"Maiden Walls That War Hath Never Entered": Rape and Post-Chivalric Military Culture in Shakespeare's Henry V

Abstract

Shakespeare's king Henry seems to be defined as much by theatrical self-awareness as by religious and patriotic fervor. Hence his spectacular victory at Agincourt has been ascribed both to inspiring epic leadership and to the cold calculation of a ruthless political elite. In contrast, my article seeks to show that this reductive polarity has obscured the fact that Henry's French war signals the emergence of a new post-chivalric culture of violence defined by what has been termed the "intellectualization of warfare." I argue that the play's going-to-war rhetoric is characterized by an obsessive concern with polluting miscegenation rooted in the principles of dynastic honor: national defeat is imagined as a rape of the land that will be newly populated with bastards. Shakespeare, however, makes us feel that this honor-based view of the war belongs to the past whereas the king's post-feudal rule poses new dangers to human integrity. Thus, Henry the courtly lover, like Henry the scourge of Harfleur, cannot distinguish between essential identity and assumed role for, in his theatre of war, the martial hero has become simultaneously an enactor and spectator of the self, a paradox before which the traditional ethics of chivalry must collapse.

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