Illustration by Taylor Jones

Yet even within the general trend of Bardolatry (evidenced by renewed conspiracy theories, best-selling guides such as Harold Bloom’s The Invention of the Human, and the now decade-and-a-half-long resurgence of movies adapting, citing or about Shakespeare), Henry V stands out in the public sphere, long amenable to propagandistic interpretations. In the United States today it enjoys an unchallenged predominance on syllabi for graduate courses in leadership and public policy — for instance, excerpts from this play (and this play only) appear in at least five courses at The Kennedy School of Government alone.

Last year I was asked by a friend of a friend to serve as a fact-checker for an upcoming profile in Fortune magazine. A consulting company, Movers and Shakespeares, uses the Bard’s plays to present “Fun, Team-Building, Executive Training, Leadership Development & Conference Entertainment based on the insights and wisdom of the Bard . . . as relevant in today’s world as they were 400 years ago!” (Look closely on the Web site, and you’ll find photos of Donald Rumsfeld and Cokie Roberts merrily reciting in costume.) The writer of the Fortune article wanted me to confirm a few of their claims about what Shakespeare’s plays teach us.

Most of these claims were, on the whole, largely innocuous, if blandly reductive and politically conservative. The leaders of the workshops, Ken and Carol Adelman, are both Republican politicos and thus tend to read Shakespeare as a kind of proto-free-market capitalist. (Ken “Cakewalk” Adelman occasionally taught Shakespeare at George Washington University’s continuing education program, sits on the board of The Shakespeare Theatre, and, in his role as D.C. insider, currently serves as a member of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board.) But what struck me the most about their take on Henry V was their loose use of the plot. Or, rather, their fabrication of it.

One of their “lessons” from Henry’s victory at Agincourt was that good leaders leverage superior technology to defeat their enemies. Henry’s troops used the longbow, which helped them overwhelm a vastly more numerous French force. This fact is, of course, historically true. But this technological “fact” is one that Shakespeare deliberately omitted from his narrative of Henry’s victory, in order to play up the valor of the English soldiers and the glory of God — he never even hints at the longbow’s strategic import. Thus the Adelmans actually invert Shakespeare’s own lesson from this play in order to justify a particular business strategy.

The Adelmans rely quite heavily on it for their corporate seminars, and understandably so: Henry makes a number of difficult executive decisions, all having to do with the management of people, in anticipation of, during, and after his expedition to reclaim France. He seeks legal and religious justification for his mission; he traps and executes traitors; he inspires his troops; he metes out justice; he consults; he negotiates; he wins. In short, if you want to be a good leader, you need to be able to “persuade like Henry V,” as the handbook Say it Like Shakespeare exhorts us to do.

The historical Henry was far less appealing. Shakespeare, according to 19th-century essayist William Hazlitt, “labours hard to apologise for the actions of the king,” but there are still traces of Henry’s repellant character present in the play, leading many readers to sense a darker undertone to the apparent celebration of “this star of England,” as the Epilogue lauds him.

If you think the business world fawns excessively over Henry, just wait until you hear what the Right does with him. Bill Bennett once introduced Margaret Thatcher with lines from the play; Dan Quayle fancied himself an underappreciated Prince Hal; Henry Hyde likened the managers of the impeachment trial to his fellow Henry’s “band of brothers.” 

The play is, admittedly, eminently quotable, with purple passages ready-at-hand for such men who would be king as Pat Buchanan (who trumpeted the coincidence of his bid for the Reform Party nomination and St. Crispin’s Day, the day of Henry’s victory at Agincourt) and Phil Gramm (who likewise invoked the holiday during his exit from the 1996 Republican primaries). Does the insistence of these Republican invocations unwittingly reveal some unspeakable fantasy for monarchical government? (Is it merely accidental that every few years someone re-discovers the Bush family’s royal lineage, information that has been public since the first Bush administration?)

