Devin Ens

“Breaches and Breeches: Sex, Masculine Pride, and War in Henry V.”

written for ENG 321: Shakespeare

 

Henry V, though reputed to be a crude, early item from Shakespeare’s canon, provides many interesting and mature discussions on morality and psychology. Far from being, as it were, pre-written by being an “historical” work, it is a testament to the bard’s skill that he can work so many ideas into a frame that has to take account of popular facts.

Interpretation of the play tends to revolve around issues of kingship, duplicity in Harry’s self-presentation, or the consequences of war, but there is a glaring line of discussion present which has generally been missed: the relationship of war to sex and masculine pride. One critic writes, “War is a version of male lust. Hal never grows up but works out ways to aggrandize himself by owning more and more property. Geography as ego. And... he’s a rapist too” (Landis 201). There are at least three significant relationships of pride, lust, and war which are brought out in the play and will be pointed to in the following. One is war as a response to insult and perceived or suggested (sexual) inadequacy. One is war as the occasion of massive rapine. The other is war itself as a sort of metaphorical rape. These themes will be brought to light most clearly by attention to the most traditionally ignored passages of Henry V.

Critics have often dismissed the comic scenes of the play as crowd-pleasing devices or filler, “only casually related to the main action” (Becker 74). The filler theory can be dismissed outright given the length the play already enjoys. The scenes involving Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph, or Fluellen and Gower actually fit the play perfectly. As far as the play’s themes go, these scenes are as rich as those featuring the king. In fact, where meaning is concerned (as opposed to history, drama, and propaganda), there are more useless scenes with Harry than there are with Pistol. The comic scenes make perfect sense if one recognises sexual territory as one of the themes of the play.

In the scene following Harry’s declaration of war, after a few words from the Chorus, the audience is given an update on some characters from Henry IV. Nell Quickly, formerly betrothed to Nym, has married Pistol (II.i.18-20). Here is a clue at what sorts of things really stir men to fight. The comrades Nym and Pistol are now at odds over this lady. Nym is beaten out, and swears he will cut Pistol’s throat for it (II.i.22-25, 71-72). The proximity of this scenario to the tennis ball incident conjures an association between the pride of insulted warlords and the pride of jilted lovers. The connection between the large-scale act of war and the commonality of men fighting over women is made here. What they share is a seat in masculine pride.

The next appearance of the clowns announces the death of Falstaff, who figured prominently in Henry IV. While this scene ties not so much into the sexual motif as into that of Henry V’s growth, and the people he had to leave behind, there are many sexual references. Many may just be what they appear: apocalyptic ravings of a dying person, but at least one is significant, “A’ said once, the devil would have him about women” (II.iii.35-36), a comment that lust may lead to doom. The scene ends with Pistol warning his bride to stay chaste, “Let housewifery appear: keep close, I thee command” (II.iii.61-62). At all times, control of one’s sexual territory must be maintained. Conquest abroad may mean unrest at home. The dukes of England discuss the protection of their land against the Scots (I.ii.136-173), and Pistol warns his wife to protect herself (for him) against would-be suitors.

The speech of the Archbishop of Canterbury, ostensibly on the king’s right to the French throne, is too confusing, tenuous, and full of fallacies to be intended as a proper justification of the invasion. These droll legal details do not incite the wrath of a nation, and have the tone of an ad hoc excuse (I.ii.33-95). Religious justification is also brought in by a very arbitrary invocation of the book of Numbers (I.ii.97-100).

The real provocation to war starts developing when Canterbury alludes to King Henry’s “mighty ancestors” (I.ii.102). This comment stirs the young king’s pride; it is considered necessary by macho morality to appear as bold, brave, and brutal as any other in one’s position. The tactic of comparative manliness as a means of goading is used by Harry in the Harfleur pep talk, “…now attest/ That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you./ Be copy now to men of grosser blood,/ And teach them how to war” (III.i.22-25).

The clincher of the decision to invade France is the arrival of the Dauphin’s mocking present of tennis balls (I.ii.258). The suggestion that the king is no warrior, but a player of light sports, is the affront to his masculinity required to commit him to the invasion.

