King Henry V
by William Shakespeare
Presented by Paul W. Collins
© Copyright 2011 by Paul W. Collins
King Henry V
By William Shakespeare
Presented by Paul W. Collins
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, audio or video recording, or other, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
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Note: Spoken lines from Shakespeare’s drama are in the public domain, as is the Globe (1864) edition of his plays, which provided the basic text of the speeches in this new version of King Henry V. But King Henry V, by William Shakespeare: Presented by Paul W. Collins, is a copyrighted work, and is made available for your personal use only, in reading and study.
Student, beware: This is a presentation, not a scholarly work, so you should be sure your teacher, instructor or professor considers it acceptable as a reference before quoting characters’ comments or thoughts from it in your report or term paper.
Chapter One
New Reign, Old Claims
O
h, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!” cries the actor, striding forward. His voice booms out, quieting the crowd milling around three sides of the raised platform that juts out past two tall pillars to a roof over part of the stage, at the rear. “A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene!”
The theater’s more genteel patrons, clustered in the surrounding galleries’ three tiers, turn to listen, and the audience of one-penny patrons, standing on the ground, moves closer.
“Then should the warlike Harry, showing as himself, assume the part of Mars,”—god of war, “and at his heels, leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire crouch, ready for employment!
“But pardon, gentles all, the flat, unraisèd spirits that have dared on this unworthy scaffold to bring forth so great an objective! Can this cock-pit hold the vasty fields of France? Or may we cram within this wooden O the many helmets that did affright the air at Agincourt? Oh, pardon!
“But, since a crookèd figure”—written number—“may attest in little place a million, let us, zeroes to this great accompt, on your imaginative forces work!
“Suppose within the girdle of these walls are now confinèd two mighty monarchies, whose high-upreared and abutting fronts only a perilous, narrow ocean parts asunder! Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts: into a thousand parts divide one man, and make imaginary puissance!”—create an army. “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth!
“For ’tis your thoughts that now must bedeck our kings, carry them here and there—jumping o’er times, forcing the accomplishment of many years into an hour-glass!
“For the which to supply, admit me as Chorus to this history—who, Prologue-like, humbly prays your patience, gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play….”
I
n a small chamber near the royal palace’s throne room in London, the Archbishop of Canterbury paces, worried about some legislation being considered by Parliament. “My lord, I’ll tell you: that same bill against us is being urgèd which in the eleventh year of the last king’s reign was likely!—and indeed had passed, but that the scrabbling and unquiet time did push it out of farther question.”
“But how, my lord, shall we now resist it?” asks another visitor to the capital, the Bishop of Ely, who came here just before the archbishop’s brief—interrupted—audience with the new king.
“It must be thought on! If it pass against us, we lose the better half of our possessions!—for all the temporal lands which devout men by testament have given to the Church would they strip from us!—being valued thus: as much as would maintain, to the king’s honour, fully fifteen earls and fifteen hundred knights, and six thousand, two hundred good squires!”—country gentlemen.
He shakes his head in disgust at the tax bill’s provisions. “For relief of lepers and weak agèd, for indigent, faint souls past corporal toil, a hundred alms-houses, right-well supplied!—and besides, to the coffers of the king, a thousand pounds by the year!
“Thus runs the billing!”
The bishop is stunned. “This would drink deep!”
“’Twould drink the cup and all!”
“But what prevention?”
The archbishop stops. He pictures the young sovereign. “The king is full of grace and fair regard….”
“And a true lover of the Holy Church.”
But Canterbury frowns. “The courses of his youth promised it not!
“The breath no sooner left his father’s body but that his wildness seemed to die too, mortified in him!—yea, at that very moment Consideration, like an angel, came and whipped the offending Adam out of him, leaving his body as a paradise, to envelop and contain celestial spirits!”—as opposed to the wine in which Henry V reputedly indulged as dissolute Prince Hal.
“Never was such a sudden scholar made!—never came reformation in such a flood, with heady currents scouring faults!—nor never did Hydra-headed wilfulness so soon lose its seat—and all at once—as in this king!”
“We are blessed in the change,” says the bishop, hopeful despite the other priest’s harsh assessment.
As the archbishop continues, his lilting tone mocks Henry’s popular appeal. “Only hear him reason on divinity and, all admiring, with an inward wish you would desire that the king were made a prelate! Hear him debate on commonwealth affairs, you would say it hath been all his study! List to his discourse on war, and you shall hear a fearful battle rendered you in music! Turn him to any cause of policy, the Gordian knot of it he will unloose, familiar as his garter!
“When he speaks as a chartered libertine, the air is still!—and a mute Wonder lurketh in men’s ears to steal his sentences, so sweet and honey’d that the art and practic parts of life must be the mistresses of his theoric!”
The archbishop’s voice hardens. “Which is to wonder how his grace should glean it, since his addiction was to courses vain, his companions unlettered, rude and shallow, his hours filled up with riots, banquets, and sports!—and never was any study noted in him—any retirement, any sequestration from open haunts and popular entertainments!”
Bishop Ely shrugs. “The strawberry grows underneath the nettle, and wholesome berries thrive and ripen best when neighboured by fruit of baser quality; and so the prince obscurèd, under a veil of wildness, his contemplation—which no doubt grew like the summer grass, fastest by night, unseen, yet crescive”—rising—“in its faculty.”
“It must be so, for miracles are ceasèd,” says the archbishop, lamenting the time’s growing devotion to science, “and therefore we must needs admire the means how things are perfected.”
Ely is concerned. “But, my good lord, how now to mitigate this bill urged by the Commons? Doth his majesty incline to it?—or no….”
