Henry V as Working-House of Ideology

Summary

Among the features specific to the text of Henry V its apparent property of giving rise to particularly acrimonious division of opinion has often been noted. To say that there are two camps sharply opposing each other is indeed almost a commonplace of critical literature, the one camp fervently applauding what they see as a panegyric upon, indeed a rousing celebration of, ‘the mirror of all Christian Kings’ and most successful English monarch of all the histories; and the followers of the other camp deriding with no less conviction the exaltation of a machiavellian conqueror in a rapacious and, after all, senseless war. Little wonder, then, that in 1939 Mark Van Doren should have thought even Shakespeare’s genius baffled vis-à-vis such hopeless material; that E. M. W. Tillyard should have considered Henry V, remarkably enough at the time of the Second World War, a dramatic failure on account of its puerile patriotism and lack of form; or that Moody E. Prior should consider the play ‘a theatrically handsome fulfillment of an obligation, performed with skill but without deep conviction’.