Chapter 5 - Masculine Dreams: Henry V and the Jacobean Politics of Court Performance

Summary

Murat Öğütcü focuses on Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599), a play which, with its charismatic male monarch, has been too often associated with or set against the late Elizabethan period. As a result, the significance of its performance at the Jacobean court in 1605 has been overlooked. Locating the play before the Jacobean court, Öğütcü compares the dramatised monarch and the real one, while reminding us that no other history play was performed at the court of James I, probably because it traces the ascendancy of a king rather than his decline. The performance of Henry V at the court was in fact more than a reminder of recent Jacobean victories. Yet, while the monarch tried to fashion himself as an Anglo-Scottish Henry V, some members of the audience possibly interpreted Prince Hal as James, who indulged in spending time with his favourites and leaving most of administration to his subjects. The Jacobean Henry V analysed by Öğütcü is thus a problematic performance of idealised masculinity meant to highlight the crucial issues of the time: dissimulation, treason, royal favouritism, war and peace, and a united Britain.