Henry V didn’t always belong exclusively to Republicans. Woodrow Wilson cited the play, with approval, as representing “the spirit of English life [which] has made comrades of us all to be a nation”; Franklin Roosevelt viewed the rousing Olivier film in a private screening; John F. Kennedy called Shakespeare “an American playwright” after a performance of some lines from Henry V at the White House. Yet Democrats aren’t nearly as invested in this drama in recent years. In fact, the closest they come to it is through a pejorative association with kings preceding or following Henry V — for instance, Jimmy Carter has been painted (literally and figuratively) as Henry VI. Some conservative commentators relished the opportunity to recite Henry IV’s dying advice to his son whenever Clinton launched a missile attack:

“Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of the former days.”

Funny how these commentators pass over this same passage when calling upon Shakespeare’s young prince today. For the Right has finally found the suitable subject for their Henriad-laden dreams: George W. Bush.

There were, admittedly, some half-hearted attempts to connect Bush I’s victory in the Gulf with Henry V’s at Agincourt; Michael Novak gushed in an April 1991 Fortune column:

Like Bush, Henry V was mocked by his foes as too weak and soft to fight. Like Bush from Aug. 2 until Mar. 2, Henry V grew in purpose and in stature from the first moments of his expedition until its bloody climax. Like Bush, Henry was fond of terms like “kind” and “gentle,” but fiercely resolute for vindication of the right. Like Bush, before the battle Henry V prayed mightily . . .

But the simile is stretched far too thinly here — no matter how uncanny the fact that Branagh’s version of Henry V was reported the previous year to be one of the Bush household’s favorite films, or that a PBS study guide for the same movie encouraged students to write a presidential campaign speech for Henry V, or that RAF Air Commodore Ian Macfadyen quoted the play before the initial air strikes against Iraq.

Perhaps this is what appeals to the Republicans the most — the reality of aristocracy smoothed over by the rhetoric of democracy

No, this is an analogy that has been seeking a referent, and the Right appears exultant in casting an appropriate actor as the Bard’s hero. Whether it was the Texas governorship, the campaign for the Republican nomination, the post-election Florida debacle, or the battle over John Ashcroft (no kidding), someone was ready and eager to recall the Shakespearean analogue of the transformed wayward Prince and his martial triumph. (Once more unto the breach: an Army major general recited the Crispin’s day speech to his troops before deployment in this second Gulf buildup; publishers donated copies of Henry V to U.S. military personnel as part of a revived “Armed Services Edition”; a professor at the Naval War College urged that a threatening speech of Henry’s “be printed in Arabic on leaflets and dropped on Baghdad, Basra, and especially Tikrit.”)

Ken Adelman provides a representative instance of this yearning for W. to play this part — this quotation comes from a 1999 Washington Magazine piece in which he casts political celebrities into (what he imagines to be) their suitable Shakespearean roles:

GEORGE W. BUSH
Henry V. A son who wishes to redeem his father’s reign, Hal puts the indiscretions of his youth behind him to get serious and go straight: “Presume not that I am the thing I was, for God doth know [and] so shall the world perceive, that I have turned away my former self.” The young king leads a robust and relentless campaign that ends in stunning victory. (Okay, I’m a Republican, but Henry V ruled as one, too.)

This version of the story resonates with a number of cherished American narratives, from the Prodigal Son to the (supposed) outsider who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps — tack on the victory against impossible odds, and you’ve got prime Spielberg material.

And yet Shakespeare’s version occurs within the narrative framework of a son who has inherited power. The dramatist thus managed to blend vertical authority with horizontal camaraderie in a way that evokes the best of both worlds, or at least effaces the worst of each. This sophisticated two-step is most palpably at work in the King’s inspirational prelude to the final battle, in which he promises: 

“He today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.”

In other words, despite the rigorous enforcement of hierarchical order throughout the rest of the play (including the execution of his former friend for petty theft), there is a glance here at a vaguely egalitarian “band of brothers.” Perhaps this is what appeals to the Republicans the most — the reality of aristocracy smoothed over by the rhetoric of democracy.