There are, in the play, images both of war as a vessel of rape, and of war as a species of rape. On the former point, King Harry announces:

And the flesh’d soldier, rough and hard of heart,

In liberty of bloody hand shall range

With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass

Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants. (III.iii.11-14)

What rein can hold licentious wickedness

When down the hill he holds his fierce career?

We may as bootless spend our vain command,

Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil,

As send precepts to the leviathan

To come ashore. (III.iii.22-27)

War is a chaotic situation. There is command, but there is no law in the civilised sense. The command is, “destroy”; whatever international conventions and internal guidelines a military force is operating with, the training of killers is the training of men with suppressed consciences. If it is palatable to hack humans to pieces, there is no reason to suppose that any other crime will be distasteful. Even where the commanding officer does not directly command rapine, or offer it as booty for the soldiers, discipline can break down, and keeping track of who is doing what is impossible.

The scene which introduces Katherine has often been dismissed or rejected (Marshall/Wood 111, Wilcox 61). Some editions of the play omit lines (cf. Marshall/Wood edition). To read the dialogue can be tedious, but the live production, with the right Katherine, plays up the girlishness, innocence, and cuteness of the princess. Her accent has an “exotic” quality and drawing the audience’s attention to specific parts of her body, “d’hand, de fingre, de mailès...” (III.iv.44), has the effect of eroticising the princess while demonstrating her naiveté. “Shakespeare has created in Princess Katherine practically the stereotype of an Englishman’s fantasy of a French debutante” (Wilcox 62). She is wanted, and not yet had: perfect for conquest. That she will be had is implied by her wish to learn English (and by the comments of Act III’s Chorus)—she will be Harry’s queen.

The appearance of Katherine follows immediately the conquest of Harfleur, the first victory on the road which ends at the princess. Again, it is the proximity of scenes which gives clue to the meaning of the subtext. As the political declaration of war was remarked on by the subsequent feuding of Nym and Pistol, so Harfleur, defeated gloriously, is shown next to the yet-to-be-conquered princess.

Katherine is a kind of hothouse orchid poised before this devastated garden. This contrast provides our first clue as to Katherine’s thematic function in the play. To appreciate her full significance, however, is to confront yet one more of the ugly realities of war presented in Henry V, and this perhaps the most appalling—that is, war as the occasion for massive sexual aggression; in essence, war as rape. This theme Shakespeare develops both literally and figuratively. Widespread sexual violence not only represents one of the commoner afflictions of war on a civilian populace; it comes to stand as a symbol for invasion itself. (Wilcox 64)

Following this scene is yet another contrast. The French princess who is learning English (III.iv) stands at the reflective border between the mighty English (III.iii), and the impotent French (III.v). The Constable of France declares, “Let us not hang like roping icicles/ Upon our houses’ thatch, whiles a more frosty people/ Sweat drops of gallant youth in our rich fields” (III.v.23-25). The inaction of the French is summed up in imagery evocative of flaccidity, while the English advance is suggested in terms both of vigour and fertility. The sexual inferiority felt by the militarily threatened is made explicit by the Dauphin:

Our madams mock at us, and plainly say

Our mettle is bred out, and they will give

Their bodies to the lust of English youth,

To new-store France with bastard warriors. (III.v.28-31)

The tunnelling scene shows the place of nationalism in starting scuffles (III.i.77-144), but Act V, Scene i, ties this subtheme together with the sexual territory line. Fluellen avenges himself on Pistol for an insult to the Welsh tradition of wearing a leek in one’s hat on St. Davy’s day (V.i.5-14). The revenge is poetically phallic as Fluellen forces Pistol to eat his leek and offers, “some more sauce to your leek?” (V.i.50-51). The feud is nationalistic, the revenge has rapacious overtones, and Pistol’s loss of face is associated with his loss of wife, for it is right after he has eaten the leek that he reveals her death (V.i.84-85). Here are the themes of pride, nationalism, sexual possession, and sexual power, all tied together. Here also is symbolic summary of the upcoming scene. As the Dauphin mockingly sent tennis balls to Harry’s court, so Harry has brought the game to France, who must now swallow his terms of peace, “if you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek” (V.i.38-39).

