2 April 2002
“And what have kings . . .?”: Harry Mourns in Shakespeare’s Henry V
By Jason Preu
Henry V (1599) is an interesting piece of work on its own and in comparison to some of Shakespeare’s other portrayals of aristocracy in action. The play does not illustrate a royal fall from grace. Instead, it traces the actions of a man as he becomes fully aware of himself as a nation’s monarch and subsequently rouses his workingman’s militia to defeat the French army. The language with which Shakespeare gives voice to Henry is sweeping, epic, and full of grandeur, yet unmistakably human. Henry’s rhetoric, particularly within act 4, serves to demark what differences there are between a king and his subjects [the “ceremony speech” (4.1.215-66)] and eventually, Henry’s effective use of language throughout the “St. Crispin’s Day speech” (4.3.18-67) empowers his people to action during what is perhaps their weakest moment. As important as that latter speech is, however, it is the former’s brilliant imagery, personification of “ceremony”, allusion to Greek deities, and other, slighter pieces of figurative language that work to give some sense of Henry’s mind as it wrestles with what it means to be a king. Furthermore, this process of realization lays the foundation upon which the magnificent “St. Crispin’s Day speech” is delivered.
Before the language itself is examined, it would do well to place the speech within the play. Harry’s apostrophe to ceremony is prefaced by an argument that ensues after he hides his identity and enters into a discussion with his soldiers. The talk soon turns towards to what extent the King is responsible for his soldiers’ souls during wartime “if the cause [of the King’s desire to go to war] be not good” (4.1.128). Harry, in disguise, makes a good argument for each man’s conscience being his own (4.1.139-72) but this simple exchange of words, and the soldier’s desire to place all responsibility upon the King’s head, leads Harry to scrutinize his “King-ness” in a powerfully mournful manner.
Harry’s speech in turn personifies, deifies, vilifies, and humbles ceremony by its various instances of hyperbole, repetition, metaphor, imagery, and symbolism. The speech opens with three lines of hyperbole, “Upon the King, / ‘Let us our lives, our souls, our debts, our care-ful wives, / Our children, and our sins, lay on the King” (4.1.212-14) as Harry speaks (somewhat mockingly) in the voice of a soldier. Harry recognizes that his people see their well being as being entirely dependent upon his manner of rule. They do not, in Harry’s mind, see that he is foremost a human and it is this view of the King that Harry wants – perhaps needs – his soldiers to get beyond if he is to consider himself a successful ruler.
To do this, Harry must determine what it that truly separates kings from their subjects. To Harry, it is the “idol ceremony” (4.1.221). Here, Harry promotes ceremony to the divine position it holds among the commoners so that he may address it as they would, as though it were a god. The demands he puts upon ceremony by way of the repeated “what’s” (4.1.220-27) echo the questions put to God by Job. The crucial difference is that while Job is concerned with the nature of his own suffering at the hands of a god whom he truly believes in, Harry, by asking, “O ceremony, show me but they worth. / What is thy soul of adoration?” (4.1.226-7) is concerned that ceremony’s elevated status among the common folk is completely misguided and not worthy of their worship.
Harry continues to disassemble iconic ceremony by directing his questions towards what fuels ceremony (4.1.231-2) and, in a particularly physical sense, “O be sick, great greatness, / And bid thy ceremony give thee cure. / Think’st thou the fiery fever will go out / With titles blown from adulation?” (4.1.232-6) towards ceremony’s usefulness. Shakespeare uses the metaphorical imagery within these lines, the “homage sweet”, “poisoned flattery”, and “fiery fever”, as a subtle way of making ceremony all the more personal to Harry, hence easier to attack.
After determining how practically ineffectual ceremony is, Harry makes a concerted effort towards deconstructing any and all of ceremony’s material symbols. He does this to expose them as mere vainglory and ultimately empty in comparison to the simple man’s life, existing as it does without such splendor (4.1.241-50). The imagery within this section, while still metaphorical, has a markedly different tone then the earlier parts of the speech. The ornate beauty of “the intertissued robe of gold and pearl” (4.1.244), the sarcastic “farcèd title” (4.1.245), and the all encompassing reach of “the tide of pomp / That beats upon the high shore of the world” (4.1.246-7) all ring with Harry’s budding realization that simply taking up these empty symbols does not a King make. Having at one time been socially involved with common men, Harry seems all too aware of how exceedingly different his life is now from then.
The tone of this speech could be seen as elegiac as Harry is at once delivering the not too flattering last rites to ceremony, saying farewell to youthful days spent in the tavern, and burying the long standing notion of a King who doesn’t know how his people live. For if there is one thing that Harry indeed knows and adores, it is his subjects. In describing the simple, working class people, Harry paints a divinely inspired, hyperbolic picture, rife with allusions to the Greek pantheon:
Never sees a horrid night, the child of hell,
But like a lackey from the rise to the set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day, after dawn
Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,
And follow so the ever-running year
With profitable labour to his grave. (4.1.253-59)
Harry understands, and indeed glorifies, the uniquely satisfied frustration derived from such a workaday existence. Shakespeare, in using these specific allusions to divine entities, seems to want his audience to understand this.
Harry, at the close of this particular apostrophe, finally puts into words his realization of the fact that his subjects’ peace rests entirely upon the King’s willingness to give up his ability to rest:
The slave, a member of the country’s peace,
Enjoys it, but in gross brain little wots
What watch the King keeps to maintain the peace,
Whose house the peasant best advantages. (4.1.263-66)
This is where the speech seems its most mournful in tone. Harry doesn’t seem regretful of his position but there does seem to be a sense of longing for times of less responsibility or perhaps just some simple recognition for what it is he must do.
In the earlier part of the speech, Shakespeare doesn’t allow for any pathos to be developed as Harry destroys ceremony’s venerated place in the public eye. Rightfully so, for were he to do otherwise would defeat the speech’s importance to Harry’s development as King as well as the play’s subsequent action. When Shakespeare allows Harry to vocalize that to be a King of a contented people a man must, in effect, never allow himself to rest, the pathos that is generated for Harry’s position is unmistakable. This generation of pathos is extremely interesting as rhetoric for Harry is, in the context of the play, delivering a soliloquy. Harry doesn’t need to generate sympathy for himself. An audience, on the other hand, would be hard-pressed not to be moved by such a statement, uttered at a time when Harry is under great stress and solitude. It’s Shakespeare’s way of reinforcing Harry’s impeccable character.
During this speech’s course, Harry squeezes the mythos of ceremony to extract the real substance of the King’s relation to his people. The emptiness he finds in ceremony leads Harry to view the simple, if ignorant, life of the common man as a divine one. For if there is no substance to ceremony, the only thing that separates the King from any other man, than the King must exist to embody a more noble purpose. For Harry, that purpose seems to be viewing the King as the vigilant watcher over his people, always alert, always presentable. Without his people, the King is no thing at all. This realization imbibes the speech with an elegiac tone as parts of the speech hint at wistfulness for easier days but, more importantly, the self-assurance that Harry seems to get from his deconstruction of ceremony arms him with the foreknowledge to choose carefully the words he choose to use in motivating his downtrodden troops during the “St. Crispin’s Day speech” (4.3.18-67).
Works Cited
Greenblatt, Stephen, gen. ed. The Norton Shakespeare. Based on the Oxford Edition. New
York: Norton, 1997. All quotations from Shakespeare’s works are taken from this edition.