register regret and nostalgia. Part 2 discusses the discontinuities of Henry V. In Henry V, the darkening of mood and themes evident in 2 Henry IV, is intensified, but contrary to a long critical tradition, this play revives the theme of subjectivity celebrated in 1 Henry IV when we catch glimpses of the young king's interiority in the scenes before the battle, and it is an interiority recognizably continuous with that of Prince Hal before the accession.

The Hundred Years War offers an opportunity to consider strategy in the context of medieval European warfare in general, while also considering the specifics of the Anglo‐French conflict of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Between 1337 and 1453, English armies invaded and occupied France with the ostensible aim of enforcing the English kings' claim to the French throne. In Chapter 4, Anne Curry explains why certain strategies were chosen at particular points, noting that strategic decisions in medieval warfare often appeared to result from personal choices by kings and princes at particular moments in time, with little attention to theory or to ‘lessons of history’. Throughout the period, rulers and commanders viewed warfare not simply as action against armies, with the ultimate goal of prevailing in battle. Instead, they also sought to demoralize the population, reduce economic sustainability, and weaken political authority through shifting alliances with continental rulers.

This chapter turns from modes of disciplinary power to the regulation of social phenomena at the mass level in order to show how ideas about biopolitics—that is, about the making of a reproducible social body—are inscribed in Elizabethan martial dramas. Exploring how discourses of fertility overlap with discourses of warfare in the theater, this chapter focus on the anonymous Edward III, a play, partly Shakespearean, which is haunted by Elizabethan military experiences in Ireland, and which, in fascinating ways, anticipates the similarly biopolitical concerns of Shakespeare's Henry V. Edward III obliquely discloses its engagement with both the matter of the Irish wars as well as with a kind of “race panic”—a fear of the erosion of Englishness—that arose in concert with the English plantation or re‐peopling, of Ireland.

The book concludes with the two most celebrated symbols of Anglo‐French nation‐building, Jeanne d'Arc and Shakespeare's Henry V. Jeanne's story occurs in the last stages of the Hundred Years War, in a period where early modern historians have conventionally sought to locate the birth of nationhood. Reclaimed repeatedly for different ideological ends, her case exemplifies the contortions and contradictions of nationalist assertion. Shakespeare acts with analogous power to articulate a drama of nation that has proved infinitely appropriable to modern histories of English and Englishness. Just as Chaucer has been used retrospectively to create an incipient Englishness well before its time, so Shakespeare's French Catherine has served as a type of subservient Frenchness to an inflated English patriotism. Yet in both writers we see a long history of creative linguistic friction that bears witness to the contrariness of the categories of ‘English’ and ‘French’ in the medieval period.

This chapter argues that from the outset of Henry V, the transformation of both the king and the polity consequent upon Henry's accession is figured as almost complete. In the Henry IV plays, Shakespeare had put a great deal of energy into showing that the miracle of the king's two bodies portrayed in the Famous victories had been no such thing; not a sudden transformation but a long-planned, and entirely calculated performance or facsimile of such a transformation. However, at the start of Henry V, Shakespeare went out of his way to show both that that was precisely how the transformation of Hal into Henry was perceived by even the most learned and eminent of his new subjects and that that perception had worked an almost miraculous transformation on the condition of the body politic.

The Life of Henry the Fifth, written in 1599, one of Shakespeare's histories, is a patriotic, epic portrayal of a phase in the bloody Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) between England and France. It describes a medieval campaign led by a chivalrous and virtuous king, who could perhaps do wrong but not a great deal of wrong, and in which the few acting in a just cause defeat the many. This chapter provides an international lawyer's commentary on the play by examining how Shakespeare used internationa1 law for his dramatic ends; to compare his version with its principal sources, the chronicles of Holinshed and Hall, and occasionally with other historians' views as to what transpired during the reign of Henry V; to assess Shakespeare's text in the light of 15th- and 16th-century norms of jus gentium, primarily as reflected in the writings of contemporary jurists and earlier medieval jurists; and, now and then, to show how attitudes toward the law of war have changed since Shakespeare's times, and thus to illustrate the law's evolution. The chapter draws on the works of modern writers on medieval and Renaissance law, such as Maurice Keen.

Henry V was concerned with bringing peace to Wales not just to forestall any attempts by the Lollards but also to wage his war in France. Welsh freemen had always looked upon war as the most honourable and glorious activity. Aside from the troops, the general population of Wales was levied by Henry V. Some who supported the war were given gentry estates in France. Back at home, lawlessness had grown in Wales. Wales was a country with a long military tradition where soldiers were readily recruited. It was in Wales where Duke Richard from the House of York started the opening skirmish of the Wars of the Roses against the House of Lancaster.

This chapter re-examines the notion of Lydgate as a ‘prince-pleaser’ laureate of the Lancastrian dynasty, exploring the involvement of his patron, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester and brother of Henry V, in the composition of the Fall. Humphrey's personal political ambitions and his conflicts with the conciliar rule of magnates during the minority of Henry VI are discussed. Consideration is given to Lydgate's substantial additions to the poem, in particular his inclusion of moralizing ‘envoy’ passages after narratives (which sharpen the advisory value of the poem) and an account of the rape of Lucretia (which draws on a prose version by the influential Florentine humanist Coluccio Salutati). Lydgate's only prose work, Serpent of Division, traces the Roman Civil Wars, the collapse of the late Roman Republic, and the final years of the life of Julius Caesar; Lydgate manipulates both this text and Roman narratives in the Fall in order to voice political advice.

