Someone once said that history is written by the winners, and, as in the case of Shakespeare's history play The Life of King Henry the Fifth, sometimes it is even dramatized by them. Total objectivity is very difficult to achieve when drawing solely from historical documents of either the victor or the loser, which is one reason why blind patriotism is such a tempting vantage point to adopt, the easy way out. But, as patriotism is totally subjective, it can be looked at from opposing angles and in most cases totally debunked: if the victors embellish while the losers omit, can either be expected to come up with the whole picture?
[...] little relationship to the drama itself and are often contradicted in the scenes immediately following. Following his famous opening appeal for us to picture “horses printing their proud hoofs i' th' receiving earth” (I.Cho.26-7) we are instead faced with two churchmen first scheming about how to circumnavigate a bill, and then convincing Henry to go to war. When the Act II Chorus tells us that all the English youth are on fire and honors thought reigns solely in the breast of every (II.Cho.1, Shakespeare actually gives us the feckless trio of Bardolph, Nym and Pistol, two of whom are fire” in a way, but only because they are fighting over a woman. [...]
[...] If the Chorus is designed to stand in for the blindly patriotic propaganda poets who sing Henry's praise, that patriotism is made ironic by the play's actual events which prove the Chorus at best an embellisher, at worst a liar. The Chorus' extravagant patriotism is countered further by Shakespeare's unjust presentation of the war. This is not a war in defense of English sovereignty, but instead a war of economic gain and opportunistic territorial conquest. The play opens, immediately following the Prologue, with the archbishops Canterbury and Ely discussing how to avoid an act laid forth by the prior king that will soon strip them of better half of our possession” Canterbury says that in return for the church's giving greater sum than ever at one time the clergy yet did to his predecessors part withal” as well as a legal excuse, under Salic Law, to invade France, the king will agree to side with them in regards the bill threatening their “possession.” Thus the war's justification is arrived at by way of selfish and conspiratorial churchmen. [...]
[...] King Henry's rhetoric inspires patriotic pride among the fictional soldiers as well as the audience; meanwhile Shakespeare calls that patriotism into question by revealing the true motives behind the war. When referring to an historical event about which the English public held such a degree of pride at the time of Shakespeare's writing, this could be the best that we could hope for. Shakespeare himself might have been caught up in the fervor men triumphed over 30,000 in a near miraculous victory. [...]
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