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Shakespeare and the Battlefield: Tradition and Innovation in Battle Scenes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Jean MacIntyre
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Extract

Representation of battle on the stages of the late Sixteenth Century is described in three oft-quoted statements:

…two Armies flie in, represented by foure swords & bucklers, and then what hard hart will not take it for a pitched field.

…with three rusty swords, And help of some few foot and half-foot words, Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars, And in the tiring house bring wounds to scars.

…we shall much disgrace With four or five most vile and ragged foils (Right ill dispos'd in brawl ridiculous) The name of Agincourt.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , May 1982 , pp. 31 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1982

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References

1 Defence of Poesie in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Feuillerat, Albert (Cambridge: The University Press, 1912), III, 38Google Scholar. Jonson, Ben, Prologue, Every Man in His Humor in English Drama 1580–1642, ed. Brooke, C. F. Tucker and Nathaniel Burton Paradise(Boston: D. C. Heath, 1933), p. 437, 9–12Google Scholar. Henry V, Chorus, IV, 49–52Google Scholar, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Evans, G. Blakemore (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974)Google Scholar. All subsequent quotations from Shakespeare are from this edition.

2 Spurgeon, Caroline, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 243Google Scholar; Henry V, ed. Walter, J. H. (London: Methuen, 1954), p. xvGoogle Scholar.

3 A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 286Google Scholar.

4 Most discussions of the battle scenes are incidental to some other argument, like Harbage's, Alfred three pages in Theatre for Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955), pp. 51–53Google Scholar, and Jorgensen's, Paul A. introductory remarks in Shakespeare's Military World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), pp. 1–4Google Scholar, which take “the admittedly inadequate dramatic convention” as axiomatic. The rest of Jorgensen's first chapter (pp. 4–34) concerns the use of drum, fife, and trumpet as prescribed by handbooks on soldier-ship for actual war, and the use of these instruments as offstage accompaniment to battle. Shirley's, FrancesShakespeare's Use of Offstage Sounds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 54–70Google Scholar, discusses only the music and shouts that accompany battle of any kind. Alan Dessen treats stage battle as but one form of stage violence, which he thinks likely to have been performed to emphasize its symbolic value, with little if any attempt at realistic representation. He does not raise the question of what the Sixteenth Century audience would have thought realistic. “The Logic of Elizabethan Stage Violence: Some Alarms and Excursions for Modern Critics, Editors, and Producers,” Renaissance Drama, New Series IX (1978), esp. 51–53Google Scholar, 55–56, 65–67. These studies do not systematically examine what playwrights expected actors to do, nor do they show any sense that Shakespeare's battles have more form than others.

5 Anderson, William, Castles of Europe from Charlemagne to the Renaissance (New York: Random House, 1970)Google Scholar, frontispiece.

6 In Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas, ed. Adams, Joseph Quincy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), p. 278 ffGoogle Scholar.

7 The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Ringler, W. A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 518Google Scholar.

8 The History of Horestes, 1567, Tudor Facsimile Texts, 37 (New York: AMS Press, 1970), Sig DiGoogle Scholar.

9 Southern, Richard, The Staging of Plays Before Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), p. 497Google Scholar.

10 Ringler, William A., Jr., “The Number of Actors in Shakespeare's Early Plays,” in The Seventeenth Century Stage, ed. Bentley, Gerald Eades (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 120Google Scholar.

11 Southern, p. 340.

12 In Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas, pp. 644–45.

13 Horestes, Sig Di.

14 Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1, s. d. II.vii; V.ii, in The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Ribner, Irving (New York: Odyssey Press, 1963)Google Scholar. In this and the following quotation I have deleted editorial [within].

15 In Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas, p. 685.

16 Plays of Christopher Marlowe, p. 50.

17 The Raigne of K. Edward the Third, III.iv, in The Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed. Brooke, C. F. Tucker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), p. 88Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., III.v, p. 89. Shakespeare imitates this show in the third act of Antony and Cleopatra: “Enter Ventidius as it were in triumph, the dead body of Pacorus borne before him.” (III.i.SD)Google Scholar. Here the procession stands for a whole campaign.

19 Ibid., IV.viii, ix, p. 97.

20 Locrine, II,4, 5, Shakespeare Apocrypha, pp. 47–48Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., III.v, p. 53.

22 Ibid., III.vi, p. 54.

23 Ibid., V.iv, pp, 62–64.

24 Holinshed, Raphael, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (London, J. Johnson, 1807–1808), III,227Google Scholar.

25 “Henry V and the Dreams of History,” English Studies in Canada, I (1975)Google Scholar. Professor Black uses Boswell-Stone's compilation Shakespeare's Holinshed, which stops one sentence before Henry's rescue of Thomas; the fact that Shakespeare does not use this episode seems to me to damage the “band of brothers” argument.

26 Holinshed's Agincourt begins when the French block the Englishmen's road. The two armies are ordered and the leaders address the “capteins” to encourage them. The French send their herald to negotiate Henry's ransom; Henry sends him back, suggesting “that the Frenchmen should be glad rather to common with the Englishmen for their ransom.” The two armies approach and then pause. Erpingham throws up his warder, the English shout and their archers shoot at the French, then take to other weapons and attack them while the king brings up his followers and the battle goes on for three hours. At this point comes Henry's aristeia against Alençon; “with plaine strength he slew two of the dukes companie, and felled the duke himself,” whom his guard kills against Henry's intention. Then comes the attack on the English camp, Henry's orders to kill prisoners, and his challenge to a hovering band of French. This ends the narrative of the battle. The next day Mountjoy and other heralds come to ask about prisoners and to arrange for the burial of the dead, at which time they also acknowledge Henry's victory. There follows the casualty list, which takes nearly two folio pages, and near the end of this comes Henry's second aristeia: “the duke of Gloucester the kings brother was sore wounded about the hips, and borne down to the ground, so that he fell backwards, with his feet towards his enemies, whom the king bestrid, and like a brother valiantlie rescued from his enimies.” Holinshed's, Chronicle, III, 76–83Google Scholar.

The only part of this battle that could not be easily performed on Shakespeare's stage is Henry's review of his troops and his conduct of them on horseback, the archery and its effect on the advancing French, and the mass movement of soldiers into the first melee. Everything else involves single fights and small groups in combat, or speech. This is why Shakespeare's version of Agincourt is so peculiar; nothing in the version available to Shakespeare and his audience calls for any kind of action that the stage had not often shown before, and was often to show again.