The Conscience of the King: Henry V and the Reformed Conscience

Abstract

Since the celebrations of Shakespearean characters as portrayals of universal human nature have been largely silenced by scholarly attacks on the universalizing of the bourgeois subject, analyses of early modern representations of human life have risked an equally ahistorical projection of a postmodern fragmented onto early modern texts and have sometimes avoided attributing all meaning to originary subjects only by effacing human agency altogether. If we assume that reality grasped through language, that there no pre-linguistic knowledge, then we need to be wary of how we use our own vocabulary in analyzing early modern subjectivities and to look carefully at historical linguistic practice. As Anne Ferry has shown, sixteenth-century English had yet to develop a vocabulary for the analysis of internal experience. Such terms as superego, unconscious, and emotions are relatively recent developments, and words like and subject were used in ways different from ours. (1) As Ferry observes, the closest term for continuous internal awareness available in sixteenth-century vocabulary was (2) Thus when William Fenner advises, Let a man examine himself, that is, his the appositional construction assumes that the self the conscience. (3) Conscience was usually defined as the part of practical understanding that applies inherent knowledge of the basic principles of good and evil to particular actions, judging past actions and legislating future ones. According to the influential preacher and theologian, William Perkins, is (as it were) a little God sitting in the middle of men[s] hearts, arraigning them in this life as they shal be arraigned for their offences at the tribunall seat of the everliving God in the day of judgement. (4) Thus, in contrast to contemporary psychoanalytic discourse, which assumes a pre-moral psyche, Fenner assumes the inherently moral nature of the self. While signified moral self-awareness, it was also the efficient cause of political action. For example, John Speed observed of the Elizabethan settlement that many that had fled the Realm in case of conscience, returned, (5) and the plethora of books published during the 1640s and 50s with such titles as The Ancient Bounds, or Liberty of Conscience (1645) and Against Universall Libertie of Conscience (1644) demonstrates that, by the time of the civil war, conscience had become a code word for political controversy. In early modern England, then, was a site where subjectivity and politics, ideas of salvation and of nationhood, were inextricably entangled. The representations of in theological, legal, political, and literary texts provide significant access to the self-understanding of early modern selves and their social relations. By focusing on in William Perkins's Discourse of Conscience, James VI and I's Basilicon Doron, and Shakespeare's history plays, particularly Henry V, I hope to illuminate tensions between individual judgment and obligations to authority within the concept of that give us more precise understanding of religious and national identity in early modern England. In Shakespeare's history plays, the nexus where internal self-awareness and external political action, the obligations of obedience and the authority of personal judgment converge. In Richard III, it performs a unifying function both structurally and politically. In the ruthless world Richard of Gloucester bustles in, most characters attempt to maintain or to acquire power and do so in defiance of their consciences. From Richard's sardonic announcement that he determined to prove a villain (1.1.30), through his gleeful boast that he has seduced Anne with God, her conscience, and these bars against me (1.2.234), to the murderer's decision not to meddle with it [conscience], it makes a man a coward (1.4.134-35), the play directs our attention to characters' choosing to act against their own understanding of moral good. …

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