It was no surprise, then, to find commentators tripping over themselves to compare Bush W to Henry V (yet again) after his first major post-9/11 speech. The monotonous litany of their voices makes one wonder whether this was in fact a talking point pressed by a White House operative — just listen to the chorus:

* “Prince Hal has become Henry V” — Peter Robinson

* “I thought that last Friday, as Bush stood atop part of the rubble of the World Trade Center, he came as close as he ever will to delivering a St. Crispin’s Day speech. That spirit and resolve carried over into the House chamber last night, and it was something to behold.” — Rich Lowry

* “George W. Bush faced Congress and the People of the United States. ‘He to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, be he ne’er so vile . . .’ exclaims King Henry as dawn breaks over the fields of Agincourt. I do not know whether the president’s speech writers study Shakespeare . . . Yet the world fell silent when he extended the call, even to the ever-so vile, to join him.” — Balint Vazsonyi

* “In Bush, the country discovered it had a young leader rising to the occasion, an easy-going Prince Hal transformed by instinct and circumstance into a warrior King Henry.” — Chris Matthews

* “But I also think, I’ve used the line before, I know, that it’s a little bit like, you know, Prince Hal becoming Henry V.” — Jeff Greenfield (to whom the host replied: “Jeff, I love when you draw Shakespearian analogies. That really makes it easy for me.”)

* “. . . when trouble hit, how rapidly we left behind the pages of Henry the 4th and suddenly we seem to be into the pages of Henry the 5th. There had been a transformation as young George W. Bush stepped up to. Now, to be sure, he has not won his Agincourt, but he has set sail, and for that the country can be grateful.” — David Gergen, who, despite the garbled syntax of the preceding assertion, seems to have successfully fashioned himself an expert on the Bush/Henry link.

One can almost hear the stirring chords of the “Non Nobis, Domine” hymn from Branagh’s post-battle tracking shot as the pundits repetitively chime in with their Shakespearean allusions.

Not that Bush’s opponents couldn’t also find comparisons. Consider Hazlitt’s characterization of Henry: 

“He was fond of war and low company: — we know little else of him. He was careless, dissolute, and ambitious; — idle, or doing mischief. In private, he seemed to have no idea of the common decencies of life, which he subjected to a kind of regal licence; in public affairs, he seemed to have no idea of any rule of right or wrong, but brute force, glossed over with a little religious hypocrisy and archiepiscopal advice. . . . Henry, because he did not know how to govern his own kingdom, determined to make war upon his neighbours. Because his own title to the crown was doubtful, he laid claim to that of France. Because he did not know how to exercise the enormous power, which had just dropped into his hands, to any one good purpose, he immediately undertook (a cheap and obvious resource of sovereignty) to do all the mischief he could.”

The audience for this supposedly self-evident connection is not someone who has read the play; rather, it is someone who hasn’t, but trusts the cultural authority of Shakespeare

Some readers of the play (”we happy few,” as Henry would say) have pointed out the numerous weaknesses, and disturbing echoes, in the Right-wing version of this analogy, even going so far as to call it claptrap. Major elements of the story glossed over include: the fact that the newly crowned Henry overtly rejects his cronies from his ne’er-do-well youth; the fact that Henry rather awkwardly effaces his responsibility for civilian deaths; the fact that the momentary triumph over France soon resulted in a generation’s worth of making “England bleed,” with carnage abroad as well as at home in civil wars; the fact that Hal informs us early in Henry IV, part I that he is deliberately misbehaving (few would claim Dubya’s youthful hijinks to be part of a visionary plan of redemption — although, as Mark Crispin Miller has argued, “it suits a politician to have everybody thinking he’s a dunce”) . . .

But no bother. The audience for this supposedly self-evident connection, I would argue, is not someone who has read the play; rather, it is someone who hasn’t, but trusts the cultural authority of Shakespeare. We are thus lulled into recognizing Bush’s supposed nobility. Moreover, the precise moment of George/Hal’s maturation is usefully malleable, as it has been played and replayed incessantly for half a decade; its most recent occasions include the war in Afghanistan, the announcement of a new preemptive military doctrine, and Bush’s address to the United Nations. Even stage directors seem eager to reinforce the reciprocal dynamic between Bush and Henry, with more than one theater company producing Henry V in response to current events. Analogies between Iraq and ‘Agincourt’ have, inevitably, resulted from Bush’s current foreign quarrels. (They might not be so far off the mark, with Republican bumper stickers and buttons proclaiming the slogan “First Iraq, Then France.”)