The final scene concludes the war by bringing the French into submission under English terms, and the French king’s daughter under the power of the English king. Those who regard this play merely as a propagandist history, or an analysis of kingliness, are apt to cut from this scene two of its most important elements: the wooing of Katherine, and the subsequent bawdy exchange between Henry and the Duke of Burgundy (Brennan 109, 110). It is here, again, that what gets ignored is precisely that which makes sense of other “irrelevancies” (cf. Becker 74).

Katherine is Henry’s “capital demand” (V.ii.97), not only because she will provide legitimacy to his claim to France, but because she is the symbolic prize of the whole endeavour. With France’s fleur-de-lis[1] comes its fleur du lit.[2] Political and sexual possession are equated, “Kate, when France is mine, and I am yours, then yours is France, and you are mine” (V.ii.180-182). This scene provides a national/sexual violation by way of the kiss (V.ii.284). Henry has convinced Katherine to break with her traditions, “nice customs curtsey to great kings” (V.ii.278-279), and French customs to English. Again, pride, nationalism, and sex are interwoven. Henry has proven himself as a man, and has proven England as a nation.

His pride will not, however, appreciate France’s flower handed to him in mere contract—he needs her consent. It will be the knowledge that she wants him that will put the crown on his ego. The macho philosophy runs thus: the mightiest will prevail and the women will want the mighty. Many a rapist has some underlying attitude to the effect of “women want it.” Shakespeare may be playing with this attitude when he contrasts the threat of rape at Harfleur with the suggestion, two scenes later, that the women of France are longing for the men of England. Perhaps it is the need for this sort of belief that motivates Henry to woo Katherine though they both know that she has no choice in the matter.

The analogy of war to sexual conquest is made explicit in the dialogue between Harry and the Duke of Burgundy. After some jocular banter about the impending fate of Katherine’s virginity, there are some rather interesting remarks about war:

KING. ...thank love for my blindness, who cannot see many a fair French city for one fair French maid that stands in my way.

BURGUNDY. Yes, my lord, you see them perspectively: the cities turned into a maid; for they are all girdled with maiden walls, that war hath never entered. (V.ii.326-332)

The king suggests that this woman tempers his bloodlust. Or, maybe, he means to imply that war is done in the absence of love, as compensation, perhaps. Probably both are meant. The duke then explicitly equates the two spheres: cities are conquered as women, women are conquered as new lands. The reference to “maiden walls, that war hath never entered,” throws innuendo into Harry’s cry of “Once more unto the breach” (III.i.1). “Henry, who has breached the cities, will do the same to Katherine to bring fertility to the land he has devastated” (Brennan 110).

Like any Shakespearean play, Henry V uses the story to carry several different lines of discussion. While the issues of kingship, and with them, manliness, are oft-discussed topics of this work, the relationship between virility and war is a neglected one. This neglect may be due to the sensitivity of the issue; on one hand there are still those who glorify war, and the connected issue of rape is something these would prefer to pretend is marginal; on the other, many are made uncomfortable that something as large-scale as war could be an extension of the sort of quarrel the likes of Nym and Pistol would engage in. Despite its neglect, Shakespeare’s analysis of this war-sex relationship cannot be ignored if sense is to be made of the inclusion of many of this play’s lines.

 

Works Cited

Becker, George J. Shakespeare’s Histories. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1977.

Brennan, Anthony. Henry V. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.

Landis, Hoan Hutton. “Another Penelope.” Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare. Ed. Marianne Novy. Chicago: Univeristy of Illinois Press, 1990. 196-211.

Shakespeare, William. Henry V. Ed. F. Marshall and Stanley Wood. London: George Gill & Sons, (year unknown; between 1892 and 1936).

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Ed. John Dover Wilson. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Wilcox, Lance. “Katherine of France as Victim and Bride.” Shakespeare Studies 27 (1985): 61-76.