The Politics of Scale in Shakespeare’s Henry V: Fiction, History, Theater

Abstract

I n a self-conscious investigation of how theatrical fictions might recount historical events, the Chorus of Shakespeare’s Henry V opens with a set of contrasts in scale: “Can this cockpit hold / The vasty fields of France?” (11–12). While the Chorus here presents the small scope of the theatrical “cockpit” as an obstacle to the audience’s full appreciation of the “vasty fields” of Agincourt, what follows over the course of the play is a set of powerful claims for the political value of these very kinds of scalar disjunctions. The play’s highly theatrical manipulations of scale afford techniques for viewing and judging things great and small, including the imperial “cause” (1.2.294) of Henry’s war with France. Audiences encounter sharp distinctions not only between entities that operate at different scales—cockpits and vasty fields; actors’ bodies and various political bodies—but also, more importantly, divergent models of historical scale itself. Unlike those scholars who see the power of theatrical display as aligned with Henry’s imperial ambitions, I argue that the highly variable spacetime of live performance helps to expose the faulty scalar devices onwhichHenry’s imperial actions rest. Henry V positions theatrical fictions as tools for scalar literacy—tools that become essential for making ethical and political judgements in a non-uniform historical field. As critics have long noted,HenryV draws on humanist debates about historiography that are closely tied to questions about the justice of Henry’s imperial cause. The play’s promoters of the English war effort deploy a particular view of historical figures as exemplars for imitation—a view that