“He seems indifferent.
“Or rather swaying more upon our part than cherishing the exhibiters against us. For, with regard to causes now in hand which I have earlier opened to his grace, as touching upon France at large, I have made an offer to his majesty from our spiritual convocation: to give a greater sum at one time than ever the clergy did yet to his predecessors part withal!”
“How did this offer seem received, my lord?”
“With good acceptance by his majesty—save that there was not time enough to hear, as I perceived his grace would fain have done, the severals and unhidden passages”—particulars and revelations—“of his true titles, derivèd from Edward, his great-grandfather,”—England’s King Edward III, “to some certain dukedoms—and generally to the crown and seat of France!”
To pursue such a claim, the king would need much money, and a “gift” from supportive churchmen would be preferable to a controversial confiscation.
“What was the impediment that broke this off?”
“The French ambassador upon that instant craved audience!—and the moment, I think, is come to give him hearing. Is it four o’clock?”
“It is.”
“Then go we in to know his embassy—which I could with a ready guess declare before the Frenchman speaks a word of it!” The archbishop moves toward the door.
The bishop follows. “I’ll wait upon you; I long to hear it!”
W
here is my gracious lord of Canterbury?” asks King Henry V in the tall throne room, which is now crowded with nobles and their attendants.
“Not here in presence,” the Duke of Exeter tells him.
“Send for him, good uncle.”
“Shall we call in the ambassador, my liege?” asks the Earl of Westmoreland.
“Not yet, my cousin; we would be resolvèd, before we hear him, of some things of weight that task our thoughts, concerning us and France.”
The two prelates enter, approach the throne, and bow.
“God and his angels guard your sacred throne, and make you long become it!” says the archbishop.
“We thank you.” King Henry cites the main concern. “My learnèd lord, we pray you to proceed, and justly and religiously unfold why the ‘law Salique’ that they have in France either should, or should not, bar us in our claim.
“And God forbid, my dear and faithful lord, that you should fashion, wrest, or bend your understanding in reading, or charge your soul”—burden it—“by opening too shrewdly titles miscreated, whose right suits not in native colours with the truth! For God doth know how many now in health shall drop their blood in approbation of what Your Reverence shall incite us to!
“Therefore take heed how you impawn our person, how you awake our sleeping sword of war! We charge you, in the name of God, take heed! For never did two such kingdoms contend without much fall of blood!—whose guiltless drops are every one a woe, a sore complaint ’gainst him whose wrong gives edge unto the swords that make such waste of brief mortality!
“Under this conjuration, speak, my lord; for we will hear, note, and believe in heart that what you speak is, in your conscience, washed as pure as is sin by baptism!”
The Archbishop of Canterbury moves forward and unfurls a document. “Then hear me, gracious sovereign, and you peers that owe your selves, your lives and services to this imperial throne.
“There is no bar to make against Your Highness’ claim to France but this, which they produce from Pharamond….” He reads aloud: “‘In terram Salicam mulieres ne succedant’—No woman shall succeed in Salique land.”
The archbishop looks up from the paper. “Which Salique land the French unjustly gloze to be the realm of France, and Pharamond the founder of this law and female bar.
“Yet their own authors faithfully affirm that the land Salique is in Germany!—between the floods of Sala and of Elbe, where Charles the Great, having subdued the Saxons, there left behind and settled certain French—who, holding in disdain the German women for some dishonest manners of their life, established then this law: to wit, no female should be inheritrix in Salique land. Which Salique, as I said, ’twixt Elbe and Sala, is at this day in Germany called Meisen.
“Then doth it well appear that Salique law was not devisèd for the realm of France—nor did the French possess the Salique land until four hundred, one and twenty years after the defunction of King Pharamond, idly supposèd the founder of this law, who died within the year of our redemption Four Hundred Twenty-Six. Charles the Great subdued the Saxons, and did seat the French beyond the river Sala, in the year Eight Hundred Five!”
He can cite past French pretenders who ignored any bar to inheritance by or through females. “Besides, their writers say, King Pepin, who deposèd Childeric, did, as heir general, being descended of Blithild, who was daughter to King Clothair, make claim and title to the crown of France!
“Also Hugh Capet, who usurped the crown of Charles, the Duke of Lorraine, sole male heir of the true line and stock of Charles the Great, in order to find his title with some shows of truth—though in pure truth it was corrupt and nought—conveyed himself as heir to the Lady Lingare, daughter to Charlemagne, who was the son to Louis the emperor.
“And Louis the son of Charles the Great, also King Louis the Tenth, who was sole heir to the usurper Capet, could not keep quiet in his conscience, wearing the crown of France, till satisfied that fair Queen Isabel, his grandmother, was lineal of the Lady Ermengare, daughter to Charles, the foresaid Duke of Lorraine—by the which marriage the line of Charles the Great was reunited to the crown of France.”
He rolls up the document briskly. “So that, as clear as is the summer sun, King Pepin’s title, Hugh Capet’s claim, and King Louis’s satisfaction all appear to rely upon right and title of the female!
“So do the kings’ of France unto this day, even if they would hold up this Salique law to bar Your Highness’s claiming from the female, and choose rather to hide themselves in a net than aptly to imbar their crookèd titles—usurped from your progenitors and you!”
In a loud, clear voice, King Henry asks, carefully, “May I with right and conscience make this claim?”
The archbishop nods solemnly. “Thus, and upon my head, dread sovereign! For in the Book of Numbers is it writ: ‘When the man dies and has no son, let the inheritance descend unto the daughter.’