The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0089 Monday, 11 February 2008
From: Harry Berger Jr <
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Date: Sunday, 10 Feb 2008 14:36:43 -0800
Subject: Re: Harry, Hal, Henry
Owing to some purely irrational prejudice, it's easier for me to
sympathize with a Harry than with a Henry, whereas I find the heartiness
of "Hal" generally repelling. But there are substantive reasons behind
this preference. One is to help counteract a tendency to insist that Hal
has been jettisoned by the beginning of Henry 5. This accords with the
notion that Harry's "I would have all such offenders so cut off" (his
response to the report of Bardolph's execution) includes Hal among the
offenders: Henry = Harry - Hal. "Hal" signifies the figure that
condenses within it the interaction between Harry and Falstaff while
"Henry" signifies the antithetical figure produced by rejection of "Hal"
and Falstaff. There's an important insight in the premise that Hal has
been "jettisoned" but it's distorted by attributing it solely to
Shakespeare. Why bypass Harry? Why not credit him with the discontinuity
produced by his reformation? Whatever the reason, I suspect that the
strong tonal contrast between the two names, "Hal" and "Henry," makes it
easier to view their bearers as two different characters and the plays
in which they appear as discontinuous. Continuity may be encouraged by
insisting that it is Harry who plans to appear before the world as Hal
first and Henry after, and who, although he jettisons Hal, continues to
enjoy the relatively informal appellative style of "Harry"-of the Harry
who values his flexibility, his ability to move upward or downward on
the scale of social being, to play the Prince of Wales or conqueror of
France with as much elan as he plays the Corinthian prince of good
fellows. From the time he is first mentioned in Richard 2 everyone calls
Harry Harry (or Hal, or the Prince) and no one calls him Henry until the
final scene of Henry 5, where he's responsible for the two exceptions in
the tetralogy:
(1) While wooing Katherine he offers her-in exchange for the voluntary
self-submission that will mitigate what is otherwise one article in the
conqueror's schedule of demands-not only England, Ireland, and France,
but also "Henry Plantagenet" (5.2.249-53). Plantagenet is the family
name of the line of English kings descended from Geoffrey of Anjou. Here
it connotes the French origin of the dynasty embodied in the fifth
Henry, who is now taking steps to perpetuate it.
(2) A little later (357-60) Exeter cites the article in which Harry
demands to be addressed in official documents as "filz Henry, Roy
d'Angleterre, Heritier de France" (repeated in Latin). Both the dynastic
name and the formal title are functions in the game of genealogical
politics. Harry reserves the formality and severity of "Henry" for such
ritual instruments of conquest as the promissory foreplay of courtship
and the ceremonial rubric by which, refathering himself, he not only
legitimizes his claim to French lands and displaces the Dauphin but also
negotiates his liberation from his first father's tainted inheritance:
"No king of England, if not king of France" (2.2.193); "Now beshrew my
father's ambition! he was thinking of civil wars when he got me"
(5.2.236-37).
It's shortly after the latter statement that he names himself not Harry
but Henry, and not Monmouth nor Lancaster nor even England but
Plantagenet, distancing this self-representation from recent fissures
and inserting it in the more venerable, more inclusive, House of the
Anglo-Gallic Angevins. Even as he aspires to be the formidable Henry of
chronicle fame, he resists the loss and incorporation of Harry into that
figure. Political legitimacy is not quite enough. That the courtship is
gratuitous from the standpoint of alliance and that it evokes comedic
conventions of fulfilled desire and mutual consent indicate a need on
Harry's part not so much for approval or acceptance as for Katherine's
voluntary assent to his persuasion. This will make her a partner, give
her a share in the responsibility for her own conquest and thus limit
his ethical liability. Although he dramatizes his advantage in the
courtship scene, as when, knowing French, he insists that she speak in
broken English, he seeks moral and personal legitimacy by making her a
coequal accomplice in what would otherwise be a kind of rape.
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