Which gave advantage to an ancient soldier,
An honest one, I warrant....’
The rest of the description, which is rather involved in style and may not have received the author’s last touches, adds nothing definite. The questioner, an unnamed ‘British lord,’ seems hardly to see the point:—
‘This was strange chance:
A narrow lane, an old man, and two boys.’
It is well attested by experience that a few determined men, or even one, may stop a panic if once they can get a rallying point; and I am much disposed to think that Shakespeare used in this passage an incident heard from someone who had actually seen it, or been very near it, ‘somewhere in Flanders.’
The most military of Shakespeare’s plays is ‘Henry V.’; there are other plays with much fighting in them, but neither within nor without the chronicle series is there one with so little of other interest in it. Henry V. is the only Shakespearean king who is a typical soldier, so much so that the type all but swallows up individual character. Mr. Masefield, who is always ingenious and often profound, thinks that Shakespeare did not admire the type; that he studied it with full knowledge and carefully framed the so-called heroic figure, a competent but no more than sufficiently competent leader, carrying on with fine animal spirits, unthinking, just and fair according to his lights, keen on playing the game as he knows it and scorning those who do otherwise with a scorn capable of being merciless, living by custom and not seeking ideas, never doubting that he is right—I am not using Mr. Masefield’s own words, but putting his judgment in a slightly less severe form; and then, Mr. Masefield will have it, Shakespeare holds up a piece of our own image to us in the jolly, obtuse soldier-king, with a whisper in his sleeve for the more knowing:—These be your gods, O Englishmen! I will not say there is nothing in Mr. Masefield’s point, but I cannot go all the way with him, the rather that if I am wrong it is in Sir Walter Raleigh’s company. Shakespeare’s command of human nature included other, richer, more complex, and more interesting characters; he knew very well that a prince always posing like Richard II., who is an accomplished cabotin, or always thinking like Hamlet, who fails not because he is weak but because he knows too much, would not have done Henry V.’s business; it does not follow that he thought ill of that business, and for my part I conceive that he admired Henry V. as the right man for his place and meant the audience to admire him. King Henry V.’s ostentatious repudiation of Prince Hal’s ways and companions is violent and awkward, and to a modern judgment unpleasant, as Mr. Masefield says. But that was forced on Shakespeare by the tale which he had to accept as history. Another difficulty is to see why a war of conquest against France should have been glorified on the stage at a time when France and England were not only at peace but in all but formal alliance against Spain: to which I see no answer except that chronicle plays were in fashion, a good play was a good play, and people did not go to the Globe to learn current European politics. We have not to consider whether Shakespeare thought Henry V. was in truth such a man as he put on the stage; or whether he did or did not stop to think that the real Henry V. must have known French quite well, if not as well as English, from his infancy; or other little puzzles that any observant reader may put, and get no certain answer, in this and most of the plays: for these things are not to our present purpose.
Shakespeare’s Henry V. is most human when he talks with his own soldiers as a plain gentleman, and they reason of the king’s responsibility in a thoroughly medieval fashion. The point is not whether a king who goes to war may have to reproach himself with the horrors of war as commonly understood, the temporal evils of death, destruction, and rapine. What is urged—and by a private soldier—is the risk that men slain in battle may die in mortal sin: ‘if these men do not die well.’ The king’s answer is a fine sample of Shakespeare’s grave prose dialogue, and, to the best of my belief, very sound moral theology. ‘Every subject’s duty is the king’s; but every subject’s soul is his own.’ It is obvious that the principle is by no means confined to warlike enterprise. Did Shakespeare write this scene to justify the Archbishop of Canterbury’s praise, at the opening of the play, of Henry’s learning in divinity?
As for the usages of war, Henry V. accepts them as he finds them: that is, as Shakespeare—not to say Grotius—found them. When he summons Harfleur to surrender he is clear that the consequences of further resistance will be the governor’s fault and not his. Everybody is aware that a town taken by storm is pillaged; there is just a hint that no known discipline could prevent it; and indeed we moderns know what ado Wellington had in that matter little more than a century ago, and in a friendly country too. As a point of strict military rule, defence of an untenable position forfeited the defenders’ right to quarter down to the Peninsular War, and Wellington thought there was much to be said for it on the ground that the existence of the rule operated to prevent useless waste of life. This, however, is not explicit in Shakespeare.
Fluellen, the Welsh captain, is really a more distinct and human character than the king, though a minor one. He is a martinet, and probably would be a bore if he were allowed to expound the disciplines of the wars and the rules of Pompey’s camp at large; but he is a thoroughly good soldier, and a good friend. If it entered into Shakespeare’s plans to show off any knowledge of military science, here was a chance; the difference between the early fifteenth and the late sixteenth century would give no trouble, as in some details not worth particularising it certainly did not. We get nothing of this kind, however, from Fluellen beyond a few words about mines and countermines, which may be paralleled by the metaphorical use of the same matter in a still better known speech of Hamlet’s.[6]