2
Henry V: Shakespeare’s Machiavellian Monarch?
Henry V is the play where Shakespeare celebrates, as he does nowhere else, the exploits
of a glorious prince. Whereas the rest of the English history plays revolve around seemingly
endless plotting and disputing over rule, in Henry V this disorder is largely set aside. Instead, the
Chorus apologizes throughout for being unable to portray adequately the magnitude of the great
deeds of “This star of England” (Epilogue 6). In the center of Shakespeare’s account of the
worst conditions English politics had endured, he provides this shining interlude wherein the
height of achievement by one of England’s most famous kings is put on full display.
The play is the last he wrote in a series of eight plays spanning the reigns of Richard II
through that of Richard III. As with all of Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, the political
context is richly elaborated. With some important prefacing in the earlier parts of the tetralogy,
the emergence of constitutionalism, multiculturalism, secularization, democratization, and the
general ‘modernization’ of the political system and the English populace are deftly outlined here.
The plot’s focus on Henry’s reasons for and execution of an invasion of France necessarily
brings in considerations of foreign policy as well. More than in any other play in the series,
Shakespeare’s plot moves beyond the questions of who should rule and how it can be obtained;
this Henry seems especially interested in the not unrelated question of how to rule well. More
specifically, he is attempting to provide the best rule possible in an age where Divine Right
theory and an authoritative church no longer preclude many of these questions from being asked,
because the line of kings has been broken and the church is losing its power to evoke blind
allegiance from the people. Henry is more than aware of the need to regain the consent of an
increasingly restless populace.
Although the question of who should rule is conspicuously muted in this play, it is
trumpeted by the historical context and the preceding plays. Richard II is a king of
Convention