This chapter is in two sections and offers a synthesis of the conclusions of the book and relates them to Marías's penultimate and longest novel, Tu rostro mañana. Hence, the first section of the chapter offers a close reading of the novel and suggests ways in which Marías develops and adds layers of complexity to what had been the preoccupations of the previous novels discussed in this study, preoccupations that include betrayal, the unknowability of others, the Spanish Civil War, intervention of the state in the life of the private individual. The first section traces the development of these preoccupations in both the novel and in Marías's journalism in the period of the novel's gestation. The chapter's second section shows how Marías has continued to use translation, intertextuality, and palimpsest as a means of developing the characterization in TRM. Close analysis is given of the quotations and paraphrasing of Shakespeare's King Henry V, W. G Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, Milton's sonnets, Sefton Delmer's autobiography, and Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry.

This chapter analyzes a relatively weak allusion to Ovid – Shakespeare and Ovid’s shared use of natural metaphors for emotional states – to understand the operation of authority in early modern dramatic adaptation. Both Ovid’s Tristia and Henry V are deep examinations of the workings of state power that analyze human feeling in terms of natural metaphors associated with particular locales. This chapter compares the language of cruelty in Ovid’s Tristia to Henry’s rhetoric of power in Henry V,arguing that Shakespeare appropriates Ovidian metaphor to imagine the emotive operation of hegemonic power. This appropriation enables audiences to see cruelty and sympathy operating in the register of emotional experiences that are geographically defined and provokes a consideration of the politics of appropriation.

Henry V is unique in allowing us to see a source play, The Famous Victories of Henry V, what Shakespeare first made of it, in the 1600 quarto of Henry V, and later expanded into the more famous folio text, printed in 1623. This sequence is normally ignored in the editing of Shakespeare’s play, but is a model of his practice in the late 1590s. Evidence of the sequence is also present in his use of Holinshed’s history and the changing roles of the king’s brothers. We see similar developments in the two plays later known as 2 and 3 Henry VI; early texts published in 1594 and 1595 respectively are not poor copies of the folio ones, but early versions, revised in the later 1590s.

This chapter explores the history plays, with particular emphasis on how Shakespeare embodies aspects of militarism in the warlike figures of Richard III and Henry V. It investigates how Shakespeare's theatre dramatised and commented on the issues that are to the fore in the military prose, arguably registering a critique that can be thought of as undermining the force of the prose's polemic. Shakespeare offered mid-twentieth-century audiences both the inspiration for anti-fascist resistance and a study of the kind of psychology that had seduced and misled the German people. Shakespeare connects his Richard to the tail end of a Morality Play tradition that had lately isolated the Vice figure from its former symbolic function as an embodiment of evil and given it a secularised and somewhat aesthetically pleasing role on the English stage. Shakespeare seems to leave the Henry of Harfleur at a considerable distance from the ideal warrior-king.

While critical responses testify to Hal's desirability, what allows that to go unnoticed — to go without saying — is that the criticism describes a Hal remarkable for his lack of desire. These are history plays, after all, and when desire enters, in the person of Princess Katherine, it does so to secure the patriarchal trajectory. Yet, oddly enough, that ending to Henry V hardly has been read as the point of Hal's arrival: it is, rather, for him to replace his father, to secure the throne, and this means the defeat of Hotspur and the rejection of Falstaff, the reconciliation with the dying king and with the Lord Chief Justice that brings Henry IV to its conclusion.

This chapter asks whether the sovereign can (and perhaps must) act outside the law in a reading of the second tetralogy of Shakespeare’s history plays. The discussion opens with an examination of the notion of sovereign immunity, contrasted with a competing line of discourse against tyranny. It then argues that questions around the king’s status relative to the law constitute an important set of issues within Shakespeare’s Richard II,where both individuals (Richard and Bolingbroke) and events (Richard’s deposition) may be read as existing outside of the law in various senses. The chapter proceeds to consider the remaining plays in the tetralogy, arguing that Henry V, a sort of quasi-outlaw before gaining the throne, finds as king that he must act outside the law to defend the interests of his state. The discussion surveys a range of legal questions in Henry V, from his claim to the throne of France to his threats before Harfleur and his killing of prisoners at Agincourt. The chapter concludes with a brief glance at espionage in Elizabethan England, and the Elizabethan state’s recourse to methods of invisible power.

This chapter argues that the attachment to a version of the Essexian and Stuart loyalist projects imputed to both King John and Richard II continued to animate the Henry IV plays and Henry V, which returned to the question of how, through the political and personal virtue and prowess of particular human agents, a polity plunged into the moral and political chaos of commodity politic might be returned to legitimate monarchical rule. They did so, through both a chronological continuation of the events staged in Richard II and a reworking of themes and tropes, questions and, indeed, answers, central to King John. In particular the central problematic addressed by these plays, and allegedly resolved in the persona of Hal/Henry, involved the ways in which the politics of honour, of martial virtue and prowess, could be combined both with the politics of popularity and of monarchical legitimacy.