What remains most galling about the loaded way in which the right insists upon the W/V connection is how deeply reactionary it is. The reductive reading of Shakespeare and the reductive reading of history are both lamentable, but perhaps inevitable in a sound-bite world. What isn’t inevitable is the conclusion of these readings: that we should celebrate the Bush presidency on account of some rather tenuous (and by no means unproblematic) similarities to a fictionalized king. This is using a cultural authority (Shakespeare) to bolster a political authority (the Bush regime) which, from its inception, has been short on, and even defiant of, the authority necessary to lead a democracy: the consent of the majority of the people.

The right-wing’s monarchical take on Henry V contrasts sharply with the response to an 1808 Philadelphia performance of the play. After Henry’s declaration “I thought upon one pair of English legs did march three Frenchmen,” the audience rioted, because the line “was interpreted as propaganda in favor of aristocratic England against revolutionary France,” according to Lawrence Levine’s account in his book Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.

It would be an understatement to say that the United States of America, from its origins, has had a peculiar relationship to the institution of monarchy; some still want it back. (It seems uncannily appropriate, in this context, that Tocqueville first read Henry V in a frontier log cabin.) We don’t, of course, have anything like an official system of hereditary aristocracy in the United States, and having the son of a president become president is obviously not without precedent, so to speak (these would be Adams family values — John Quincy, as it happens, considered himself a critic of Shakespearean performance.) 

Yet there was surprisingly little conversation about Bush’s rather advantageous familial circumstances during the 2000 campaign. (As the host of Saturday Night Live just before the Inauguration, Charlie Sheen was asked if he would ever play the role of president, as does his father Martin Sheen; in response, he quipped “I could never be the president. Think about it. I’ve abused cocaine, I’ve been arrested, I’m not a very smart guy. It’s a big joke to think people would want someone like me just because his dad was president.”)

For the first half century of our independence from Great Britain, there were occasional movements calling for an elective king, but never a king who could hand his title to his son. If anything, in 1776 Americans were so dismayed by King George III’s behavior that, according to historian Forrest McDonald, “they established almost no executive branches at all. The Congress of the Confederation had no executive arm . . . mistrust lingered, as is attested by the fact that a quarter to a third of the delegates [at the 1787 Constitutional Convention] supported a plural executive.”

While the Constitution does admit an executive branch with limitations and checks, it explicitly states that “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States” (Article 1, Section 9). Yet the inertia of social institutions is extraordinarily difficult to redirect. George Washington himself was taken with the symbols of kingship, preferring the title ‘His High Mightiness’ and employing kingly iconography in his public appearances. Given this early American history of infatuation with regal trappings, maybe we shouldn’t be all that surprised that there are some today who would favor thinking of the Bush family as a kind of dynasty, and that these royalists are thus understandably elated by the resonances with King Henry’s story.

Henry V need not only be read as the affirmation of repressive authority. The play was a favorite of a member of that Democratic aristocracy, Robert Kennedy. RFK once quoted the play not in the context of bolstering elitist sentiment, but rather in the more ambiguous setting of a debate with his advisers regarding legislation “to feed hungry children in the South,” as Robert Coles has related. Kennedy’s allusion to Henry V required interpretation rather than reinforcement of a pre-given mindset; his allusion demanded contemplation of what Coles has termed “moral leadership” rather than smug complacency. In other words, there was a time, not so long ago, when politicians themselves actually read Henry V with some sophistication beyond crass self-promotion. When exactly did we become resigned to leaving the interpretation of Shakespeare’s political significance to reactionary pundits and consultants?

When Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of “our preposterous use of books,” he was referring disdainfully to someone who “knew not what to do, so he read.” We have the inverse at work in the Bush/Henry connection — the preposterous use of Shakespeare by those who have read the play (badly), bullying an audience unfamiliar with Henry V into conceding the connection. It is no small irony that this audience likely includes the president himself.

P O P  F O R U M
Has the Right finally found its man?

Scott Newstok teaches English at Rhodes College. He is editor of Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare.