• 1 William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. Andrew Gurr, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, Cambridge, Cambr (...)
• 2 Michael Saenger, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, (...)

1Shakespeare’s Henry V is often portrayed and staged as a play not only about the glory, but also about the tragedy of war. That such conflicting interpretations came to be so repeatedly attached to the story of how the second English monarch of the House of Lancaster invaded France and won the battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years’ War in 1415 can be explained especially in the light of the play’s textual and linguistic make-up. Indeed, and as I shall argue, Shakespeare’s history play is unique in the way that it is a linguistically troubled and conflicted piece of writing. As one of its most recent editors put it, “No play of Shakespeare’s makes so much use of differences in language and has more language barriers”.1 As I aim to demonstrate, the play is much more than an Anglo-French confrontation seen from an English angle. It anatomises the concept of nationhood: it is slippery, ambivalent, and fluid on the one hand, jingoistic and rigid on the other. Henry V is ideal when it comes to studying scenes in the Other’s language, as well as otherness and alterity. In his book on Shakespeare and the French Borders of English, Michael Saenger writes cogently that “Nationalism cannot exist without a sense of alterity, so translation and citation become crucial battlegrounds where essentialist notions of nationhood are both fixed and eroded”.2 The two scenes on which I shall mainly focus – the scene almost entirely in French (iii.iv), during which Princess Katherine of France tries to learn a few rudiments of English from her servant Alice, and the wooing scene between Henry V and the Princess where Alice acts partly as an interpreter between the two (v.ii) – exploit and expose linguistic and cultural faultlines. The two scenes encapsulate many of the issues of the play at large. Moreover, while questioning the idea of foreignness through specific linguistic interplay, they challenge the very notion of Shakespearean scenic division in theatrically productive ways, as we shall see.

• 3 See James Hirsh, “Act Divisions in the Shakespeare First Folio”, Publications of the Bibliographica (...)
• 4 Alan C. Dessen, “Divided Shakespeare: Configuring Acts and Scenes”, in Margaret Jane Kidnie and Son (...)
• 5 Hirsh, “Act Divisions in the Shakespeare First Folio”, p. 256.

2None of the three quarto editions of Henry V (published respectively in 1600, 1602, and 1619) contained act or scene divisions. This was the case of all Shakespearean quarto playbooks (with the exception of the 1622 quarto edition of Othello, which had act breaks and was marketed differently by its publisher).3 Most plays connected to the public theatres reached print during Shakespeare’s lifetime without scene divisions other than exit-exeunt indications for clearing the stage. By 1623, when the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays was published, conventions had changed and “readers might have expected five-act division in printed play texts” and thus found “twenty-eight of the thirty-six Folio plays divided into five acts and two others partly divided”.4 Nevertheless, scholars have pointed out that these divisions were superimposed to make the book conform more to classical standards and lend it literary cachet, especially in the light of the publication in 1616 of Ben Jonson’s Works, whose plays were not only printed with act and scene divisions, but were also composed with the five-act structure in mind. The result, as far as Shakespeare’s First Folio is concerned, is that, “Although the Folio publishers may have made their volume marginally more marketable by inserting act divisions, their intervention has led to an enduring misrepresentation of the dramatic structures of Shakespeare’s plays”.5

• 6 Dessen, “Divided Shakespeare: Configuring Acts and Scenes”, p. 339.

3This does not mean that early Shakespeare was actually performed with no scene breaks, but that other factors apart from exits and entrances played a part. Serving the needs of a play such as Henry V, with an abundance of characters and a necessarily limited cast of actors, probably had an influence on how the play was divided. Nonetheless, there were additional factors, as Alan Dessen suggested: “a concern for imagery or patterning or economy” may have presided over theatrical choices and the shaping of scenes.6 We shall try to bear these factors in mind when exploring the English lesson scene and the wooing scene in Henry V, all the more so as the textual history of the play indicates that its scenic divisions remained very fluid until the mid-eighteenth century at least.

• 7 Lewis Theobald (ed.), The works of Shakespeare: in seven volumes, London, printed for A. Betteswort (...)
• 8 Thomas Hanmer (ed.), The works of Shakespear. In six volumes, Oxford, printed at the Theatre, 1743– (...)

4Divided artificially into five acts from the First to the Fourth Folio (1685), the play was not split into scenes in collected editions of Shakespeare until Lewis Theobald’s 1733 edition. However, Theobald did not formally number the scenes: he only divided them using introductory and situational comments. He also appended a note to the English lesson scene indicating that the sudden use of French for an entire scene appeared to him incongruous and aesthetically displeasing.7 A decade later, Henry V is divided in numbered acts and scenes in Thomas Hanmer’s 1743 edition (see Figures 1 and 2). The English lesson scene is numbered, but relegated to the bottom margin without any further comment. As for the wooing scene, it is considered as a completely separate scene and becomes Act 5, scene 3 of the play.8 In modern editions of Henry V, though, the wooing scene is not a stand-alone scene – it is a mere parenthesis in the middle of the larger concluding scene of the play.

• 9 Samuel Johnson (ed.), The plays of William Shakespeare, in eight volumes, London, printed for J. an (...)

5To go back to the English lesson, this scene does not make a reappearance in the main text of major eighteenth-century multi-volume editions of Shakespeare until Samuel Johnson’s 1765 edition, in which – incidentally – the wooing scene still remains separate, as Act 5, scene 4 of the play this time. In a footnote, Johnson acknowledges the ill-reputation of the first scene (the English lesson) among his predecessors and justifies his reasons for reinstating it with this back-handed compliment: “It may be observed, that there is in it not only the French language, but the French spirit. […] Throughout the whole scene there may be found French servility, and French vanity”.9 Samuel Johnson – the man who had done so much to establish the English language on firm ground with the publication in 1755 of his Dictionary of the English Language – had sensed the potential for satire of the French and for comedy in the context of eighteenth-century cross-Channel cultural and political warfare. At all events, the scene (almost entirely in French) had been construed as a linguistic oddity, so much so that the publishers of Shakespeare’s First Folio had set the whole passage in italics, visually signalling its difference to the reader – a feature that has almost completely disappeared from modern editions of the play.

• 10 Saenger, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English, p. 6. On language and identity, see also in (...)

6Despite their apparent linguistic oddities, the English lesson scene (spoken in Shakespeare’s French and replete with partly deformed English words for comic effect), as well as the laborious Anglo-French dialogue between Henry V and Princess Katherine in the wooing scene, are perfectly in keeping with the wider linguistic din and true Babel – or babble – of languages found elsewhere in the play. The linguistic confusion might be seen as intentional in some regards. Michael Saenger, for instance, surmises that in Henry V “Shakespeare uses the idea of France to explore language and identity”.10

• 11 This is of course ironical from a historical point of view as Henry V wanted English to become the (...)

7Indeed, on the face of it, the English conquerors seem to impose their language on the French. On closer examination, however, it appears that a fair proportion of those involved in Henry’s military project simply do not speak the same language.11 Ironically, while the majority of French nobles speak perfect English (interspersed here and there with a few French words for local colour), Henry’s own troops have trouble understanding one another – whether they are Welsh, Scottish, Irish or simply English. The French in the play sound almost as if they could be teaching the English their own language.

• 12 For George Puttenham, a tongue can only be called a language after some kind of social consent: “af (...)

8Nym’s use of the Latin solus [alone] at the beginning of the play (ii.i.39–40) is a source of comic misunderstanding and argument between him and Pistol, who takes it as an insult. Pistol throws false French words back at Nym: “‘Couple a gorge’!” [cut the throat] (ii.i.58) and also some Latin: “pauca” [few] (63), which of course only worsens matters between them. In Act 3 the clash of accents and points of view between the four captains – Gower the Englishman, Llewellyn the Welshman, Jamy the Scotsman and Macmorris the Irishman – is blatant. In the course of the scene, Macmorris is accused of incompetence by Llewellyn. Macmorris responds indignantly: “Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal? What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?” (iii.iii.61–63). Macmorris’s hypersensitivity shows how close Henry’s so-called united army is to fragmentation.12 It is precisely the plurivocal language spoken by these characters which prevents Henry’s epic measures from taking over completely.

• 13 The refrain is a distorted version of the Irish “cailin og a’ stor” [young maiden, my treasure]. Se (...)

9When Henry’s common soldiers encounter the French, the linguistic confusion which arises furthers this disruptive work, as the meaning of Henry’s mission in France is turned around and twisted by the plurivocal din. In Act 4, scene 4 of the play Shakespeare stages a bilingual encounter between Pistol and a French soldier, Monsieur Le Fer. Pistol, who understands no French, turns Le Fer’s French words into English puns and even answers with the Irish refrain of a popular song: “Quality? ‘Colin o custure me’” (4).13 The French words are thus “translated”, transformed by the money-grabbing Pistol who loves the sound of jingling coins (cf. “moi” [I] / “moys” [10–11] and “bras” [arm] / “brass” [13–14]). Rather than attempting to speak French, Pistol also mimics French words which he assembles almost meaninglessly: “Oui, coupe la gorge, par ma foi” [yes, cut the throat, by my faith] (29).

• 14 Claude-Gilbert Dubois, Mythe et langage au seizième siècle, Bordeaux, Ducros, 1970, p. 27 (translat (...)

11From a general perspective, it is useful to bear in mind that Babel had of course become a symbol of the general religious and linguistic crisis which had affected most European nations since the Reformation. Christian truth was divided and England as a Protestant nation was left to pick up the pieces of a theological edifice it had helped to bring down. This left the nation in a peculiar position – not only nostalgic for its former place within a united Christendom but also living in the hope of a new Babel – one which it might either have to fight for or work at. The latter solution (work at) was the one chosen by Renaissance humanists for whom translation and the study of ancient and modern languages were the keys to a more profound understanding among Christian nations. As Claude-Gilbert Dubois writes, “There is clearly a will to get over the linguistic divisions of Babel not by searching for a lingua humana [a human language] that is forever lost, but by conquering existing languages”.14

• 15 William Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds), William Shakespeare: The C (...)
• 16 Hubert Bost also underlined the intimate links between political power and the story of Babel: “Bab (...)

12Yet there are signs in Shakespeare that this conquest was a problematic and conflicted one. Fractures had already run deep during the reign of Henry’s father – Henry IV. A few years before, Shakespeare had shown how the man who deposed King Richard II had trouble reasserting the unity of the nation. “Painted full of tongues”, Rumour had appeared like an image of Babel in the prologue to 2 Henry IV, asking the audience to “open your ears”, as “Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, / The which in every language I pronounce”.15 It is not surprising that the Babylonian theme should serve as a kind of intertext to these plays, as the story of Babel is the point of juncture of nation and language.16

• 17 A. E. B. Coldiron, Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality, Cambridge, Cambridge Unive (...)

14In many instances, and no doubt unconsciously, Shakespeare adopts the style of macaronic verse or prose. Macaronic style implies that its author uses a medley of both vernacular and foreign words. They are juxtaposed and thus co-exist side by side. The work of translation is displaced onto the reader, or in this case onto the members of Henry V’s audience. Anne Coldiron explains usefully that “the full visibility of the foreign in them [macaronic writings] nevertheless invites attention to intercultural fault-lines and ideological conflicts” and that “in macaronics every line is a contact zone”.17 The most famous example of macaronic prose in modern times is probably James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939).

• 18 See Saenger, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English, pp. 7–8; 105; 109; 112–13.

15Translation implies an attempt at negotiating difference, as we have already noted, but it can also convey the idea of displacement and thus potentially of loss and disorientation.18 Interestingly, in Henry V Shakespeare confronts his audience members directly with this sense of loss and allows them to experience for themselves what it means to be strangers in a strange land. In the scene known as the “English lesson” (iii.iv), where the French princess Katherine is taught a few rudiments of the conqueror’s English, audiences have to struggle linguistically. In a strange way, the scene also turns out to be a kind of lesson in French. Indeed, Shakespeare suddenly changes the conventions used so far – the French now actually speak French. This change of conventions is unsettling and this was no doubt intended. Realism and verisimilitude are beside the point here, as the purpose is not really to make the French sound more French. This is in fact a complex moment from a theatrical point of view, one that works on several levels.

