Shakespeare and the Welsh Part IV

Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Celtic ‘Other.’
(Read Part One of this Series First?)

It’s not just the Welsh who are represented in Shakespeare’s Henry V. There are the enemy French of course, but the famous ‘Four Captains’ scene has also made this play a favourite with post-colonial critics looking at English identity and Englishness as defined by England’s near neighbours. The ‘Four Captains’ are:

·        Gower the Englishman,

·        MacMorris the Irishman,

·        Jamy the Scot, and

·        Fluellen the Welshman.

Writer and historian Christopher Highley says the play as a whole shows, “Shakespeare’s disillusioned ambivalence about the reasons behind and the consequences of England’s empire-building.” It also produces “a skeptical counter-discourse about English expansionism within the British Isles.” What does that mean?

Henry V: A Game of Two Halves.

Basically, the play is set up in the first half as a nationalistic epic. It’s all about England and Englishness and how glorious, right, courageous, noble and manly England is. The nation, under Harry’s leadership, gets stirred up against the French in a similar way to how Britain got stirred up about the Falklands under Thatcher. The army – whose stout yeomen’s arms are ‘made in England’ are almost like a hoard of English soccer fans boarding an airplane to attend the World Cup. The costume designer for The Hollow Crown even had that image in mind.

The scene with the ‘Four Captains’ marks a turning point. Things start to go wrong – it’s harder than the English think and the audience sees that the army is hardly as ‘pure’ in terms of Englihness as everyone assumed at the outset. Shakespeare deliberately throws a spanner in the works of his mostly English audience’s nationalism by showing them how dependent Harry’s army is on Celtic ‘others’ whose nations define England’s borders.

Agincourt: An ‘English’ Victory?

Ireland, Scotland and Wales are not only represented as fighting for England’s cause; they also simultaneously threaten it. At that time in history, Scotland was the most immediate threat – Harry’s gains in France are won by risking a Scottish invasion whilst his army is absent from Britain fighting the Battle of Agincourt.

The conclusion? Shakespeare’s Henry V suggests that England and Englishness is not as mighty and confident as it is at first represented to be. In fact, throughout Shakespeare’s history plays as a whole, the kingdom has been shown to be unstable.

Henry the Fift: ‘Frenemies’ and Neighbours From Hell.

Within the British Isles as a whole, England’s kings have a tenuous hold on power. Keep in mind too that the Royal line changes several times again between the time of Henry V and the days of Shakespeare. The play was also performed during the times of The Nine Years War in Ireland (1594-1603).

English identity was more fragile than that of its Celtic neighbours. According to Christopher Ivic in his essay ‘Norman Bastards, Bastard Normans: Anamalous Identities in The Life of Henry the Fift,’“for many English writers, Welshness was viewed as more ancient, true and unmixed than Englishness.”

The bloodline of the Tudors owed much to Wales, as did the victory of Henry VII over Richard III, the House of York and the Plantagenet dynasty. Henry VIII may have brought about the Act of Union between the two nations of England and Wales, but even this was not enough to erase national, linguistic, cultural and psychological differences between the two peoples.

And besides all that, after Elizabeth I, England was ruled by a Scotsman, James I!

Is Shakespeare’s Henry V a British or an English Play?

Many critics claim that Shakespeare’s Henry V is a celebration of British identity and patriotism as opposed to Englishness. But, as Ivic points out, an interesting but little-known fact about the play is that in one manuscript (F1), the lines of dialogue for the Welsh captain, Fluellen, are often introduced in the margin as ‘Welch’ instead of ‘Fluellen’ or ‘Flu.’ Likewise for MacMorris, ‘Irish;’ and for Jamy, ‘Scot.’ Gower the Englishman, on the other hand, is consistently represented as ‘Gower.’

The play therefore seems to have been written from an English rather than a ‘British’ perspective – but it is more than a simple celebration of English identity, more than an ‘epic of English nationalism.’ It is a sophisticated interrogation of the whole idea of England and Englishness, and of English imperial right and superiority. The Welshness of Fluellen is used to destabalise any easy national identity which the predominantly English audience might like to assume.

Fluellen as a Representation of Welshness.

Christopher Highley: “Fluellen figures the colonial subject who has internalized English values and subordinated his own provincial loyalties to service to the English nation-state.”

Christopher Ivic: “many Elizabethans and Jacobeans considered Wales to be a mild, compliant neighbor.” Shakespeare’s Henry V can be seen as “disseminating an idealized (indeed fictionalized) Anglo-Welsh alliance. But Wales and Welshness also serve as disturbing examples of various forms of proximity […] and the play’s inscriptions of these forms of proximity unsettle notions of England, English and Englishness.”

 

For King Harry, God, England and St. George! Or Not.

Finally, if Fluellen represents the Welsh and Welshness, surely the play has no greater cypher of Englishness than King Henry himself. Not so! The character who inspires so much English nationalistic pride in the beginning of the play is towards the end of it inverted in a surprising and almost shocking way.

Harry’s Englishness first begins to Waver when he disguises himself as a common soldier and goes walking around the camp at night to hear the opinions of his men. Initially he’s mistaken for a Cornishman, which immediately makes his Englishness ambiguous.

But Shakespeare doesn’t stop there. Next, Harry tells Pistol he’s a ‘Welchman’ – a kinsman of Fluellen, no less. And later again, after the battle, ‘Harry English’ confesses to Fluellen, ‘I am Welch you know good countriman,’ to which Fluellen responds, ‘All the water in the Wye, cannot wash your Maiesties Welsh plod out of your body.’

What’s going on? Why would Shakespeare have his most English character do this, when the actual Henry V had no Welsh blood at all? Well, Henry V was born in Monmouth, but that doesn’t seem enough of a reason to have him state something like this. My own personal theory? You’ll have to wait for the next post, and in the meantime please leave a comment.

Tara for now