• 19 On Shakespeare’s French in this scene, see Jean-Michel Déprats, “A French History of Henry V”, in T (...)
• 20 The scene is also to some extent a parody of language manuals (cf. Katherine’s “je suis le bon écol (...)

17Nevertheless, this is not quite what happens for a series of reasons. First, even in a scene spoken mainly in Shakespeare’s French, where interpretation and translation are naturally involved, foreign and English words retain a resonance that reminds us of macaronic prose. Despite Katherine’s satisfaction with the way she has acquired a few English words, the lesson fails comically and culturally. There is good reason to believe that an audience might feel at once amused and aliened by Shakespeare’s broken French19 jumbled with partly deformed English words chosen for their potential to create sexual innuendo through wordplay and linguistic confusion.20

• 21 “De foot et de count? O Seigneur Dieu, ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impu (...)
• 22 Coldiron, Printers without Borders, p. 28.

18Only a few English words emerge, which have to do with parts of the body thus allowing for kinetic play and miming that could help audience understanding. Yet the English words which filter through are distorted – they produce that distancing comic effect which we have mentioned, but they also contribute to the play’s verbal confusion, linguistic hybridity and instability. Indeed, language in this scene is so unstable that Katherine’s pronunciation of the English words she so wants to learn produces strange effects. The princess’s linguistic efforts rebound on her ironically as the English words she pronounces have unforeseen meanings in her own language. They take on obscene connotations, which are multiplied by the fact that they were originally spoken by two cross-dressed boys on the Elizabethan stage. Sexual intercourse, or semen (“foot” / “foutre”) and female genitals (“count”, or “con”, in modern French / “cunt” [46–47]) are evoked through a series of interlingual puns. Again, it is typical of this play that the so-called proper way of speaking a language is denied and even the supposed proper pronunciation produces “improprieties”, as it were.21 As in macaronic verse and style, alterities remain juxtaposed, “assuming motion rather than stasis and yet without assuming any overall telos”, or resolution, as Anne Coldiron writes.22

• 23 Saenger, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English, p. 114.

19Adopting a reception point of view, one can easily imagine that this scene could never produce univocal interpretations. How did such a scene translate for an audience? Could this have been entirely realistic when the scene was first staged? Shakespeare’s early modern audiences no doubt experienced what it felt like to be foreigners. Whether they understood French or not, the English lesson scene may well have produced an alienating effect: French members of the audience (there was quite a large community of Huguenot exiles in London at the time) could suddenly feel out of place in London and English people could feel out of place in Shakespeare’s France. In both cases, translation, and the metaphoric change of place it implies, introduces disruption and unease, as Saenger argues, leaving us “without a home”.23

• 24 As Jacques Derrida has pointed out, “colonial violence” and “linguistic imperialism” are notions wh (...)

24Henry’s Anglo-French crusade is clearly set to expand his colonialist enterprise to the land of the infidel.24 The king’s rhetoric soon reaches new heights, suggesting that Katherine and he will be pioneers and trendsetters. Together they will carve a new cultural identity that will reach beyond the boundaries of their two nations: “Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion. We are the makers of manners, Kate, and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults […]” (243–246). Unfortunately, this promise is quickly overshadowed by Henry and Burgundy’s lurid innuendos in the ensuing dialogue between the two men. The English king cannot quite hide his colonialist desire to possess those “maiden cities” in France (291).

• 25 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, London and New York, Routledge (...)

25In Henry’s Anglo-French project, the promise of hybridisation is there as well as the prospect that both nations will be transformed and yet, as Sara Ahmed writes of colonial encounters, “the conditions of meeting are not equal, so too hybridization involves differentiation (the two do not co‑mingle to produce one). How others are constituted and transformed through such encounters is dependent upon relationships of force”.25